Quotes about Ambition

Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away. It is not important that he should mature as soon as an apple tree or an oak. Shall he turn his spring into summer? If the condition of things which we were made for is not yet, what were any reality which we can substitute?

If you have built castles in the air, your work need not to be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.

A voice said to him—Why do you stay here and live this mean moiling life, when a glorious existence is possible for you? Those same stars twinkle over other fields than these.—But how to come out of this condition and actually migrate thither? All that he could think of was to practise some new austerity, to let his mind descend into his body and redeem it, and treat himself with ever increasing respect.

Oswald Sanders asked, Should it not be the office that seeks the man, rather than the man the office?2

For small erections may be finished by their first architects; grand ones, true ones, ever leave the copestone to posterity. God keep me from ever completing anything. This whole book is but a draught—nay, but the draught of a draught. Oh, Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience!

Be sure of this, O young ambition, all mortal greatness is but disease.

He who has never failed somewhere, that man cannot be great.

There's always someone out there training for your spot. For my scholarship at the University of Florida, for my job with the Denver Broncos, for my position with the New York Jets. And that's the reason to get up earlier or stay up later.

New York is such a competitive place; it tears people apart. People come here and, if they can't make it in the first month, they get torn apart and they have to go back to where they came from. I don't think that's terribly healthy.

Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.

I don't tell people, 'You're okay the way that you are.' That's not the right story. The right story is, 'You're way less than you could be.'

If you aim at nothing, you'll hit it every time.