c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Kiss me," he growled."I shouldn't—""I. Don't. Give. A. Damn."Well hell. My lips touched his—barely. I pulled back and looked at him—unfamiliar, dangerous, and so exciting. I devoured his mouth without thinking. Don't think, just touch. I ran my fingers across his strong shoulders and down his arms. His skin felt hot under my hands, his body hard. He sucked in his abs so I could get into his pants, if I wanted to. I slid one hand over his stomach and under his jeans, touching his hard cock, smiling when he groaned.
— Amelia James, Her Twisted Pleasures
You should be cuddling with her. I can’t believe I just said that. Cuddling makes me want to vomit a little, but apparently women like it.
— Lexi Blake, The Men with the Golden Cuffs
I’m not playing at all. And f**k you, you’re trying to pull me into vagina talk. I won’t do it. I don’t have feelings. None at all. And I’m keeping it that way.
— Lexi Blake, The Men with the Golden Cuffs
Holy crap. Is that an elephant penis?
— Lexi Blake, The Men with the Golden Cuffs
If it’s that jerk, he’s going to see my gun. ‘My body is a weapon.’ Dumb sh*t. I bet my gun can take out his body really damn quick.
— Lexi Blake, The Men with the Golden Cuffs
Today, it's possible to read both erotica and books written for children without fear of social castigation.
— Amelia Gray
I can give you a girl’s perspective,” Eve offered with a smile. “I’m totally not into the girl-on-girl thing, but I know an attractive pussy when I see one.
— Lexi Blake, The Men with the Golden Cuffs
I actually told him to f**k himself. And that if he needed an ass to paddle, he should look in the mirror.
— Lexi Blake, The Men with the Golden Cuffs
Well I guess I should ask what your name is in case I slip and touch you without getting permission, I'd like to know who's punching me." She giggled and said, "Nah, you have permission but if you need a name it’s Sindy, S-I-N, not like the girl next door, and what should I call you, besides the man I want to get naked?” He said “Keith, and if you want me to be the boy next door I can try, but I’ll probably fail.” She said- “Nope the boy next door is too much like the one whose nose I just tried to break; you can be the sexy stranger.
— Sarina Asheford, Anticipation
He had the face of an angel, but he f**ked like a devil.
— Lilly Hale, Destiny For Three
Oh God, can I keep you? You don’t need batteries, do you?
— Barbara Elsborg, Saying Yes
You know what would really help? If men started looking at it like a bank. The more you deposit the more you can withdraw later. Make a woman come as a rule, she’s going to be more receptive to regular sex and much more open-minded about what’s on the table as far as experimenting. Common sense.
— Chloe Cole, Undercover Lovers
Your lips are so soft and girly. I really must know what you use on them.
— Leia Shaw, Destined for Harmony
Ecstasy..."When you increase your ability to create ecstasy out of those things found in everyday life, all of your ecstatic sensual experiences grow deeper.
— Barabara Carrellas
A woman’s sexuality is not at all like a man’s. A man can literally f**k a watermelon and come. If you put enough friction on his c**k, in some semblance of a rhythm, he will orgasm. It’s a no brainer.
— Chloe Cole, Undercover Lovers
Do you like blowjobs? “Did you just ask me if I like blowjobs?” he asked in a low voice. “I swear that’s what it sounded like.” “Yes.” She folded her hands in front of her and met his gaze head-on. “I haven’t given nearly enough of them but I’d like to practice.
— Cari Quinn, Undercover Lovers
Sweetheart, I’ll be a Marine ‘til they bury my cold, dead, decrepit ass in the ground a good fifty or sixty years from now.
— Dee Tenorio, Undercover Lovers
Do you take credit cards? I bet your pony would be worth a ride.
— Cari Quinn, Undercover Lovers
Did you know studies show that eighty percent of women have faked orgasm? And fifty percent admit to doing it on a regular basis?
— Chloe Cole, Undercover Lovers
Here,” I said, shoving the board into his hands. He started laughing.“WHAT are you laughing at?!” I demanded irritably.“Well, it’s just that… that’s going to hurt a bit, my dear. Go on, bend over. I’ll demonstrate.
— Sadey Quinn, Under Order
Not much makes me feel uncomfortable about sexuality. It’s the most natural thing in the world. I don’t really get why people make such a stink. It’s like being embarrassed of hunger or thirst.
— Chloe Cole, Undercover Lovers
don’t order me around like that unless it involves a safe word and a couple of interesting toys.
— Tessie Bradford, Ageless Desires
I wanted to, um, apologize for earlier. I can't believe I did that. I didn't think it could be real and—” “Didn’t think what could be real?” …Your penguin.
— Cari Quinn, Undercover Lovers
I know you want to fuck me. And I know you wish you didn’t. So how about we compromise and you can sit here and say, ‘No, Nora,’ ‘Don’t, Nora,’ ‘Stop, Nora,’ and I’ll ignore all those protests and slide right down on your cock anyway? And I’ll do it because no and don’t and stop aren’t your safe word. So you can finally get fucked and still sleep like a baby in your big lonely bed tonight feeling all clean and shiny and virginal because, after all, you did say ‘no’ and that awful Nora Sutherlin just wouldn’t listen.
— Tiffany Reisz, The Siren
Women worry too much about how they smell or taste. I assure you, I love to taste a woman’s primal essence on my tongue.” Something melted inside her. He liked it? “Really? You’re not just being polite, are you, Sir?” “No, kitten, when it comes to sex, I don’t have a polite bone in my body.
— Kallypso Masters, Nobody's Hero
You may get me to say the word, but know this, you will never truly own me. That right belongs to my real master. You may take his symbol off my hip, but there will always be a scar that reminds us both what was there. And you might take his collar off my throat, but you'll never erase his name from my soul.
— Kitty Thomas, Tender Mercies
Tell me what you want?” His breath was warm against her lips.“I want you.”“How? Give me permission, tell me it’s okay to strip you naked, kiss you wherever the need takes me, and f**k you until you can’t see straight.”“Yes, yes, please, all of that.
— Dominique Eastwick, Strawberry Kisses
I’d do you both in heartbeat and come back for seconds.
— Tielle St. Clare, Shadow's Embrace
A werewolf bite turned me gay?
— Tielle St. Clare, Shadow's Embrace
No, but it’s your reality now. Put on your big-boy pants and deal with it.
— Tielle St. Clare, Shadow's Embrace
A werewolf.” He said the word like he was learning a foreign language and wanted to get the accent right.
— Tielle St. Clare, Shadow's Embrace
Led Zeppelin! I clapped my hand over my mouth.This big, strong man, wearing a muscle shirt and cargo pants, sang rock songs to a toddler in the middle of the night. I was so toast. Game over. And it was doubly terrifying, considering I had no idea how to make him stick around. He would leave and take his sweetness and his Pepto and our hearts.
— Amber Lin
Oh, it's delightful to have ambitions. I'm so glad I have such a lot. And there never seems to be any end to them-- that's the best of it. Just as soon as you attain to one ambition you see another one glittering higher up still. It does make life so interesting.
— L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables
We have advantages. We have a cushion to fall back on. This is abundance. A luxury of place and time. Something rare and wonderful. It's almost historically unprecedented. We must do extraordinary things. We have to. It would be absurd not to.
— Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
A man’s worth is no greater than the worth of his ambitions.
— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
Ambition is not a dirty word. Piss on compromise. Go for the throat.
— Steven Erikson, Gardens of the Moon
If it's IN you to climb you must -- there are those who MUST lift their eyes to the hills -- they can't breathe properly in the valleys.
— L.M. Montgomery, Emily of New Moon
[I]t occurred to me that the voracious ambition of humans is never sated by dreams coming true, because there is always the thought that everything might be done better and again.
— John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
Politeness. Now there's a poor man's virtue if ever there was one. What's so admirable about inoffensiveness, I should like to know. After all, it's easily achieved. One needs no particular talent to be polite. On the contrary, being nice is what's left when you've failed at everything else. People with ambition don't give a damn what other people think about them.
— Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale
By faithfully working eight hours a day you may eventually get to be boss and work twelve hours a day.
— Robert Frost
The others in the dorm thought I wanted to be a writer, because I was always alone with a book, but I had no such ambition. There was nothing I wanted to be. 
— Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood
I have no spurTo prick the sides of my intent, but onlyVaulting ambition, which o'erleaps itselfAnd falls on the other.
— William Shakespeare, Macbeth
I think I benefited from being equal parts ambitious and curious. And of the two, curiosity has served me best.
— Michael J. Fox
It is true of the Nation, as of the individual, that the greatest doer must also be a great dreamer.
— Theodore Roosevelt
Grab it while you can because tomorrow could suck you dry.
— Nora Roberts, The Pagan Stone
I've been very lucky at what's happened in my career to date, but playing something as far from me as possible is an ambition of mine - anything from a mutated baddy in a comic book action thriller, to a detective. If anything, I'd like Gary Oldman's career: he's the perfect example of it. I've love to have a really broad sweep of characters - to be able to do something edgy, surprising and unfashionable.
— Benedict Cumberbatch
I’m tough, I’m ambitious, and I know exactly what I want. If that makes me a bitch, okay.
— Madonna
Ambition is all very well, my lad, but you must cloak it.
— Jonathan Stroud, The Amulet of Samarkand
Isana laughed. "And you, lady? Are you a woman of conscience or of ambition?"The lady smiled. "That's a question rarely asked here at court.""And why is that?""Because a woman of conscience would tell you that she is a person of conscience. A woman of ambition would tell you that she is a person of conscience—only much more convincingly.
— Jim Butcher, Academ's Fury
Miss Tick sniffed. 'You could say this advice is priceless,' she said. 'Are you listening?''Yes,' said Tiffany.'Good. Now ... if you trust in yourself ...''Yes?''... and believe in your dreams ...''Yes?''... and follow your star ...' Miss Tick went on.'Yes?''... you'll still get beaten by people who spent THEIR time working hard and learning things and weren't so lazy. Goodbye.
— Terry Pratchett, The Wee Free Men
You could never understand why I grind like I doMakiyah & Jalani why I grind like I do
— Nicki Minaj
There was no more dangerous kind of madman than one who devoted a good brain and a courageous heart to unhealthy ambitions.
— Michael Moorcock, The City in the Autumn Stars: Being a Continuation of the Story of the Von Bek Family and Its Association with Lucifer, Prince of Darkness, and the Cure for the World's Pain
I don't want to rot like mangoes at the end of the season, or burnout like the sun at the and of the day. I cannot live like the gardener, the cook and water-carrier, doing the same task everyday of my life... I want to be either somebody or nobody. I don't want to be anybody.
— Ruskin Bond, The Room on the Roof
Why do men like me want sons?" he wondered. "It must be because they hope in their poor beaten souls that these new men, who are their blood, will do the things they were not strong enough nor wise enough nor brave enough to do. It is rather like another chance at life; like a new bag of coins at a table of luck after your fortune is gone.
— John Steinbeck, Cup of Gold: A Life of Sir Henry Morgan, Buccaneer, with Occasional Reference to History
His resolve is not to seem, but to be, the best.
— Aeschylus, The Seven Against Thebes
People with ambition don't give a damn what other people think of them.
— Diane Setterfield
Every man of ambition has to fight his century with its own weapons. What this century worships is wealth. The God of this century is wealth. To succeed one must have wealth. At all costs one must have wealth.
— Oscar Wilde
You will follow me, if we are what we are, you and I, if we live, if the world exists, if you know the meaning of this moment and can't let it slip by, as others let it slip, into the senselessness of the unwilled and unreached.
— Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
I was ambitious and desperate to direct my first film, so I capitulated and blew it. Never again. Never fucking again.
— Craig Ferguson, American on Purpose: The Improbable Adventures of an Unlikely Patriot
This is the age of the specialist, and years ago Rollo had settled on his career. Even as a boy, hardly capable of connected thought, he had been convinced that his speciality, the one thing he could do really well, was to inherit money.
— P.G. Wodehouse, The Man Upstairs and Other Stories
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, Loser Takes All
I want to be known as unknown.
— CQAnonymoud
We've had enough." He took back the report and jammed it under his arm. "We've had a bellyful, in fact.""And like everyone who's had enough," said Control as Alleline noisily left the room, "he wants more.
— John le Carré, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
More than ambition, more than ability, it is rules that limit contribution; rules are the lowest common denominator of human behavior. They are a substitute for rational thought.
— Hyman G. Rickover
He built up a situation that was far enough from the truth. It never occurred to him that Helen was to blame. He forgot the intensity of their talk, the charm that had been lent him by sincerity, the magic of Oniton under darkness and of the whispering river. Helen loved the absolute. Leonard had been ruined absolutely, and had appeared to her as a man apart, isolated from the world. A real man, who cared for adventure and beauty, who desired to live decently and pay his way, who could have travelled more gloriously through life than the Juggernaut car that was crushing him.
— E.M. Forster, Howards End
This is a woman whose belly is filled with pride. She has been eating nothing but her own ambition for nearly thirty years.
— Philippa Gregory, The White Queen
The mayor was the most dangerous of individuals. He possessed, in equal amounts, unhealthy doses of charm and ambition. He was a driven opportunist.
— Marc Fitten
Follow your star, it's never too late, even if it doesn't quite happen as you expect.
— Jemima Pett
The first virtue of a young man today - that is, for the next fifty years perhaps, as long as we live in fear, and religion has regained its powers - is to be incapable of enthusiasm and not to have much in the way of brains.
— Stendhal
I don't have the type of ambition that will make me do anything at any cost to get what I want. I don't want to be beholden to people. I don't want to open a shop with your money because I don't want to be indebted to you.""I'm your husband; it's our money.""Morally, legally, maybe yes, but in here," she put a hand to her head "and here," she lay the flat of her hand over her heart, "it's your money. You earned it or were given it way before you met me.
— Dorothy Koomson, The Woman He Loved Before
The children are innocent until proven guilty. For their sake, not ours, we must soldier on, muddling our way toward frugality, simplicity, liberty, community, until some kind of sane and rational balance is achieved between our ability to love and our cockeyed ambition to conquer and dominate everything in sight. No wonder the galaxies recede from us in every direction, fleeing at velocities that approach the speed of light. They are frightened. We humans are the Terror of the Universe.
— Edward Abbey, Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast
It's a shame that we humans are never able to pull in the same direction . . . [n]ot even when confronted by infinity.
— Gentry Lee, Rama II
Relinquish! What! my vocation? My great work? My foundation laid on earth for a mansion in heaven? My hopes of being numbered in the band who have merged all ambitions in the glorious one of bettering their race - of carrying knowledge into the realms of ignorance - of substituting peace for war - freedom for bondage - religion for superstition - the hope of heaven for the fear of hell? Must I relinquish that? It is dearer than the blood in my veins. It is what I have to look forward to, and to live for.
— Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
It is the age of ambition that proves the mettle of men
— José de Alencar
It is indeed strange, given the heavy emphasis placed by chroniclers on Churchill's sheer magnitude of personality, that the ingredient of pure ambition should be so much ignored or even disallowed.
— Christopher Hitchens, Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays
To want something desperately, to be tested, to feel that life will be impossible if the object of one's desires is not achieved, is always dangerous for the soul. Some people attempt to climb Everest because, as they say, it is there; others want nothing but wealth and care little how or where they collect it; others still, with less avaricious tastes - perhaps desiring nothing more than freedom from fear - are blinded by the same personal sun that shines on all human ambition. At some time or another it burns most of us.
— Bryan Forbes, International Velvet
On some days it felt like we owned the Earth, and the only place left to expand to was the next planet down the line.
— Yudhanjaya Wijeratne, Numbercaste
Some of the best of us are quite unambitious.
— Anthony Powell, Afternoon Men
When ambition exceeds ability, you are going to experience hardship. We have the choice to fear it or embrace it.
— Kevin Jorgenson
Talent helps, but it won't take you as far as ambition.
— Paul Arden, It's Not How Good You Are, It's How Good You Want To Be
Don't wish it was easier, wish you were better. Don't wish for less problems, wish for more skills. Don't wish for less challenges, wish for more wisdom. The major value in life is not what you get. The major value in life is what you become. Success is not to be pursued; it is to be attracted by the person you become.
— Jim Rohn
The last goose in the column is flying just as high.
— Marty Rubin
If you don't have the ambition to be the very best at what you do, then what's the point? If you aim for greatness but keep missing -- fine. At least you had the guts to aim. There's honour in failing that way. But there's nothing honourable about settling for mediocrity.
— Benjamin Wood, The Ecliptic
The ambition of men compels them to break even the most heartfelt vows.
— A.H. Septimius
Once you have some yes's in your life, the no's are not that bad.
— RZA
Time flies when you're fulfilling your ambitions in a completely unexpected way.
— J.C. Lillis, A&B
Ambition is a stairway that never ends.
— Joyce Rachelle
What strange and thoughtless creatures we were, back in those days. We would go up to the rooftops to smoke, Wurth and I; and there in the company of other insomniac souls we would look out at the vast expanse of lights and glamour. We watched the towers as they climbed higher, and higher, as humanity reached for the skies.
— Yudhanjaya Wijeratne, Numbercaste
What I was sure of was that Tommy had something I'd never seen in anyone else: a blind and unhinged and totally unfounded ambition. He was so out of touch, so lacking in self-awareness, yet also wildly captivating. That night there was this aura around Tommy- an aura of the possible.
— Greg Sestero, The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made
In Russia, the person who put Sevastopol on the literary map was Leo Tolstoy, a veteran of the siege. His fictionalized memoir The Sebastopol Sketches made him a national celebrity. Already with the first installment of the work published, Tsar Alexander II saw the propaganda value of the piece and ordered it translated into French for dissemination abroad. That made the young author very happy. Compared with Tolstoy’s later novels, The Sebastopol Sketches hasn’t aged well, possibly because this is not a heartfelt book. As the twenty-six-year-old Tolstoy’s Sevastopol diaries reveal, not heartache but ambition drove him at the time. Making a name as an author was just an alternative to two other grand plans—founding a new religion and creating a mathematical model for winning in cards (his losses during the siege were massive even for a rich person).
— Constantine Pleshakov, The Crimean Nexus: Putin’s War and the Clash of Civilizations
Surely there must be in a world of manifold beautiful things something among them for me. And always, while I am still young, there is that dim light, the Future. But it is indeed a dim, dim light, and ofttimes there's a treachery in it.
— Mary MacLane, I Await the Devil's Coming
I have an ambition to live 300 years. I will not live 300 years. Maybe I will live one year more. But I have the ambition. Why you will not have ambition? Why? Have the greatest ambition possible. You want to be immortal? Fight to be immortal. Do it. You want to make the most fantastic art or movie? Try. If you fail, is not important. We need to try.
— Alejandro Jodorowsky
I want my writing to bring people not just to think of "trees" as they mostly do now, but of each individual tree, and each kind of tree.
— Roger Deakin
When the right stage gets missing, true talent that can grow to inspire, nurture and change lives least gets the right stage to manifest; real deft and dexterity remains latent and people only die with their dreams, abilities and capabilities.
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
I have heard many a young unmarried lady exclaim with a bold sweep of conception, “Ah me! I wish I were a widow!” Mrs. Keith was precisely the widow that young unmarried ladies wish to be. With her diamonds in her dressing-case and her carriage in her stable, and without a feather’s weight of encumbrance, she offered a finished example of satisfied ambition.
— Henry James, Watch and Ward
I told myself that I was going to live the rest of my life as if it were Saturday.
— Chip Gaines, The Magnolia Story
...You are a little boy. You want the moon to drink from as a golden cup; and so, it is very likely that you will become a great man -- if only you remain a little child. All the world'sgreat have been little boys who wanted the moon; running and climbing, they sometimes catch a firefly. But if one grow to a man's mind, that mind must see that it cannot have the moon and would not want it if it could -- and so, it catches no fireflies.' [Merlin]
— John Steinbeck, Cup of Gold: A Life of Sir Henry Morgan, Buccaneer, with Occasional Reference to History
Richard, marked for misery and defeat, acknowledged that power which sentiment possesses to exalt us—to convince us that our minds, endowed with a soaring, restless aspiration, can find no repose on earth except in love.
— Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck
Men of great ambition have sought happiness . . . and have found fame.
— Napoléon Bonaparte
You know, you the worst kind, you want to marry the artist and live like squalor, but you wait, in five years you be like, Baby Jake why we eat ramen noodles every night? You a hustler, don't blind me, I see.
— Stephanie Danler, Sweetbitter
My only career goal is to be an halloween icon.
— Nuno Roque
The tonality of my life is hidden behind my ambition.
— Tanmaya Guru
Emperor, king, general, duke,” he whispered to himself. “These are just labels. Climb up the family tree of any of them high enough and you’ll find a commoner who dared to take a chance.
— Ken Liu, The Grace of Kings
Ambition is the capacity for unhappiness.
— Manu Joseph, The Illicit Happiness of Other People
Ambition's ambition is immortality. To create an eternal legacy.
— Renzo Dante (Saligiare)
A day in a man’s life is constructed according to whether he accepts or rejects flashes of inspiration.
— Eiji Yoshikawa, Taiko: An Epic Novel of War and Glory in Feudal Japan
You don’t come to live here unless the delusion of a reality shaped around your own desires isn’t a strong aspect of your personality. 'A reality shaped around your own desires' — there is something sociopathic in that ambition.
— Zadie Smith
Cecil: “A cup of love is greater than a pitcher full of ambition.
— William Carmichael, The Missionary
Talents too many, not enough of any.
— Naomi Wood, Mrs. Hemingway
You don’t come to live here [New York City] unless the delusion of a reality shaped around your own desires isn’t a strong aspect of your personality. 'A reality shaped around your own desires' — there is something sociopathic in that ambition.
— Zadie Smith
No ambition which feeds on blood can be a worthy one
— Nilesh Rathod, Destiny of Shattered Dreams
Ambition had never troubled me, so I decided to begin by watching life at my leisure for a few years, waiting until I finally felt tempted to find some circle of influence for myself.
— Stefan Zweig, The Collected Stories of Stefan Zweig
A place in the sun, that's what I am aiming for... and who could ever ask for more?' -Columbine to Pierrot
— Ana Claudia Antunes, Pierrot & Columbine
You are always a bishop with a ambition and second as a fisher.
— Deyth Banger
In fact, ambitious tension actually limits our ability to succeed because it keeps us in a state of contraction emotionally and physically. It seems to give us energy but doesn't really.  Like the white sugar of mental health, there's a short high followed by a crash.  The cultivation of mental rest or surrender is like eating healthy food.  It doesn’t give us an immediate rush, but over time it provides a lot more energy.
— Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of "A Course in Miracles"
If I keep pushing myself, I’ll finally be somebody. I’ll finally matter. I’ll finally arrive.” Nonsense. You won’t be satisfied. The only thing worse than failing to realize any of your dreams, is seeing them all come true. You were meant for something more. Even if you could be known the world over, what does it matter if you have no time to be known by God?
— Kevin DeYoung, Crazy Busy: A (Mercifully) Short Book about a (Really) Big Problem
Give your ambition a name.
— Clifford Cohen
Some people may call me a nerd. I claim the label with pride.
— Bill Gates
A dreamless sleep and a life without ambition are synonymous with death.
— Faisal Khosa
Don’t aim at success—the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue…as the unintended side-effect of one’s personal dedication to a course greater than oneself.
— Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning
If you can't get everyone on your side, make sure they're right behind you.
— Benny Bellamacina, The King of Rhyme
Nippers was a whiskered, sallow, and, upon the whole, rather piratical-looking young man of about five and twenty. I always deemed him the victim of two evil powers — ambition and indigestion.
— Herman Melville, Bartleby the Scrivener
Have you ever had an experience where, had things turned out just a little bit differently, your entire life would have been transformed?Like a Supreme Court clerkship, a Rhodes Scholarship gets mentioned in your obituary.The door was open just a crack, in a way that seemed to say “I have an ‘open door’ policy, but I really don’t want to be bothered.”Success didn’t take you off the treadmill, but simply put you on a different treadmill, at a higher speed and with a steeper incline.When we’re young, overachieving, and unstoppable, we all think we’re special. But as we grow older, we reach a more realistic understanding of our place in the world. It happens at different times for different people, but eventually we all come to terms with our own ordinariness.
— David Lat, Supreme Ambitions
Your ambition is the most reliable alarm clock.
— Faisal Khosa
There is nothing in the world so enticing as that which you have been told you may not have.
— Marie Brennan, The Tropic of Serpents
Soldiers in foreign camps, so far from being missionaries for good, require missionaries themselves, more than the natives. Andrew Carnegie
— H.W. Brands, T.R.: The Last Romantic
The world’s deadliest mercenaries choose to serve you, the whispers say, because they have yet to meet me.
— Marie Lu, The Rose Society
In Washington, the venerable were often vulnerable.
— John Taliaferro, All the Great Prizes : The Life of John Hay, from Lincoln to Roosevelt
Ambition is the intellectual equivalent of body odour.
— Jerry Toner, The Roman Guide to Slave Management: A Treatise by Nobleman Marcus Sidonius Falx
One of my objectives is learning more than is absolutely necessary.
— Jules Verne, Journey To The Centre Of The Earth: Teacher's Book
Ambition is a noble passion which may legitimately take many forms
—  there was something noble in the ambitions of Attila or Napoleon
Success comes only through strong will, determination and effort.
— Santonu Kumar Dhar, The Effort
Great ambition and conquest without contribution is without significance. What will your contribution be? How will history remember you?
— William Hundert - The Emperors Club
Self-reliance and self-learning are your greatest assets.
— Lailah Gifty Akita, Pearls of  Wisdom: Great  mind
Self-confidence is your greatest virtue.
— Lailah Gifty Akita, Pearls of  Wisdom: Great  mind
Ambition is not everything.""No. Not everything, but it's something. Something important, if you ask me.
— Tiffany Quay Tyson, Three Rivers
. . . I should wish you to think more deeply, to look further, and aim higher than you do.
— Anne Brontë, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
Many of these new readers were not yet college-educated, but in terms of their seriousness about the world, their own literacy, and above all their ambitions for their children, they might as well have been.
— David Halberstam
My mind was not that of a conqueror, but that of a cow that spends its life chewing contentedly in the meadow of invoices, waiting for the train of eternal grace to pass by. How good it felt to exist without pride of ambition. To live in hibernation.
— Amélie Nothomb, Stupeur et tremblements
He hated House members who longed only to run for the Senate, and senators who longed only to run for the presidency. He was appalled by what he felt television had done to the Senate by the mid-fifties. It had become a major launching platform for presidential campaigns. He thought television had ruined the Senate as a serious body. “All they do there is preen and comb their hair and run for President. It’s like a presidential primary over there,
— David Halberstam, The Powers That Be
At the end, we will arrive where we started.
— Aditya Ajmera
I've been absolutely terrified every moment of my life - and I've never let it keep me from doing a single thing I wanted to do.
— Georgia O'Keeffe
Ambition and stupidity are a dangerous combination.
— Dean Koontz, Odd Apocalypse
There is no friendship between kings.
— Jayne Castel, The Breaking Dawn
Embrace the beauty of good moment.
— Lailah Gifty Akita, Pearls of  Wisdom: Great  mind
Beware of that demon called 'Changing The World'.
— Marty Rubin
The only candid thing in life is time, nothing else flows seamlessly
— Akul Singh
You can fail at what you don't want, so you might as well try what you do want.
— Jim Carrey
Being crazy, for the rest of us, is a form of sanity.
— Dave Matthes, Bar Nights
Let me ask you this: How many days do you have left, if any, in the life you promised for yourself yesterday?
— Dave Matthes, Bar Nights
So you mean to tell me you won't fuck anyone you don't share some kind of deep emotional connection with? What a sad, depressing, truly horrible life you must lead...
— Dave Matthes, Bar Nights
In this world, you only get what you grab for.
— Giovanni Boccaccio
Ambition is a funny thing: it creeps in when you least expect it and keeps you moving, even when you think you want to stay put
— Lena Dunham, Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She's "Learned"
Peace is the first casualty in every ambition.
— Sweety Shinde, Arjun: Without a Doubt
Leadership is not about your ambition. It is about bringing out the ambitions of your team.
— Cheryl A. Bachelder, Dare to Serve: How to Drive Superior Results by Serving Others
Ambition is a path, not a destination, and it is essentially the same path for everybody. No matter what the goal is, the path leads through Pilgrim's Progress regions of motivation, hard work, persistence, stubbornness, and resilience under disappointment. Unconsidered, merely indulged, ambition becomes a vice; it can turn a man into a machine that knows nothing but how to run. Considered, it can be something else - pathway to the stars, maybe.
— Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety
I don't care much whether I ever get to know anything - but I want to work out something in figures - something that hasn't got to do with human beings. I don't want people particularly. In some ways, Henry, I'm a humbug - I mean, I'm not what you all take me for. I'm not domestic, or very practical or sensible, really.And if I could calculate things, and use a telescope, and have to work out figures, and know to a fraction where I was wrong, I should be perfectly happy, and I believe I should give William all he wants.
— Virginia Woolf, Night and Day
Like overzealous religious converts, climbers originally from the lower rungs of society tend to go overboard when they ape the upper class.
— Maureen Corrigan, Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading: Finding and Losing Myself in Books
Distraught with the comprehension of his demise, a shovel stood dormant, in the ditch of her own digging. Now sheltered from the glare of greed and ambition, were the distasteful thoughts sprinkled in fool’s gold.
— Don Swann II
For he, who has never sailed through storms, can never trust sailors of such ships.
— Ashish Jaiswal, True Dummy - a fable of existence
But ambition is a funny thing: it creeps in when you least expect it and keeps you moving, even when you think you want to stay put.
— Lena Dunham, Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She's "Learned"
The problem with telling people that they can do anything they want to do is that it is objectively, factually inaccurate. Otherwise the whole world would just be ballet dancers and pop stars.
— David Nicholls, Us
At the end of the day let their be no regrets, only a desire to do more tomorrow than you did today.
— Noel DeJesus
The British have always been madly overambitious, and from one angle it can seem like bravery, but from another it looks suspiciously like a lack of foresight.
— Ben Aaronovitch, Whispers Under Ground
There is nothing more vindictive, nothing more underhanded, than a little world that would like to be a big one.
— Stefan Zweig, The Post-Office Girl
Trying to be more than human one becomes less.
— Marty Rubin
At the end of the day let there be no regrets, only a desire to do more tomorrow than you did today.
— Noel DeJesus
Somewhere between what is...and what can be...begs the question...what are you meant to be?
— Manoj Vaz
Ambition is the necessary spur of a great mind to great action; when acting upon a weak mind it impels it to absurdity, or sours it with discontent.
— Frances Wright
Always stay one step a head, unless you’re already there
— Benny Bellamacina, Philosophical Uplifting Quotes and Poems
My ambition is to enjoy my life and to do exactly what I want to do. And I'll do that. I will be free.
— Venus Williams
And the next time I did school stuff in the middle of the night, I just did it in my closet with the door locked. Honestly, what is wrong with this country when striving for excellence means you need antidepressants?
— Rachel Hawkins, Rebel Belle
She knows about the music stuff, but she doesn't care. That's why I didn't tell her about my job at the studio. She doesn't want make me want to be better, like you do. She doesn't get that it's scary... to want something so much and not be sure if you're good enough.
— Brandy Colbert, Pointe
What's important is the ambition that results from our weakness.
— Sharon Creech, The Great Unexpected
A lot of people see it as a kind of failure to stay in the place where you’re from, especially if you’re from the Midwest. Like ambition is geographic.
— Leah Stewart, The History of Us
You want to know the great thing about today, it doesn't care about what you did or didn't do yesterday or what you're going to do tomorrow, it only cares about what you do right now.
— Noel DeJesus
Nothing becomes some women more than the prick of ambition. Love, on the contrary, may make them very dull.
— Françoise Sagan, Dans un mois, dans un an
She raised herself up on an elbow, stroked my forehead & said in a hushed half-whisper, 'You will be famous.' "The seed was planted. Ambition fed on the compost of my vanity.
— F.R. Tallis, The Forbidden
Yes, but the artist?" said Nigel almost fiercely. "He's different, you know he is. He's driven by some compulsion: if he can't do what he knows he has to do with his life he might as well be dead. He's got to break through the world's indifference, or else break himself against it. He can't help it.
— Mary  Stewart, My Brother Michael
True ambition is trying to paint yourself out of a corner
— Josh Stern, And That's Why I'm Single: What Good Is Having A Lucky Horseshoe Up Your Butt When The Horse Is Still Attached?
Maybe that was the trouble. She got the first and biggest share of everything – first whack at the new clothes and the biggest part of any special treat. Hazel never had to grab for anything and she was soft.
— Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
I'm nothing but my ambition to become more than the marionette others created me to be.
— Jennifer Megan Varnadore
A longing for the extraordinary had grabbed ahold of her and was burning her up inside, so hot and fierce that her heart had gone stone cold toward everything and everybody standing in her way. That was Mama. Fire and ice.
— D. Anne Love, Semiprecious
Even if we’ve never been inside a synagogue or a mosque or a church—even if we have, and vowed never to go back—deep down in our striving hearts, beneath all the ambition and the fear, we suspect that we were made for a different sort of life.
— Heather Choate Davis, Elijah & the SAT: Reflections on a hairy old desert prophet and the benchmarking of our children's lives
Universities, he (William Dershowitz) says, have been absorbed into the commercial ethos. Instead of being intervals of freedom, they are breeding grounds for advancement. Students are too busy jumping through the next hurdle in the résumé race to figure out what they really want. They are too frantic tasting everything on the smorgasbord to have life-altering encounters. They have a terror of closing off options. They have been inculcated with a lust for prestige and a fear of doing things that may put their status at risk.
— David Brooks
Keep your eyes on the stars and your feet on the ground
— Theodore Roosevelt
Let your ambitions fly. Let nothing hold you back.
— Nabil N. Jamal
A man shrinks or expands into the degree and nature of his ambition. Ambition needs to be cultivated and refined, and yet has no teachers.
— Neel Burton
He shed a lake of blood and murdered a king for a cold, lonely throne.
— Jayne Castel, Nightfall till Daybreak
Minor talents or failing talents ask much of those who associate with them. They suck, they cling, they sour, they devour, and they can kill their hosts. Disappointment is a deadly companion. We didn't yet know how many of us would end up in its grip, because we were all still striving, and some of us thought we were thriving.
— Margaret Drabble, The Pure Gold Baby
It is better to die than carry the burden of expectations, you die every moment then, bearing situations you are not supposed to put up with.
— Aporva Kala, Life... Love... Kumbh...
The worst president is closer by nature to the best then either is to anyone who has not gone through what it requires to become president.
— George Friedman, The Next Decade: What the World Will Look Like
Ambition is enthusiasm with a purpose.
— Frank Tyger
I know what other people think about me,” Rusty told her. “ ‘That Rusty,’ they say. ‘Charming and handsome,’ they say first, of course—they’re not blind. Then they add, ‘All the ambition and drive of a chocolate sundae.’ 
— Sarah Rees Brennan, Untold
I believe we are powerful, but we don't use our minds to full capacity. Your mind is powerful enough to help you attain whatever you want.
— Michael  Jackson, Moonwalk
Spending time with people without ambition is a self-destruction.
— Amen Muffler
The man of ambition thinks to find his good in the operations of others
—  the man of pleasure in his own sensations
The older I get, the more I see how much motivations matter. The Zune was crappy because the people at Microsoft don't really love music or art the way we do. We won because we personally love music. We made the iPod for ourselves, and when you're doing something for yourself, or your best friend or family, you're not going to cheese out. If you don't love something, you're not going to cheese out. If you don't love something, you're not going to cheese out. If you don't love something, you're not going to go the extra mile, work the extra weekend, challenge the status quo as much.
— Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs
Author says he suffered from both "a craving to be famous" and "a horror of being known to like being known.
— T.E. Lawrence
You may delay your ambition, but never forget your ambition.
— Amit Kalantri
I believe at least in one of the chief tenets of the Christian faith--contentment with a lowly place. I am a doctor and I know that ambition--the desire to succeed--to have power--leads to most ills of the human soul. If the desire is realized it leads to arrogance, violence and final satiety; and if it is denied--ah! if it is denied--let all the asylums for the insane rise up and give their testimony! The are filled with human beings who were unable to face being mediocre, insignificant, ineffective and who therefore created for themselves ways of escape from reality so to be shut off from life itself forever.
— Agatha Christie, Appointment with Death
I know what you want. One month after the ascension of Philippe the Gullible, M. Laclos found in a gutter, deceased. Blamed on a traffic accident. Two months after, King Philippe found in a gutter, deceased— it really is a bad stretch of road. Philippe’s heirs and assigns having coincidentally expired, end of the monarchy, reign of M.Danton.
— Hilary Mantel, A Place of Greater Safety
Theories cannot claim to be indestructible. They are only the plough which the ploughman uses to draw his furrow and which he has every right to discard for another one, of improved design, after the harvest. To be this ploughman, to see my labours result in the furtherance of scientific progress, was the height of my ambition, and now the Swedish Academy of Sciences has come, at this harvest, to add the most brilliant of crowns.
— Paul Sabatier
Alice knows those stories. The routiers and condottieri of the Free Companies, who fight the wars of whichever prince will pay their fees, and amuse themselves in between times, are said to commit every kind of crime: from eating meat in Lent to slitting open pregnant women to kill their unborn and unbaptised children. The countryside of the southern lands is supposed to be full of their victims: a sea of vagabonds - priests without parishes; destitute peasants; artisans looking for work. ‘So you’, Alice says, ‘were one of the famous sons of iniquity…’ The Pope calls them that when they rob churches. But the Pope also uses them regularly. Alice knows she sounds a little breathless. She can’t altogether keep the admiration out of her voice. If she’d been a man, she thinks, she might have done exactly the same thing as Wat, to better herself fast.
— Vanora Bennett, The People's Queen
That's what you got for being a servant of no ambition: a shrunken life, hung up like a gibbet as a warning to others.
— Emma Donoghue, Slammerkin
Grandma sees these things when she talks about them and gestures with her hands like she's painting brush strokes in the air. The way Grandma paints her dreams for me, there's a low sky.
— Heidi W. Durrow, The Girl Who Fell from the Sky
At last a lifetime ambition of mine to become a pimp was satisfied.
— Jack Woodford, The Autobiography of Jack Woodford
An empty bottle of Jack is almost just as beautiful as a new and unopened bottle...in the same sense as looking down at muddied feet, and looking back the way you came. The journey you've taken to get to this point, the experiences and sights and music listened to, the shit scrolled down on paper. An empty bottle may hold more promise than a full one in that regard...
— Dave Matthes, Sleepeth Not, the Bastard
I am told by people all the time that they simply do not have time to read and listen to all the material they have purchased or subscribed to. But time is democratic and just. Everyone has the same amount. When I choose to read with my mid morning coffee break and you choose to blather about trivia with friends, when I choose to study for an hour sitting on my backyard deck at day's end but you choose to watch a TIVO'd American Idol episode, we reveal much. When someone says he does not have the time to apply himself to acquiring the know-how required to create sufficient value for his stated desires, he is a farmer surrounded by ripe fruit and vegetables, whole grains, and a herd of cattle on his own property who dies of starvation, unable to organize his time and discipline himself to eat.
— Dan S. Kennedy
...you cannot value dreams according to the odds of their coming true. The real value is in stirring within us the will to aspire.
— Sonia Sotomayor, My Beloved World
Ambition’ is ‘greed’ rebranded.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana
We had made the error of staying small – and there is no more unforgivable crime in America.
— Pat Conroy, The Prince of Tides
Ambition is greed without makeup.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Some men escape the grip. Maybe their wives have no social ambitions; maybe they've hit a sentence or two in a 'dangerous book' that pleased them; maybe they started on the treadmill as I did and were knocked off. Anyway, they're the congressmen you can't bribe, the Presidents who aren't politicians, the writers, speakers, scientists, statesmen who aren't just populate grab-bags for a half-dozen women and children.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise
It never occurs to her that she will not be a writer and only occasionally does it occur to her, depressingly, that she is going to grow into a woman, not a man.
— Jean Stafford
There is something I want to do. But it's something to work towards, not something that should be handed to me on a plate. What's the point of doing something if you know you've got someone to rescue you if you fail? I like to work hard at something and then to reap the rewards. I take pride in what I do. What's the point if I know my rich husband will bail me out if I mess up?
— Dorothy Koomson, The Woman He Loved Before
The brown and charred rags that hung from the sides of it, I presently recognized as the decaying vestiges of books. They had long since dropped to pieces, and every semblance of print had left them. But here and there were warped boards and cracked metallic clasps that told the tale well enough. Had I been a literary man I might, perhaps, have moralized upon the futility of all ambition. But as it was, the thing that struck me with keenest force was the enormous waste of labour to which this sombre wilderness of rotting paper testified.
— H.G. Wells