Ambition Life Ambitions Quotes

I think this business of good vs. evil is of no interest to the power hungry ~ Bangambiki Habyarimana

I saw only the reality of his destiny, which he had known
how to follow with unfaltering footsteps, that life begun in humble
surroundings, rich in generous enthusiasms, in friendship, love, war
in
all the exalted elements of romance. ~ Joseph Conrad

Andrew has neither purpose nor ambition," Kevin said. "I was the first person who ever looked at Andrew and told him he was worth something. When he comes off these drugs and has nothing else to hold him up I will give him something to build his life around."

"He agreed to this?" Neil asked. "But he's fighting you every step of the way. Why?"

"When I first said you would be Court, why were you upset with me?"

"Because I knew it'd never happen," Neil said, "but I wanted it anyway. ~ Nora Sakavic

Thus, his ambition led him not to relieve his patients' madness, but to exasperate it - to let it breathe with a life of its own. And this he did in certain ways that wholly eradicated what human attributes remained in these people. But sometimes that peculiar magic he saw in their eyes would seem to fade, and then he would institute his 'proper treatment,' which consisted of putting them through a battery of hellish ordeals intended to loosen their attachment to the world of humanity and to project them further into the realm of the 'silent, staring universe' where the insanity of the infinite might work a rather paradoxical cure. The result was something as pathetic as a puppet and as exalted as the stars, something at once dead and never dying, a thing utterly without destiny and thus imperishable, forever consigned to that abysmal vacuity which is the essence of all that is immortal. ~ Thomas Ligotti

Now he reduced his progress to the rhythm of his boots -- he walked across the land until he came to the sea. Everything that impeded him had to be outweighed, even if only by a fraction, by all that drove him on. In one pan of the scales, his wound, thirst, the blister, tiredness, the heat, the aching in his feet and legs, the Stukas, the distance, the Channel; in the other, I'll wait for you, and the memory of when she had said it, which he had come to treat like a sacred site. Also, the fear of capture. His most sensual memories -- their few minutes in the library, the kiss in Whitehall -- was bleached colorless through overuse. He knew by heart certain passages from her letters, he had revisited their tussle with the vase by the fountain, he remembered the warmth from her arm at the dinner when the twins went missing. These memories sustained him, but not so easily. Too often they reminded him of where he was when he last summoned them. They lay on the far side of a great divide in time, as significant as B.C. and A.D. Before prison, before war, before the sight of a corpse became a banality.

But these heresies died when he read her last letter. He touched his breast pocket. It was a kind of genuflection. Still there. Here was something new on the scales. That he could be cleared had all the simplicity of love. Merely tasting the possibility reminded him of how much had narrowed and died. His taste for life, no less, all the old ambitions and pleasures. The pro ~ Ian McEwan

Waste forces within him, and a desert all around, this man stood still on his way across a silent terrace, and saw for a moment, lying in the wilderness before him, a mirage of honourable ambition, self-denial, and perseverance. In the fair city of this vision, there were airy galleries from which the loves and graces looked upon him, gardens in which the fruits of life hung ripening, waters of Hope that sparkled in his sight. A moment and it was gone. Climbing to a high chamber in a well of houses, he threw himself down in his clothes on a neglected bed, and its pillow was wet with wasted tears. ~ Charles Dickens

There used to be a canny politician in the Hyde Park area in Chicago in which I at one time lived for several years. His slogan was "I am for harmony if I have to use an axe." As "Secretary of Charm," if and when my merits and ambitions are recognized by my appointment to that office, I will take a page out of old "Doc" Jamieson's book. My motto will be "I will have charm, even if I have to use a club. ~ Beatrice Fairfax

You shouldn't do that," said Laura. "You could set yourself on fire. ~ Margaret Atwood

I had still the ambition, formed in Sligo in my teens, of living in imitation of Thoreau on Innisfree, a little island in Lough Gill, and when walking through Fleet Street very homesick I heard a little tinkle of water and saw a fountain in a shop window which balanced a little ball upon its jet, and began to remember lake water. From the sudden remembrance came my poem Innisfree. ~ William Butler Yeats

Be free from vanity and pride. Be free from belief, disbelief, convictions, and parties. Be free from habit. Be free from ambition and greed. Be free from family and surroundings. Be free from fanaticism. Be free from fate; be master of your own life. Be free from death; life depends on the will of others, but death on our own will. ~ Sarah Bakewell

As he was valiant, I honour him. But as he was ambitious, I slew him. ~ William Shakespeare

Do you know what my ambition is in life? To be without ambition. As far back as I can remember I've been absolutely hag-ridden. I'd like to attain the state of mind that the Indians call Nirvana. That, for me, would happen if I were free of ambition. ~ Tallulah Bankhead

be much more friendly to such things that matter most .Things that will propel your vision and ambition to higher heights. Things that will help you enlarge your tentacles. Do not look down on small things however ~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

No one should be surprised at the difficulty of faith, if there is some part of his life where he is consciously resisting or disobeying the commandment of Jesus. Is there some part of your life which you are refusing to surrender at his behest, some sinful passion, maybe, or some animosity, some hope, perhaps your ambition or your reason? ... How can you hope to enter into communion with him when at some point in your life you are running away from him? ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer

But sometimes...sometimes I wake with a mad thought in my head: What if that boy's life mattered as much as anyone else's, even Caesar's? What if I were offered a choice: to doom that boy to the misery of his fate, or to spare him, and by doing so, to wreck all Caesar's ambitions? I'm haunted by that thought - which is ridiculous! It's self-evident that Caesar matters infinitely more than that Gaulish boy; one stands poised to rule the world, and the other is a miserable slae, if he even still lives. Some men are great, others are insignificant, and it behooves those of us who are in-between to ally ourselves with the greatest and to despise the smallest. To even begin to imagine that the Gaulish boy maters as much as Caesar is to presume that some mystical quality resides in every man and makes his life equal to that of any other, and surely the lesson life teaches us is quite the opposite! In stength and intellect, men are anything but equal, and the gods lavish their attention on some more than on others. ~ Steven Saylor

At lilac evening I walked with every muscle aching among the lights of 27th and Welton in the Denver colored section, wishing I were a Negro, feeling that the best the white world had offered was not enough ecstasy for me, not enough life, joy, kicks, darkness, music, not enough night ... I wished I were a Denver Mexican, or even a poor overworked Jap, anything but what I was so drearily, a "white man" disillusioned. All my life I'd had white ambitions; that was why I'd abandoned a good woman like Terry in the San Joaquin Valley I passed the dark porches of Mexican and Negro homes. ~ Jack Kerouac

I cannot project the degree of hatred required to make those women run around in crusades against abortion. Hatred is what they certainly project, not love for the embryos, which is a piece of nonsense no one could experience, but hatred, a virulent hatred for an unnamed object ... Their hatred is directed against human beings as such, against the mind, against reason, against ambition, against success, against love, against any value that brings happiness to human life. In compliance with the dishonesty that dominates today's intellectual field, they call themselves pro-life. ~ Ayn Rand

What if his ambitions was just a name he gave to a kind of conformity, and he was going back because he wasn't brave enough to live a life that wasn't expected of him, a life so far from any road that there wouldn't be any signposts or milestones? ~ Caleb Crain

What did I know of life, I who had lived so carefully? Who had neither won nor lost, but just let life happen to him? Who had the usual ambitions and settled all too quickly for them not being realised? Who avoided being hurt and called it a capacity for survival? Who paid his bills, stayed on good terms with everyone as far as possible, for whom ecstasy and despair soon became just words once read in novels? One whose self-rebukes never really inflicted pain? Well, there was all this to reflect upon, while I endured a special kind of remorse: a hurt inflicted at long last on one who always thought he knew how to avoid being hurt - and inflicted for precisely that reason. ~ Julian Barnes

We have time for everything:
to sleep, to run from one place to another,
to regret having mistaken and to mistake again,
to judge the others and to forgive
ourselves
we have time for reading and writing,
for making corrections to our texts, to regret ever having
written

we have time to make plans and time not to respect them,

we have time for ambitions and sicknesses,
time to blame the destiny and the details,

we have time to watch the clouds, advertisements or
some ordinary accident,
we have time to chase our wonders away
and to postpone the answers,
we have time to break a dream to pieces and then
to reinvent it,

we have time to make friends, to lose friends,
we have time to receive lessons and forget them afterwards,

we have time to receive gifts and not to understand them.

We have time for them all.
There is no time for just a bit of tenderness.
When we are aware about to do this we die.

I've learned that you cannot make someone love you;
All you can do is to be a loved person.
the rest … depends on the others.

I've learned that as much as I care
others might not care.

I've learned that it takes years to earn trust
and just a few seconds to lose it.

I've learned that it does not matter WHAT you have in your life
but WHO you ha ~ Octavian Paler

If we experience life thoughtfully and bravely, we discover the journey doesn't end in a watercolored sunset on the horizon. Rather, we keep finding new roads with even greater challenges. Our ambitions expand because our courage soars, one success at a time. ~ Karen Henry Clark

Happiness is our natural state. Happiness is the natural state of little children, to whom the kingdom belongs until they have been polluted and contaminated by the stupidity of society and culture. To acquire happiness you don't have to do anything, because happiness cannot be acquired. Does anybody know why? Because we have it already. How can you acquire what you already have? Then why don't you experience it? Because you've got to drop something. You've got to drop illusions. You don't have to add anything in order to be happy; you've got to drop something. Life is easy, life is delightful. It's only hard on your illusions, your ambitions, your greed, your cravings. Do you know where these things come from? From having identified with all kinds of labels! ~ Anthony De Mello

Facing the backside of the future is the only way to move forward ~ Benny Bellamacina

She was a great wife ... and a wonderful mother, a good daughter, a devoted sister and a truly nice person, which doesn't sound like much but it was one of her ambitions, to be a nice person, and she really got there, I think. She was always there. Or close, anyway.
Of course, she did spend her first thrity-nine years worrying too much and waiting for rotten things to happen to her. Then when they did, and some of the things were obviously, really, truly rotten, she realised she could have a lot more fun not waiting for them.
So you know what she did then? She just stopped seeing the rot. ~ Sarah-Kate Lynch

When I see people complaining about their lives, who have yet to have the epiphany of realizing that if you want something better you first got to get off your ass and quit complaining. Life isn't easy but worth it when you actually apply yourself. You will fail, as a humbling experience, but your triumph and victory are certain when you have a little ambition. ~ Sai Marie Johnson

We all have goals and dreams. Say them aloud to yourself; if they don't sound slightly impossible then they aren't set high enough. ~ Noel DeJesus

Her only life ambition was to read every good book that had ever been published. ~ Ken Kalfus

I felt I would live a long, lonely, useless life and die alone and unmissed (did I mention that I never bothered filling out any grad-school
applications?) It's self-indulgent, I know, but this is what happens to the overachieving but essentially useless children of parents who raised their children to do well on tests but
failed to equip them with the poison-tipped spurs of true ambition. ~ Jon Fasman

Today I will work when others procrastinate, I will confront my fears when others hide from theirs, and I will create solutions when others find excuses; today I refuse to allow my enemies to out work me. ~ Noel DeJesus

I have spent a great deal of my life discovering that my ambitions and fantasies - which I once thought of as totally unique - turn out to be clichés ~ Nora Ephron

Most people try to avoid cliches. It's my ambition in life to try to get 'em right! ~ Philip Schultz

Maybe someday, if I succeed at something, I'll stop saying, "It isn't fair" about everything else. ~ Lois Lowry