#ambition

... while I bathed, while I tried but failed to sleep, I considered how I might become more like the women I respected and admired. Surrounded as I was by ambitious, accomplished women, I couldn't ignore the little voice in my head that said maybe I was supposed to shed halfway, and do something significant. Contribute something. Accomplish something. Choose. Be. ↗

— Therese Anne Fowler

#zelda-fitzgerald #respect

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

A noble man compares and estimates himself by an idea which is higher than himself; and a mean man, by one lower than himself. The one produces aspiration; the other ambition, which is the way in which a vulgar man aspires. ↗

— Marcus Aurelius

#aspiration #aspires #compares #estimates #higher

There is, however, another purpose to which academies contribute. When they consist of a limited number of persons, eminent for their knowledge, it becomes an object of ambition to be admitted on their list. ↗

— Charles Babbage

#admitted #ambition #another #becomes #consist

Medicine was certainly intended to be a career. I wanted to become a psychiatrist, an adolescent ambition which, of course, is fulfilled by many psychiatrists. ↗

— J. G. Ballard

#ambition #become #career #certainly #course

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

The early commentators who put down the pre-presidential Roosevelt as an empty-headed young lightweight, all ambition and no talent, now seem comically wrong to a modern book-reading, movie-going, television-watching, legend-loving American public conditioned to think of him as one of the presidential giants on the order of Washington and Lincoln. ↗

— Russell Baker

#american #american public #commentators #conditioned #down

Those who seize the day become seriously rich. ↗

— Richard Koch

#creativity #motivation #productivity #motivational

I have no ambition to govern men; it is a painful and thankless office. ↗

— Thomas Jefferson

#ambition #govern #i #men #office

One of the things I realized early in my career is that you do what you believe, in knowing that if you don't, you will never like yourself. When you compromise out of fear or ambition, it eats inside you. ↗

— Samuel Dash

#believe #career #compromise #early #eats