Quotes About Ambition

Unfortunately, Bretorius had found mediocrity too high a bar. He had advanced in the fleet the old-fashioned way: he'd stuck around so long they had to give him a command, or muster him out.

Firing a manager inspired only the ambitious who wanted to take his or her place. But murder motivated everyone. It belonged in every supervisor's tool kit.

poor, or take a little chance

There are no ordained results in this world, I've discovered. The trying is what counts most.

Patton loved war; Monty loved himself.

I will clamber through the clouds and exist.

Then felt I like like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken; Like stout Cortes when with eagle eyes He star'd at the Pacific-and all his men Look'd at each other with a wild surmise Silent upon a peak in Darien

No one can usurp the heights... But those to whom the miseries of the world Are misery, and will not let them rest.

I burn'd And ached for wings

That men, who might have tower'd in the van Of all the congregated world, to fan And winnow from the coming step of time All chaff of custom, wipe away all slime Left by men-slugs and human serpentry, Have been content to let occasion die, Whilst they did sleep in love's Elysium.

I would sooner fail than not be among the greatest.

John Gibson Lockhart, writing in Blackwood's Magazine, described Endymion as "imperturbable drivelling idiocy". With biting sarcasm, Lockhart advised, "It is a better and a wiser thing to be a starved apothecary than a starved poet; so back to the shop Mr John, back to plasters, pills, and ointment boxes

I'll tell you how to burn

When I have fears that I may cease to be Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain, Before high piled books, in charact'ry, Hold like rich garners the full-ripen'd grain … When I Have Fears that I May Cease to Be

Impossible is for the unwilling

The imagination of a boy is healthy, and the mature imagination of a man is healthy; but there is a space of life between, in which the soul is in a ferment, the character undecided, the way of life uncertain, the ambition thick-sighted: thence proceeds mawkishness, and all the thousand bitters which those men I speak of must necessarily taste in going over the following pages.

In other words, you want to become totally bourgeois. You people have all been brainwashed. I imagine that you'd like to become a success or something equally vile.

Then, too, if I were a Negro, I would not be pressured by my mother to find a good job, for no good jobs would be available. My mother herself, a worn old Negress, would be too broken by years of underpaid labor as a domestic to go out bowling at night. She and I could live most pleasantly in some moldy shack in the slums in a state of ambitionless peace, realizing contentedly that we were unwanted, that striving was meaningless.

thought you'd make Levy Pants nationwide.

John Kennedy Toole

You can do more! A lot more. If you want a...record you can be proud of, you'll do a heck of a lot more than just what you have to.

You have to be a bastard to make it, and that's a fact. And the Beatles are the biggest bastards on earth.

There's room at the top, they are telling you still. But first you must learn how to smile as you kill!

If you want to be like the folks up on the hill, you have to learn to smile while you kill