#ambition

Currently, the Library of Congress houses eighteen million books. American publishers add another two hundred thousand titles to this stack each year. This means that at the current publishing rate, ten million new books will be added in the next fifty years. Add together the dusty LOC volumes with the shiny new and forthcoming books, and you get a bookshelf-warping total of twenty-eight million books available for an English reader in the next fifty years! But you can read only 2,600 - because you are a wildly ambitious book devourer. ... For every one book that you choose to read, you must ignore ten thousand other books simply because you don't have the time (or money!). ↗

— Tony Reinke

#books #goals #limitations #reading #money

It is the most ambitious and driven among us who are the most sorely in need of having our reckless hopes dampened through immersive dousings in the darkness which religions have explored. This is a particular priority for secular Americans, perhaps the most anxious and disappointed people on earth, for their nation infuses them with the most extreme hopes about what they may be able to achieve in their working lives and relationships. ↗

— Alain de Botton

#americans #anxiety #atheism #disappointment #drive

There are so many things to take into account - your ambition, your ego, the press, the consumers. You can never be sure that you'll be on top of the pile again. ↗

— Giorgio Armani

#again #ambition #consumers #ego #into

My ambition is to have beautiful encounters, not to make money. ↗

— Juliette Binoche

#beautiful #encounters #make #money

Humility was an important part of the way I grew up. And I found that to be less common when I moved to California. That's not to say humble people don't exist there, but ambition seems really important. ↗

— Anna Kendrick

#california #common #exist #found #grew

Great ambition, the desire of real superiority, of leading and directing, seems to be altogether peculiar to man, and speech is the great instrument of ambition. ↗

— Adam Smith

#ambition #desire #directing #great #instrument

Being non-commercial is never an ambition. Movies come together at different points for fortuitous reasons. You do them as you get the opportunity, as opposed to doing them when you choose to or design to. ↗

— Ethan Coen

#being #choose #come #design #different

It's time to stop following your dreams and time to start chasing them! ↗

— Habeeb Akande

#determination #dreams #procrastination #dreams

Every man is said to have his peculiar ambition. Whether it be true or not, I can say for one that I have no other so great as that of being truly esteemed of my fellow men, by rendering myself worthy of their esteem. ↗

— Abraham Lincoln

#be true #being #esteem #esteemed #every

THE EMPRESS LO was not beautiful but she was ambitious and, sometimes, ambition can take you further than beauty. The women of the court never wondered how she got this far because as all women know, the rise to power is relatively simple ~ especially if it is a man who has control. ~ from the Three Lives of Empress Lo. Forthcoming. ↗

— Hope Barrett

#forthcoming #power #beauty