Ambition is the path to success. Persistence is the vehicle you arrive in.
Interpretation
Ambition drives you toward your goals, while persistence ensures you reach them.
This quote emphasizes that having ambition is essential for setting goals and aspiring to achieve success. However, it is persistence—the continuous effort and determination—that ultimately allows an individual to overcome obstacles and reach their desired outcomes. It highlights a dual aspect of success: the initial desire to achieve and the ongoing work required to materialize that success.
In practice
This quote can be used in a motivational speech about achieving career goals.
Why do we fully tax some kinds of income from capital, like interest and dividends; partially tax other kinds like capital gains; defer tax on other kinds, like IRAs; and impose no tax at all on still other types of capital income, like interest on municipal bonds? This simply is not rational. These distinctions don't have any inherent logic.
Respect your fellow human being, treat them fairly, disagree with them honestly, enjoy their friendship, explore your thoughts about one another candidly, work together for a common goal and help one another achieve it. No destructive lies. No ridiculous fears. No debilitating anger.
Becoming number one is easier than remaining number one.
Every time I have some moment on a seashore, or in the mountains, or sometimes in a quiet forest, I think this is why the environment has to be preserved.
Basketball can serve as a kind of metaphor for ultimate cooperation. It is a sport where success, as symbolized by the championship, requires that the dictates of community prevail over selfish impulses.
We need to get beyond the politics of the moment, the deficit of the hour, the military count of the day, the numbers that rarely shape events. Our long-term interests must be in people and in the values of democracy and individual liberty.
It is always better to imitate a successful man than to envy him.
There might have been a thousand people who had a better athletic feat than what I did. So for me, just the fact that they gave Canadian Athlete of the Year - and also, I was voted third in the Male Athlete of the Year - the fact that some people did consider what I did an athletic feat, that really makes me feel good.
The secret of success is to make your mind work for you - not against you. This means constantly being positive, constantly setting up challenges you can meet - either today, next week, or next month etc.
Success is not about money and power. Real success is about relationships. There's no point in making $50 million a year if your teenager thinks you're a jerk and you spend no time with your wife.
As I was growing up, I did a lot of talent shows. I won fifteen Sunday nights straight in a series of talent shows in Macon. I showed up the sixteenth night, and they wouldn't let me go on any more. Whatever success I had was through the help of the good Lord.
I struggled for a while, but when I was cast in an Off Broadway show called 'Once Upon a Mattress,' that kind of put me on the map.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.