Quotes About Ambition

I'd give a lot to achieve fun," Elphaba said. "The best I usually hope for is stirring, and when people say that they're usually referring to digestion-

Flying is desire fulfilled.

Finally I am coming to the conclusion that my highest ambition is to be what I already am. —Journal of Thomas Merton

If you're not failing, you're not trying hard enough.

I was comforted by the words of my model Benjamin Franklin, who reflected of his own chart: On the whole, though I never arrived at perfection I had been so ambitious of obtaining, but fell far short of it, yet as I was, by the endeavor, a better and a happier man that I otherwise should have been had I not attempted it.

It's fun to fail, I kept repeating. It's part of being ambitious; it's part of being creative. If something is worth doing, it's worth doing badly.

And of course, arriving at one goal usually reveals another, yet more challenging goal. Publishing the first book means it's time to start the second. There's another hill to climb. The challenge, therefore, is to take pleasure in the "atmosphere of growth

Theodore Roosevelt, An Autobiography

My ambition, however, was also a factor in leaving the law. I'd become convinced that passion was a critical factor in professional success... I could see that in my co-clerks at the Supreme Court: they read law journals for fun, they talked about cases during their lunch hours, they felt energized by their efforts. I didn't.

If you're not failing, you're not trying hard enough.        Over-the-counter

We set out to be wrecked.

It was time to expect more of myself. Yet as I thought about happiness, I kept running up against paradoxes. I wanted to change myself but accept myself. I wanted to take myself less seriously—and also more seriously. I wanted to use my time well, but I also wanted to wander, to play, to read at whim. I wanted to think about myself so I could forget myself. I was always on the edge of agitation; I wanted to let go of envy and anxiety about the future, yet keep my energy and ambition.

I can DO ANYTHING I want, but I can't DO EVERYTHING I want.

phrase from James Collins and Jerry Porras's book Built to Last: "BHAG—Big Hairy Audacious Goals, all the way. I resisted this for years, thinking that to shoot too high only meant I would fail. What I didn't realize was that shooting high motivated me much more.

I was comforted by the words of my model Benjamin Franklin, who reflected of his own chart: On the whole, though I never arrived at perfection I had been so ambitious of obtaining, but fell far short of it, yet as I was, by the endeavor, a better and a happier man than I otherwise should have been had I not attempted it.

I later changed my passwords to a goal I've been working on, or an achievement I want.

He wondered if he'd be better off staying at the bum shelter with his false bum and forgetting about his real bum. But he couldn't. His bum was trying to take over the world.

I believe that if someone always looked at the skies, one would end up with wings.

Books aren't made in the way that babies are: they are made like pyramids, There's some long-pondered plan, and then great blocks of stone are placed one on top of the other, and it's back-breaking, sweaty, time consuming work. And all to no purpose! It just stands like that in the desert! But it towers over it prodigiously. Jackals piss at the base of it, and bourgeois clamber to the top of it, etc. Continue this comparison.

I'm the sort of man who's doomed to be a failure and I'll go to my grave without ever knowing whether I was real gold or just tinsel!

you must - do you hear me, young man? - you must work more than you are doing!

Car tout bourgeois, dans l'échauffement de sa jeunesse, ne fût-ce qu'un jour, une minute, s'est cru capable d'immenses passions, de hautes entreprises. Le plus médiocre libertin. a rêvé des sultanes ; chaque notaire porte en soi les débris d'un poète.

Every bourgeois in the ferment of his youth, if only for a day or a minute, has believed himself capable of a grand passion, of a high endeavor. Every run-of-the-mill seducer has dreamed of Eastern queens. Not a lawyer but carries within him the débris of a poet.

In spite of her vapourish airs (as the housewives of Yonville called them), Emma, all the same, never seemed gay, and usually she had at the corners of her mouth that immobile contraction that puckers the faces of old maids, and those of men whose ambition has failed.