Quotes About Ambition

Reimagine themselves. When I was a little girl, I would go to the one little store in town and leaf through the fashion and movie magazines and dream about…something better.

Karl Popper once said that attempts to create heaven on earth invariably produce hell.

We all want to break our orbits, float like a satellite gone wild in space, run the risk of disintegration. We all want to take our lives in our own hands and hurl them out among the stars.

If you want it, boys, get it here, thing. - Sweet Thing

Yet egotism can also be useful to ambitious creatures, driving their single-minded pursuit of success. Madness seems essential in order to be "great.

humans wrestled endlessly with their own overpowering egos. Some tried suppressing selfness, seeking detachment. Others subsumed personal ambition in favor of a greater whole—family, religion, or a leader. Later they passed through a phase in which individualism was extolled as the highest virtue, teaching their young to inflate the ego beyond all natural limits or restraint.

It wasn't that I wanted to be a writer; I just didn't want to be stupid.

Limited money and family obligations have never stopped a man who really wanted to do something, although they provide excuses for a man who is not really up to the creative challenge in the first place. Find out today whether you are willing to do what it takes.

What you settle for is determined by your fear.

If you'd just try, I'm sure you'd be able to fly.

Burn Today And Produce a Fire That Lights Up Tomorrow

Law school was, for the most part, full of overindulged kids looking to become lawyers either to please daddy or to bring home the big paycheck.

Talent is its own expectation, Jim: you either live up to it or it waves a hankie, receding forever.

Like so many other nerdy, disaffected young people of that time, I dreamed of becoming an 'artist', i.e., somebody whose adult job was original and creative instead of tedious and dronelike.

Some persons can give themselves away to an ambitious pursuit and have that be all the giving-themselves-away-to-something they need to do. Though sometimes this changes as the players get older and the pursuit more stress-fraught. American experience seems to suggest that people are virtually unlimited in their need to give themselves away, on various levels. Some just prefer to do it in secret.

I had four hundred thousand pages of continental philosophy and lit theory in my head. And by God, I was going to use it to prove to him that I was smarter than he was.

I Philo, educating yourself was something you had to do in spite if school, not because of it -- which is basically why so many of my high school peers are still there in Philo even now, selling one another insurance, drinking supermarket liquor, watching television, awaiting the formality of their first cardiac.

a quick intelligence he squanders on an insatiable need to advance some impression of himself—that

Everyone should get at least one good look at the eyes of a man who finds himself rising toward what he wants to pull down to himself.

And here's a cliché' that's earned its status as a cliché': whether you're free or locked up depends, all and only, on what you want. What you have matters about as much as the color of your sky. Or your bars.

if you're poor old Mario Incandenza you take your competitive strokes where you can find them.

My ambitions at this point are modest and mostly surround staying alive.

central conundra of millennial après-garde film, most of which, in the teleputer age of home-only entertainment, involved the question why so much aesthetically ambitious film was so boring and why so much shitty reductive commercial entertainment was so much fun.

You play right up to your limit and then pass your limit and look back at your former limit and wave a hankie at it, embarking.