Quotes About Ambition

I always knew I'd be in music in some sort of capacity. I didn't know if I'd be successful at it, but I knew I'd be doing something in it. Maybe get a job in a record store. Maybe even play in a band. I never got into this to be a star.

The Roaring Eighties were a new gilded age, where winning was celebrated at all costs.

I think naturally, if you're an actor, there's a high level of assertiveness that you need to have to survive this business. There's boldness in being assertive, and there's strength and confidence.

If you have a level of expectation in your life that you have to be a quote-unquote star, whatever that means, you might be setting yourself up for failure.

An invincible determination can accomplish almost anything, and in this lies the great distinction between great man and little man. - Thomas Fuller

Secretly, I wanted to look like Jimi Hendrix, but I could never quite pull it off.

Having a sense of purpose is having a sense of self. A course to plot is a destination to hope for.

Sometimes power is all a person has, so they will protect it even unto their own destruction, for without power they have nothing.

Do not let your ambitions become a sanctuary for your failures.

Ambition is not what a man would do, but what a man does, for ambition without action is fantasy.

Architects of grandeur are often the master builders of disillusionment.

Do not let your grand ambitions stand in the way of small but meaningful accomplishments.

A person who wants nothing fears nothing.

Too much aggression and work will move what you desire further away.

The secret of life is to find out what one really wants.

When you first get started, you're the only one with a vision. When you become creative and use your imagination, pretty soon the things you imagined, you can get done. If you got a taste of it, if you got a taste of what I'm talking about, you'd rather do that than eat. You couldn't get enough of it. You'll hunger for it the rest of your life.

My mother told me on several different occasions that she was livin' her dream vicariously through me. She once said that I was getting' to do all the things that she would have wanted to have done.

The minute you choose to do what you really want to do, it's a different kind of life.

I could've been a contender. I could've had class and been somebody. Real class. Instead of a bum, let's face it, which is what I am.

What Makes Sammy Run?

You don't understand. I could have had class. I could have been a contender.

Work hard, and if you can't work hard, be smart; and, if you can't be smart, be loud.

I coulda' had class. I coulda' been a contender! But instead I got a one way ticket to Palookaville.

There seem to be two kinds of self-conscious self-made men, those who like to dwell on the patriotic details of their ascent from newsboy or shoe-shiner at two bucks and peanuts a week and those who take every new level as if it were the only one they ever knew, rushing ahead so fast they are ashamed, afraid to look back and see where they've come from. One is a bore and the other is a heel.