Lost Ambition Quotes

The trouble with modern democracy is that men do not approach to leadership until they have lost the desire to lead anyone.

Three decades ago, in a top story of the century, Americans placed six flags on the Moon. Today we no longer try for new and bold space achievements; instead, we celebrate the anniversaries of the past.

The boy gathers materials for a temple, and then when he is thirty, concludes to build a woodshed.

Summer grasses — all that remains of great soldiers' imperial dreams.

My love for my children makes me glad that I am what I am, and keeps me from desiring to be otherwise; and yet, when I sometimes open a little box in which I still keep my fast yellowing manuscripts, the only tangible remnants of a vanished dream, a dead ambition, a sacrificed talent, I cannot repress the thought, that after all I have chosen the lesser part, that I have sold my birthright for a mess of pottage

One of us had loved the other more perfectly, had watched the other more closely, and one of us listened and the other hadn’t, and one of us held on to the ambition of the one idea far longer than was reasonable, whereas the other, passing a garbage can one night, had casually thrown it away.

If you are a nurturing mother, and a good one, you can go to play groups, sit on the floor and play all the games, and have tea with the other mothers, but wouldn't you like to think that's not all there is? That you haven't hung up your high heels without knowing how to walk in them?

I wanted to be an actor, and when that day happened that was sort of like the end. Now let it take me.

I think this is when most people give up on their stories. They come out of college wanting to change the world, wanting to get married, wanting to have kids and change the way people buy office supplies. But they get into the middle and discover it was harder than they thought. They can't see the distant shore anymore, and they wonder if their paddling is moving them forward. None of the trees behind them are getting smaller and none of the trees ahead are getting bigger. They take it out on their spouses, and they go looking for an easier story.

Young women with ambitions should be very crafty and cautious, lest mayhap they be caught in the soft, silken mesh of a happy marriage, and go down to oblivion, dead to the world.

Where is it now, the glory and the dream?

I was going to be a doctor, but who makes it as a doctor anymore?

One of the great tragedies we witness almost daily is the tragedy of men of high aim and low achievement. Their motives are noble. Their proclaimed ambition is praiseworthy. Their capacity to achieve is great. But their discipline is weak. They succumb to indolence. Appetite robs them of will.

I wanted to be a vet. I really thought that's what I wanted to do.

I spent so long studying really hard to become a fine actor, but threw it all away because I got the adulation and the fame so easily.

When you are young, your potential is infinite. You might do anything, really. You might be Einstein. You might be DiMaggio. Then you get to an age where what you might be gives way to what you have been. You weren't Einstein. You weren't anything. That's a bad moment.

Before I was in Girls Aloud, I wanted to be a nanny. But then Girls Aloud started and that ruined that dream!

If you're suddenly doing something you don't want to do for four years, just so you've got something to fall back on, by the time you come out you don't have that 16-year-old drive any more and you'll spend your life doing something you never wanted to do in the first place.

I'd probably be famous now if I wasn't such a good waitress.

Marriage is like a vacuum cleaner. You stick it to your ear and it sucks out all your energy and ambition.

The men and woman who make the best boon companions seem to have given up hope of doing something else...some defect of talent or opportunity has cut them off from their pet ambition and has thus left them with leisure to take an interest in their lives of others. Your ambition may be, it makes him keep his thoughts at home. But the heartbroken people - if I may use the word in a mild, benevolent sense - the people whose wills are subdued to fate, give us consolation, recognition, and welcome.