Quotes About Ambition

Moral of the story: bullshit may get you to the top, but it never lets you stay there!

One morning a man walked into his office and told his boss, "Boss, I want you to know, three big companies are after me. You must give me a raise." His boss said, "What! Which companies? Who wants you?" He said, "The electric company, the telephone company, and the gas company.

All of us - who might have probed space, or cured cancer, or built industries - were, instead, black victims of the white man's American social system.

All of us—who might have probed space, or cured cancer, or built industries—were, instead, black victims of the white man's American social system.

told Reginald what I had learned: that in order to get something you had to look as though you already had something.

All I had was to improve on their strategy [...] anytime you find someone more successful than you are, especially when you're both engaged in the same business—you know they're doing something that you aren't.

Anytime you see someone more succesful than you are, the are doing something you aren't

So early in life, I had learned that if you want something, you had better make some noise.

So early in life, I learned that if you want something, you had better make some noise

CHAPTER 7 HUSTLER

I would cry out and make a fuss until I got what I wanted. I remember well how my mother asked me why I couldn't be a nice boy like Wilfred; but I would think to myself that Wilfred, for being so nice and quiet, often stayed hungry. So early in life, I had learned that if you want something, you had better make some noise.

To have failed is to have striven, to have striven is to have grown.

Our business in life is not to get ahead of other people, but to get ahead of ourselves.

Rares sont ceux qui ont assez de folie pour entreprendre de réaliser leurs rêves

As a lawyer's daughter, I'd always known that if you want to do something, no matter how far-fetched it may seem to other, you should seek legal advice.

I took heart seeing that it was possible to stay modest and low-key and still do the work you wanted to do, that being competitive might actually muddy or even obliterate your own vision because you were so busy comparing, looking over your shoulder.

The man of ambition thinks to find his good in the operations of others; the man of pleasure in his own sensations; but the man of understanding in his own actions.

Ambition means tying your well-being to what other people say or do. Self-indulgence means tying it to the things that happen to you. Sanity means tying it to your own actions.

People who labor all their lives but have no purpose to direct every thought and impulse toward are wasting their time—even when hard at work.

Even the least of our activities ought to have some end in view.

If you don't have a consistent goal in life, you can't live it in a consistent way.

17. To pursue the unattainable is insanity, yet the thoughtless can never refrain from doing so.

The pomps and glories which he despised were all his; what to most men is an ambition or a dream, to him was a round of weary tasks which nothing but the stern sense of duty could carry him through. And he did his work well.

He who is greedy of credit and reputation after his death, doth not consider, that they themselves by whom he is remembered, shall soon after every one of them be dead; and they likewise that succeed those; until at last all memory, which hitherto by the succession of men admiring and soon after dying hath had its course, be quite extinct.