Quotes About Ambition

It had evidently not occurred to her as yet that those who consent to share the bread of adversity may want the whole cake of prosperity for themselves.

he could do charming things, if only he had known how to finish them!

Undine's white and gold bedroom, with sea-green panels and old rose carpet, looked along Seventy-second Street toward the leafless tree-tops of the Central Park. She went to the window, and drawing back its many layers of lace gazed eastward down the long brownstone perspective. Beyond the Park lay Fifth Avenue—and Fifth Avenue was where she wanted to be!

Obviously he had aspired too high, or been too impatient; but it was his nature to be aspiring and impatient, and if he was to succeed it must be on the lines of his own character.

Denis Eady was the son of Michael Eady, the ambitious Irish grocer, whose suppleness and effrontery had given Starkfield its first notion of smart business methods, and whose new brick store testified to the success of the attempt. His son seemed likely to follow in his steps, and was meanwhile applying the same arts to the conquest of the Starkfield maidenhood. Hitherto Ethan Frome had been content to think him a mean fellow; but now he positively invited a horse-whipping.

Even now, however, she was not always happy. She had everything she wanted, but she still felt, at times, that there were other things she might want if she knew about them.

I am horribly poor—and very expensive. I must have a great deal of money.

Ethan's love of nature did not take the form of a taste for agriculture. He had always wanted to be an engineer, and to live in towns, where there were lectures and big libraries and "fellows doing things.

Odbacila sam par dobrih prilika na samom po?etku – pretpostavljam da to svaka devojka uradi, a znate da sam vrlo siromašna – i vrlo skupa.

He had begun too late to subject himself to the persistent mortification of spirit and flesh which is a condition of the average business life...

His face, with its tossed red hair and straggling moustache, had a driven uneasy look, as though life had become an unceasing race between himself and the thoughts at his heels.

Chi ama le idee non è destinato a morire di fame.

All they wanted now was what she herself wanted only a few short hours ago: to be bowed to when they caught certain people's eyes; to be invited to one more dull house; to be put on the Rector's Executive Committees, and pour tea at the Consuless's "afternoons".

She still did and was all that Undine had so sedulously learned not to be and to do; but to dwell on these obstacles to her success was to be more deeply impressed by the fact that she had nevertheless succeeded.

La diferencia es que estos jovencitos dan por sentado que van a conseguir cuanto se proponen, mientras que nosotros casi siempre dábamos por sentado que no debíamos conseguirlo. Aunque me pregunto si algo que uno está seguro de conseguir le haría latir tan locamente el corazón.

minnows who go to a whale to learn how to grow bigger are likely to be swallowed in the process.

Ralph had never seen his way clearly in that dim underworld of affairs where men of the Moffatt and Driscoll type moved like shadowy destructive monsters beneath the darting small fry of the surface.

History consists, for the greater part, of the miseries brought upon the world by pride, ambition, avarice, revenge, lust, sedition, hypocrisy, ungoverned zeal, and all the train of disorderly appetites, which shake the public with the same —"troublous storms that toss The private state, and render life unsweet." These vices are the causes of those storms. Religion, morals, laws, prerogatives, privileges, liberties, rights of men, are the pretexts.

Now, whatever, either on good or upon bad grounds, tends to raise a man in his own opinion, produces a sort of swelling and triumph, that is extremely grateful to the human mind.

What shadows we are, and what shadows we pursue!

he was, indeed, arrived at that pitch of greatness, that the means of his ruin could only be found in his own family.

All things come to him who hustles while he waits.

Yet New York is always the chef, never the diner. Being

I wanted power so badly that I had convinced myself I already had too much of it, that I was an evil schemer who might destroy everyone around me through the poison seeping out of my pores. I was appalled by my own majesty. I wanted someone to betray.