“... 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.”
“Those who seize the day become seriously rich.”
“Everyone was willing to take some small risk to lessen the damage of their ambition and disorder and lawlessness.”
“In the closeness of the passage, the queen could smell the other woman s perfume, a musky scent that spoke of moss and earth and wildflowers. Under it, she smelled ambition.”
“It may be that you will be happiest in the rat race; perhaps, like me, you are basically a rat.”
“Status quo or grow: You are in control of your future.”
“Potential is an excuse to procrastinate; Ambition is a means to thrive.”
“It never occurs to her that she will not be a writer and only occasionally does it occur to her, depressingly, that she is going to grow into a woman, not a man.”
“Some men escape the grip. Maybe their wives have no social ambitions; maybe they ve hit a sentence or two in a dangerous book that pleased them; maybe they started on the treadmill as I did and were knocked off. Anyway, they re the congressmen you can t bribe, the Presidents who aren t politicians, the writers, speakers, scientists, statesmen who aren t just populate grab-bags for a half-dozen women and children.”
“Ambition is greed without makeup.”
“Ambition is a drug that turns it s addicts into potential madmen.”
“Roger was not personally ambitious; he mainly wanted life not to make too many demands on him.”
“High and holy ambition--to be a saint--is not opposed to holy humility--total reliance on God s grace. Exactly the opposite. Ambition without humility is ambition that fails. It is pride, which goes before a fall (Prov 16:18). Humility without ambition is false humility.”
“Whoever that came up with the idea of people having to have a dream sure knew how to keep these creatures called human beings preoccupied.”
“The brown and charred rags that hung from the sides of it, I presently recognized as the decaying vestiges of books. They had long since dropped to pieces, and every semblance of print had left them. But here and there were warped boards and cracked metallic clasps that told the tale well enough. Had I been a literary man I might, perhaps, have moralized upon the futility of all ambition. But as it was, the thing that struck me with keenest force was the enormous waste of labour to which this sombre wilderness of rotting paper testified.”
“There is something I want to do. But it s something to work towards, not something that should be handed to me on a plate. What s the point of doing something if you know you ve got someone to rescue you if you fail? I like to work hard at something and then to reap the rewards. I take pride in what I do. What s the point if I know my rich husband will bail me out if I mess up?”
“Frog in the mud is happier than the man, because it has no ambition to reach the stars!”