Quotes About Ambition

There never were greed and cunning in the world yet, that did not do too much, and overreach themselves. It is as certain as death.

Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show

Fortune or misfortune, a man can but try; there's not to be done without trying - accept laying down and dying.

It's the whole point of the thing, you know—that, and leaving the business to take care of itself, as it seems to have made up its mind not to take care of me.

And if we were not all three in fairyland, certainly I was. I lived principally on Dora and coffee. To have reason to think that when she was with other people she was yet mindful of me, seemed to me the summit of human ambition. There is no doubt whatever that I was a lackadaisical young spoony; but there was a purity of heart in all this still that prevents my having quite a contemptuous recollection of it.

In London, he had expected neither to walk on pavements of gold, nor to lie on beds of roses; if he had had any such exalted expectation, he would not have prospered. He had expected labour, and he found it, and did it and made the best of it. In this, his prosperity consisted.

But I like business,' said Pancks, getting on a little faster. 'What's a man made for?' 'For nothing else?' said Clennam. Pancks put the counter question, 'What else?' It packed up, in the smallest compass, a weight that had rested on Clennam's life; and he made no answer.

If you entertain the supposition that any real success, in great things or in small, ever was or could be, ever will or can be, wrested from Fortune by fits and starts, leave that wrong idea here or leave your cousin Ada here.

And Ralph always wound up these mental soliloquies by arriving at the conclusion, that there was nothing like money.

It only shows how true the old saying is, that a man never knows what he can do till he tries, gentlemen. From "Pickwick Papers" ch. 49 page 646

You are envious, Biddy, and grudging. You are dissatisfied on account of my rise in fortune, and you can't help showing it.

Ama ne yaz?k ki elimden gelenler içimden gelenlerin gerisinde kal?rd?.

Now, I return to this young fellow. And the communication I have got to make is, that he has Great Expectations.

There was something wonderfully hopeful about his general air, and something that at the same time whispered to me he would never be very successful or rich.

Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. To

There's not a Hand in this town, sir, man, woman, or child, but has one ultimate object in life. That object is, to be fed on turtle soup and venison with a gold spoon. Now, they're not a-going—none of 'em—ever to be fed on turtle soup and venison with a gold spoon.

Go and be somethingological directly.

So, Mr. Bounderby threw on his hat—he always threw it on, as expressing a man who had been far too busily employed in making himself, to acquire any fashion of wearing his hat—and with his hands in his pockets, sauntered out into the hall. 'I never wear gloves,' it was his custom to say. 'I didn't climb up the ladder in them.—Shouldn't be so high up, if I had.' Being

He comes here at the peril of his life, for the realization of his fixed idea. In the moment of realization, after all his toil and waiting, you cut the ground from under his feet, destroy his idea, and make his gains worthless to him. Do you see nothing that he might do, under the disappointment?

You find us, Copperfield,' said Mr Micawber, with one eye on Traddles, 'at present established, on what may be designated as a small and unassuming scale; but, you are aware that I have, in the course of my career, surmounted difficulties, and conquered obstacles.

The most important thing in life is to stop saying, 'I wish' and start saying, 'I will'. Consider nothing impossible, then treat possibilities as probabilities

Martin was very glad to hear this, feeling well assured that if intelligence and virtue led, as a matter of course, to the acquisition of dollars, he would speedily become a great capitalist.

This, again, was among the fictions of Coketown. Any capitalist there, who had made sixty thousand pounds out of sixpence, always professed to wonder why the sixty thousand nearest Hands didn't each make sixty thousand pounds out of sixpence, and more or less reproached them every one for not accomplishing the little feat. What I did you can do. Why don't you go and do it?

Mr. Stryver, a man of little more than thirty, but looking twenty years older than he was, stout, loud, red, bluff, and free from any drawback of delicacy, had a pushing way of shouldering himself (morally and physically) into companies and conversations, that argued well for his shouldering his way up in life.