Quotes About Ambition

I still remember when my teacher told me that football wouldn't give me anything to eat

When I graduated from high school, the teacher said I was throwing my life away following music.

At the age of 15, a teacher had asked me what I wanted to do for a career, and without knowing why or even how I replied that I wanted to be a poet.

Teachers started recognizing me and praising me for being smart in science and that made me want to be even smarter in science!

As far as men go, it is not what they are that interests me, but what they can become.

When we are young, parents and teachers tell us we can do anything and become whatever we want. But as we grow older, these same people tell us we must be more realistic.

Do what you love. Go to a good art school and study with the best teachers. Move to New York and read Ask Mark Kostabi.

I once had a dream and this one familiar god, who was probably one of my master teachers, said, 'You should not worry about being on the charts. That's not important.

My parents were very traditional Nigerians who wanted doctor, lawyer, teacher [children], but when I actually had a dream and I presented the dream to them, they were 100 percent supportive.

Though conscious of the difficulty of learning without a teacher, I set out with high hope, and a fixed purpose, at whatever cost of trouble, to learn how to read.

My ambition really was, even as a child, to be a writer, a commentator, and a teacher, but a teacher of Talmud.

If you say "I'm going to be an actor, but I'll get a teaching degree just in case," when things get hard, you'll just be a teacher and that's how you get stuck.

When I started performing, I decided that if in five years I couldn't earn as much money acting as I could as a teacher, it would be unrealistic for me to continue on the stage.

I wanted to be an English teacher. I wanted to do it for the corduroy jackets with patches on the side.

That which a man takes for himself no one can deny him.

To want to be ahead, and to celebrate and mythify this endeavor, is indeed one of the most powerful impulses of modernity itself.

and that's why it's so hard for them when they discover that this equality they've been told about is a carrot on a stick – something that's dangled in front of their noses to keep them going, but always kept just out of reach.

The worst thing is that the enslaved secretly dream of enslaving their enslavers. The persecuted yearn to be persecutors. The slaves dream of being masters. As in the book of Esther.

Never complain or make excuses. If something seems unfair, just prove yourself by working twice as hard and being twice as good.

For unlike my mother, I did not believe I could be anything I wanted to be. I could only be me.

I hated the tests the raised hopes and failed expectations. - Two Kinds

I imagine a hundred Chinese Icaruses, molding wings out of earwax. You can't stop people from wishing.

And I remembered reading an article about baby boomers, how we expect the best and when we get it we worry that maybe we should have expected more, because it's all diminishing returns after a certain age.

It was not the only disappointment my mother felt in me. In the years that followed, I failed her so many times, each time asserting my own will, my right to fall short of expectations. I didn't get straight As. I didn't become class president. I didn't get into Stanford. I dropped out of college. For unlike my mother, I did not believe I could be anything I wanted to be. I could only be me.