Quotes About Ambition

It is in fact the height of selfishness to merely consume what others create and to retreat into a shell of limited goals and immediate pleasures.

Do not wait for a coronation; the greatest emperors crown themselves.

All masters want to appear more brilliant than other people.

Those who seek to achieve things should show no mercy. Kautilya, Indian philosopher third century B.C. OBSERVANCE

If the world is like a giant scheming court and we are trapped inside it, there is no use in trying to opt out of the game. That will only render you powerless, and powerlessness will make you miserable. Instead of struggling against the inevitable, instead of arguing and whining and feeling guilty, it is far better to excel at power. In fact, the better you are at dealing with power, the better friend, lover, husband, wife, and person you become.

With such a deep rooted interest you can withstand the setbacks and failures, the days of drudgery, and the hard work that are always a part of any creative action. You can ignore the doubters and critics. You will then feel personally committed to solving the problem and will not rest until you do so.

The mind must not wander from goal to goal, or be distracted by success from its sense of purpose and proportion.

A false path in life is generally something we are attracted to for the wrong reasons—money, fame, attention, and so on. If it is attention we need, we often experience a kind of emptiness inside that we are hoping to fill with the false love of public approval.

Making money or being successful should be a natural result of this ideal and not the goal itself.

Renaissance diplomat and courtier Niccolò Machiavelli wrote, "Any man who tries to be good all the time is bound to come to ruin among the great number who are not good.

Our levels of desire, patience, persistence, and confidence end up playing a much larger role in success than sheer reasoning powers.

If it is money, you will choose a place for your apprenticeship that offers the biggest paycheck. Inevitably, in such a place you will feel greater pressures to prove yourself worthy of such pay, often before you are really ready.

To some people the notion of consciously playing power games—no matter how indirect—seems evil, asocial, a relic of the past. They believe they can opt out of the game by behaving in ways that have nothing to do with power. You must beware of such people, for while they express such opinions outwardly, they are often among the most adept players at power.

Do not be afraid to bring out the more sensitive or ambitious sides to your character. These repressed parts of you are yearning to be let out. In the theater of life, expand the roles that you play. Don't worry about people's reactions to any changes in you they sense. You are not so easy to categorize, which will fascinate them and give you the power to play with their perceptions of you, altering them at will.

You must always be prepared to place a bet on yourself, on your future, by heading in a direction that others seem to fear.

Concentrate on a single goal, a single task, and beat it into submission.

it is always best to choose a task that is slightly above you, one that might be considered ambitious on your part. This is a corollary of the Law of the Creative Dynamic—the higher the goal, the more energy you will call up from deep within. You will rise to the challenge because you have to, and will discover creative powers in yourself that you never suspected.

When the evening began, Fouquet was at the top of the world. By the time it had ended, he was at the bottom. Voltaire, 1694-1778

Without enemies you will not know how or where to maneuver, and you will lose a sense of your limits, of how far you can go.

Once, early on, while still engaged in shipping and sidetracked by a rare vacation in his lavish, specially built yacht, he came back to find that his partners had ousted him from his firm. The classic Vanderbilt response? I won't sue you for the law is too slow. I will ruin you!

Orphaned at age 11 in 1755, Mayer followed the sound of clinking coins rather than his parents' idea that he become a rabbi.

Mayer, still not content with the excess, next began operating a money exchange bureau in their yard. What's considered the very first Rothschild bank appeared to be a nine-square-foot hut-but things weren't quite what they appeared to be. Mayer installed a large iron chest that, when opened from the back, revealed a stairway leading to a secret storage cellar.

The secret of politics is to care about success, but not too much.

the vague thought passed through my mind that all of us, probably, would die like that: unexpectedly, in the middle of something we wanted to do, instead of at the end of our endeavors, as we always fondly believe.