ambition

Why do men like me want sons?" he wondered. "It must be because they hope in their poor beaten souls that these new men, who are their blood, will do the things they were not strong enough nor wise enough nor brave enough to do. It is rather like another chance at life; like a new bag of coins at a table of luck after your fortune is gone.

But ambition is a funny thing: it creeps in when you least expect it and keeps you moving, even when you think you want to stay put.

I've been very lucky at what's happened in my career to date, but playing something as far from me as possible is an ambition of mine - anything from a mutated baddy in a comic book action thriller, to a detective. If anything, I'd like Gary Oldman's career: he's the perfect example of it. I've love to have a really broad sweep of characters - to be able to do something edgy, surprising and unfashionable.

Trying to be more than human one becomes less.

I told myself that I was going to live the rest of my life as if it were Saturday.

Your ambition is the most reliable alarm clock.

Talented people hit targets no one else can hit. Ambitious people aim to hit targets no one else can see.

What I was sure of was that Tommy had something I'd never seen in anyone else: a blind and unhinged and totally unfounded ambition. He was so out of touch, so lacking in self-awareness, yet also wildly captivating. That night there was this aura around Tommy- an aura of the possible.

There is nothing in the world so enticing as that which you have been told you may not have.

A place in the sun, that's what I am aiming for... and who could ever ask for more?' -Columbine to Pierrot

Ambition is the intellectual equivalent of body odour.

Don't wish it was easier, wish you were better. Don't wish for less problems, wish for more skills. Don't wish for less challenges, wish for more wisdom. The major value in life is not what you get. The major value in life is what you become. Success is not to be pursued; it is to be attracted by the person you become.

Soldiers in foreign camps, so far from being missionaries for good, require missionaries themselves, more than the natives. Andrew Carnegie

Don__ aim at success__he more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue_as the unintended side-effect of one__ personal dedication to a course greater than oneself.

The tonality of my life is hidden behind my ambition.

Have you ever had an experience where, had things turned out just a little bit differently, your entire life would have been transformed?Like a Supreme Court clerkship, a Rhodes Scholarship gets mentioned in your obituary.The door was open just a crack, in a way that seemed to say __ have an __pen door_ policy, but I really don__ want to be bothered.__uccess didn__ take you off the treadmill, but simply put you on a different treadmill, at a higher speed and with a steeper incline.When we__e young, overachieving, and unstoppable, we all think we__e special. But as we grow older, we reach a more realistic understanding of our place in the world. It happens at different times for different people, but eventually we all come to terms with our own ordinariness.

Many of these new readers were not yet college-educated, but in terms of their seriousness about the world, their own literacy, and above all their ambitions for their children, they might as well have been.

I want to be known as unknown.