Quotes About Ambition

The fact is, of course, that the metaphysician wants to re-think the universe; the plain man does not. The metaphysician seeks for an inclusive system where all reality can be rationally housed. The plain man is less ambitious. He is content with the kind of knowledge he possesses about men and things—so far as it goes. Science has already told him much; each day it tells him more. And, within the clearing thus made for him in the tangled wilderness of the unknown, he feels at home.

Dreams will get you nowhere, a good kick in the pants will take you a long way.

Nothing arouses ambition so much in the heart as the trumpet-clang of another's fame.

He who finds Fortune on his side should go briskly ahead, for she is wont to favor the bold.

Old men alone have time to love; young men are rowing ... the galleys of ambition.

The secret of great fortunes without apparent cause is a crime forgotten, for it was properly done.

Judged from a literary point of view, Nathan lacks style and cultivation. Like most young men, ambitious of literary fame, he disgorges to-day what he acquired yesterday.

Our dreams need time and physical means and painstaking thought before they can be realized.

Do for God what you do for your ambitious projects, what you do in consecrating yourself to Art, what you have done when you loved a human creature or sought some secret of human science. Is not God the whole of science, the all of love, the source of poetry? Surely His riches are worthy of being coveted! His treasure is inexhaustible, His poem infinite, His love immutable, His science sure and darkened by no mysteries.

Glory is a poison, good to be taken only in small doses.

Ambitious men ought to follow curved lines, the shortest road in politics.

Make another failure like that ... and you'll be immortal.

If a man would have the right to make stepping-stones of all the heads which crowd a drawing-room, he must be the lover of some artistic woman of fashion.

Well, gold contains all things in embryo; gold realizes all things for us.

In retrospect I realize that fate was a ladder on which, at the time, I could not afford to miss a single rung. To skip out on even one scene would have meant never making it to the top, although it would have been by far the easier choice. What motivated me was probably that little light still left in my half-dead heart, glittering in the darkness. Yet without it, perhaps, I might have slept better.

want to be overwhelmed, too, while I'm still not too old. I want to be blown away by greatness. Because I've started wanting to become a better person, now, even just a little bit better.

As soon as she gets an idea in her head she does it, you know? I just stand back in amazement at her way of making things happen.

You never risked everything; you risked as little as possible. You sold the idea of risking everything to the sort of idiot who thought that was how you got rich, but you kept your own risks to an absolute minimum. That way if you did make a mistake--and everybody made mistakes, or they weren't really trying--it didn't finish you. Let others ruin themselves--there were always rich pickings in the wreckage--but don't ever risk too much yourself.

You ask a lot of little kids today what they want to be when they grow up and they say "I want to be famous." You ask them for what reason and they don't know or care. I think Andy Warhol got it wrong: in the future so many people are going to become famous that one day everybody will end up being anonymous for fifteen minutes.

I sucked a lot of breasts to get where I am today.

You don't need planning permission to build castles in the sky.

The thing I hate the most about advertising is that it attracts all the bright, creative and ambitious young people, leaving us mainly with the slow and self-obsessed to become our artists.. Modern art is a disaster area. Never in the field of human history has so much been used by so many to say so little.

Nothing in the world is more common than unsuccessful people with talent, leave the house before you find something worth staying in for.

The future rewards those who press on. I don't have time to feel sorry for myself. I don't have time to complain. I'm going to press on.