Quotes About Ambition

You have to take great risks to get great rewards.

Your brightest light will take you to your greatest heights.

Your dreams are ink; reality is the canvas. Paint masterpieces.

At one time I was weary of verse writing, and wanted to give it up. At another time I was determined to be a poet until I could establish a proud name over others. The alternatives battled in my mind and made my life restless.

Poor boy - leaves moon-viewing for rice-grinding.

I would never want to live in L.A., and I made that decision years ago, so I never chose that path for myself, although I have much respect for those that do it at a high level.

I had a nightmare about being Trapped in an elevator with a self-made man-- He was born with a silver bootstrap in his mouth; He pulled himself up by his spoons. But when he lived in the fraternity, Before he could roll his sleeves up and get anything done, He would pack his laundry into boxes And mail it off to his mother and his grandmother-- They would wash and iron his clothes, And then mail them back to him.

Is it the lack of opportunity that creates the lack of ambition, or has that always existed? Most of them must have parents who work, or who studied, and who of course want the same thing for their kids. But how do you find that in a town where the major achievement was always seen as escaping it? Eventually

A girl need not necessarily have the perfect start in life to fulfill such a dream.

to turn pro." "It bothers me that so many runners feel they somehow don't deserve to take the sport all the way and find out how good they can be," I said. "I wish more folks with average talent would just go for it.

At the risk of sounding like Uncle Rico from Napoleon Dynamite who can't let go of the past

You don't become a runner by winning a morning workout. The only true way is to marshal the ferocity of your ambition over the course of many day, weeks, months, and (if you could finally come to accept it) years. The Trial of Miles; Miles of Trials.

Son, if you really want something in this life, you have to work for it. Now quiet! They're about to announce the lottery numbers.

I'll keep it short and sweet - Family. Religion. Friendship. These are the three demons you must slay if you wish to succeed in business.

Perhaps a wish was just a hope with better aim.

Beware of the gap. The gap between where you are and where you want to be. Simply thinking of the gap widens it. And you end up falling through.

And yet we had done what so often happened in the proud history of geographic discovery. We had found paradise. And then we had set it on fire.

The hardest dream of all is the dream of not being tormented by our unlived dreams. To cope with and accept unfulfillment as a natural human condition. To be complete in our incompleteness. To be free from the shackles of memory, and ambition, to be free from comparison to other people and other hypothetical selves, and to meet the moment without any other agenda, to exist as freely as time itself.

She wondered how many Dans there were in the world, dreaming of things they would hate if they actually got them.

Start fires. But only metaphorically. Unless you are cold and it's a safe setting. In which case: start fires.

Maybe in some lives you just float around and expect nothing else and don't even try to change. Maybe that was most lives.

It is easy to mourn the lives we aren't living. Easy to wish we'd developed other talents, said yes to different offers. Easy to wish we'd worked harder, loved better, handled our finances more astutely, been more popular, stayed in the band, gone to Australia, said yes to the coffee or done more bloody yoga.

If one advances confidently,' Thoreau had written in Walden, 'in the direction of his dreams, and endeavours to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.

Go confidently in the direction of your dreams,' Thoreau had said. 'Live the life you've imagined.