Quotes About Ambition

After my mother died, I learned that she'd had a scholarship to the University of Nebraska, but - in kind of a tradition that females don't do things like that - her father prevented her from going. She always said that she wasn't allowed to go to college, but until she died, I never knew that she'd had this scholarship.

New York is traditional New York, you know what I'm saying? It's the stomping ground of the hustlers and go-getters.

I was never the big leaper, the dunker, the long and athletic kid who looked the part of a traditional basketball star. Truth be told, I wasn't even considered a top guard coming out of my recruiting class.

I think a lot of what I wanted to do in 2014 was build a repertoire or a portfolio for what I can do with traditional celebrities or with brands or whatever. Maybe 2015 is the year I start reaching out to people I always dreamed to do stuff with.

My dad, coming from a very traditional family, always wanted me to be a doctor. So he would always ask me, 'What are you going to be when you grow up?' And I'd have to say 'Dr. Chen.'

The most important thing when deciding on a club are the traditions of the team and the project of the club - what it is they want to do in the future.

That was never on my radar, traffic stopping. It was never important to me.

I never in my life saw myself as a game show host. I don't want to be a traffic cop.

The best part of being an angel investor is seeing these kids coming up with companies that get way more traffic than Reddit had when we sold it. I think, 'Are you kidding me? They're just kids, and they've done so much.'

I do whatever I do. I go to the club. I work on material. While other people are sleeping, I'm awake. I always liked that. I like being able to drive when there's no traffic. It's almost like you own the street at night.

'Traffic' was so good, and I really don't want to take a step back.

I'm not so naive as to think that everybody always succeeds, right? I mean, half of Shakespeare's stories are tragedies - right?

I think when I started out, when I was very young, I wanted to be an actor and do the great epic tragedies.

The tragedy of life is often not in our failure, but rather in our complacency; not in our doing too much, but rather in our doing too little; not in our living above our ability, but rather in our living below our capacities.

The real tragedy of the poor is the poverty of their aspirations.

Abraham Lincoln comes from nothing, has no education, no money, lives in the middle of nowhere on the frontier. And despite the fact that he suffers one tragedy and one setback after another, through sheer force of will, he becomes something extraordinary: not only the president but the person who almost single-handedly united the country.

The tragedy is that so many have ambition and so few have ability.

It's rare in Hollywood to get the chance to work on something that you actually care about. The tragedy of the place is all these talented people trying to get excited about stuff they themselves would only view at gunpoint.

I'm happy that I worked alone on 'Tragedy,' but it's obvious that I was trying to create something much bigger than I could do on my own.

This is the tragedy of the entrepreneur. They literally cannot slack off. That's why Alan Sugar looks so jowly, tired and angry, and Richard Branson so phonily, aggressively cheery.

Now most people do not want an ordinary life in which they do a job well, earn the respect of their collaborators and competitors, bring up a family and have friends. That's not enough any more, and I think that is absolutely tragic - and I'm not exaggerating - that people feel like a decent, ordinary, fun life is no longer enough.

There is a tragic kind of joke. You really can't keep a man down - good but often otherwise - because history's mechanics are built to keep him climbing toward the top. Somehow, Icarus gets to be reborn as Iron Man.

I think 4 percent growth is a good goal. And I think the fact that we have become used to an economy that sort of putt putts along between 1 and 2 percent is sort of tragic.

We were making 'Tragic Kingdom,' and we were kind of battling with the record company. It was just being drawn-out, in the same kind of situation where we were all working, we all had jobs, we were going to school.