Quotes About Ambition

Stretching yourself beyond the boundaries of your current self requires carefully choosing and then pursuing ideals: ideals that are up there, above you, superior to you—and that you can't always be sure you will reach.

There is great intrinsic pleasure in helping already competent and admirable young people become highly skilled, socially valuable, autonomous, responsible professionals. It is not unlike the pleasure taken in raising children, and it is one of the primary motivators of valid ambition.

I will make a different plan. I will try to want whatever it is that would make my life better—whatever that might be—and I will start working on it now.

not everyone who is failing is a victim, and not everyone at the bottom wishes to rise,

Have some humility. Clean up your bedroom. Take care of your family. Follow your conscience. Straighten up your life. Find something productive and interesting to do and commit to it. When you can do all that, find a bigger problem and try to solve that if you dare. If that works, too, move on to even more ambitious projects. And, as the necessary beginning to that process . . . abandon ideology.

those who start to have will probably get more.

If you make what you want clear and commit yourself to its pursuit, you may fail. But if you do not make what you want clear, then you will certainly fail.

Sometimes all that learning, impossible without the failure, leads you to see that aiming your ambition in a different direction would be better (not because it is easier; not because you have given up; not because you are avoiding—but because you have learned through the vicissitudes of your experience that what you seek is not to be found where you were looking, or is simply not attainable in the manner by which you chose to pursue it).

When you dare aspire upward, you reveal the inadequacy of the present and the promise of the future.

The winners don't take all, but they take most, and the bottom is not a good place to be.

I will try to want whatever it is that would make my life better—whatever that might be—and I will start working on it now.

with each day, your baseline of comparison gets a little higher, and that's magic. That's compound interest. Do that for three years, and your life will be entirely different. Now you're aiming for something higher. Now you're wishing on a star. Now the beam is disappearing from your eye, and you're learning to see. And what you aim at determines what you see. That's worth repeating. What you aim at determines what you see.

The young man had come to realize that every place he might find himself in had more potential than he might first see (particularly when his vision was impaired by the resentment and cynicism he felt from being near the bottom).

You must determine where you are going in your life, because you cannot get there unless you move in that direction.

An idea has an aim. It wants something. It posits a value structure. An idea believes that what it is aiming for is better than what it has now.

An idea begins to take shape: "I am going to live my life properly. I am going to aim at the good. I am going to aim at the highest good I can possible manage.

Set your ambitions, even if you are uncertain about what they should be. The better ambitions have to do with the development of character and ability, rather than status and power. Status you can lose. You carry character with you wherever you go, and it allows you to prevail against adversity

is necessary to lift your eyes above the horizon, to establish a transcendent goal, if you wish to cease being a puppet, under the control of things you do not understand and perhaps do not want to understand. Then

There is no shortage of oppressors among the downtrodden, even if, given their lowly positions, many of them are only tyrannical wannabes. It's the easiest path to choose, moment to moment, although it's nothing but hell in the long run.

It isn't you I care about, it is who you could be

A responsible person decides to make a problem his or her problem, and then works diligently—even ambitiously—for its solution,

The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n.152 … Here we may reign secure, and in my choice To reign is worth ambition though in Hell: Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav'n.153

Ambition is often—and often purposefully—misidentified with the desire for power,

Stretching yourself beyond the boundaries of your current self requires carefully choosing and then pursuing ideals: ideals that are up there, above you, superior to you—and that you can't always be sure you will reach. But if it's uncertain that our ideals are attainable, why do we bother reaching in the first place? Because if you don't reach for them, it is certain you will never feel that your life has meaning.