ambition

...it must be odd to have no ambition, not to want something more.

To die famous is the goal of the immortal. To die young is the goal of the healthy. To die memorably is the goal of the survivor.

In the days when I was ambitious I worked out a very pretty little plan for conquering the whole earth and rearranging things as they ought to be; and when, in the end, everything became so good it almost began to be boring, then I was going to stuff my pockets with as much money as I could lay hands on and creep away, vanish in some cosmopolis and sit at a corner cafe and drink absinthe and enjoy seeing how everything went to the devil as soon as I wasn't on the scene any more.

Frog in the mud is happier than the man, because it has no ambition to reach the stars!

It is better to die than carry the burden of expectations, you die every moment then, bearing situations you are not supposed to put up with.

By adherence to a special set of rules, the child of the shabby-genteel can sometimes leap across the time which has passed by his family and function in the real world without doing violence to the hopes his mother held out for him. But those who cannot live within this pattern are the freaks and poets, and they travel a different road to peace.

...you cannot value dreams according to the odds of their coming true. The real value is in stirring within us the will to aspire.

Ambition is a path, not a destination, and it is essentially the same path for everybody. No matter what the goal is, the path leads through Pilgrim's Progress regions of motivation, hard work, persistence, stubbornness, and resilience under disappointment. Unconsidered, merely indulged, ambition becomes a vice; it can turn a man into a machine that knows nothing but how to run. Considered, it can be something else - pathway to the stars, maybe.

It was such a feeling of developing your inner self to the people who liked to dig deeper and deeper until you cannot fathom the deepest evil in you.

There comes a time in everyone__ life__nd I do mean in everyone__ life__hen you ask yourself what it is that you__e been doing with your life. Sometimes you even realize that whatever you__e been doing all your life, you__e been doing it wrong. Dead wrong_ Son, you want that realization to hit you when you__e 70? Or 50? Or when you__e still young, with your whole life still ahead of you?

Author says he suffered from both "a craving to be famous" and "a horror of being known to like being known.

Ambition is enthusiasm with a purpose.

Keep your eyes on the stars and your feet on the ground

At last a lifetime ambition of mine to become a pimp was satisfied.

Grandma sees these things when she talks about them and gestures with her hands like she's painting brush strokes in the air. The way Grandma paints her dreams for me, there's a low sky.

If a man wants his dreams to come true he must wake up.

everyone endeavors as much as possible to make others love what he loves, and to hate what he hates... This effort to make everyone approve what we love or hate is in truth ambition, and so we see that each person by nature desires that other persons should live according to his way of thinking...

If you are not working towards something, your life will end with nothing.