Quotes about Ambition

Professional standards, the standards of ambition and selfishness, are always sliding downward toward expense, ostentation, and mediocrity. They tend always to narrow the ground of judgment. But amateur standards, the standards of love, are always straining upward toward the humble and the best. They enlarge the ground of judgment. The context of love is the world.

The future was coming to me, but I had not so much as lifted a foot to go to it.

I'm a failed poet. Maybe every novelist wants to write poetry first, finds he can't, and then tries the short story, which is the most demanding form after poetry. And, failing at that, only then does he take up novel writing.

A man's moral conscience is the curse he had to accept from the gods in order to gain from them the right to dream.

that alertness for measuring and weighing event against eventuality, circumstance against human nature, his own fallible judgement and mortal clay against not only human but natural forces, choosing and discarding, compromising with his dream and his ambition like you must with the horse which you take across country, over timber, which you control only through your ability to keep the animal from realizing that actually you cannot, that actually it is the stronger.

Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or your predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.

My gad, one of them, warrant officer pilot, captain and M. C. in turn said to me once; if you can treat a crate that way, why do you want to fly at all?

The moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess SUCCESS. That - with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word 'success' - is our national disease.

the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess sucess is our national disease

how infinitely passionate a thing religion at its highest flights can be. Like love, like wrath, like hope, ambition, jealousy, like every other instinctive eagerness and impulse, it adds to life an enchantment which is not rationally or logically deducible from anything else.

There are probably several hundred thousand if we narrow the definition to include only those who in their search for money and power are ruthless and deceitful.

There are probably several hundred thousand if we narrow the definition to include only those who in their search for money and power are ruthless and deceitful.