Quotes About Ambition

In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it. (Mr. Dumby, Act III)

If you want to be a grocer, or a general, or a politician, or a judge, you will invariably become it; that is your punishment. If you never know what you want to be, if you live what some might call the dynamic life but what I will call the artistic life, if each day you are unsure of who you are and what you know you will never become anything, and that is your reward.

There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.

If you don't get everything you want, think of the things you don't get that you don't want.

Women, as some witty Frenchman once put it, inspire us with the desire to do masterpieces and always prevent us from carrying them out.

Discontent is the first step in the progress of a man or a nation.

Ambition is the last refuge of the failure

Basil Hallward is what I think I am: Lord Henry what the world thinks me: Dorian what I would like to be—in other ages, perhaps.

Nothing should be out of the reach of hope. Life is a hope.

God knows; I won't be an Oxford don anyhow. I'll be a poet, a writer, a dramatist. Somehow or other I'll be famous, and if not famous, I'll be notorious. Or perhaps I'll lead the life of pleasure for a time and then—who knows?—rest and do nothing. What does Plato say is the highest end that man can attain here below? To sit down and contemplate the good. Perhaps that will be the end of me too.

Our ambition should be to rule ourselves, the true kingdom for each one of us; and true progress is to know more, and be more, and to do more.

You have never been poor, and never known what ambition is.

To win back my youth, there is nothing I wouldn't do - except take exercise, get up early, or be a useful member of the community.

He's such an extraordinarily brilliant person that it would be terrible if he let himself do nothing in the end.

If you did not do so for the sake of riches,You must have done so for the sake of novelty.

While they have not got their aims, their anxiety is how to get them. When they have got them, their anxiety is lest they should lose them.

If the search for riches were sure to be successful, though I should become a groom with a whip in my hand to get them, I will do so. As the search may not be successful, I will follow after that which I love.

The will to win, the desire to succeed, the urge to reach your full potential... these are the keys that will unlock the door to personal excellence.

She'd stood by that creed. No softness, because the world wasn't soft; lots of laughter, because if you were in on the joke, the joke couldn't be on you; And no wanting what you couldn't take, because the world never gave. Or so she'd thought.

Great things.

Anything that doesn't take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.

I never had any doubts about my abilities. I knew I could write. I just had to figure out how to eat while doing this. [ Cormac McCarthy's Venomous Fiction , New York Times, April 19, 1992]

My daddy once told me that some of the most miserable people he ever knew were the ones that finally got what they'd always wanted.

Maybe. Anyway, some men get what they want. No man. Or perhaps only briefly so as to lose it. Or perhaps only to prove to the dreamer that the world of his longing made real is no longer that world at all.