Quotes About Ambition

Mick hadn't become the NFL'S leading quarterback by lying back and playing dead.

She should have everything she wants.

At first I thought it was a fear of failure. Now I think you're afraid to succeed.

Yeah. But aren't you good at your job? Isn't this what you've been training for, putting in time at that Dallas news station, hoping for your big break? He flashed a grin at her.Baby, I'm your big break.

Jonathan Turley was even more blunt in his assessment: "Barack Obama is really the president Richard Nixon always wanted to be.

Michael Jordan didn't become a great basketball player because he wanted to do product endorsements. Van Gogh didn't become a great painter because he dreamed that one day his paintings would sell for $50 million.

Everyone forgets Icarus also flew.

I believe that Icarus was not failing as he fell, but just coming to the end of his triumph.

In those days he really didn't know what he was talking about; that is to say, he was a young jailkid all hung-up on the wonderful possibilities of becoming a real intellectual, and he liked to talk in the tone and using the words, but in a jumbled way, that he had heard from 'real intellectuals.

and never really thought I'd amount to anything. It was precisely what I wanted the whole world to think; then I could sneak in, if that's what they wanted, and sneak out again, which I did.

Vanity of vanities… all is vanity.' You kill yourself to get to the grave. Especially you kill yourself to get to the grave before you die; and the name of the grave is 'success', the name of that grave is hullabullo boom boom horseshit.

Hell man, I know very well you didn't come to me only to want to become a writer, and after all what do I really know about it except that you've got to stick to it with the energy of a benny addict.

now this warm thought of greatness is a big chill in the wind—for

I have finally taught Dean that he can do anything he wants, become mayor of Denver, marry a millionairess, or become the greatest poet since Rimbaud. But he keeps rushing out to see the midget auto races

I have finally taught Dean that he can do anything he wants, become mayor of Denver, marry a millionaires, or become the greatest poet since Rimbaud. But he keeps rushing out to see the midget auto races. I go with him.

Everyone looked like a broken-down movie extra, a withered starlet; disenchanted stunt-men, midget auto-racers, poignant California characters with their end-of-the-continent sadness, handsome, decadent, Casanova-ish men, puffy-eyed motel blondes, hustlers, pimps, whores, masseurs, bellhops-- a lemon lot, and how's a man going to make a living with a gang like that?

he wanted so much to live...

You boys going to get somewhere, or just going?

Now he'd bought a new suit to go back in; blue with pencil stripes, vest and all—eleven dollars on Third Avenue, with a watch and watch chain, and a portable typewriter with which he was going to start writing in a Denver rooming house as soon as he got a job there.

You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.

What did you have in you? - some childish notions, a few half-baked sentiments, a lot of undigested beauty, a great black mass of ignorance, a heart filled to bursting with love, and an ambition as big as your love and as futile as your ignorance.

Man always gets less than he demands from life.

Why didn't you dare it before? he asked harshly. When I hadn't a job? When I was starving? When I was just as I am now, as a man, as an artist, the same Martin Eden?

I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry-rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet." - Jack London