Quotes on Ambition

I've got a great ambition to die of exhaustion rather than boredom.

You don't come to live here unless the delusion of a reality shaped around your own desires isn't a strong aspect of your personality. A reality shaped around your own desires - there is something sociopathic in that ambition.

If you want to reach a goal, you must 'see the reaching' in your own mind before you actually arrive at your goal.

I would rather be ashes than dust! I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry-rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet. The function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.

For a person whose sole burning ambition is to write - like myself - college is useless beyond the Sophomore year.

When we were walking through the narrow alleys [of the Mathare Valley slums], it was literally impossible not to step in the raw sewage and the garbage alongside the little homes. But at the same time it was also impossible not to see the human vitality, the aspiration and the ambition of the people who live there.

Well-being and happiness never appeared to me as an absolute aim. I am even inclined to compare such moral aims to the ambitions of a pig.

I dread our own power, and our own ambition; I dread our being too much dreaded... We may say that we shall not abuse this astonishing, and hitherto unheard-of-power. But every other nation will think we shall abuse it. It is impossible but that, sooner or later, this state of things must produce a combination against us which may end in our ruin.

Strive not to be a success, but rather to be of value.

It is a grand thing to rise in the world. The ambition to do so is the very salt of the earth. It is the parent of all enterprise, and the cause of all improvement.

A man who aspires to rise above the mediocre, to be something more than the ordinary, surely deserves admiration, even if he fails and loses a fortune on account of his ambitions (...) if one has failed only where others have not had the courage or will to try, there is consolation - indeed, deep satisfaction - to be gained from his observation when looking back over one's life. #Page no.134

I love entertaining people; I strive to make them feel good, and they make me feel wonderful. To explain it simply, I like what I do, and my ambition is to get better as I get older. That's really what I'm all about.

Live for each second without hesitation

Perhaps middle-age is, or should be, a period of shedding shells; the shell of ambition, the shell of material accumulations and possessions, the shell of the ego.

My main ambition as a historian is to figure out what's really happening in the world, instead of the fictions that humans have been creating for thousands of years in order to explain or control what's happening in the world.

Ambition has become a dirty word, and I believe it is a great evolutionary force for the positive. If people fail or go astray in their ambition I can live with it but not with people lowering their expectations, wasting time, slacking off and glorifying failure and stupidity.

My favorite literary heroine is Jo March. It is hard to overstate what she meant to a small, plain girl called Jo, who had a hot temper and a burning ambition to be a writer.

There is one weakness in people for which there is no remedy. It is the universal weakness of LACK OF AMBITION!

...ambition without pious restraint must end in failure, often involving in its ruin that beautiful reverence which solaces common men for the obscurity and poverty of their lot.

If we each get on a treadmill right now, one of two things is going to happen... either you're going to get off first or I am going to die. Period.

The very substance of the ambitious is merely the shadow of a dream.