The Lorax: How nice to meet someone so undeterred by things like…reality.
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And then because of the success of that damn book, suddenly I have to do another book, and another book and another book. I’m not somebody who’s set out to be a novelist per se. It just happened to be the clearest success I’ve had. I didn’t want to be trapped into just sitting in a room typing. It’s not the life I have envisaged for myself–sitting in a room typing for year after year. I kind of wanted to do something that would be…I’d get to work with a lot people, have a lot of fun, have a lot of meetings, have lots of brainstorming, lots of clever people around. I’ve also a chance to get a lot of toys. So that’s what this was. It was a kind of mid-life crisis project.
Coach Taylor: I’ll tell you something. I know you didn’t want me to step foot in your house tonight. I’ll tell you something else and don’t you ever forget this. You should feel proud. You should feel real proud.
Matt: Yes, sir.
Coach Taylor: This is all yours for the taking. Depends on how much you want it. It’s yours for the taking. The other night you played for a few minutes. Tomorrow, four quarters. You can’t be distracted by anything. You’re gonna have a lot of distractions. You’re gonna have our fans, their fans. You got the band. You got the cheerleaders with their pretty young-shaped legs bouncing up and down. You got a job to do. Nothing else.
Algernon: Stop him? Me? It’s more than my job’s worth to stop him once he gets like this. He’s out to rule the world, if he can get a government grant.
Carmen Sternwood: You’re not very tall are you?
Philip Marlowe: Well, I, uh, I try to be.
Salieri: While my father prayed earnestly to God to protect commerce, I would offer up secretly the proudest prayer a boy could think of: “Lord, make me a great composer. Let me celebrate Your glory through music and be celebrated myself. Make me famous through the world, dear God. Make me immortal. After I die, let people speak my name forever with love for what I wrote. In return, I will give You my chastity, my industry, my deepest humility, every hour of my life. Amen”. And do you know what happened? A miracle!
Gekko: Lunch is for wimps.
I resolved to follow my dream. I wanted to push every boundary. I wanted to swim further than anyone else. I wanted to cross seas and round capes that no one had dreamed of swimming before. And I wanted to swim in waters that were so cold no one thought it was possible to survive in them. And though it promised to make me poor and would take away the security provided by a career in law, that didn’t worry me.
Natalie: Two guys have ascended five miles into the sky. They walked up a wall of ice, and are preparing to knock on the door of Heaven itself. There’s really no end to what we can do. You know what the trick is?
Dan: What?
Natalie: Get in the game.
Leslie Knope: Dream with me for a second, Ann: doesn’t this neighborhood deserve a first class park? Imagine a shiny new playground with a jungle gym, and swings, pool, tennis courts, volleyball courts, racquetball courts, basketball courts, regulation football field, we can put an amphitheater with ‘Shakespeare in the Park’…
Ann Perkins: It’s really not that big of a pit.
Leslie Knope: We can do some of those things.
Anakin Skywalker: I feel lost.
Padmé: Lost?
Anakin Skywalker: Obi-Wan and the Council don’t trust me.
Padmé: They trust you with their lives.
Anakin Skywalker: Something’s happening. I’m not the Jedi I should be. I want more. And I know I shouldn’t.
To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self, an impossible claim that one should be at once Rose Bowl princess, medieval scholar, Saint Joan, Eleanor of Aquitane, one’s sister, and a stranger in a pink hat seen once and admired on the corner of 55th and Madison-as well as oneself, mysteriously improved.
Where does discontent start? You are warm enough, but you shiver. You are fed, yet hunger gnaws you. You have been loved, but your yearning wanders in new fields. And to prod all these there’s time, the Bastard Time.
I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.
Themistocles said that he certainly could not make use of any stringed instrument; could only, were a small and obscure city put into his hands, make it great and glorious.
Ambition is not what a man would do, but what a man does, for ambition without action is fantasy.
Do not let your grand ambitions stand in the way of small but meaningful accomplishments.
Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Don’t bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.
Ambition can creep as well as soar.
If you have an idea of what you want to make, what you were put here to do, then just go and do that.
There are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart’s desire. The other is to gain it.
I’ll be a poet, a writer, a dramatist. Somehow or other I’ll be famous, and if not famous, I’ll be notorious. Or perhaps I’ll lead the life of pleasure for a time and then—who knows?—rest and do nothing. What does Plato say is the highest end that man can attain here below? To sit down and contemplate the good. Perhaps that will be the end of me too.
Every man is said to have his peculiar ambition. Whether it be true or not, I can say, for one, that I have no other so great as that of being truly esteemed of my fellow-men, by rendering myself worthy of their esteem.
Padme: You’re not all-powerful, Ani.
Anakin: Well, I should be.
Life is so short. Why waste a single day of it doing something that doesn’t matter, that doesn’t try to do something big?
If you are a dreamer,
Come in.
If you are a dreamer,
A wisher,
A liar,
A hoper,
A prayer,
A magic-bean-buyer,
If you’re a pretender,
Come sit by my fire,
For we have some flax-golden tales to spin.
Come in! Come in!