"Hold fast to your most indefinite, waking dream."
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Ambition quotes
Ambition
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Ambition quotes (page 33 of 114)
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"Where is the "unexplored land" but in our own untried enterprises? To an adventurous spirit any place--London, New York, Worcester, or his own yard--is "unexplored land," to seek which Frémont and Kane travel so far. To a sluggish and defeated spirit even the Great Basin and the Polaris are trivial places."
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"My actual life is a fact, in view of which I have no occasion to congratulate myself; but for my faith and aspiration I have respect. It is from these that I speak."
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"No man who acts from a sense of duty ever puts the lesser duty above the greater. No man has the desire and the ability to work onhigh things, but he has also the ability to build himself a high staging."
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"It is best to lay our plans widely in youth, for then land is cheap, and it is but too easy to contract our views afterward. Youths so laid out, with broad avenues and parks, that they may make handsome and liberal old men! Show me a youth whose mind is like some Washington city of magnificent distances, prepared for the most remotely successful and glorious life after all, when those spaces shall be built over and the idea of the founder be realized. I trust that every New England boy will begin by laying out a Keene Street through his head, eight rods wide."
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"If the artist is necessarily sensitive, does that sensitiveness form in its essence a state constantly liable to shade off into the morbid? Does this liability, moreover, increase in proportion as the effort is great and the ambition intense?"
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"First, define your credo- the belief system of the organization. Secondly, define your real ambition, or where do you want to go as a collective community."
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"I believe that the establishment of a real ambition, a powerfully galvanizing and exciting vision of what a group is setting out to create, is vitally important."
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"All buoyant leaders are driven by a real ambition- that is, what is being created that didn't exist before- and one criteria for that real ambition, is that on initial inspection, it seems fundamentally impossible."
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"I write flawed characters. Ones that do not always make the best decisions and are driven by ambition or lust. They are not black or white, they are in the large space that exists between."
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"No man, I suspect, ever lived long in the country without being bitten by these meteorological ambitions. He likes to be hotter and colder, to have been more deeply snowed up, to have more trees and larger blown down than his neighbors."
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"Ambition's cradle oftenest is its grave"
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"To explore the whole sphere of the modern soul, to have sat in every nook- my ambition, my torture, and my happiness"
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"It was the most earnest ambition I ever had....Not that I ever really wanted to be a preacher, but because it never occurred to me that a preacher could be damned. It looked like a safe job."
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"You have no ambition, I well know. Your wishes are all moderate.' 'As moderate as those of the rest of the world, I believe. I wish as well as every body else to be perfectly happy, but like every body else it must be in my own way. Greatness will not make me so."
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"Oh, I know I can sing. What I really want to be is an actress."
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"To make converts is the natural ambition of everyone."
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"I never engaged in public affairs for my own interest, pleasure, envy, jealousy, avarice or ambition, or even the desire of fame"
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"The Commonwealth of Learning is not at this time without Master-Builders, whose mighty Designs, in advancing the Sciences, will leave lasting Monuments to the Admiration of Posterity; But every one must not hope to be a Boyle, or a Sydenham; and in an Age that produces such Masters, as the Great-Huygenius, and the incomparable Mr. Newton, with some other of that Strain; 'tis Ambition enough to be employed as an Under-Labourer in clearing Ground a little, and removing some of the Rubbish, that lies in the way to Knowledge."
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"It is ambition enough to be employed as an under-labourer in clearing the ground a little, and removing some of the rubbish that lies in the way to knowledge."
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