Quotes About Ambition

Since the Vorkosigan family motto might as well be, Anything worth achieving is worth overachieving

Someday, Miles, his boss ImpSec Chief Simon Illyan had once said to him, I hope you live to have a dozen subordinates just like you. Miles hadn't realized till now that had been a formal curse on Illyan's part.

A vida é muito menos assustadora quando se enterram as ambições e se pára de desejar coisas.

The bigger they are, the harder they fall. And the better the world liked seeing them fall.

I tried not to think about my life. I did not have any good solid plans for it long-term - no bad plans either, no plans at all - and the lostness of that, compared with the clear ambitions of my friends (marriage, children, law school), sometimes shamed me. Other times in my mind I defended such a condition as morally and intellectually superior - my life was open and ready and free - but that did not make it less lonely.

Women now were told not to settle for second best, told that they deserved better, but at a time, it seemed, when there was so much less to go around.

Get a Job, she shouted silently to God. Get a real Job.

This was my modest dream come true: unambitious flight. The kind that never even got high enough for a view.

I tried not to think about my life. I did not have any good solid plans for it long-term - not bad plans either, no plans at all - and the lostness of that, compared with the clear ambitions of my friends (marriage, children, law school), sometimes shamed me. Other times in my mind I defended such a condition as morally and intellectually superior - my life was open and ready and free - but that did not make it any less lonely.

From here on in, many things can happen. But the main one will be this: you decide not to go to law school after all, and, instead, you spend a good, big chunk of your adult life telling people how you decided not to go to law school after all. Somehow you end up writing again.

You are too gifted a person to be living in a state that borders on North Dakota.

If you're bored with life, if you don't get up every morning with a burning desire to do things, you don't have enough goals.

You were not born a winner, and you were not born a loser. You are what you make yourself be.

I was given a room overlooking Constitution Island. The shutters kept out nearly all the starlight and moonlight—sleeping was a dive into a pit, and the sound of reveille seemed to come from a distant star. I lay there, watching the red light steal through the bottom of the shutters. The darkness felt delicious. I wondered if maybe I'd missed my true career.

It sometimes happens that in relatively powerless and impoverished countries there arise men of enormous vision who are frustrated and offended by the limitations of their lives and seek to reach out for the stars on behalf of themselves and their nations.

entailment of the family estates, but envisaged for himself

What is worse is that one wonders how, to-morrow, one will find strength enough to go on doing what one has been doing the day before, and for so much too long before that, – strength for the whole mad business, for a thousand and one vain projects: attempts to escape crushing necessity; attempts which are always stillborn....

A person may be smaller in success than in defeat; it depends on what he is trying to do

What do you wish to be? What would you like to become?" I did not know, and I told her so, but the question worried me. Should I know? "There is time," she said, "but the sooner you know, the sooner you can plan. To have a goal is the important thing, and to work toward it. Then, if you decide you wish to do something different, you will at least have been moving, you will have been going somewhere, you will have been learning.

Up to a point a man's life is shaped by environment, heredity, and movements and changes in the world about him; then there comes a time when it lies within his grasp to shape the clay of his life into the sort of thing he wishes to be. Only the weak blame parents, their race, their times, lack of good fortune, or the quirks of fate. Everyone has it within his power to say, this I am today, that I shall be tomorrow. The wish, however, must be implemented by deeds.

A great book begins with an idea; a great life, with a determination

The wealthy and satisfied do not migrate, they stagnate.

All men wish to be captains, but few men wish to shoulder the burden of decision, and in coming here with these others, I had staked a claim that I must wall against misfortune.

It has seemed to me that each year one should pause to take stock of himself, to ask: Where am I going? What am I becoming? What do I wish to do and become? Most people whom I encountered were without purpose, people who had given themselves no goal. The first goal need not be the final one, for a sailing ship sails first by one wind, then another. The point is that it is always going somewhere, proceeding toward a final destination.