716 quotes found
“Men of great ambition have sought happiness . . . and have found fame.”
“Emperor, king, general, duke,” he whispered to himself. “These are just labels. Climb up the family tree of any of them high enough and you’ll find a commoner who dared to take a chance.”
“A day in a man’s life is constructed according to whether he accepts or rejects flashes of inspiration.”
“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 somethin...”
“Cecil: “A cup of love is greater than a pitcher full of ambition.”
“You don’t come to live here [New York City] 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' — t...”
“If I keep pushing myself, I’ll finally be somebody. I’ll finally matter. I’ll finally arrive.” Nonsense. You won’t be satisfied. The only thing worse than failing to realize any of your dreams, is ...”
“Success comes only through strong will, determination and effort.”
“. . . I should wish you to think more deeply, to look further, and aim higher than you do.”
“My mind was not that of a conqueror, but that of a cow that spends its life chewing contentedly in the meadow of invoices, waiting for the train of eternal grace to pass by. How good it felt to exi...”
“I've been absolutely terrified every moment of my life - and I've never let it keep me from doing a single thing I wanted to do.”
“Ambition and stupidity are a dangerous combination.”
“I don't care much whether I ever get to know anything - but I want to work out something in figures - something that hasn't got to do with human beings. I don't want people particularly. In some wa...”
“The problem with telling people that they can do anything they want to do is that it is objectively, factually inaccurate. Otherwise the whole world would just be ballet dancers and pop stars.”
“Always stay one step a head, unless you’re already there”
“A lot of people see it as a kind of failure to stay in the place where you’re from, especially if you’re from the Midwest. Like ambition is geographic.”
“Nothing becomes some women more than the prick of ambition. Love, on the contrary, may make them very dull.”
“Yes, but the artist?" said Nigel almost fiercely. "He's different, you know he is. He's driven by some compulsion: if he can't do what he knows he has to do with his life he might as well be dead. ...”
“Maybe that was the trouble. She got the first and biggest share of everything – first whack at the new clothes and the biggest part of any special treat. Hazel never had to grab for anything and sh...”
“Even if we’ve never been inside a synagogue or a mosque or a church—even if we have, and vowed never to go back—deep down in our striving hearts, beneath all the ambition and the fear, we suspect t...”
