Quotes About Ambition

And what was the ultimate goal? To have one's work caged in art's great zoos—the Modern, the Met, the Louvre?

Then I read Little Women, and of course, like a lot of really young girls, I was very taken with Jo - Jo being the writer and the misfit.

I didn't mind the misery of a vocation but I dreaded not being called

We sometimes eclipse our own dreams with reality (p.43)

The brilliant trees burned through the heavy mist and he climbed them to pluck leaves of gold, cramming fistfuls inside his sweater, imagining the wealth that would be his.

one candidate desperately shovels money down a pit, and the other builds empty edifices in his own name,

that without a doubt we sometimes eclipse our own dreams with reality

Your vision of where or who you want to be is the greatest asset you have.

Talent helps, but it won't take you as far as ambition.

You need to aim beyond what you are capable of.

If you think you're unable to be on the cover of Time magazine, make it your business to be there.

It's not how good you are, It's how good you want to be.

Nearly all rich an powerful people are not notably talented, educated, charming or good-looking. They become rich and powerful by wanting to be rich and powerful.

Your vision of where or who you want to be is the greatest asset you have. Without having a goal it's difficult to score.

When it can't be done, do it. If you don't do it, it doesn't exist.

All I wanted to do was write - at the time, poems, and prose, too. I guess my ambition was simply to make money however I could to keep myself going in some modest way, and I didn't need much, I was unmarried at the time, no children.

You can't put your feet on the ground until you've touched the sky.

As long as you are dreaming, there is always a way out

Con men and tricksters run the world. Rascals rule. And do you know why? because they are hungier than we are. because they know what they want. because they believe in life more than we do.

Life got in the way -- two years in the army, work, marriage, family responsibilities, the need to earn more and more money, all the muck that bogs us down when we don't have the balls to stand up for ourselves -- but I had never lost my interest in books.

He is twenty-eight years old, and to the best of his knowledge he has no ambitions. No burning ambitions, in any case, no clear idea of what building a plausible future might entail for him.

But money, of course, is never just money. It's always something else, and it's always something more, and it always has the last word.

That was all he had ever aspired to, with a wife thrown into the bargain, maybe, and a kid or two to go along with her. It had never felt like too much to ask for, but after three years of struggling to write his dissertation, Tom finally understood that he didn't have it in him to finish. Or, if he did have it in him, he couldn't persuade himself to believe in the value of doing it anymore.

That was the real difference, Ferguson concluded. Not too little money or too much money, not what a person did or failed to do, not buying a larger house or a more expensive car, but ambition. That explained why Brownstein and Solomon managed to float through their lives in relative peace—because they weren't tormented by the curse of ambition.