You know, I stumble about what I’m going to do. I don’t plan. I’ve never had ambitions.
I’m living in the present. I have no ambition. It’s true. But I want to live.
I worked on new plays at the Traverse and did my best work in Scotland for years, so I never had ambitions for things like Disney.
I was happy when I got into film school. I’d simply satisfied my ambition to show them that I could get in – nothing else – although I do believe they shouldn’t have accepted me. I was a complete idiot. I can’t understand why they took me. Probably because I’d tried three times.
I’ve never been interested enough to have a career trajectory. I’ve never had any ambition or thought of what I should be doing or had any idea of what I’d like to do. Never. And still don’t. And if something comes along, I say ‘Fine.’
Once I started getting paid to be a writer and not having lots of other gross responsibilities, like making the puzzle or whatever, then my ambition changed, and I thought, ‘Now I want to be a good writer.’ And that became my ambition.
I wanted people to talk about the finale of ‘The Vampire Diaries’ as one of their favorites, which is a lofty ambition, but it certainly drove me hard creatively to make sure that we had put as much thought and love into it as we possibly could.
My big ambition was to be Richard Petty.
Be a warrior when it comes to delivering on your ambitions. And a saint when it comes to treating people with respect, modeling generosity, and showing up with outright love.
I definitely have a lot of ambition.
I didn’t start off as a journalist; I started off as a poet. My ambition was to practise poetry. Then I found journalism, but that other voice never fled from me.
Something I can’t stress enough is the massive importance of work experience. It’s the only way to find out what work is really like when you’re figuring out what path to take and to get an understanding of what it takes to achieve your career ambitions.
Ambition devours gold and drinks blood and climbs so high by other men’s heads, that at the length in the fall, it breaks its own neck; therefore, it is better to live in humble content than in high care and trouble.
My greatest pleasure is to invent. My continual mad ambition is to make something true and beautiful that never existed in the world before.
If you have ambition, you might not achieve anything, but without ambition, you are almost certain not to achieve anything.
If you sell yourself short before you even start, you’ll never know how far you could have gone. Ambition is a wonderful thing and has gotten me farther than I ever thought I’d go.
I was never somebody who grew up going, ‘I really want to be a singer in a band,’ and I never had any ambition toward anything, really.
A man’s worth is no greater than his ambitions.
Throughout her career, many women would view Mrs. Clinton as an imperfect vessel for the feminist cause. She was a Yale-educated lawyer who, at the height of the 1970s women’s movement, moved to Arkansas to put her own ambitions on hold in furtherance of her husband’s career.
Five enemies of peace inhabit with us – avarice, ambition, envy, anger, and pride; if these were to be banished, we should infallibly enjoy perpetual peace.
When I graduated from law school in 1959, there wasn’t a single woman on any federal bench. It wouldn’t be a realistic ambition for a woman to want to become a federal judge. It wasn’t realistic until Jimmy Carter became our president.
Anybody with artistic ambitions is always trying to reconnect with the way they saw things as a child.
I’m not somebody with over-weening ambition.
A young man without ambition is an old man waiting to be.
I had two ambitions: One was to be in The Actors Studio, and the other was to walk into a bar where actors hung out, and everyone would know that I was a professional actor and I would be accepted.
Ambition is the path to success. Persistence is the vehicle you arrive in.
When I was 13, I forged my date of birth so that I could get a Saturday job at Woolworth’s, earning £1 3s 6d for the day. But my real ambition was to do something in the music world – or, at least, close to it.
There’s never been a game plan, and I suppose I’ve had an uneasy relationship with my ambition. Someone who had been in my year at drama school once said to me that I was terrifyingly ambitious back then. Which was not at all what I felt at the time – I felt paralysed with shyness, though that evaporated.
Fiction’s essential activity is to imagine how others feel, what a Saturday afternoon in an Italian town in the 2nd Century looked like. My ambition is solely to get some effect, as of light on stone in a forest on a September day.
We must listen and learn, show humility and seek again to talk for and to people’s ambitions and concerns.
As far as I am concerned, ambition is the most dangerous occupation in the world. I have never been ambitious, or if I have, it’s only been by default.
The term ‘personal ambition’ immediately puts me off. It feels like finding a sliver of onion in my ice cream. There’s nothing wrong with a sliver of onion, but I don’t want it in my ice cream.
Ambition, of course, is the politician’s currency.
My ambition when I was four years old was to be married.
I have no personal ambitions. I consider it a great privilege to have been given an opportunity to serve, through the Congress party, the people of India. I think that itself is a great reward. I have no personal ambitions in that regard.
‘Chef’ is a dish of arroz con pollo served with a smile but not much style. The critic in the film would give it a low grade, for agreeability without ambition.
The idea of accumulating ambitions or achievements didn’t get much further than wanting to do the next exciting thing. I really haven’t set out with any list of achievements.
My craziest ambition is to take John Madden’s job and salary.
From the very beginning, I had an ambition for ‘The Luminaries’: a direction – but not a real idea.
The same ambition can destroy or save, and make a patriot as it makes a knave.
There weren’t a lot of career opportunities in crazy-fast hardcore punk, so you didn’t have a lot of ambition, just the love and passion to play music with your friends.
A garden requires patient labor and attention. Plants do not grow merely to satisfy ambitions or to fulfill good intentions. They thrive because someone expended effort on them.
Though ambition in itself is a vice, it often is also the parent of virtue.
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. How far I shall succeed in gratifying this ambition is yet to be developed.
Coming from a small town, I didn’t have big dreams. My biggest ambition was to find a job for myself.
It is a grand thing to rise in the world. The ambition to do so is the very salt of the earth. It is the parent of all enterprise, and the cause of all improvement.
‘The Haters’ has some of the generalities of band experiences that I’ve had – the camaraderie, the grubbiness, the outsized collective ambitions and frequent painful collisions with reality – but very few of the specifics. I guess it was a way for me to take some of my experiences to their logical crazy extremes.
It’s good to test yourself and develop your talents and ambitions as fully as you can and achieve greater success; but I think success is the feeling you get from a job well done, and the key thing is to do the work.
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.
Whatever success I may have attained is due to the fact that since I was old enough to work at all, my ambition has never deserted me.
Our parents were really, really grounded people but also really ambitious people, meaning they saw our ambition and were willing to help us chase it.
It’s not my ambition to direct lots of films. I think if I direct one film in my whole life, why rush it?
My own ambitions were eclectic. My father ran a steel plant, and I was expected to study metallurgy and end up at the steel plant when I finished high school at age 15. Despite my proficiency at science, I decided against it and instead went on to study filmmaking.
Religion united its influence with those of loyalty and love, and the order of knighthood, endowed with all the sanctity and religious awe that attended the priesthood, became an object of ambition to the greatest sovereigns.
We’re not all nice, and there are a lot of levels of ambition and niceness.
I am so attracted to ambition and drive and talent. If a man loves something and can put his heart into it, I am instantly into him. I like a strong man who can be in control and make decisions but who is sensitive and attentive. That is the perfect combination.
Unless we get serious about addressing Iran’s regional ambitions in places like Syria, then our allies are never going to be confident that we have a strategy for the region.
So they’ve actually – it’s not that her character is a singer, but she had ambition to do that at an earlier time in her life. So I’ve actually sung two or three times now on the show.
