Quotes About Ambition

I'd love to be a saxophonist. I don't know why, but I pretend I'm the saxophonist when I listen to music. I have about as much chance playing the sax as I do learning how to fly.

Even when I was a little kid, I always said I would be in the movies one day, and damned if I didn't make it.

I never met anybody who said when they were a kid, "I wanna grow up and be a critic.

My principal motive is the belief that we can still make admirable sense of our lives even if we cease to have … "an ambition of transcendence

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

I'm the boy who's going to glom onto this junk—if I'm lucky.

Don't let men get too happy. It would kill me. (581 Ways To Kill Your Boss)

You'd break your heart to make it bigger, so why not crack your skull when the mind swells.

It should be enough. To make something beautiful should be enough. It isn't. It should be.

He was not dead yet, not exactly— parts of him were dead already, certainly other parts were still only waiting for something to happen, something grand, but it isn't always about me, he keeps saying, though he's talking about the only heart he knows— He could build a city. Has a certain capacity. There's a niche in his chest where a heart would fit perfectly and he thinks if he could just maneuver one into place— well then, game over.

You want a better story. Who wouldn't?

I try, I do. I try and try. A happy ending?

We have not touched the stars, nor are we forgiven

Here you are on the TV, saying Watch me, just watch me.

I had a dream about you. We were in the gold room where everyone finally gets what they want.

you must want something, just tell me, and it's yours.

We can do anything. It's not because our hearts are large, they're not, it's what we struggle with

Just as pretending to be brave can become real courage, we may find that outfitting ourselves as the person we want to be brings us closer to becoming that person.

King Alexander, the son of Ammon and of Philip the king, also supreme king of Europe and all Asia, Egypt and Libya, to the Tyrians who are as nothing.

We toil after goals, most of them—indeed every single one of them—of transitory significance and, having gained one of them, we immediately set forth for the next, as if that one had never been, with this next one being essentially more of the same. Look at a busy street any day, and observe the throng going hither and thither. To what? Some office or shop, where the same things will be done today as were done yesterday, and are done now so they may be repeated tomorrow…

you would be surprised how many people seriously limit their dreams. They're your dreams for heaven's sake. There should be no limit to them. Plans have to be realistic; dreams don't.

I spent every spare second available - evenings, weekends, lunch breaks - studying everything I could that would help me. But I told no one.

PLANS HAVE TO BE REALISTIC; DREAMS DON'T

The key is to appreciate what we've got right now and yet still dream and plan.