Quotes About Ambition

Don't take anyone else's definition of success as your own. (This is easier said than done.)

One can never consent to creep when one feels an impulse to soar.

Despite the success cult, men are most deeply moved not by the reaching of the goal, but by the grandness of effort involved in getting there-or failing to get there.

The problem is not that you cannot have what you think you want. The problem is that when you get what you think you want, it won't satisfy.

Success is not greedy, as people think, but insignificant. That's why it satisfies nobody.

Is there anything in life so disenchanting as attainment?

Achievement: The death of an endeavor, and the birth of disgust.

We are never further from our wishes than when we imagine that we possess what we have desired.

The closer one gets to the top, the more one finds there is no "top."

The toughest thing about success is that you've got to keep on being a success. Talent is only a starting point in business. You've got to keep working that talent.

It's not that I'm not grateful for all this attention. It's just that fame and fortune ought to add up to more than fame and fortune.

The prospect of success in achieving our most cherished dream is not without its terrors. Who is more deprived and alone than the man who has achieved his dream?

Success is not a doorway, it's a staircase.

There is no business in the world so troublesome as the pursuit of fame: life is over before you have hardly begun your work.

The exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess Success is our national disease.

I have found that it is much easier to make a success in life than to make a success of one's life.

Bad will be the day for every man when he becomes absolutely contented with the life he is living, when there is not forever beating at the doors of his soul some great desire to do something larger.

The only time you find success before work is in the dictionary.

She's the kind of woman who climbed the ladder of success, wrong by wrong.

My formula for success is rise early, work late, and strike oil.

Success to me is having ten honeydew melons and eating only the top half of each one.

Progress means taking risks, for you can't steal home and keep your foot on third base.

There are but two ways of rising in the world: either by one's own industry or profiting by the foolishness of others.

Either do not attempt at all, or go through with it.