Quotes About Ambition

What you get by achieving your goals is not as important as what you become by achieving your goals.

It is not that we love to be alone, but that we love to soar, and when we do soar, the company grows thinner and thinner until there is none at all. …We are not the less to aim at the summits though the multitude does not ascend them.

Be resolutely and faithfully what you are; be humbly what you aspire to be.

In the long run men only hit what they aim at. Therefore, though they should fail immediately, they had better aim at something high.

Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.

In the long run, we only hit what we aim at.

As for the Pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs.

Nations are possessed with an insane ambition to perpetuate the memory of themselves by the amount of hammered stone they leave. What if equal pains were taken to smooth and polish their manners? One piece of good sense would be more memorable than a monument as high as the moon.

Shall a man go and hang himself because he belongs to the race of pygmies, and not be the biggest pygmie that he can? Let everyone mind his own business, and endeavor to be what he was made

The best thing a man can do for his culture when he is rich is to endeavor to carry out those schemes which he entertained when he was poor.

Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it.

If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours...If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.

Nations are possessed with an insane ambition to perpetuate the memory of themselves by the amount of hammered stone they leave.

The secret of achievement is to hold a picture of a successful outcome in the mind

We are a race of tit-men...

We must walk consciously only part way toward our goal, and then leap in the dark to our success.

In the long run men hit only what they aim at. Therefore, though they should fail immediately, they had better aim at something high.

Yet some, not wise, go to the other side of the globe, to barbarous and unhealthy regions, and devote themselves to trade for ten or twenty years, in order that they may live—that is, keep comfortably warm—and die in New England at last. The luxuriously rich are not simply kept comfortably warm, but unnaturally hot; as i implied before, they are cooked, à la mode.

This spending of the best part of one's life earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it reminds me of the Englishman who went to India to make a fortune first, in order that he might return to England and live the life of a poet.

If a man constantly aspires is he not elevated.

In the long run, you hit only what you aim for.

I foresee, that, if my wants should be much increased, the labor required to supply them would become a drudgery.

Perhaps these pages are more particularly addressed to poor students.

Some are dining in our ears that we Americans, and moderns generally, are intellectual dwarfs compared with the ancients, or even the Elizabethan men. But what is that to the purpose? A living dog is better than a dead lion. Shall a man go and hang himself because he belongs to the race of pygmies, and no be the biggest pygmy he can be? Let everyone mind his own business, and endeavor to be what he was made.