She Is Ambitious Quotes & Sayings

Too many people are frightened. They want youth to last. They complain bitterly if sickness comes. But the world is always in tumult, and fortunes rise and fall and fail. It is the ambitious who accomplish things. It takes courage to be ambitious, for never was anything great achieved without risk. — Jeff Wheeler

Okay, so all a woman has to do is ignore society's expectations, be ambitious, sit at the table, work hard, and then it's smooth sailing all the way. What could possibly go wrong? — Sheryl Sandberg

Let it be remembered that most men live in a world of their own, and that in that limited circle alone are they ambitious for distinction and applause. Sir Mulberry's world was peopled with profligates, and he acted accordingly.
Thus, cases of injustice, and oppression, and tyranny, and the most extravagant bigotry, are in constant occurrence among us every day. It is the custom to trumpet forth much wonder and astonishment at the chief actors therein setting at defiance so completely the opinion of the world. But there is no greater fallacy; it is precisely because they do consult the opinion of their own little world that such things take place at all, and strike the great world dumb with amazement. — Charles Dickens

Packed with fascinating personal perspective and testimony, Michael Takiffs A Complicated Man wholly justifies its title. The book is far more than a kaleidoscopic oral biography of President Bill Clinton. Aspect by aspect, it guides us through the struggles of postmodern America, as the most ambitious baby boomer of his generation seeks to modernize the Democratic Party-and, as in a Greek drama, is fated to be destroyed. Veritably, an all-American saga, with a cast of thousands-favorable and unfavorable. — Nigel Hamilton

I am confirmed in my division of human energies. Ambitious people climb, but faithful people build. — Julia Ward Howe

I realize I'm an ambitious guy, but I just try to take things as they come, you know, for the most part. — Rob Brown

The cabman looked at the pieces of silver, which, appearing very minute in his big, grimy palm, symbolised the insignificant results which reward the ambitious courage and toil of a mankind whose day is short on this earth of evil. — Joseph Conrad

Read (or listen to on CD) Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand This book is a fictional cautionary tale of what would happen if the most ambitious, innovative thinkers were no longer rewarded for using their minds to help advance society. — Steve Siebold

If Mom was feeling ambitious, she scribbled a small list of items beneath the word, but seeing as her handwriting is virtually illegible, we won't know what's in each box until we actually open it. Like Christmas. Except we already own everything. — Victoria Schwab

The general problem with ambitious systems is complexity. [ ... ] it is important to emphasize the value of simplicity and elegance, for complexity has a way of compounding difficulties. — Fernando J. Corbato

Poetry and progress are like two ambitious men who hate one another with an instinctive hatred, and when they meet upon the same road, one of them has to give place. — Charles Baudelaire

Every ambitious would-be empire, clarions it abroad that she is conquering the world to bring it peace, security and freedom, and it is sacrificing her sons only for the most noble and humanitarian purposes. That is a lie; and it is an ancient lie, yet generations still rise and believe it. — Henry David Thoreau

You are so full of light," I say after a moment. "You align with joy, and I with fear and fury. If you could see into my thoughts, you would surely turn away. So why would you stay with me, even if return to Kenettra and resume our lives?"

"You paint me as a saint," he murmurs. "But I aligned with greed solely to prevent that."

Even now, he can make my lips twitch with a smile. "I'm serious, Magiano."

"As am I. None of us are saints. I have seen your darkness, yes, and know your struggle. I won't deny it." He touches my chin with one hand. At this gesture, the whispers seem to settle, pushed away where I can't hear them. "But you are also passionate and ambitious and loyal. You are a thousand things, mi Adelinetta, not just one. Do not reduce yourself to that. — Marie Lu

You see me, Lord Bassanio, where I stand, such as i am. Though for myself alone I would not be ambitious in my wish to wish myself much better, yet for you I would be trebled twenty times myself, a thousand times more rich, that only to stand high in your accunt I might in virtues, beauties, livings, friends, exceed account. But the full sum of me is sum of something, which, to term in gross, is an unlessoned girl, unschooled, unpracticed; happy in this, she is not yet so old but she may learn; happier than this, she is not bred so dull but she can learn; happiest of all, is that her gentle spirit commits itself to yours to be idrected as from her lord, her governor, her king. Myself, and what is mine, to you and yours is now converted. But now I was the lord of this fair mansion, master of my servants, queen o'er myself; and even now, but now, this house, these servants, and this same myself are yours, my lord's. I give them. — William Shakespeare

In any case, I hope that it will be a good thing when we understand how our minds are built, and how they support the modes of thought that we like to call emotions. Then we'll be better able to decide what we like about them, and what we don't - and bit by bit we'll rebuild ourselves. I don't think that most people will bother with this, because they like themselves just as they are. Perhaps they are not selfish enough, or imaginative, or ambitious. Myself, I don't much like how people are now. We're too shallow, slow, and ignorant. I hope that our future will lead us to ideas that we can use to improve ourselves. — Marvin Minsky

I believe whatever smart, ambitious people are working on will be the trend of the future. I do think that it's worth thinking critically about what the future will be. — Sam Altman

The War Department in Washington briefly weighed more ambitious schemes to relieve the Americans on a large scale before it was too late. But by Christmas of 1941, Washington had already come to regard Bataan as a lost cause. President Roosevelt had decided to concentrate American resources primarily in the European theater rather than attempt to fight an all-out war on two distant fronts. At odds with the emerging master strategy for winning the war, the remote outpost of Bataan lay doomed. By late December, President Roosevelt and War Secretary Henry Stimson had confided to Winston Churchill that they had regrettably written off the Philippines. In a particularly chilly phrase that was later to become famous, Stimson had remarked, 'There are times when men have to die. — Hampton Sides

You can't be both happy and ambitious. — J.A. Konrath

Women give men a place to go. A man is a useless piece of equipment whose purpose is lost if it were not for women ...
It's like this. A man might go out and get a job, but only for someplace to go during the day. And he's only working that job to give the money to his wife. And then, if he does really well ... to buy her good jewelry. And only because she asks for it. Diamonds aren't a man's idea. The first woman sent the first man into a hole in the ground, and when he emerged with the first diamond she looked at it and said, 'It's too small. Dig farther. Men are not ambitious outside of their desire to impress women. A woman, in return, gives a man's life shape. A context. A place to go. It's very simple. — Adriana Trigiani

My mum is bright, ambitious, well read, political and very bolshie: when my dad was conscripted into the Army and posted to Libya, she convinced some general to let her go with him. I don't know how she managed it. — Jo Brand

Evelyn tried to control people by controlling weapons, but Jeanine was more ambitious - she knew that when you control information, or manipulate it, you don't need force to keep people under your thumb. They stay there willingly. That is what the Bureau - and the entire government, probably - is doing: conditioning people to be happy under its thumb. — Anonymous

Who can wonder at the attractiveness ... of the bar, for our ambitious young men, when the highest bribes of society are at the feet of the successful orator? — Marsilio Ficino

It's funny. Of all the jobs I've been ambitious for, this is one that never crossed my mind. — Edmund S. Muskie

If you start from a belief that the most knowledgeable person on earth does not have even one percent of the total knowledge on earth, that shoots down social engineering, economic central planning, judicial activism and innumerable other ambitious notions favored by the political left. — Thomas Sowell

Its subtlest, most appealing accomplishment may be in how other characters respond to Gregorius' precipitous swerve onto the spiritual path. ( ... ) That said, Night Train to Lisbon is a very long, ambitious book that's feverishly overwritten. ( ... ) Think of W.G. Sebald recast for the mass market: stripped of nuance, cooked at high temperature and pounded home, clause after clause. Some of the clumsiness derives from Barbara Harshav's inelegant translation
we're often aware of her struggle
but she can't be blamed for the pervasive bloat. — Michelle Huneven

Ambitious and thought-provoking, Higher Education in America represents an informed and informative addition to ongoing debates at the national, state, and institutional levels about the aims higher education ought to aspire to and how best to achieve them. — David M. Brown

If I was ambitious in my career, then I would have moved to the United States and given it a good go at films. — Keeley Hawes

I'm tough, ambitious, and I know exactly what I want. — Madonna Ciccone

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

If you are ambitious of climbing up to the difficult, and in a manner inaccessible, summit of the Temple of Fame, your surest way is to leave on one hand the narrow path of Poetry, and follow the narrower track of Knight-Errantry, which in a trice may raise you to an imperial throne. — Miguel De Cervantes

At MGM, you knew you were going to be working next year; you knew you were going to get paid. But I was too ambitious musically to settle for it. And I wanted to gamble with whatever talent I might have had. — Andre Previn

I have an image of a woman with a romantic kind of beauty and an orderly, logical mind." "Hunter - " "Wait, I'm just fleshing her out. She's ambitious, full of nerves, highly sensuous without being fully aware of it." He could see her eyes change, growing as dark as the sky above them. "She's caught in the middle of something she can't explain or understand. Things happen around her and she's finding it more and more difficult to distance herself from it. And there's a man, a man she desires but can't quite trust. He doesn't offer her the logical explanations she wants, but the illogic he offers seems terrifyingly close to the truth. If she puts her trust in him, she has to turn her back on most of what she believes is fact. If she doesn't, she'll be alone. — Nora Roberts

It is necessary to find one's own way in New York. New York City is not hospitable. She is very big and she has no heart. She is not charming. She is not sympathetic. She is rushed and noisy and unkempt, a hard, ambitious, irresolute place, not very lively, and never gay. When she glitters she is very, very bright, and when she does not glitter she is dirty. New York does nothing for those of us who are inclined to love her except implant in our hearts a homesickness that baffles us until we go away from her, and then we realize why we are restless. At home or away, we are homesick for New York not because New York used to be better and not because she used to be worse but because the city holds us and we don't know why. — Maeve Brennan

They were men linked more to one another, their schools, their own social class and their own concerns than they were linked to the country. Indeed, about one of them, Averell Harriman, there would always be a certain taint, as if somehow Averell were a little too partisan and too ambitious (Averell had wanted to be President whereas the rest of them knew that the real power lay in letting the President come to them; the President could take care of rail strikes, minimum wages and farm prices, and they would take care of national security). — David Halberstam

Professional ambition is expected of men but is optional - or worse, sometimes even a negative - for women. "She is very ambitious" is not a compliment in our culture. — Sheryl Sandberg

I love acting, but I am a mom, and the roles just weren't coming because of a mixture of things: because I'm not ambitious, and because I'm older, and I had a baby. I really felt like I had said a graceful and completely happy goodbye to acting in a significant way. And I had sort of made my peace with that. — Jennifer Jason Leigh

Aubrey obviously plays Karen's, Sarah Michelle Gellar's, younger sister. And, um, she's sort of always been the underdog in the family and somebody who is not as ambitious or driven as her sister, as Karen's character, so she's sort of always felt like she's had to follow in her sister's footsteps. — Amber Tamblyn

The other problem is that she hasn't arrived."
"Oh, yeah? And who is she?"
"Well, she is a remarkable, funny, classy woman who can say the word fuck without being trashy. She makes me laugh, is ambitious, loves me because I'm nice, not in spite of it, and is as nice in return. She is simply enchanting."
"Shooting for the stars there, aren't you, pal?"
"Shouldn't we all?"
I didn't know anymore, although I utterly envied his romanticism. — Megan Karasch

If a woman is sufficiently ambitious, determined and gifted, there is practically nothing she can't do. — Helen Lawrenson

I've become good friends with Lena Dunham, and the thing I had in common with Lena when I was 24 is I was as ambitious as she was. What we don't have in common is that I was not as talented. My voice was not as clearly defined. — Mike Birbiglia

Ron told Pippa that during the six years he had spent on the book, Valerie Chernow had developed a powerful identification with Hamilton's wife. "She used to say, 'Eliza is like me: She's good, she's true, she's loyal, she's not ambitious.' There was a purity and a goodness about the character, and that was like Valerie," he says. In 2006, after 27 years of marriage, Valerie passed away. For her gravestone, Ron chose a line from the letter that Hamilton wrote to Eliza on the night before the duel: "Best of wives and best of women. — Lin-Manuel Miranda

All my girlhood I always planned to do something big ... something constructive. It's queer what ambitious dreams a girl has when she is young. I thought I would sing before big audiences or paint lovely pictures or write a splendid book. I always had that feeling in me of wanting to do something worth while. And just think, Laura ... now I am eighty and I have not painted nor written nor sung."
"But you've done lots of things, Grandma. You've baked bread ... and pieced quilts ... and taken care of your children."
Old Abbie Deal patted the young girl's hand. "Well ... well ... out of the mouths of babes. That's just it, Laura, I've only baked bread and pieced quilts and taken care of children. But some women have to, don't they? ... But I've dreamed dreams, Laura. All the time I was cooking and patching and washing, I dreamed dreams. And I think I dreamed them into the children ... and the children are carrying them out ... doing all the things I wanted to and couldn't. — Bess Streeter Aldrich

They think the recipe for a 'home-maker' is- a woman who isn't smart enough, lacks skills and above all isn't ambitious enough! Well she is every bit as smart as the woman who puts on a suit to go to work in a man's world to prove- times have changed! She is every bit as intelligent! — Mrinalini Mitra

My second wife left me because she said I was too ambitious. She didn't realize that it is only the dying who are free from ambition. And they probably have the ambition to live. Some men disguise their ambition
that's all. I was in a position to help this young man my wife loved. He soon showed his ambition then. There are different types of ambition - that is all, and my wife found she preferred mine. Because it was limitless. They do not feel the infinite is an unworthy rival, but for a man to prefer the desk of an assistant manager - that is an insult. — Graham Greene

The classic scenario unfolds like this. An ambitious and successful woman heads down a challenging career path with the thought of having children in the back of her mind. At some point, this thought moves to the front of her mind, typically once she finds a partner. The woman considers how hard she is working and reasons that to make room for a child she will have to scale back. A law associate might decide not to shoot for partner because someday she hopes to have a family. A teacher might pass on leading curriculum development for her school. A sales representative might take a smaller territory or not apply for a management role. — Sheryl Sandberg

If she is efficient and capable or ambitious, it is assumed that she has failed to find satisfaction as a normal woman, even to the extent of implying a glandular abnormality or sexual perversion. — Germaine Greer

The other thing that's happened with writing is that I'm not afraid it will go away. Up until a couple of years ago, I feared that sitting down with paper and pencil revealed too much desire and that for such ambition I would be punished. My vocabulary would contract anorexia, ideas would be born autistic, even titles would not come to flirt with me anymore. I suppose this was tied to that internal judge, the serpent who eats her own tail. She insinuates you're not good enough; you believe her and try less, ratifying her assessment; so you try even less; and on and on. This snake survives on your dying. Finally, now, the elided words of my wisest writing teacher, the poet David Wojahn, make sense. "Be ambitious," he said, "for the work." Not for the in-dwelling editor. That bitch was impossible to please anyway. — Marsha L. Larsen

It's hard to be ambitious if you're content, isn't it? — Tucker Carlson

He's ambitious - even excessively ambitious. He wants to become a provocateur, but he doesn't know a single revolutionary song. — Teffi

To appear unambitious amongst the ambitious is to invite loathing or fear. To be in the game, but not playing with intent to win, is to be the enemy. — Josephine Hart

Polybius foresaw Rome's decadence. "All things are subject to decay and change," he wrote. "When a state, after having passed with safety through many and great dangers, arrives at the highest degree of power, and possesses an entire and undisputed sovereignty, it is manifest that the long continuance of prosperity must give birth to costly and luxurious manners, and that the minds of men will be heated with ambitious contests, and become too eager and aspiring in the pursuit of dignities. And as those evils are continually increased, the desire of power and rule, and the imagined ignominy of remaining in a subject state, will first begin to work the ruin of the republic; arrogance and luxury will afterwards advance it; and in the end the change will be completed by the people; when the avarice of some is found to injure and oppress them, and the ambition of others swells their vanity, and poisons them with flattering hopes. — Anonymous

I don't worry about superpower confrontation. You know, I lived through the Cold War days, and where everybody was worried about a Soviet Union armed to the teeth. I think we're going to get along fine with Russia, and I don't see them as internationally ambitious. — George H. W. Bush

Noomi [Rapace] felt fresh. And she's passionate and ambitious in all the right ways. She's a tour de force. Every time I was trying to have a discussion with the actors, she'd be pulling out a blade out from underneath her gypsy skirt and menace someone saying, "Maybe I should slit your throat." — Kam Williams

The ambitious will always be first in the crowd; he presseth forward, he looketh not behind him. More anguish is it to his mind to see one before him, than joy to leave thousands at a distance — Akhenaton

Chappe also had all sorts of ambitious plans for his invention; he hadn't intended its use to be so predominantly military in nature, and wanted to promote its employment in business. — Tom Standage

But ambitious encroachments of the federal government, on the authority of the State governments, would not excite the opposition of a single State, or of a few States only. They would be signals of general alarm ... But what degree of madness could ever drive the federal government to such an extremity. — James Madison

We seem ambitious God's whole work to undo ... With new diseases on ourselves we war, And with new physic, a worse engine far. — Michel De Montaigne

Electra Heart is the antithesis of everything I stand for. And the point of introducing her and building a concept around her is that she stands for the corrupt side of American ideology, and basically that's the corruption of yourself. My worst fear - that's anyone's worst fear - is to lose myself and become an empty person. And that happens a lot when you're very ambitious. — Marina And The Diamonds

This is New York. If people found out worshipping the devil actually worked, every ambitious type A would be practicing it in their studio apartments. — Marisha Pessl

For men tied fast to the absolute, bled of their differences, drained of their dreams by authoritarian leeches until nothing but pulp is left, become a massive, sick Thing whose sheer weight is used ruthlessly by ambitious men. Here is the real enemy of the people: our own selves dehumanized into the masses. And where is the David who can slay this giant? — Lillian Smith

Gu himself presides over the room- a genial, noisy man with the widest, jauntiest, must luxuriant and ambitious mustache I have ever seen, permanently fighting gravity and the razor in its attempts to make contact with Gu's eyebrows. — Peter Mayle

The problem with doing physically ambitious art is that to view it, you still have to be in your physical body. — Molly Crabapple

I'm ambitious, I want to play in the Champions League, and that's the aim with Tottenham - to start qualifying for the Champions League on a consistent basis. — Gareth Bale

Most crime fiction plots are not ambitious enough for me. I want something really labyrinthine with clues and puzzles that will reward careful attention. — Sophie Hannah

I was a young guy who started as a fact checker," he said, "but I always knew - and was told - that I would get a shot at reporting, writing, and editing. For a young, ambitious, talented woman, that elevator was out of order. — Lynn Povich

The ranks of society are once again filled with Ambitious Mamas, whose
only aim is to
see their Darling Daughters married off to Determined Bachelors — Julia Quinn

Everyone lives a self-centered life ... whether its trivial like what's for breakfast, or more ambitious, like achieving some lofty goal, a person is constantly on her own mind. — T.M. Goeglein

It isn't that women are less ambitious, but women want to find a balance between work, love, and family. — Michelle Bachelet

Humans are ambitious and rational and proud. And we don't fall in line with people who don't respect us and who we don't believe have our best interests at heart. We are willing to follow leaders, but only to the extent that we believe they call on our best, not our worst. — Rachel Maddow

If any ambitious man have a fancy to revolutionize, at one effort, the universal world of human thought, human opinion, and human sentiment ... — Edgar Allan Poe

Everyone finds their own version of Charles Dickens. The child-victim, the irrepressibly ambitious young man, the reporter, the demonic worker, the tireless walker. The radical, the protector of orphans, helper of the needy, man of good works, the republican. The hater and the lover of America. The giver of parties, the magician, the traveler. — Claire Tomalin

Ambitious, absorbing, and poignantly moving. — Joyce Carol Oates

All I want is that Americans still be able to read the alphabet in a hundred years. I am not very ambitious. — Gore Vidal

When ambition enters, creativity disappears - because an ambitious man cannot be creative, because an ambitious man cannot love any activity for its own sake. While he is painting he is looking ahead; he is thinking, 'When am I going to get a Nobel Prize?' When he is writing a novel, he is looking ahead. He is always in the future - and a creative person is always in the present. — Rajneesh

Oh, maybe a little treasure for the more rabid Incunks, the collectors and the academics who maintained their positions in large part by examining the literary equivalent of navel-lint in each other's abstruse journals; ambitious, overeducated goofs who had lost touch with what books and reading were actually about and could be content to go on spinning straw into footnoted fool's gold for decades on end. — Stephen King

I don't think Bono decided to be ambitious, he just is. But if this country ever ran out of electricity, just shove a plug up his hole and it would run for a week. — Gavin Friday