Quotes About Ambition

Cora didn't know what optimistic meant. She asked the other girls that night if they were familiar with the word. None of them had heard it before. She decided that it meant trying.

Fear drove these people, even more than cotton money.

He'd broken through into a small corner of American success where his race did not curse him. Some might have lived in that space happily, rising alone. Lander wanted to make room for others. People were wonderful company sometimes.

Entrepreneur?" Pepper said the last part like manure. "That's just a hustler who pays taxes.

She'd have to get started if she was going to read them all.

or at least recognizing that he carried himself differently than other colored boys his age and taking this for industry.

Why should anyone else have it easy. Spoken like a true New Yorker.

In time the saplings and hedges on the perimeter would provide shade and character; now they spoke of fine intentions.

This city is reward for all it will enable you to achieve and punishment for all the crimes it will force you to commit.

He was a curious boy. He wanted to be a dentist, a pragmatic choice. Teacher, doctor, preacher, undertaker. What a colored boy can aspire to in a world like this. Colored people always got bad teeth, always got a soul needed tending. Always dying.

In this world, however, his reward was that void attending most human endeavor, with which all are well acquainted. His accomplishments, such as they were, gathered on the heap of the unsung.

How had he suffered the old arrangement for that long? Part of moving up in the world is realizing how much shit you used to eat.

Harry had worked his way through the American Dream and come to the conclusion that is was composed of a good lunch and a deep red wine that could soar.

It was America, after all. The sort of place where you should be allowed to walk as high as you wanted. But what if you were the one walking underneath? What if the tightrope walker really had fallen? It was quite possible that he could have killed not just himself, but a dozen people below. Recklessness and freedom - how did they become a cocktail?

At Yale, when he was young and headstrong, he'd been sure that one day he'd be the very axis of the world, that his life would be one of deep impact. But every young man thought that. A condition of youth, your own importance. The mark you'd make upon the world. But a man learns sooner or later. You take your little nice and you make it your own.

So you want to be a dancer? I asked. I want to dance better than I already do, he said.

Failure is good. Failure admits ambition. Failure admits bravery. Failure admits daring. It requires courage to fail and even more courage to know that you're going to fail...And in the end there's only one real failure - and that's the failure to be able to fail. Having tried is the true bravery.

What a man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task.

What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task.

What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task. What

they considered "very important" to them now, 16 percent of the students checked "making a lot of money"; 78 percent said their first goal was "finding a purpose and meaning to my life.

What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task. What he needs

But everything great is just as difficult to realize as it is rare to find

It isn't the past which holds us back, it's the future; and how we undermine it, today.