Quotes About Ambition

If a man has talent and can't use it, he's failed. If he uses only half of it, he has partly failed. If he uses the whole of it, he has succeeded, and won a satisfaction and triumph few men ever know.

If a man has a talent and cannot use it, he has failed. If he has a talent and uses only half of it, he has partly failed. If he has a talent and learns somehow to use the whole of it, he has gloriously succeeded, and won a satisfaction and a triumph few men ever know.

I don't know yet what I am capable of doing, but, by God, I have genius -- I know it too well to blush behind it.

Without triers they would never be any successors

Without triers there would never be any successors

Pearls rarely turn up in oysters served to you on a plate; you have to dive for them.

I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours..

Even in times of the most entrenched rationalism, there lives in every man a little Alexander who never managed to conquer his Eudaimon Arabia.

We must just keep on and on until the mountains themselves crumble from nausea or we learn to scale them and cool our hands in the sky.

Listen, you are no longer a boy. You are forty. When will you learn not to wait for chance but to build on what you have and use each day to consolidate your position? Why have you never been anything more than Tribune? Because your plans always begin with next month.

MRS. ANTROBUS: What, George? What have you lost? ANTROBUS: The most important thing of all: The desire to begin again, to start building.

She resembled the swallow in the fable who once every thousand years transferred a grain of wheat, in the hope of rearing a mountain to reach the moon. Such persons are raised up in every age; they obstinately insist on transporting their grains of wheat and they derive a certain exhilaration from the sneers of the bystanders. "How queerly they dress!" we cry. "How queerly they dress!

Caesar does not love, nor does he inspire love. He diffuses an equable sense of ordered good will, a passionless energy that creates without fever, and which expends itself without self-examination or self-doubt.

If you can't stand the way this place is take yourself to higher places

Think of how far you've come," Maggie said softly. "And then ask yourself how much farther you wish to go

But surely, she argued with herself, life was more than this relentless getting ahead? Surely, there was more to life than self-actualization and ambition and success? What was wrong with linking one's happiness to that of another human being? Why should fifty years of peak capitalism eradicate something that the Eastern philosophers had taught for thousands of years—that life is about interconnectedness, interdependence, and yes, even sacrifice?

Doors open because you're beautiful, but I wouldn't cultivate beauty to the exclusion of brains.

Having a second chance makes you want to work even harder.

Because even bigger than her sadness was her determination.

No matter how dizzying his professional highs, Shane just couldn't resist the pull of the tide sweeping him out. Self-destruction was always imminent. No, if writing had been the cure, the past fifteen years would've looked very different. He wouldn't have taken so long to get sober. He might've picked a permanent place to live, put down actual roots. Invested in Seamless or Spotify. He'd have gotten serious about the business of living.

MAKE AMERICA NEW YORK.

Renee was entering her acquisitions meeting with the air of Scarlett throwing the Yankees off Tara. Renee was all about going into battle. She wore a fitted gray BCBG pantsuit and her shaggy bob sleekly tucked behind her ears. She was Not Fucking Around.

Eva wanted things. She'd just forgotten how to get them.

Moving to New York was about reinvention. If you didn't want that, you stayed in Kenosha, Wisconsin.