Quotes About Ambition

How low do you have to stoop in this country to be President?

To put our faith in tangible goals would seem to be, at best, unwise. So we do not strive to be firemen, we do not strive to be bankers, nor policemen, nor doctors. WE STRIVE TO BE OURSELVES. But don't misunderstand me. I don't mean that we can't BE firemen, bankers, or doctors—but that we must make the goal conform to the individual, rather than make the individual conform to the goal.

And only those who can see above and beyond the American goal of respectable mediocrity can enjoy a life that leads to anything but a struggle to attain that end.

Art is long and life is short, and success is very far off." —J. Conrad

I felt like a monster reincarnation of Horatio Alger... a Man on the Move, and just sick enough to be totally confident.

So if I decide to leap for The Fountain when I finish this memo, I want to make one thing perfectly clear—I would genuinely love to make that leap, and if I don't I will always consider it a mistake and a failed opportunity, one of the very few serious mistakes of my First Life that is now ending.

about to quit." "Why?" He laughed. "Everybody quits—you'll quit. Nobody worth a shit can work here.

Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven. —John Milton, Paradise Lost

And indeed, that IS the question: whether to float with the tide, or to swim for a goal. It is a choice we must all make consciously or unconsciously at one time in our lives. So few people understand this! Think of any decision you've ever made which had a bearing on your future: I may be wrong, but I don't see how it could have been anything but a choice however indirect — between the two things I've mentioned: the floating or the swimming.

The scene [Bruegel's 'Landscape with the Fall of Icarus'] is filled with a vast field, and a cow and a farmer plowing. In the left-hand corner is a tiny ocean the size of a palm, and there, I can barely make it out, the two legs of a man who fell headlong into the sea. This is called the Fall of Icarus. Compared to everyday life, the fall of an idealist who flew too high with candle-wax wings is an unremarkable tragedy.

They say we're here because of desire. In our desire to live better than others, we are cruel to each other.

Las gentes son iguales en todo el mundo: todas carecen de algo, todas caen enfermas, todas actúan con necedad, y todas sucumben a la ambición.

He (William Cort) had some desire to be successful, but it did not burn so strongly in him that he was prepared to overcome his character to achieve it.

Father is a school manqué ... He always wanted to write books. But he became rich instead, so is not allowed.

I learned that I' have to be detached if I was ever to achieve anything at all.

I knew salesmen, they made good murderers.

Russia, like all other countries not named China, faces an uphill battle to establish the degree of content dominance that an autocrat might want.

Life has taught this boy to string nets beneath his hopes.

The motto here is that a new door opens every time you push another man out a window.

I accuse you of marching towards supreme power. - said by Jean-Baptiste Louvet to Robespierre (1792)

power is the goal of all ambition

If you fail at the large things it means you have not large ambitions. Concentration, focus - that is all. The aptitudes come, the tools forge themselves.

On these things he spent all his money and it was his ambition to have as little as possible in his banking account when he was killed, as, when he was depressed, he knew he would be, before the statutory age of forty-five.

Now the pieces in the puzzle fell firmly into place. For this it was certainly worth scaring away a few birds and wiping out a few people. Privacy? Of course Doctor No would have to kill him and the girl. Power? This was it. Doctor No had really got himself into business.