Ambition Quotes

“Why do I do anything?' she says. 'I'm educated enough to talk myself out of any plan. To deconstruct any fantasy. Explain away any goal. I'm so smart I can negate any dream.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Choke

“If you're waiting until you feel talented enough to make it, you'll never make it.”
― Criss Jami, Healology

“Never give up.
It's like breathing—once you quit, your flame dies letting total darkness extinguish every last gasp of hope. You can't do that. You must continue taking in even the shallowest of breaths, continue putting forth even the smallest of efforts to sustain your dreams. Don't ever, ever, ever give up.”
― Richelle E. Goodrich, Smile Anyway: Quotes, Verse, and Grumblings for Every Day of the Year

“People will kill you. Over time. They will shave out every last morsel of fun in you with little, harmless sounding phrases that people uses every day, like: 'Be realistic!'"

[What It Is (2009)]”
― Dylan Moran

“The credit belongs to those who are actually in the arena, who strive valiantly; who know the great enthusiasums, the great devotions, and spend themselves in a worthy cause; who at best know the triumph of high achievement; and who, at worst, if they fail, fail while daring greatly, so that their place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.”
― Theodore Roosevelt

“I would not sit waiting for some vague tomorrow, nor for something to happen. One could wait a lifetime, and find nothing at the end of the waiting. I would begin here, I would make something happen.”
― Louis L'Amour, Sackett's Land

“It doesn't matter how great your shoes are if you don't accomplish anything in them.”
― Martina Boone, Compulsion

“There is a time in the life of every boy when he for the first time takes the backward view of life. Perhaps that is the moment when he crosses the line into manhood. The boy is walking through the street of his town. He is thinking of the future and of the figure he will cut in the world. Ambitions and regrets awake within him. Suddenly something happens; he stops under a tree and waits as for a voice calling his name. Ghosts of old things creep into his consciousness; the voices outside of himself whisper a message concerning the limitations of life. From being quite sure of himself and his future he becomes not at all sure. If he be an imaginative boy a door is torn open and for the first time he looks out upon the world, seeing, as though they marched in procession before him, the countless figures of men who before his time have come out of nothingness into the world, lived their lives and again disappeared into nothingness. The sadness of sophistication has come to the boy. With a little gasp he sees himself as merely a leaf blown by the wind through the streets of his village. He knows that in spite of all the stout talk of his fellows he must live and die in uncertainty, a thing blown by the winds, a thing destined like corn to wilt in the sun.”
― Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio: A Group of Tales of Ohio Small Town Life

“You pigs, you. You rut like pigs, is all. You got the most in you, and you use the least. You hear me, you? Got a million in you and spend pennies. Got a genius in you and think crazies. Got a heart in you and feel empties. All a you. Every you...'

[...]

Take a war to make you spend. Take a jam to make you think. Take a challenge to make you great. Rest of the time you sit around lazy, you. Pigs, you! All right, God damn you! I challenge you, me. Die or live and be great. Blow yourselves to Christ gone or come and find me, Gully Foyle, and I make you men. I make you great. I give you the stars.”
― Alfred Bester, The Stars My Destination

“If it's IN you to climb you must -- there are those who MUST lift their eyes to the hills -- they can't breathe properly in the valleys.”
― L.M. Montgomery, Emily of New Moon

“I have no spur
To prick the sides of my intent, but only
Vaulting ambition, which o'erleaps itself
And falls on the other.”
― William Shakespeare, Macbeth

“What do you mean I have to wait for someone's approval?  I'm someone.  I approve.  So I give myself permission to move forward with my full support!”
― Richelle E. Goodrich, Smile Anyway: Quotes, Verse, and Grumblings for Every Day of the Year

“It's in those quiet little towns, at the edge of the world, that you will find the salt of the earth people who make you feel right at home.”
― Aaron Lauritsen, 100 Days Drive: The Great North American Road Trip

“Life's trials will test you, and shape you, but don’t let them change who you are.”
~ Aaron Lauritsen, ‘100 Days Drive”
― Aaron Lauritsen, 100 Days Drive: The Great North American Road Trip

“I’m tough, I’m ambitious, and I know exactly what I want. If that makes me a bitch, okay.”
― Madonna

“It occurred to me that the voracious ambition of humans is never sated by dreams coming true, because there is always the thought that everything might be done better and again. aa”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“Live for each second without hesitation”
― Elton John

“The voracious ambition of humans is never sated by dreams coming true, because there is always the thought that everything might be done better and again.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“In my terms, I settled for the realities of life, and submitted to its necessities: if this, then that, and so the years passed. In Adrian's terms, I gave up on life, gave up on examining it, took it as it came. And so, for the first time, I began to feel a more general remorse - a feeling somewhere between self-pity and self-hatred - about my whole life. All of it. I had lost the friends of my youth. I had lost the love of my wife. I had abandoned the ambitions I had entertained. I had wanted life not to bother me too much, and had succeeded - and how pitiful that was.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“Those with less curiosity or ambition just mumble that God works in mysterious ways. I intend to catch him in the act.”
― Damien Echols, Life After Death

“The difference between greed and ambition is a greedy person desires things he isn't prepared to work for.”
― Habeeb Akande

“The person who doesn't scatter the morning dew will not comb grey hairs”
― Hunter S. Thompson

“We must not look past the maneuvers of politicians who feel driven by intuition fed by visionary hysteria. They pretend to have a 'privileged' mission to shoulder but rob people's physical or mental property, appropriating their cultural heritage. If their intuition is cautioned as vicious or murderous by reason or facts, history will forever eradicate their soul from the holy grail of humanity, especially those who want to set the world on fire for their sole ambition. ("What after bowling alone?" )”
― Erik Pevernagie

“From this point forward, you don’t even know how to quit in life.”
~ Aaron Lauritsen, ‘100 Days Drive”
― Aaron Lauritsen

“I should not act better than anybody, but sure as hell, NOBODY’S better than ME!”
― Patricia D'Arcy Laughlin, Sacrifices Beyond Kingdoms: A Provocative Romance Torn Between Continents and Cultures

“It is hard work to control the workings of inclination and turn the bent of nature; but that it may be done, I know from experience. God has given us, in a measure, the power to make our own fate: and when our energies seem to demand a sustenance they cannot get--when our will strains after a path we may not follow--we need neither starve from inanition, not stand still in despair: we have but to seek another nourishment for the mind, as strong as the forbidden fruit it longed to taste--and perhaps purer; and to hew out for the adventurous foot a road as direct and broad as the one Fortune has blocked up against us, if rougher than it.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“Humanity does not ask us to be happy. It merely asks us to be brilliant on its behalf. Survival first, and then happiness as we can manage it.... Take what pleasure you can in the interstices of your work, but your work is first, learning first, winning is everything because without it there is nothing.”
― Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game

“To wish a healthy man to die is the wish from a mind of sickness. To wish an ailing man to die is the wish of the ambitious.”
― Roman Payne

“Forgiveness heals the forgiver, though not necessarily the forgiven.”
― Patricia D'Arcy Laughlin, Sacrifices Beyond Kingdoms: A Provocative Romance Torn Between Continents and Cultures

“Explore, Experience, Then Push Beyond.”
― Aaron Lauritsen, 100 Days Drive: The Great North American Road Trip