Quotes About Ambition

He was of the mold from which great men are made. Having said of anything 'Let it be done' he at once felt not only that it was accomplished, but that he had done it himself.

his reach exceeds his grasp. He tries to do things no one else would even dream of attempting-and he usually brings about three-quarters of it off. The last quarter sometimes trips him up, but the parts he does manage are remarkable. And no one else would have tried.

I have an older sister named Haley and she wanted to be an actress. So I wanted to be an actress. It's really funny the way that some people don't give kids enough credit for like really being driven, and really wanting to do things so badly.

Your love of glory must conquer your will to survive; or why fight at all? Why not be a smith, a brewer, a wool merchant? Why are you in the contest, if not to win, and if not to win, then to die?

Edward Seymour says, 'You should have been a bishop, Cromwell.' 'Edward,' he says, 'I should have been Pope.

Damn it all, Cromwell, why are you such a . . . person? It isn't as if you could afford to be.

Just think, she said to herself. I could be living on the Right Bank. I could be married to a senior clerk at the Treasury. I could be sitting with my feet up, embroidering a linen handkerchief with a rambling-rose design. Instead I'm on the rue des Cordeliers in pursuit of a baguette, with a three-inch blade for comfort.

No son wishes to see his son less powerful than himself.

Rafe shrugs. 'He is frightened of you, sir. You have outgrown him. You have gone beyond what any servant or subject should be.' It is the cardinal over again, he thinks. Wolsey was broken not for his failures, but for his successes; not for any error, but for grievances stored up, about how great he had become.

But remember this above all: defeat your instinct. Your love of glory must conquer your will to survive; or why fight at all? Why not be a smith, a brewer, a wool merchant? Why are you in the contest, if not to win, and if not to win, then to die?

Vadier (on Danton): "We'll clean up the rest of them, and leave that great stuffed turbot till the end." Danton (on Vadier): "Vadier? I'll eat his brains and use his skull to shit in.

A decade of self-aggrandisement, since his daughter flashed her cunny at the king, has made Boleyn rich and settled and confident.

Gradually, you see, our people are coming into the power they have always thought is their due.

To his inner ear, the cardinal speaks. He says, I saw you, Crumb, when you were at Elvetham: scratching your balls in the dawn and wondering at the violence of the king's whims. If he wants a new wife, fix him one. I didn't, and I am dead.

We make great progress only at those times when we become melancholy—at those times when, discontented with the real world, we are forced to make for ourselves one more bearable. "The Theory of Ambition," an essay: JEAN-MARIE HÉRAULT DE SÉCHELLES

But what do they get by the change? One dog sated with meat is replaced by a hungrier dog who bites nearer the bone. Out goes the man grown fat with honor, and in comes a hungry and a lean man.

And I thought I would win him, I really thought I would, for he was tenacious of the world, tenacious of his person, and had a good deal to live for. In the end he was his own murderer. He wrote and wrote and he talked and talked, then suddenly at a stroke he cancelled himself. If ever a man came close to beheading himself, Thomas More was that man.

They always say, we'll just do another year. It's called the golden handcuffs.

He thinks of making his fortune. We all know that money sticks to yours hands. No, It passes through them, alas.

He who climbs higher than he should, falls lower than he would.

And Louis is weak. Let him give an inch, and some Cromwell will appear.

Men like Carew, he knows, tend to blame him, Cromwell, for Anne's rise in the world; he facilitated it, he broke the old marriage and let in the new. He does not expect them to soften to him, to include him in their companionship; he only wants them not to spit in his dinner.

John More, Gregory Cromwell, what have we done to our sons? Made them into idle young gentlemen—but who can blame us for wanting for them the ease we didn't have?

We are vain and ambitious all the same, and we never do live quiet, because we rise in the morning and we feel the blood coursing in our veins and we think, by the Holy Trinity, whose head can I stamp on today? What worlds are at hand, for me to conquer? Or at the least we think, if God made me a crewman on his ship of fools, how can I murder the drunken captain, and steer it to port and not be wrecked?