Quotes About Ambition

It has flowered; flowered from vanity, ambition, idealism, passion, loneliness, courage, laziness, the usual seeds

I am one who will force himself to desert these windy and moonlit territories, these midnight wanderings, and confront grained oak doors. I will achieve in my life - heaven grant that it be not long - some gigantic amalgamation between the two discrepancies so hideously apparent to me. Out of my suffering I will do it. I will knock. I will enter.

This fiddling and drifting and not impressing oneself upon anything – this always refraining and fingering and cutting things up into little jokes and facetiousness – that's what's so annihilating. Yet given little money, little looks, no special gift – what can one do? How could one battle? How could one leap on the back of life and wring its scruff?

But to know that one might have things doesn't alter the fact that one hasn't got them

And why not enjoy [life] this very moment?' The thought struck him like a bullet. Ambition dropped like a plummet. Rid of the heart-burn of rejected love, and of vanity rebuked, and all the other stings and pricks which the nettle-bed of life had burnt upon him when ambitious of fame, but could no longer inflict upon one careless of glory, he opened his eyes…

Virtually all the characters in the novel have failed to live up to their early dreams and ambitions.

and you wish to be a poet; and you wish to be a lover

Libertado da angústia do amor rechaçado, da vaidade recriminada e de todos os outros ferrões e espinhos com que as urtigas da vida o haviam ferido quando ambicionava a fama, mas que não podiam molestar quem desdenhava da glória, ele abriu os olhos, que tinham se mantido abertos o tempo todo mas só haviam visto pensamentos, e avistou sua casa, aninhada lá embaixo no vale.

Better is it', she thought, 'to be clothed with poverty and ignorance, which are the dark garments of the female sex; better to leave the rule and discipline of the world to others; better be quit of martial ambition, the love of power, and all the other manly desires if so one can more fully enjoy the most exalted raptures known to the humane spirit, which are', she said aloud, as her habit was when deeply moved, 'contemplation, solitude, love.

Why, after all, did she do these things? Why seek pinnacles and stand drenched in fire? Might it consume her anyhow! Burn her to cinders!

How many men in a thousand million, he asked himself, reach Z after all?

Only human beings—what did THEY want?

Arise, awake, stop not till the goal is reached.

I believe the poor fierce-eyed child had figured out that with a mere fifty dollars in her purse she might somehow reach Broadway or Hollywood - or the foul kitchen of a diner (Help Wanted) in a dismal ex-prairie state, with the wind blowing, and the stars blinking, and the cars, and the bars, and the barmen, and everything soiled, torn, dead.

At eight, he had once told his mother that he wanted to paint air.

The softness and fragility of baby animals caused us the same intense pain. She wanted to be a nurse in some famished Asiatic country; I wanted to be a famous spy.

and I switched to English literature, where so many frustrated poets end as pipe-smoking teachers in tweeds.

He was powerless because he had no precise desire, and this tortured him because he was vainly seeking something to desire.

He started as a maker of Cartesian devils—imps of bottle glass bobbing up and down in methylate-filled tubes hawked during Catkin Week on the boulevards. He

I have in my head many projects that were begun and interrupted at various times...I simply shall not pursue them if the time remaining before my execution is not sufficient for their ordelry conclusion.

We have come to a generation which seeks advance without ideals - discovery without stars.

People up today and down tomorrow, working this week and fired the next, beaten and baffled, but determined not to be wholly beaten, buying furniture on the installment plan, filling the house with roomers to help pay the rent, hoping to get a new suit for Easter—and pawning that suit before the Fourth of July.

What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?

Good evening, daddy! I know you've heard The boogie-woogie rumble Of a dream deferred Trilling the treble And twining the bass Into midnight ruffles Of cat-gut lace. –"Boogie: 1 A.M." by Langston Hughes