Quotes About Ambition

How many of the things I fear or dread are actually things that I want?

Where there is willpower there is a Band Aid that's eventually going to fall off. You only need willpower to get what you don't want or you only want to want. By want to want, I mean, something you wish you wanted but don't really.

You need to grab your dream out of the sky like it's a kite and pinch the string through your fingers until you reach the spool.

It is an awful, just sickening feeling, I discovered, to live with somebody, to exist in the midst of sharing a life, only to realize it is utterly doomed. It was botulism of the soul. I'd had such ambition for building a life together, because I wanted that strength of character and security. But I had overlooked the most important thing: he wasn't right for me. I wasn't right for him. Merely wanting us to be right and good together wasn't enough.

I nodded again, but I knew I would not grow up to drive a bulldozer. It would be awful to be dirty all day like these men. I didn't say it, but at best I would keep one in the backyard, like a goat.

The more time I spent at the Finches', the more I realized what a waste of my life this school crap was. It was nothing but a holding tank for kids without bigger plans or ideas.

If you spend twenty years trying to get something and you still don't have it, is it admirable to keep trying? Or did you pass admirable several miles back and it's getting close to straitjacket time? If you are no closer to having something you've been chasing for twenty years, your data is broken. Either you can't get it, period; you already have it; you don't really need or want it; or it's not real.

So if you think the job really suits you, be you.

But on those Friday afternoons, ambition did not spread its wings to embrace the study of medicine. We all wanted to be masters like our teachers. Their life appeared to be so enjoyable. All they had to do was learn the lessons set, by heart, and sit and hear boys repeat them by rote.

When your laboratory explodes, lacing your body with a supercharged elixir, what do you do? You don't just lie there. You crawl out of the rubble, hideously scarred, and swear vengeance on the world. You keep going. You keep trying to take over the world.

One day you wake up and realize the world can be conquered... I'm going to put a mask on and scrawl my name across the face of the world, build cities of gold, come back and stomp this place flat, until even the bricks are just dust. So you can just shut up. All of you. I'm going to move the world.

There are days when you just don't feel all that evil. You don't become a world-class villain overnight. -Dr. Impossible

I'm cold and free and the smartest man in the world, and this time they're going to know it, I promise you. I promise you that.

It doesn't matter. You keep going. You keep trying to take over the world.

One day you wake up and realize the world can be conquered...

Money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver.

Do you mean to tell me that you're thinking seriously of building that way , when and if you are an architect?" "Yes." "My dear fellow, who will let you?" "That's not the point. The point is, who will stop me?

Ask yourself whether the dream of heaven and greatness should be left waiting for us in our graves-or whether it should be ours here and now and on this earth.

I take no pride in hopeless longing; I wouldn't hold a stillborn aspiration. I'd want to have it, to make it, to live it.

Well, I always know what I want. And when you know what you want--you go toward it. Sometimes you go very fast, and sometimes only an inch a year. Perhaps you feel happier when you go fast. I don't know. I've forgotten the difference long ago, because it really doesn't matter, so long as you move.

The most depraved type of human being ... (is) the man without a purpose.

Because, you see, God—whatever anyone chooses to call God—is one's highest conception of the highest possible. And whoever places his highest conception above his own possibility thinks very little of himself and his life. It's a rare gift, you know, to feel reverence for your own life and to want the best, the greatest, the highest possible, here, now, for your very own. To imagine a heaven and then not to dream of it, but to demand it.

A man's ego is the fountainhead of human progress.

Know what you want in life and go after it. I worship individuals for their highest possibilities as individuals, and I loathe humanity, for its failure to live up to these possibilities.