Quotes About Ambition

As for me, I don't think writing is that hard, as long as you're comfortable with failure on every single level.

What she wanted was a kind of greatness that women were not allowed ...

I had this temp receptionist job in New York, and I kind of hated it, and in the morning I would come out of the subway and just walk along the New York streets with all these people around me and kind of sing to myself. Like, 'She's gonna make it!'

I lifted my head, my gaze meeting his. "Wanting something doesn't guarantee you will get it." "A man can still hope." "I've never had much room for hope.

When one is striding bravely into the future one cannot watch one's footing.

Nothing inspires motivation more than success.

No. She wasn't happy spending her days reading about other people living their lives to the fullest, sultans risking it all for their people. She wanted to be living those things herself, doing them herself.

You tell yourself that you aren't something or that you can't be something, and you know what? It will become true. You have to decide who you are and what you can do and then go after what you want. Because believe me, no one is going to give it to you.

You can tell yourself that you aren't something or that you can't be something, and you know what? It will become true. You have to decide who you are and what you can do and then go after what you want. Because believe me, no one is going to give it to you.

I have ceased to care about anything. I have no personal ambition, or even the desire that people call me nice, or pretty, or witty. Nor do I have any use for sensation, nor do I care. Cessation. It is a technical circle, encircling, cycle, of giving the body to be burned, but having no charity. ... What can I do? For without love I am truly dead.

Not every wealthy man might choose a public life, but anyone who chose public life must be a wealthy man. Corruption, coercion and predation ensured the determined could acquire fortunes. Augustus, while still a teenager, had amassed enough money to support a private army. Ambitious men gathered the support of peers and bestowed patronage on numerous clients. Patronage, indeed, was at the heart of the whole system.

I don't want to be Caesar Plodding round Britain, [...] Freezing my nuts off in a Scythian midden Hadrian's matching riposte conveyed wit and affability and a side of his personality that he was eager to project: I don't want to be a Florus, Crawling round pubs, Skulking in pie-shops Bitten by bugs.

Within weeks of Trajan's death the senate was coerced into agreeing to the summary execution of four alleged plotters against Hadrian's life. Neither he nor the senate ever forgot it, and the senate never forgave him. The deaths also appeared to contradict the new emperor's own stated intentions for his reign.

I took myself—secretly, secretly—very seriously! I knew I was a writer. I didn't know how hard it would be. But no one knows that; and that does not matter.)

My mother told me in the hospital that day that I was not like my brother and sister: "Look at your life right now. You just went ahead and...did it." Perhaps she meant that I was already ruthless. Perhaps she meant that, but I don't know what my mother meant.

Pam's determination was almost always stronger than her disappointments

Haweeya had never been able to figure out exactly what Americans wanted. (Everything, she sometimes thought. They wanted everything.)

This is why dreams can be such dangerous things: they smolder on like a fire does, and sometimes they consume us completely.

If you keep your destiny in mind, every moment in life becomes an opportunity for moving closer to it.

History teaches us what human beings are like in reality rather than what we would like them to be. And when we deal with the sum total of history's record, high-minded ideals like those of Plato's Philosopher Rulers have to be pushed off over the side. Reality teaches a very different set of lessons about politics—and Machiavelli's ambition was to present them to posterity

but from their regard to their own interest.

our passions in constructive directions.

Britain was "the nation of shopkeepers," a phrase that was not meant to flatter.

The rich man is the man with the most fertile imagination, in other words; his eyes really are bigger than his stomach.