Quotes About Ambition

To go to the Oscars for Moneyball - that was pretty amazing. And to be able to go work with Kathryn Bigelow - that's going to be pretty sweet. Hopefully I don't have to go back to being a waiter. That's still my main goal.

Right now, my job is that I'm like an ambulance chaser. I've got to look for movies with white guys falling out of them.

I'm in show business... I want to hang out with Janet Jackson, not Jesse Jackson.

Do you know? What the fuck do women want? l know what you want: everything.

The fact that you have failed to get the lesser proves conclusively that you deserve the greater.

So long as the man with ambition is a failure, the world will tell him to let go of his ideal; but when his ambition is realized, the world will praise him for the persistence and the determination that he manifested during his dark hours, and everybody will point to his life as an example for coming generations. This is invariably the rule. Therefore pay no attention to what the world says when you are down. Be determined to get up, to reach the highest goal you have in view, and you will.

In ambition, as in love, the successful can afford to be indulgent toward their rivals. The prize our own, it is graceful to recognize the merit that vainly aspired to it.

Large natures have usually large desires, and only the small are satisfied with the small.

Ambitious princes value inherited kingdoms not so much as conquered provinces.

A failure establishes only this, that our determination to succeed was not strong enough.

We trifle when we assign limits to our desires, since nature hath set none.

I quickly decided to turn loss and failure into my driving force.

Not all who become leaders crave the power that goes with it.

From the time that I can remember, I worked to make money - either baby-sitting, or one year wrapping gifts at a department store at Christmas, so I could have my own money.

The artists I look up to are the ones who push their own limits.

When you have a specific vision for something, you just go in and attack it.

I've never watched an entire episode of American Idol. It's too mean. Why would anyone want to go on a show to be ripped apart? I don't want to be tough with my singers, but I do want to tell them on The Voice that if you really want this, you'll be kicked when you're down. You have to be willing to roll with those punches. You have to really want it.

Even when I was little, I knew I was meant to perform. I would watch specials on TV or videos of Janet or Whitney, and I would start crying because I was like "I want that so bad!"

I remember watching the Grammys and looking at the performances and crying to my mom, saying how much I wanted to be there. Thank god, cut to years later, I won Best New Artist at the Grammys and performed there, and now made a movie with one of my idols -- Cher.

That overachieving, ambitious, nobody-can-hold-me-down attitude I had, which came from a place of anger and aggression, has transformed into feeling like I will take on the world, but I will do it with an embrace, rather than with my dukes up.

I always wanted to have my own album released before I graduated from high school.

Right now I'm pretty single... My career is my boyfriend.

My parent's divorce and hard times at school, all those things combined to mold me, to make me grow up quicker. And it gave me the drive to pursue my dreams that I wouldn't necessarily have had otherwise.

I remember watching the Grammys and looking at the performances and crying to my mom, saying how much I wanted to be there.