Quotes About Ambition

What's the point of knocking yourself out for anybody but yourself? The answer was obvious. There wasn't any.

Yeah, I should be in college, Mom, but I'm not. The world is my classroom, and one day I'll write a book, and that will be my degree.

He explained that when he had gotten to Toledo, he had a meeting with himself. He said he realized he had become satisfied with being a starting pitcher in the big leagues, and with the money he was making.

When somebody says it's not about the money, it's about the money.

Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.

New York: A third-rate Babylon.

I believe that it is something quite different, and that that something may be described briefly as a desire to shine in the world without too much effort. The young theologue, in brief, is commonly an ambitious but somewhat lazy and incompetent fellow, and he studies theology instead of medicine or law because it offers a quicker and easier route to an assured job and public respect.

Looking back over a life of hard work… my only regret is that I didn't work even harder.

And at last I resolved to scale that tower, fall though I might; since it were better to glimpse the sky and perish, than to live without ever beholding day.

When Kleiner showed me the sky-line of New York I told him that man is like the coral insect — designed to build vast, beautiful, mineral things for the moon to delight in after he is dead.

Such was the code: Strive for victory, but never seem to be self-involved.

Gold, or at least the prospect of it, saved him, then killed him.

A young mark twain on the make: I can't turn in inkstand into Aladdin's lamp.

He adored competing but didn't want you to know he'd ever worked at it.

He has not shown the special interest in reading that we should like to see but he likes shop work. George H. W. Bush's parents on his Andover application

I can see that spark coming back when he talks about the future.

Many people have serious academic degrees but cannot find a job, and sadly their degrees are so limited that they cannot even think about how to create a job for themselves.

The first thing is to have the will; the rest is technique.

I'm an extremely wealthy man. I own the sky. I have invested all my capital in the sun. I'm not bad-tempered, as you seem to imagine, nor do I bear grudges. But like all wealthy men, I'm a little frightened of losing my fortune.

That blasted family could never look at a living thing without wanting to make a profit out of it, preferably by killing it.

He belonged to the men who have cared for great things, not to bring themselves honor, but because doing great things could alone satisfy their natures.

Watching Jamila sometimes made me think the world was divided into three sorts of people: those who knew what they wanted to do; those (the unhappiest) who never knew what their purpose in life was; and those who found out later on. I was in the last category, I reckoned, which didn't stop me wishing I'd been born into the first.

It is only the insane who achieve anything significant.

If I weren't white and middle class I'd have been in Pyke's show now. Obviously mere talent gets you nowhere these days. Only the disadvantaged are going to succeed in seventies' England