Quotes About Ambition

Siempre es demasiado tarde o demasiado temprano para lo que uno quiere hacer.

Last guys don't finish nice.

Sometimes I wished I could become a shoemaker too.

I would never make a lion, I knew that; but I might pick up a small gain here and there in the attempt.

it greatly bothered him that I had such a flunky job, washing cages and sweeping up dogs' hair; and also that I was no longer a college man but trying to keep up on Helmholtz who was a dead number to him; in other words, that I should be of the unformed darkened-out mass. It was often that way with me, that people would feel the world owed me distinctness.

I want! I want! I want!

Well, I need a job. Something that'll leave me the free time I want. I like the way you arrange your life. What do you intend to do with this free time? I intend to use it. I didn't like the implication of this. Why should he need his time free and I be questioned?

Some men seem to know exactly where their opportunities lie; they break prisons and cross whole Siberias to pursue them. One room holds me.

I may well be a flop at this line of endeavor. Columbus too thought he was a flop, probably, when they sent him back in chains. Which didn't prove there was no America.

Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul!

Whenever I write a dramatic poem I can't understand why the characters should ever want to be anything but poets themselves.

What did Danton lose his head for, or why was there a Napoleon, if it wasn't to make a nobility of us all?

I labor, I spend, I strive, I design, I love, I cling, I uphold, I give way, I envy, I long, I scorn, I die, I hide, I want.

I know that I don't have to be next year what I was last year. I've been at one end and I can get to the other. There's no limit to what I can be. And even if I should miss being so dazzling, I know the idea of it is genuine.

I had yet to find out how little people want you to succeed in an extraordinary project, and what comfort some have that the negligible is upheld and all other greater efforts falls on its face.

His intellect would have been more effective if he had had an aggressive paranoid character, eager for power. He was jealous but not exceptionally competitive, not a true paranoiac.

She wants to live in the delirious professions, as Valéry calls them—trades in which the main instrument is your opinion of yourself and the raw material is your reputation or standing.

I felt singularly ashamed of not being a doctor.

He was the obscure failure of an aggressive and powerful clan.

Everybody wanted to be what he was to the limit.

it is only the hope of what is claimed that begets and nurishes the wish;

Happiness has more to do with where you are heading than where you are.

The ability to work hard and make sacrifices comes naturally to those who know exactly what they want.

My mother, in the style of the times, told me I could do anything I set my sights on. She said I could be the president, an astronaut, or the next Charles Schulz. I believed her because at that point in my life I hadn't yet noticed the pattern of her deceptions.