Quotes About Ambition

If we stay at home and mind our business, who will want railroads?

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. It is not important that he should mature as soon as an apple tree or an oak. Shall he turn his spring into summer? If the condition of things which we were made for is not yet, what were any reality which we can substitute?

All men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or something to be.

Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you imagined.

If you have built castles in the air, your work need not to be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.

you must everywhere build on piles of your own driving.

Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined

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

The boy gathers materials for a temple, and then when he is thirty, concludes to build a woodshed

If we have had the seven-years' itch, we have not seen the seventeen-year locust yet in Concord. We are acquainted with a mere pellicle of the globe on which we live. Most have not delved six feet beneath the surface, nor leaped as many above it. We know not where we are. Beside, we are sound asleep nearly half our time. Yet we esteem ourselves wise, and have an established order on the surface. Truly, we are deep thinkers, we are ambitious spirits.

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?

If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, he will meet with success unexpected in common hours.

I one evening overtook one of my townsmen, who has accumulated what is called 'a handsome property'..on the Walden road, driving a pair of cattle to market, who inquired of me how I could bring my mind to give up so many of the comforts of life. I answered that I was very sure I liked it passably well; I was not joking. And so I went home to my bed, and left him to pick his way through the darkness and the mud to Brighton, which place he would reach some time in the morning.

But man's capacities have never been measured; nor are we to judge of what he can do by any precedents, so little has been tried.

One of the maxims which the devil, in a late visit upon earth, left to his disciples, is, when once you are got up, to kick the stool from under you. In plain English, when you have made your fortune by the good offices of a friend, you are advised to discard him as soon as you can.

but doth not the person who expends vast sums in the furniture of his house or the ornaments of his person, who consumes much time and employs great pains in dressing himself, or who thinks himself paid for self-denial, labour, or even villany, by a title or a ribbon, sacrifice as much to vanity as the poor wit who is desirous to read you his poem or his play?

a man will put forth greater efforts to save himself from ruin than he will merely to improve his position.

When I met Jimmy Burke in 1964, he practically owned New York's Kennedy Airport. If you ask me, they named the place after the wrong Irishman.

I take up my own pen again - the pen of all my old unforgettable efforts and sacred struggles. To myself - today - I need say no more. Large and full and high the future still opens. It is now indeed that I may do the work of my life. And I will.

Take the word for it of a man who has made his way inch by inch, and does not believe that we'll wake up to find our work done because we've lain all night a-dreaming of it; anything worth doing is devilish hard to do!

It wouldn't have been failure to be bankrupt, dishonoured, pilloried, hanged; it was failure not to be anything. 

if I dont do something on the grand scale, it is that my genius is altogether imitative, and that I have nor recently encountered any very striking models of grandeur.

I have heard many a young unmarried lady exclaim with a bold sweep of conception, "Ah me! I wish I were a widow!" Mrs. Keith was precisely the widow that young unmarried ladies wish to be. With her diamonds in her dressing-case and her carriage in her stable, and without a feather's weight of encumbrance, she offered a finished example of satisfied ambition.

What's a man,' she pursued, 'especially an ambitious one, without a variety of ideas?