Ambitious Dreams Quotes

O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams." Which dreams, indeed, are ambition; for the very substance of the ambitious is merely the shadow of a dream.

This was not the career she'd dreamed of as an ambitious seventeen-year-old, but now it was hard to remember ever feeling innocent and audacious enough to dream of a certain type of life, as if you got to choose how things turned out.

Which dreams, indeed, are ambition, for the very substance of the ambitious is merely the shadow of a dream.

No ambition which feeds on blood can be a worthy one

And yet is not mankind itself, pushing on its blind way, driven by a dream of its greatness and its power upon the dark paths of excessive cruelty and of excessive devotion. And what is the pursuit of truth, after all?

The very substance of the ambitious is merely the shadow of a dream.

To become a better you, secure your dreams from the jaws of people who discredit your ambitions.

Well, OK then." He narrowed his eyes. "How about you? Do you have any...romances I should know about?" "Nope. Not one." "Well, good. Excellent. There'll be plenty of time for boys when you leave college and become a nun." She smiled. "I'm glad you have such ambitious dreams for me.

Great dreams of great dreamers are always transcended.

Most poor people do not really aspire to end poverty; they merely aspire to escape it.

I think it is often easier to make progress on mega-ambitious dreams. Since no one else is crazy enough to do it, you have little competition. In fact, there are so few people this crazy that I feel like I know them all by first name.

Over time I’ve learned, surprisingly, that it’s tremendously hard to get teams to be super ambitious. It turns out most people haven’t been educated in this kind of moonshot thinking. They tend to assume that things are impossible, rather than starting from real-world physics and figuring out what’s actually possible. It’s why we’ve put so much energy into hiring independent thinkers at Google, and setting big goals. Because if you hire the right people and have big enough dreams, you’ll usually get there. And even if you fail, you’ll probably learn something important. It’s also true that many companies get comfortable doing what they have always done, with a few incremental changes. This kind of incrementalism leads to irrelevance over time, especially in technology, because change tends to be revolutionary not evolutionary. So you need to force yourself to place big bets on the future.

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.

Dream big; let your aspirations be everything.

If you succeed with one dream...it's not long before you're conjuring up another, slightly harder, a bit more ambitious, a bit more dangerous

Work dominates life in Eden-Olympia, and drives out everything else. The dream of a leisure society was the great twentieth-century delusion. Work is the new leisure. Talented and ambitious people work harder than they have ever done, and for longer hours. They find their only fulfillment through work. The men and women running successful companies need to focus their energies on the task in front of them, and for every minute of the day. The last thing they want is recreation.

I told the members of the graduating class that they should be ambitious not just in pursuing their dreams but in aspiring to become leaders in their fields.

She had said he had been driven away from her by a dream,--and there was no answer one could make her--there seemed to be no forgiveness for such a transgression. And yet is not mankind itself, pushing on its blind way, driven by a dream of its greatness and its power upon the dark paths of excessive cruelty and of excessive devotion. And what is the pursuit of truth, after all?

The highest kind of writing—which must not be confused with the most ambitious kind…belongs to the realm of grace. Talent is part of it, certainly; a thorough understanding of the secret laws, absolutely. But finding the subject and theme which is in perfect harmony with your deepest nature, your forgotten selves, your hidden dreams, and the full unresonated essence of your life—now that cannot be reached through searching, nor can it be stumbled upon through ambition. That sort of serendipity comes upon you on a lucky day. It may emerge even out of misfortune or defeat. You may happen upon it without realising that this is the work through which your whole life will sing. We should always be ready. We should always be humble. Creativity should always be a form of prayer.

After Death nothing is, and nothing, death, The utmost limit of a gasp of breath. Let the ambitious zealot lay aside His hopes of heaven, whose faith is but his pride; Let slavish souls lay by their fear Nor be concerned which way nor where After this life they shall be hurled. Dead, we become the lumber of the world, And to that mass of matter shall be swept Where things destroyed with things unborn are kept. Devouring time swallows us whole. Impartial death confounds body and soul. For Hell and the foul fiend that rules God's everlasting fiery jails (Devised by rogues, dreaded by fools), With his grim, grisly dog that keeps the door, Are senseless stories, idle tales, Dreams, whimseys, and no more.

Keep a sharp eye on the game, and not the money. Money will pass away, but the game will play on.

Never surround yourself with people who are envious of your ambitions. Decide to be at the right place at the right time and save yourself for greater opportunities.

Go for your goal, be ambitious. Do what you dream, unlock your wishes.

Be Thou exalted over my reputation. Make me ambitious to please Thee even if as a result I must sink into obscurity and my name be forgotten as a dream.

I dream about having a house by the water and not doing anything, not feeling ambitious, nor having the need to make money.

Got dreams in my mind that got me hustling all the time.

There is no greater fulfillment as the pursuit of dreams.

A world full of "certainties" All the plans, all the vanities. Where black covers the white Suited in "confidence"- the constant fight. A million roads I dream to take One destination, knowing not I turn where. A green veil covers for two years, some two decades. But the "plan" awaits, new roads to make. I pant, I struggle, I do my best While they say, "You are, dear, but so inadequate".

The Stoics taught a life of restraint and control, the personal cultivation of learning, beauty, and reason. The Stoics asked the Romans to realize that much that is encountered in life is beyond the individual's control. Make the best of what can be humanly cultivated. It is a kind of Platonism shrunk to a pursuit of private feelings and thoughts: Do the best with what you can control and refine, and let the rest go. "The world is rational, but it is only amenable to active intervention within the limits of the individual's capacity. Do not try to be an overachiever. Do not dream of social transformation. Private cultivation rather than social action makes for the good life. Although the slave Epictetus was one of the principal Stoic writers, the emperor Marcus Aurelius's upper-class background is more typical of its devotees. "Stoicism is a narrow ethic, one suitable to the emotional and intellectual needs of aristocrat and slave alike, but less useful for the ambitious middle class.

He keeps silent for several seasons. In my mind, hundreds of questions that I don’t ask. Instead, I go to Machu Picchu, explore the Amazon rainforest, and stay in Marrakech. I return to my own life before love. I go back to my twenty-year-old self, plan my life again, keep an ambitious dream, and become stronger and wiser. But at times, I still write letters that I never send to him. That his silence is

I was a little girl with big dreams. I wanted to be a star like Madonna, Dolly Parton, or Whitney Houston. I had simpler dreams too, dreams that seemed even harder to achieve and that felt too ambitious to say out loud: I wanted my dad to stop drinking. I want my mom to stop yelling. I want everyone to be okay.

Focus on your goals and ambitions and less on people and things that are counterproductive. A few simple disciplines practiced everyday along with the right mindset will eventually give you the results you desire.

And in an essential way, this was what he was most ashamed of: not his poor understanding of sex, not his traitorous racial tendencies, not his inability to separate himself from his parents or make his own money or behave like an autonomous creature. It was that, when he and his colleagues sat there at night, the group of them burrowed deep into their own ambitious dream-structures, all of them drawing and planning their improbable buildings, he was doing nothing. He had lost the ability to imagine anything. And so every evening, while the others created, he copied: he drew buildings he had seen on his travels, buildings other people had dreamed and constructed, buildings he had lived in or passed through. Again and again, he made what had already been made, not bothering to improve them, just mimicking them. He was twenty-eight; his imagination had deserted him; he was a copyist. It frightened him. JB had his series. Jude had his work, Willem had his. But what if Malcolm never again created anything? He longed for the years when it was enough to simply be in his room with his hand moving over a piece of graph paper, before the years of decisions and identities, when his parents made his choices for him, and the only thing he had to concentrate on was the clean blade stroke of a line, the ruler's perfect knife edge.

Dreams, always dreams! and the more ambitious and delicate is the soul, the more its dreams bear it away from possibility. Each man carries in himself his dose of natural opium, incessantly secreted and renewed. From birth to death, how many hours can we count that are filled by positive enjoyment, by successful and decisive action? Shall we ever live, shall we ever pass into this picture which my soul has painted, this picture which resembles you? These treasures, this furniture, this luxury, this order, these perfumes, these miraculous flowers, they are you. Still you, these mighty rivers and these calm canals! These enormous ships that ride upon them, freighted with wealth, whence rise the monotonous songs of their handling: these are my thoughts that sleep or that roll upon your breast. You lead them softly towards that sea which is the Infinite; ever reflecting the depths of heaven in the limpidity of your fair soul; and when, tired by the ocean's swell and gorged with the treasures of the East, they return to their port of departure, these are still my thoughts enriched which return from the Infinite - towards you.

His [Luke]letter went something like this: "Dear Mr President, Thank you for introducing me to the Hall of Famers and for showing me the Oval Office. I think if I work really hard I will have a chance for both." The next time I saw the president I told him about my son's ambitious plans. His response was beautiful: "Never get between a boy and his dreams

when he and his colleagues sat there at night, the group of them burrowed deep into their own ambitious dream-structures, all of them drawing and planning their improbable buildings, he was doing nothing. He had lost the ability to imagine anything.

There is nothing after death; and death is nothing - only the finishing post of life's short race. Ambitious, give up your hopes; anxious, your fears. Vast Chaos, and the hungry mouth of Time, consume us all. Death is inseparable; it destroys the body, and does not spare the soul. For Taenarus - the realm of the grim king - the jealous hound that guards the infernal gate - these are all idle tales, fables, the stories of a troubled dream. You ask, where will you be when you are dead? Where the unborn are.

Or no—let us say you are not quite such a person. You are ambitious, yes, and in the name of success you are willing to do all manner of things that people with conscience would never consider, but you are not an intellectually gifted individual. Your intelligence is above average perhaps, and people think of you as smart, maybe even very smart. But you know in your heart of hearts that you do not have the cognitive wherewithal, or the creativity, to reach the careening heights of power you secretly dream about, and this makes you resentful of the world at large, and envious of the people around you. As this sort of person, you ensconce yourself in a niche, or maybe a series of niches, in which you can have some amount of control over small numbers of people. These situations satisfy a little of your desire for power, although you are chronically aggravated at not having more. It chafes to be so free of the ridiculous inner voice that inhibits others from achieving great power, without having enough talent to pursue the ultimate successes yourself. Sometimes you fall into sulky, rageful moods caused by a frustration that no one but you understands.

You’re sure you want to do this,” Galen says, eyeing me like I’ve grown a tiara of snakes on my head. “Absolutely.” I unstrap the four-hundred-dollar silver heels and spike them into the sand. When he starts unraveling his tie, I throw out my hand. “No! Leave it. Leave everything on.” Galen frowns. “Rachel would kill us both. In our sleep. She would torture us first.” “This is our prom night. Rachel would want us to enjoy ourselves.” I pull the thousand-or-so bobby pins from my hair and toss them in the sand. Really, both of us are right. She would want us to be happy. But she would also want us to stay in our designer clothes. Leaning over, I shake my head like a wet dog, dispelling the magic of hairspray. Tossing my hair back, I look at Galen. His crooked smile almost melts me where I stand. I’m just glad to see a smile on his face at all. The last six months have been rough. “Your mother will want pictures,” he tells me. “And what will she do with pictures? There aren’t exactly picture frames in the Royal Caverns.” Mom’s decision to mate with Grom and live as his queen didn’t surprise me. After all, I am eighteen years old, an adult, and can take care of myself. Besides, she’s just a swim away. “She keeps picture frames at her house though. She could still enjoy them while she and Grom come to shore to-“ “Okay, ew. Don’t say it. That’s where I draw the line.” Galen laughs and takes off his shoes. I forget all about Mom and Grom. Galen, barefoot in the sand, wearing an Armani tux. What more could a girl ask for? “Don’t look at me like that, angelfish,” he says, his voice husky. “Disappointing your grandfather is the last thing I want to do.” My stomach cartwheels. Swallowing doesn’t help. “I can’t admire you, even from afar?” I can’t quite squeeze enough innocence in there to make it believable, to make it sound like I wasn’t thinking the same thing he was. Clearing his throat, he nods. “Let’s get on with this.” He closes the distance between us, making foot-size potholes with his stride. Grabbing my hand, he pulls me to the water. At the edge of the wet sand, just out of reach of the most ambitious wave, we stop. “You’re sure?” he says again. “More than sure,” I tell him, giddiness swimming through my veins like a sneaking eel. Images of the conference center downtown spring up in my mind. Red and white balloons, streamers, a loud, cheesy DJ yelling over the starting chorus of the next song. Kids grinding against one another on the dance floor to lure the chaperones’ attention away from a punch bowl just waiting to be spiked. Dresses spilling over with skin, matching corsages, awkward gaits due to six-inch heels. The prom Chloe and I dreamed of. But the memories I wanted to make at that prom died with Chloe. There could never be any joy in that prom without her. I couldn’t walk through those doors and not feel that something was missing. A big something. No, this is where I belong now. No balloons, no loud music, no loaded punch bowl. Just the quiet and the beach and Galen. This is my new prom. And for some reason, I think Chloe would approve.

In the dormitories, she'd been surrounded by the relentlessly ambitious, but in that West Hollywood apartment building, all of the neighbors she met were people whose dreams of fame had already been dashed. Cinematographers working at Kodak stores, screenwriters teaching English to immigrants, actors starring in burlesque shows in seedy bars.

Timing for a dream is never right, Yet you must persevere against the tide. A tenacious mind can turn any table, Even amidst the utter absence of light.

Be ambitious in your dreams...look at the world with curious eyes ready to explore every inch of it. For every moment you spend doing what you love is life well spent.

It's not how good you are, It's how good you want to be.

Which dreams indeed are ambition;for the very substance of the ambitious is merely the shadow of a dream. A dream itself is but a shadow.

You have to be enthusiastic enough to do what is required for achieving your dreams and goals.

Failure is ambition in motion.

Everyone has a dream. The ambitious make that dream a goal. The motivated build a plan. The successful execute.

He is a person. With hopes and dreams of his own. They might not be as ambitious as yours, but he’s got every right to pursue them.

Which dreams indeed are ambition, for the very substance of the ambitious is merely the shadow of a dream.

For us ambitious galactic travelers, exploration of other galaxies in person will forever be a dream.

Being ambitious women means we are hardworking women, willing to go and serve and sacrifice to turn big dreams into reality. Holy ambition, to me, is the face of kindness at work.

Tonight I will dream of a better tomorrow, but today I will awake with a vision more ambitious than yesterday.

Caroline, or Sister Carrie, as she had been half affectionately termed by the family, was possessed of a mind rudimentary in its power of observation and analysis. Self-interest with her was high, but not strong. It was, nevertheless, her guiding characteristic. Warm with the fancies of youth, pretty with the insipid prettiness of the formative period, possessed of a figure promising eventual shapeliness and an eye alight with certain native intelligence, she was a fair example of the middle American class—two generations removed from the emigrant. Books were beyond her interest—knowledge a sealed book. In the intuitive graces she was still crude. She could scarcely toss her head gracefully. Her hands were almost ineffectual. The feet, though small, were set flatly. And yet she was interested in her charms, quick to understand the keener pleasures of life, ambitious to gain in material things. A half-equipped little knight she was, venturing to reconnoitre the mysterious city and dreaming wild dreams of some vague, far-off supremacy, which should make it prey and subject—the proper penitent, grovelling at a woman's slipper.

A person of large dreams does not allow other people’s opinion to damper his or her zestfulness. Overcoming fear of making an irreversible, lifetime mistake is the first step of living an artistic existence.

I don’t think there is any one single answer to the need for care. I just want, to echo my friend Dori, more care, more of the time. I want us to dream mutual aid in our postapocalyptic revolutionary societies where everyone gets to access many kinds of care—from friends and internet strangers, from disabled community centers, and from some kind of non-fucked-up non-state state that would pay caregivers well and give them health benefits and time off and enshrine sick and disabled autonomy and choice. I want us to keep dreaming and experimenting with all these big, ambitious ways we dream care for each other into being.

I know that where you come from, maybe someone who goes to poly or ITE is considered a failure. But who's to say that going to poly or ITE can't be another person's dream? Maybe you think that we're not ambitious enough. I don't know. But where does it say that only going to JC or university can be considered an ambition? Everyone has their own goal to work towards. And even if our goals are different, that doesn't mean that we don’t have to work hard for them, or that we don't struggle to reach them too.

For one who sets himself to look at all earnestly, at all in purpose toward truth, into the living eyes of a human life: what is it he there beholds that so freezes and abashes his ambitious heart? What is it, profound behind the outward windows of each one of you, beneath touch even of your own suspecting, drawn tightly back at bay against the backward wall and blackness of its prison cave, so that the eyes alone shine of their own angry glory, but the eyes of a trapped wild animal, or of a furious angel nailed to the ground by his wings, or however else one may faintly designate the human 'soul,' that which is angry, that which is wild, that which is untamable, that which is healthful and holy, that which is competent of all advantaging within hope of human dream, that which most marvelous and most precious to our knowledge and most extremely advanced upon futurity of all flowerings within the scope of creation is of all these the least destructible, the least corruptible, the most defenseless, the most easily and multitudinously wounded, frustrated, prisoned, and nailed into a cheating of itself: so situated in the universe that those three hours upon the cross are but a noble and too trivial an emblem how in each individual among most of the two billion now alive and in each successive instant of the existence of each existence not only human being but in him the tallest and most sanguine hope of godhead is in a billionate choiring and drone of pain of generations upon generations unceasingly crucified and is bringing forth crucifixions into their necessities and is each in the most casual of his life so measurelessly discredited, harmed, insulted, poisoned, cheated, as not all the wrath, compassion, intelligence, power of rectification in all the reach of the future shall in the least expiate or make one ounce more light: how, looking thus into your eyes and seeing thus, how each of you is a creature which has never in all time existed before and which shall never in all time exist again and which is not quite like any other and which has the grand stature and natural warmth of every other and whose existence is all measured upon a still mad and incurable time; how am I to speak of you as 'tenant' 'farmers,' as 'representatives' of your 'class,' as social integers in a criminal economy, or as individuals, fathers, wives, sons, daughters, and as my friends and as I 'know' you?

You chased love when you were young, You chased fame when you were ambitious, You chased health when you were sick, You chased wealth when you were poor, But what should you chase when you get old? I tell you what -- chase your dreams till the end of your life, because that's what your life is meant to be.

I was a little girl with big dreams. I wanted to be a star like Madonna, Dolly Parton, or Whitney Houston. I had simpler dreams, too, dreams that seemed even harder to achieve and that felt too ambitious to say out loud: I want my dad to stop drinking. I want my mom to stop yelling. I want everyone to be okay.

Then the Yogi suddenly fell silent, and when I looked puzzled he shrugged and said: ‘Don’t you see yourself where the fault lies?’ But I could not see it. At this point he recapitulated with astonishing exactness everything he had learned from me by his questioning. He went back to the first signs of fatigue, repugnance, and intellectual constipation, and showed me that this could have happened only to someone who had submerged himself disproportionately in his studies and that it was high time for me to recover my self-control, and to regain my energy with outside help. Since I had taken the liberty of discontinuing my regular meditation exercises, he pointed out, I should at least have realized what was wrong as soon as the first evil consequences appeared, and should have resumed meditation. He was perfectly right. I had omitted meditating for quite a while on the grounds that I had no time, was too distracted or out of spirits, or too busy and excited with my studies. Moreover, as time went on I had completely lost all awareness of my continuous sin of omission. Even now, when I was desperate and had almost run aground, it had taken an outsider to remind me of it. As a matter of fact, I was to have the greatest difficulty snapping out of this state of neglect. I had to return to the training routines and beginners’ exercises in meditation in order gradually to relearn the art of composing myself and sinking into contemplation.” With a small sigh the Magister ceased pacing the room. “That is what happened to me, and to this day I am still a little ashamed to talk about it. But the fact is, Joseph, that the more we demand of ourselves, or the more our task at any given time demands of us, the more dependant we are on meditation as a wellspring of energy, as the ever-renewing concord of mind and soul. And – I could if I wished give you quite a few more examples of this – the more intensively a task requires our energies, arousing and exalting us at one time, tiring and depressing us at another, the more easily we may come to neglect this wellspring, just as when we are carried away by some intellectual work we easily forget to attend to the body. The really great men in the history of the world have all either known how to meditate or have unconsciously found their way to the place to which meditation leads us. Even the most vigorous and gifted among the others all failed and were defeated in the end because their task or their ambitious dream seized hold of them, made them into persons so possessed that they lost the capacity for liberating themselves from present things, and attaining perspective. Well, you know all this; it’s taught during the first exercises, of course. But it is inexorably true. How inexorably true it is, one realizes only after having gone astray.

Only the uncool have the requisite alone time to advance their species. And so it was that, eventually, between drawing meatship schematics in the dirt and dreaming of a world where she didn’t hate literally everyone, the shiest and most sensitive of Yurtmaks began to plan the most ambitious massacre in the history of the galaxy: the murder of stupidity.

In order to understand how engineers endeavor to insure against such structural, mechanical, and systems failures, and thereby also to understand how mistakes can be made and accidents with far-reaching consequences can occur, it is necessary to understand, at least partly, the nature of engineering design. It is the process of design, in which diverse parts of the 'given-world' of the scientist and the 'made-world' of the engineer are reformed and assembled into something the likes of which Nature had not dreamed, that divorces engineering from science and marries it to art. While the practice of engineering may involve as much technical experience as the poet brings to the blank page, the painter to the empty canvas, or the composer to the silent keyboard, the understanding and appreciation of the process and products of engineering are no less accessible than a poem, a painting, or a piece of music. Indeed, just as we all have experienced the rudiments of artistic creativity in the childhood masterpieces our parents were so proud of, so we have all experienced the essence of structual engineering in our learning to balance first our bodies and later our blocks in ever more ambitious positions. We have learned to endure the most boring of cocktail parties without the social accident of either our bodies or our glasses succumbing to the force of gravity, having long ago learned to crawl, sit up, and toddle among our tottering towers of blocks. If we could remember those early efforts of ours to raise ourselves up among the towers of legs of our parents and their friends, then we can begin to appreciate the task and the achievements of engineers, whether they be called builders in Babylon or scientists in Los Alamos. For all of their efforts are to one end: to make something stand that has not stood before, to reassemble Nature into something new, and above all to obviate failure in the effort.

Wilson had dreamed of having a torrid romance with a writer. “I wanted to be Sylvia and Ted,” she said. What she fell for instead was a relentless, ambitious geek. The pair attended the same abnormal-psychology class and compared their grades following an exam. Justine notched a 97, Musk a 98. “He went back to the professor, and talked his way into the two points he lost and got a hundred,

What are humanity’s great dreams? To conquer the world? To split the atom? When Alexander spread his empire from the Mediterranean to India, we say he conquered the world, but he barely touched a quarter of it. We lie. We lie again when we say we split the atom. ‘Atom’ was supposed to be the smallest piece of matter—all we did is give that name to something we can split, knowing that there are quarks and tensors, other pieces smaller that we cannot touch, and only these deserve the title ‘atom.’ Man is more ambitious than patient. When we realize we cannot split a true atom, cannot conquer the whole Earth, we redefine the terms to fake our victory, check off our boxes and pretend the deed is done. Alexander conquered Earth, we tell ourselves, Rutherford split the atom, no need to try again. Lies.

And in an essential way, this was what he was most ashamed of: not his poor understanding of sex, not his traitorous racial tendencies, not his inability to separate himself from his parents or make his own money or behave like an autonomous creature. It was that, when he and his colleagues sat there at night, the group of them burrowed deep into their own ambitious dream-structures, all of them drawing and planning their improbable buildings, he was doing nothing. He had lost the ability to imagine anything. And so every evening, while the others created, he copied: he drew buildings he had seen on his travels, buildings other people had dreamed and constructed, buildings he had lived in or passed through. Again and again, he made what had already been made, not even bothering to improve them, just mimicking them. He was twenty-eight; his imagination had deserted him; he was a copyist.

Carolina Maria de Jesus wrote in her diary: 'Everyone has an ideal in life. Mine is to be able to read.' She is ambitious, but it is a strange ambition for a woman. She wants learning. She wants the pleasure of reading and writing. Men ask her to marry but she suspects that they will interfere with her reading and writing. They will resent the time she takes alone. They will resent the focus of her attention elsewhere. They will resent her concentration and they will resent her self-respect. They will resent her pride in herself and her pride in her unmediated relationship to a larger world of ideas, descriptions, facts. Her neighbors see her poring over books, or with pen and paper in hand, amidst the garbage and hunger of the favela. Her ideal makes her a pariah: her desire to read makes her more an outcast than if she sat in the street putting fistfuls of nails into her mouth. Where did she get her ideal? No one offered it to her. Two thirds of the world’s illiterates are women. To be fucked, to birth children, one need not know how to read. Women are for sex and reproduction, not for literature. But women have stories to tell. Women want to know. Women have questions, ideas, arguments, answers. Women have dreams of being in the world, not merely passing blood and heaving wet infants out of laboring wombs. 'Women dream,' Florence Nightingale wrote in Cassandra, 'till they have no longer the strength to dream; those dreams against which they so struggle, so honestly, vigorously, and conscientiously, and so in vain, yet which are their life, without which they could not have lived; those dreams go at last. . . . Later in life, they neither desire nor dream, neither of activity, nor of love, nor of intellect.

But afterwards in the pub, they had dreamed about the big stories and talked for hours of how they would never be satisfied with the conventional or the shallow but instead would always dig deep. They were young and ambitious and wanted it all, all at once. There were times when Levin missed that, not the salary, or the working hours, or even the easy life in the bars and the women, but the dreams—he missed the power in them. He sometimes longed for that throbbing urge to change society and journalism and to write so that the world would come to a standstill and the mighty powers bow down. Even a hotshot like himself wondered: Where did the dreams go?

But perhaps we see a different set of sins in our own time: a reluctance to take on any new Great National Projects, a general self-indulgence, a culture built on consumption, whole generations raised in an environment where dreams are purchased at the mall. If we could somehow select the virtues of early Americans from amid their failings, we might choose their optimism, their endurance, their inventiveness, their willingness to do something big and difficult--like dig a canal across the mountains or build a new kind of road on rails. These people took on challenges that a more sober and settled population might consider too ambitious, if not downright insane.

In fact, our ship crossed the channel and hugged around the coast of Kent and then up the Thames into London. It was a truly vile place, and only ever became worse as the centuries rolled by. It was a city for the grasping, the ambitious, and the perverse. Seekers of power and pleasure. Desperate men and women living in filth, breathing in the smoke and stench of rotting shit while dreaming of one day winning great wealth and marrying their son to an impoverished lady. A city of pimps, jesters, smooth-skinned lads, flatterers, pretty boys, effeminates, paederasts, singing girls, quacks, sorceresses, extortioners, night wanderers, magicians, mimes, beggars, and buffoons.

Have you ever been called “too much?” Too ambitious? Too independent? Too sensitive? Too difficult? Too bold? Maybe you are “too much” but maybe that’s exactly who you’re supposed to be? Maybe the beauty of your life comes from what your “too muchness” gives you? That’s making music or art simply because you want to. It’s pursuing what makes you curious. It’s replacing “maybe” with “definitely.” It’s listening to other people’s stories, learning new cultures, and tasting new foods. It’s introducing yourself to new people and realizing your dreams aren’t unrealistic as you once thought. It’s opening your heart and letting new kinds of love in. It’s striving to be whole, not perfect. Life can be messy but being “too much” is what makes it a beautiful mess.

Joan [Blondell] had always kept it real, always kept her priorities straight. “I wasn’t that ambitious. I enjoyed a home life more than a theatrical career. I just took what they gave me, because I wanted to get home quickly.” Joan, said one writer, personified everyone’s “good friend,” on- and off-camera. “Of all the stars I have interviewed,” wrote Charles Higham, “I have liked Joan Blondell the best. She is unique in my experience in being an actress who is devoid of ego, self-congratulation and self-pity, and would not dream of quoting a favorable review of herself. She is down-to-earth and human and real. This is almost unheard of in Saran-wrapped Hollywood.” Her accessibility, straightforwardness and her quick-with-a-comeback attitude was her appeal, and it never diminished as she got older.

We are told to dare to dream and then follow our dreams. But once we start, they turn around and tell us we are too ambitious. It is very difficult for a woman to have it all; the career, a happy marriage, and even happier children. For a man, it is a piece of cake. He will have his flourishing career, a picture-happy family, and throw in an occasional mistress or two, if he can afford it. You try such antics and society will bury you alive. A woman’s place is by her husband, to obey and respect him, to never overshadow him. He leads, she follows. But I ask, what if my vision is much larger than even the man himself? What then? Should a woman have to choose? Abandon all her dreams and aspirations just because? Or should she follow her dreams and say goodbye to any kind of personal life she dreamt of? You tell me.

I don’t know,” Scot offered. “Being a hero feels fair and fine to me.” Mordred turned to him and looked him up and down under his dark brows. “That’s because you’re young, inexperienced, and living in the sunrise glow of a moment of glory. Enjoy it, fellow, while it lasts. You’ve accomplished something that you’ve longed to achieve and felt was an impossible dream since childhood. You’ll have the best half-year of your life (if you’re lucky) and then the glory of this moment will set beyond your horizon. You’ll be left empty, questioning everything, and wishing for a challenge to equal the old. It is the central cycle of every ambitious man’s life—it is the reason he seeks and achieves glory, and the reason that one day his own glory grows too heavy and crushes him, especially as he gets too old to bear its weight.

Like Dick Whittington, who set off with his possessions in a handkerchief and a surprisingly well-trained cat at his side, young ambitious people flock to cities to live a different life from the one they grew up with. They want the construct, just as much as those who dream of a bucolic ideal want theirs. City-dwellers have museums, restaurants, cinemas, theatres: they get everything when it’s new and they can decide whether they like it before anyone else does. They can see artists, hear musicians, buy groceries in the middle of the night and books on their way home from the pub. The city, for all its failings, so carefully enumerated by Juvenal, is still wonderful. So those of us who live in one should enjoy it for what is is, and always has been: a glorious, grubby, industrial, gastronomical, cultural, social mess.

There must be more than this, Sarah Boyle thinks, from time to time. What could one do to justify one's passage? Or less ambitiously, to change, even in the motion of the smallest mote, the course and circulation of the world? Sometimes Sarah's dreams are of heroic girth, a new symphony using laboratories of machinery and all invented instruments, at once giant in scope and intelligible to all, to heal the bloody breach; a series of paintings which would transfigure and astonish and calm the frenzied art world in its panting race; a new novel that would refurbish language. Sometimes she considers the mystical, the streaky and random, and it seems that one change, no matter how small, would be enough. Turtles are supposed to live for many years. To carve a name, date and perhaps a word of hope upon a turtle's shell, then set him free to wend the world, surely this one act might cancel out absurdity?

Buster Friendly said, “We may never know. Nor can we fathom the peculiar purpose behind this swindle. Yes, folks, swindle. Mercerism is a swindle!” “I think we know,” Roy Baty said. “It’s obvious. Mercerism came into existence—” “But ponder this,” Buster Friendly continued. “Ask yourselves what is it that Mercerism does. Well, if we’re to believe its many practitioners, the experience fuses—” “It’s that empathy that humans have,” Irmgard said. “—men and women throughout the Sol System into a single entity. But an entity which is manageable by the so-called telepathic voice of ‘Mercer.’ Mark that. An ambitious politically minded would-be Hitler could—” “No, it’s that empathy,” Irmgard said vigorously. Fists clenched, she roved into the kitchen, up to Isidore. “Isn’t it a way of proving that humans can do something we can’t do? Because without the Mercer experience we just have your word that you feel this empathy business, this shared, group thing. How’s the spider?” She bent over Pris’s shoulder. With the scissors, Pris snipped off another of the spider’s legs. “Four now,” she said. She nudged the spider. “He won’t go. But he can.” Roy Baty appeared at the doorway, inhaling deeply, an expression of accomplishment on his face. “It’s done. Buster said it out loud, and nearly every human in the system heard him say it. ‘Mercerism is a swindle.’ The whole experience of empathy is a swindle.” He came over to look curiously at the spider. “It won’t try to walk,” Irmgard said. “I can make it walk.” Roy Baty got out a book of matches, lit a match; he held it near the spider, closer and closer, until at last it crept feebly away. “I was right,” Irmgard said. “Didn’t I say it could walk with only four legs?” She peered up expectantly at Isidore. “What’s the matter?” Touching his arm she said, “You didn’t lose anything; we’ll pay you what that—what’s it called?—that Sidney’s catalogue says. Don’t look so grim. Isn’t that something about Mercer, what they discovered? All that research? Hey, answer.” She prodded him anxiously. “He’s upset,” Pris said. “Because he has an empathy box. In the other room. Do you use it, J. R.?” she asked Isidore. Roy Baty said, “Of course he uses it. They all do—or did. Maybe now they’ll start wondering.” “I don’t think this will end the cult of Mercer,” Pris said. “But right this minute there’re a lot of unhappy human beings.” To Isidore she said, “We’ve waited for months; we all knew it was coming, this pitch of Buster’s.” She hesitated and then said, “Well, why not. Buster is one of us.” “An android,” Irmgard explained. “And nobody knows. No humans, I mean.” Pris, with the scissors, cut yet another leg from the spider. All at once John Isidore pushed her away and lifted up the mutilated creature. He carried it to the sink and there he drowned it. In him, his mind, his hopes, drowned, too. As swiftly as the spider.

Nobody can return to you something that was never yours, to begin with. Let’s trace back to the history of your race: the humans were made for slavery and were found faulty for that purpose. They showed immense energy and willpower only when confronted against tremendous obstacles with no weapons in their hands. With those bare hands, and the wits that exceeded even those of their creators and equalled the ones of mighty gods, they could break mountains. Once the humans earned at least a bit of benevolence from their creators, though, they’d immediately turn into lazy drunkards feasting upon the luxuries of life. They were quite haughty creatures, at that – one could never make them work without posing a certain purpose before their eyes. They should be given an aim they approved of, or else, they’d move no finger! Yet, if such necessities were met, they’d begin to loaf around. Forbidding them to taste those luxuries? Nay, they obeyed not! Hence, their creators cast them down on Earth – a planet inhabited by many other faulty experiments of different alien species, so that their lives would end. Yet even here, the humans defied their creators – instead of dying out, they adapted to the environment they were cast in, due to their boundless wits and the unexplainable willpower that no other species could ever possess. They mated the local species whom they could more or less find a common language with, killed off the obstacles, and conquered the planet as their own. The conquering ambitions of their creators, the boundless wisdom of their gods, and the primal instincts of Earthly nature – all of it meddled in these extraordinary creatures. They were full of instability, unpredictability, wild dreams, and rotten primitivism. Which side they would develop, depended entirely upon their choice. Aye, they had proven faulty to their creators, yet had attained the perfect treasure they required – the freedom. Could they make use of it? – Nay, certainly not… at least not many of them. There are certain individuals among the human race, who are able to well balance their mixed-up nature and grow into worthy people that merit our godly benevolence. However, most of them are quite an interesting bunch whom an ambitious man like me can make good use of. I am half-human with godly and angelic descendance, so I guess, I am worthy to be their sole ruler, their only saviour, their treasured shepherd… The shepherds too make use of their sheep – they guide them, then to consume some of them for wool and meat. Shepherds do not help the sheep for granted – they use their potential to its fullest. I shall be the same kind of a god – I shall help these magnificent creatures to achieve the wildest of their dreams but will use their powers for my own benefit. These poor creatures cannot define their potential alone, they cannot decide what’s the best and the fittest for them! I can achieve that. Free human souls? – Nay, they need no freedom. What they need, is to serve the rightful master, and that rightful master I shall be.

Hamlet. What have you, my good friends, deserved at the hands of Fortune that she sends you to prison hither? Guildenstern. Prison, my lord? Hamlet. Denmark’s a prison. Rosencrantz. Then is the world one. Hamlet. A goodly one, in which there are many confines, wards, and dungeons, Denmark being one o’ th’ worst. Rosencrantz. We think not so, my lord. Hamlet. Why, then ’tis none to you, for there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so. To me it is a prison. Rosencrantz. Why then your ambition makes it one. ’Tis too narrow for your mind. Hamlet. O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams. Guildenstern. Which dreams indeed are ambition, for the very substance of the ambitious is merely the shadow of a dream. Hamlet. A dream itself is but a shadow. Rosencrantz. Truly, and I hold ambition of so airy and light a quality that it is but a shadow’s shadow. Hamlet. Then are our beggars bodies, and our monarchs and outstretched heroes the beggars’ shadows.

whatever happened to the one whose hands could take pencil to paper and turn imagination into reality? whose feet could walk out the backyard door and into another world? the one with eyes ready to swallow the sky whole and a heart ambitious enough to do it? whatever happened to the one who raced from dawn ’til dusk, waving in the wind on wings of wax to wrap their fingertips around the sun, yet cowered from the glow of streetlights? the one who decided even the sun wasn’t enough and pocketed entire galaxies instead? whatever happened to the one whose dreams were so grand the universe itself had to expand to keep up the pace? the one who refused to be contained and became a universe themself? the one you’re thinking about right now? skull kid childhood is the time when one reaches toward the sky and grows into the person they were meant to be, but my childhood was the time when i reached toward fictional faces and buried my roots within a flawless facade. my childhood was the time when i rejected my own growth to mirror the growth of others because i wasn’t sure who i was supposed to be.

It’s a heady question, how women balance these concerns. Recently, the question has found its way back to the center of a contentious and very emotional debate. If you’re Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook and author of Lean In, you believe that women should stop getting in their own way as they pursue their professional dreams—they should speak up, assert themselves, defend their right to dominate the boardroom and proudly wear the pants. If you’re Anne-Marie Slaughter, the former top State Department official who wrote a much-discussed story about work-life balance for The Atlantic in June 2012, you believe that the world, as it is currently structured, cannot accommodate the needs of women who are ambitious in both their professions and their home lives—social and economic change is required. There’s truth to both arguments. They’re hardly mutually exclusive. Yet this question tends to get framed, rather tiresomely, as one of how and whether women can “have it all,” when the fact of the matter is that most women—and men, for that matter—are simply trying to keep body and soul together. The phrase “having it all” has little to do with what women want. If anything, it’s a reflection of a widespread and misplaced cultural belief, shared by men and women alike: that we, as middle-class Americans, have been given infinite promise, and it’s our obligation to exploit every ounce of it. “Having it all” is the phrase of a culture that, as Adam Phillips implies in Missing Out, is tyrannized by the idea of its own potential.

The goal was ambitious. Public interest was high. Experts were eager to contribute. Money was readily available. Armed with every ingredient for success, Samuel Pierpont Langley set out in the early 1900s to be the first man to pilot an airplane. Highly regarded, he was a senior officer at the Smithsonian Institution, a mathematics professor who had also worked at Harvard. His friends included some of the most powerful men in government and business, including Andrew Carnegie and Alexander Graham Bell. Langley was given a $50,000 grant from the War Department to fund his project, a tremendous amount of money for the time. He pulled together the best minds of the day, a veritable dream team of talent and know-how. Langley and his team used the finest materials, and the press followed him everywhere. People all over the country were riveted to the story, waiting to read that he had achieved his goal. With the team he had gathered and ample resources, his success was guaranteed. Or was it? A few hundred miles away, Wilbur and Orville Wright were working on their own flying machine. Their passion to fly was so intense that it inspired the enthusiasm and commitment of a dedicated group in their hometown of Dayton, Ohio. There was no funding for their venture. No government grants. No high-level connections. Not a single person on the team had an advanced degree or even a college education, not even Wilbur or Orville. But the team banded together in a humble bicycle shop and made their vision real. On December 17, 1903, a small group witnessed a man take flight for the first time in history. How did the Wright brothers succeed where a better-equipped, better-funded and better-educated team could not? It wasn’t luck. Both the Wright brothers and Langley were highly motivated. Both had a strong work ethic. Both had keen scientific minds. They were pursuing exactly the same goal, but only the Wright brothers were able to inspire those around them and truly lead their team to develop a technology that would change the world. Only the Wright brothers started with Why. 2.

Clad in red velvet it came, the very covering my old Master had so loved, the dream king, Marius. It came swaggering and camping through the lighted streets of Paris as though God had made it. But it was a vampire child, the same as I, son of the seventeen hundreds, as they reckoned the time to be then, a blazing, brash, bumbling, laughing and teasing blood drinker in the guise of a young man, come to stomp out whatever sacred fire yet burnt in the cleft scar tissue of my soul and scatter the ashes. It was The Vampire Lestat. It wasn't his fault. Had one of us been able to strike him down one night, break him apart with his own fancy sword and set him ablaze, we might have had a few more decades of our wretched delusions. But nobody could. He was too damned strong for us. Created by a powerful and ancient renegade, a legendary vampire by the name of Magnus, this Lestat, aged twenty in mortal years, an errant and penniless country aristocrat from the wild lands of Auvergne, who had thrown over custom and respectability and any hope of court ambitions, of which he had none anyway since he couldn't even read or write, and was too insulting to wait on any King or Queen, who became a wild blond-haired celebrity of the boulevard gutter theatricals, a lover of men and women, a laughing happy-go-lucky blindly ambitious self-loving genius of sorts, this Lestat, this blue-eyed and infinitely confident Lestat, was orphaned on the very night of his creation by the ancient monster who made him, bequeathed to him a fortune in a secret room in a crumbling medieval tower, and then went into the eternal comfort of the ever devouring flames. This Lestat, knowing nothing of Old Covens and Old Ways, of soot covered gangsters who thrived under cemeteries and believed they had a right to brand him a heretic, a maverick and a bastard of the Dark Blood, went strutting about fashionable Paris, isolated and tormented by his supernatural endowments yet glorying in his new powers, dancing at the Tuileries with the most magnificently clad women, reveling in the joys of the ballet and the high court theater and roaming not only in the Places of Light, as we called them, but meandering mournfully in Notre Dame de Paris itself, right before the High Altar, without the lightning of God striking him where he stood. Armand’s description of Lestat from The Vampire Armand

Kill Yourself Buddhism argues that your idea of who “you” are is an arbitrary mental construction and that you should let go of the idea that “you” exist at all; that the arbitrary metrics by which you define yourself actually trap you, and thus you’re better off letting go of everything. In a sense, you could say that Buddhism encourages you to not give a fuck. It sounds wonky, but there are some psychological benefits to this approach to life. When we let go of the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves, we free ourselves up to actually act (and fail) and grow. When someone admits to herself, “You know, maybe I’m not good at relationships,” then she is suddenly free to act and end her bad marriage. She has no identity to protect by staying in a miserable, crappy marriage just to prove something to herself. When the student admits to himself, “You know, maybe I’m not a rebel; maybe I’m just scared,” then he’s free to be ambitious again. He has no reason to feel threatened by pursuing his academic dreams and maybe failing. When the insurance adjuster admits to himself, “You know, maybe there’s nothing unique or special about my dreams or my job,” then he’s free to give that screenplay an honest go and see what happens. I have both some good news and some bad news for you: there is little that is unique or special about your problems. That’s why letting go is so liberating. There’s a kind of self-absorption that comes with fear based on an irrational certainty. When you assume that your plane is the one that’s going to crash, or that your project idea is the stupid one everyone is going to laugh at, or that you’re the one everyone is going to choose to mock or ignore, you’re implicitly telling yourself, “I’m the exception; I’m unlike everybody else; I’m different and special.” This is narcissism, pure and simple. You feel as though your problems deserve to be treated differently, that your problems have some unique math to them that doesn’t obey the laws of the physical universe. My recommendation: don’t be special; don’t be unique. Redefine your metrics in mundane and broad ways. Choose to measure yourself not as a rising star or an undiscovered genius. Choose to measure yourself not as some horrible victim or dismal failure. Instead, measure yourself by more mundane identities: a student, a partner, a friend, a creator. The narrower and rarer the identity you choose for yourself, the more everything will seem to threaten you. For that reason, define yourself in the simplest and most ordinary ways possible. This often means giving up some grandiose ideas about yourself: that you’re uniquely intelligent, or spectacularly talented, or intimidatingly attractive, or especially victimized in ways other people could never imagine.

or charismatic Skeet, whose ambitious dreams were so easy to become smitten with until you realised there was no work ethic to back them up.

Monopolies drive progress because the promise of years or even decades of monopoly profits provides a powerful incentive to innovate. Then monopolies can keep innovating because profits enable them to make the long-term plans and to finance the ambitious research projects that firms locked in competition can’t dream of.

Yeah, my dad picked [ the name Olga]. Wanted to make me 'ambitious.' But my mother worried that I would take after the Olga from Puerto Rican Obituary. That Olga was ashamed of her identity and died dreaming of money and being anything other than herself.

Firstly, after you achieve a goal, no matter how big it was, a short period of euphoria will be followed by depression or apathy if you don’t set the next ambitious goal. Dreams should grow faster than you reach them, and even before accomplishing a current goal you need to have in mind the next goal to make sure that the cycle ‘progress, success, dopamine, happiness, progress’ is never suspended.

In any event, it caused him to join the army, that historic institution of elevation for the ambitious but badly born.

Behind the rise of populist politics in recent years is a genuine anguish: many feel thrust aside by the ruthless juggernaut of globalized technocracy. Populisms are often described as a protest against globalization, although they are more properly a protest against the globalization of indifference. At bottom reflect the pain at the loss of roots and community, and a generalized feeling of anguish. Yet, in generating fear and sowing panic, populisms are the exploitation of that popular anguish, not its remedy. The often cruel rhetoric of populist leaders denigrating the ‘other’ in order to defend a national or group identity reveals its spirit. It is a means by which ambitious politicians attain power.

Just like in every other community, ambitious, talented people are born in low-status communities. Our research indicates that people in low-status communities have hopes, dreams, and aspirations for their lives. Unfortunately, many people feel they can experience these hopes, dreams, and aspirations only outside of their community

While I agree that there is a level of regret about not living intentionally, the tragedy of life is not having no goals. The tragedy of life is living your whole life chasing goals and dreams that don’t matter. The tragedy lies in being ambitiously committed to a dream that should have been surrendered in pursuit of something greater and better.

While fate may present opportunities for the ambitious, it is ultimately the resourceful and adaptable prince who can bend fortune to his will. Do not rely solely on chance or the goodwill of others; rather, seize the initiative and forge your own path to greatness.

Like all hard labor, picking cotton broke the body but freed the mind for dreams of vengeance, images of illegal pleasure—even ambitious schemes of escape. Cutting into these big thoughts were the little ones. Another kind of medicine for the baby? What to do about an uncle’s foot swollen so large he can’t put it in a shoe? Will the landlord be satisfied with half the rent this time?

Find them? That I did,’ cried Riose. His lips were stiff as he spoke. It seemed to require effort to refrain from grinding molars. ‘Patrician, they are not magicians; they are devils. It is as far from belief as the outer nebulae from here. Conceive it! It is a world the size of a handkerchief, of a fingernail; with resources so petty, power so minute, a population so microscopic as would never suffice the most backward worlds of the dusty prefects of the Dark Stars. Yet with that, a people so proud and ambitious as to dream quietly and methodically of Galactic rule. ‘Why, they are so sure of themselves that they do not even hurry. They move slowly, phlegmatically; they speak of necessary centuries. They swallow worlds at leisure; creep through systems with dawdling complacence. ‘And they succeed. There is no one to stop them. They have built up a filthy trading community that curls its tentacles about the systems further than their toy ships dare reach. For parsecs, their Traders – which is what their agents call themselves

wet cap and lets it drip on the table. “Bag of cash!” he scoffs. “She’s still buying into Strycker’s case. Strycker’s all about appealing to clichés: The bag of cash. The American Dream. The inhuman laborer. The ambitious and ungrateful son who can’t appreciate what’s been done for him.

Timing for a dream is never right, yet you must persevere against the tide.

The problem is not that they’re ambitious, it’s that they “try” to do so much that they never actually do anything. Their focus is all off. Two

Better abandon citizenship than abandon your dream.

Burn so bright that the sun gets fried!

Carl pointed his finger at me and then at Austin, who was still sitting next to him. “You see, my ambitious friends, when you do things your own way, you might achieve some success and gain some riches. But when you humble yourselves and strive to live with purpose while relying on a greater power for guidance, you will receive everything you set out to achieve and then some. Every day people get the same opportunity King Solomon did. Only most are so obsessed with themselves and don’t ask for wisdom. Instead, they ask for riches. That’s why they get neither.