Quotes About Ambition

Someone's going to drag me out of someplace feet-first, so it might as well be from my place of business. Besides, if I retire, what do you suggest I do, chase golf balls with the rest of the morons? Maybe I should take courses in Chinese stamp collecting or the history of Peru at Loch in Kop University downtown?

Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.   —HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.

Courage is energized by challenges; it is inspired by difficult tasks and even seeks them out. When courage is present, we rise to meet different challenges for the sake of what we want to accomplish, and we're not discouraged by thought of hardship or by the length of the undertaking.

Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity trust upon them.

In a world in which success was the only virtue, he had resigned himself to failure.

Major Major had lied, and it was good. He was not really surprised that it was good, for he had observed that people who did lie were, on the whole, more resourceful and ambitious and successful than people who did not lie.

Gold was not sure of many things, but he was definite about one: for every successful person he knew, he could name at least two others of greater ability, better, and higher intelligence who, by comparison, had failed.

Success and failure are both difficult to endure. Along with success come drugs, divorce, fornication, bullying, travel, meditation, medication, depression, neurosis and suicide. With failure comes failure.

Kraft was a skinny, harmless kid from Pennsylvania who wanted only to be liked, and was destined to be disappointed in even so humble and degrading an ambition. Instead, of being liked, he was dead, a bleeding cinder on the barbarous pile whom nobody had heard in those last precious moments while the plane with one wing plummeted.

Colonel Cathcart was impervious to absolutes. He could measure his own progress only in relationship to others, and his idea of excellence was to do something at least as well as all the men his own age who were doing the same thing even better.

As soon as there was profit, there were people who wanted to make it, more than they wanted to make anything else.

He had decided to live forever or die in the attempt, and his only mission each time he went up was to come down alive. The

Vannak, akik középszer?nek születnek, vannak, akik elérik a középszer?séget, és vannak, akik nyögnek a középszer?ség lármájában.

That's my trouble, you know," Yossarian mused sympathetically, folding his arms. "Between me and every ideal I always find Scheisskopfs, Peckems, Korns and Cathcarts. And that sort of changes the ideal.

Elhatározta, hogy örökké fog élni, vagy belehal a próbálkozásba, és számára a bevetésnek egyetlen célja volt, éspedig az, hogy élve térjen vissza.

Mindenki arra tanított bennünket, hogy magasrend? dolgok után vágyakozzunk.

I don't want to make sacrifices. I want to make dough.

It takes brains not to make money," Colonel Cargill wrote in one of the homiletic memoranda he regularly prepared for circulation over General Peckem's signature. "Any fool can make money these days and most of them do. But what about people with talent and brains? Name, for example, one poet who makes money.

I sometimes think of myself as Fortinbras — ha, ha — in the play Hamlet by William Shakespeare, who just keeps circling and circling around the action until everything else falls apart, and then strolls in at the end to pick up all the pieces for himself.

His novel, a work he had wrestled with, on and off, for almost three years, he had finally abandoned after one page. The novel was derivative of a poem Gold had written seven years before that was itself derived from a brilliant exegesis by a young Englishman of the works of Samuel Beckett that Gold wished he'd written himself.

You know, that might be the answer—to act boastfully about something we ought to be ashamed of. That's a trick that never seems to fail." "Do you think it will work?" "I'm sure it will. And let's promote him to captain, too, just to make certain.

kid I wanted apple cheeks someday, and I decided to work at it until I got them, and by God, I did work at it until I got them, and that's how I did it, with crab apples in my cheeks

Homer begged and Rembrandt went bankrupt. Aristotle, who had money for books, his school, and his museum, could not have bought this painting of himself. Rembrandt could not afford a Rembrandt.