Quotes About Ambition

I put myself up for full professor, an act of such unprecedented and unmitigated arrogance that the committee approved it, thus effectively rooting me to the scene of the crime, too weighed down by tenure, rank, and salary to be marketable ever again.

Non basta una vita One life isn't enough

For people who dealt largely in dreams, his father was fond of observing, realtors were a surprisingly unromantic bunch, like card counters in a Vegas casino.

people confuse power with will because so few of them have the foggiest idea what they want. Absent any knowledge, will remains impotent. A limp dick, as it were." She regarded him, eyebrow arched. "The lucky few who happen actually to know what they want are said to have will-power.

people are forever confusing will with power

they were dreamers who felt no urgency about bringing their dreams to fruition.

We do not want what's good for us.

The world is divided between kids who grew up wanting be their parents and those like us, who grow up wanting anything but. Neither group ever succeeds.

The world is divided between kids who grew up wanting to be their parents and those like us, who wanted anything but. Neither group ever succeeds.

Had I been more, I'd be more. Simple.

Miss Beryl was not unaware of Mr. Wirfly's shortcomings, but she steadfastly maintained that he was not so much incompetent as unambitious, a character trait almost impossible to find in a lawyer.

I earned good money,' he said. 'I was driving in good teams, I was winning races, I had pole positions … basically, not a lot to prove. So what is the point to take still the risk? That was my question to myself last week. But the other side is, what is the rest of your life?

the impulse to dream had been slowly beaten out of me by experience.

I had tasted what to me was life, and I would have more of it, somehow, someway.

the city in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries in America could be an alluring place; but it also often was, for persons without brains or money or simply good luck, a crucible in which the superficial elements of personality and civilization were quickly burned away, to reveal the animal underneath. As

was building up in me a dream which the entire educational system of the South had been rigged to stifle. I was feeling the very thing that the state of Mississippi had spent millions

Ahead the long rails were glinting in the moonlight, stretching away, away to somewhere, somewhere where he could be a man.

Most of us try to do too much because we are secretly afraid we will not be able to do anything at all.

This trip was not about running for president. This trip was preparing to BE president.

it's hard to talk sensibly with giants - their massive heads tend to get lost in the clouds

In my experience a boy will change his goal from unobtainable to obtainable once he realizes which is which. By that logic you should settle for me. Doesn't work for girls. We want what we can't have.

Don't you ever feel that way? Like you could do a better job if you rqan the world?' 'Um... no. Me running the world would be kind of a nightmare.

I'm all about doing the impossible.

He warned me the greediest wishes cause the greatest sorrows.