Quotes About Ambition

Columbus sailed over numberless unknown worlds to discover his one superficial western one;

eats the whale by its own light, does

With a frigate's anchors for my bridle-bitts and fasces of harpoons for spurs, would I could mount that whale and leap the topmost skies

Sharing the same blood with England, and yet her proved foe in two wars—not wholly inclined at bottom to forget an old grudge—intrepid, unprincipled, reckless, predatory, with boundless ambition, civilized in externals but a savage at heart, America is, or may yet be, the Paul Jones of nations. Regarded in this indicatory

Didn't want to try to: ain't one limb enough? What should I do without this other arm? And I'm thinking Moby Dick doesn't bite so much as he swallows.

Look at a politician, eighty years old, making a speech to a crowd in the rain. What's driving him? Not ambition. He's been a senator for forty years. He can never be anything more. But by winning this election he can have one more Hit. He'd rather die of pneumonia than risk missing the Hit.

Pug thought, that in a trivial way was like the President's. Some people had it, some didn't. He himself had none of it. In the Navy the quality was not overly admired. The name for it was "grease." Men who possessed it had a way of climbing fast; they also had a way of relying upon it, till they got too greasy and slipped.

about Sidney, who wants to be a writer or a forest ranger or a composer or anything except what his father is, because he's ashamed of his father being a Jew, or because he thinks he's too sensitive for business or law, whatever the damned Freudian reason may be—and he ends up in his father's business just the same. I've opened my apartment door to enough of those." Noel crooked

Look at a politician, eighty years old, making a speech to a crowd in the rain. What's driving him? Not ambition. He's been a senator for forty years. He can never be anything more. But by winning this election he can have one more Hit.

Believe in yourself, work hard, work smart and passionately present your best self to the world.

And what he greatly thought, he nobly dared.

What greater glory attends a man, while he's alive, than what he wins with his racing feet and striving hands?

I would rather follow the plow as thrall to another man, one with no land allotted him and not much to live on, than be a king over all the perished dead.

A man cannot hide away the cravings of a hungry belly; this is an enemy which gives much trouble to all men; it is because of this that ships are fitted out to sail the seas, and to make war upon other people.

Beware, Diomedês! Forbear, Diomedês! Do not try to put yourself on a level with the gods; that is too high for a man's ambition. The immortal gods are one race, men that walk upon the earth are another.

Look, my Lord! see, Heaven itself declares against your impious intentions!" "Heaven nor Hell shall impede my designs," said Manfred, advancing again to seize the Princess.

Memes have an ultimate ambition: taking vast chunks of the world into their possession and restructuring it according to their form.

He who jumps for the moon and gets it not leaps higher than he who stoops for a penny in the mud.

If you permit unprincipled and ambitious men to monopolize the soil, they will become masters of the country in the certain order of cause and effect. . . .

Don't be afraid to do something different Dare to be something more.

For every moment of triumph, for every instance of beauty, many souls must be trampled.

As things stand now, I am going to be a writer. I'm not sure that I'm going to be a good one or even a self-supporting one, but until the dark thumb of fate presses me to the dust and says 'you are nothing', I will be a writer.

On some days you get what you want, and on others, you get what you need.

Still humping the American Dream