Quotes About Ambition

The wishbone will never replace the backbone

and a motto in a frame: sometimes i feel like giving up but then i remember of a lot of motherfuckers to prove wrong

A man can't soar too high, when he flies with his own wings.

No bird soars too high if he soars with his own wings.

A Horrible thought: could this be the pattern of my life ahead? Every ambition thwarted, every dream stillborn? But a seconds reflection tells me that what I'm currently experiencing is shared by all sentient, suffering human beings, except for the very, very few: the genuinely talented - the odd, rare genius - and, of course, the exceptionally lucky swine.

I write - poignantly, in the most heartfelt way - about how I miss her and how I detest my life in this school and she responds with detailed plans for her future life as an archaeologist or philosopher or - new, this - a veterinary surgeon.

Maybe this is the answer - maybe this is how to find true contentment - to live your life within confined horizons. To set modest goals, achievable ambitions. Not all of us can manage it, alas.

I may be a shit writer,' I remember him saying once, 'but I'm richer than any of the good ones.

William Boyd

Cornell off to realise another impossible dream, righting more geopolitical wrongs. In a way, she thought, you had to admire someone like that. They burned brighter than ordinary mortals.

You remember I had a strong inclination all my life to be a painter. Under different circumstances I would rather have been a painter than to bother with these god-damn words. I never actually thought of myself as a poet but I knew I had to be an artist in some way.

the sky goes out if you should fail.

The reader knows himself as he was twenty years ago and he has also in mind a vision of what he would be, some day. Oh, some day! But the thing he never knows and never dares to know is what he is at the exact moment that he is. And this moment is the only thing in which I am at all interested. Ergo, who cares for anything I do? And what do I care?

I have always associated [Al Que Quiere!] with a figure on a soccer field: to him who wants the ball to be passed to him. [...] I was convinced nobody in the world of poetry wanted me but I was there willing to pass the ball if anyone did want it.

she opened the door! nearly six feet tall, and I . . . wanted to found a new country—

Boys, be ambitious. Be ambitious not for money, not for selfish aggrandizement, not for the evanescent thing which men call fame. Be ambitious for the attainment of all that a man can be.

Every one is expected to look out for himself here. I fancy that there would be very little rising if men were expected to rise for the sake of others, in America.

An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why.

All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection. So I rate us on the base of our splendid failure to do the impossible.

I'm a failed poet. Maybe every novelist wants to write poetry first, finds he can't, and then tries the short story, which is the most demanding form after poetry. And, failing at that, only then does he take up novel writing.

Making or getting money is a kind of game where there are not any rules at all.

Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency . . . to get the book written. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the "Ode on a Grecian Urn" is worth any number of old ladies.

The last sound on the worthless earth will be two human beings trying to launch a homemade spaceship and already quarreling about where they are going next.

The end of wisdom is to dream high enough to lose the dream in the seeking of it.