Robert Burton Quotes

I was once asked if a big business man ever reached his objective. I replied that if a man ever reached his objective he was not a big business man.

I remember how, in the corporate world, I always knew there was some higher position I could attain, which meant that, like Zeno's arrow, I was guaranteed never to arrive and always to remain dissatisfied.

It sucks when you can't play the game you love.

Acting provides the fulfillment of never being fulfilled. You're never as good as you'd like to be. So there's always something to hope for.

I'd be lying if I claimed that, in spite of our amiable afternoons, I don't have an ache somewhere in my heart that my children will not be playing Carnegie Hall anytime soon.

Like dogs in a wheel, birds in a cage, or squirrels in a chain, ambitious men still climb and climb, with great labor, and incessant anxiety, but never reach the top.

When you are very idealistic, but caught in a world which is all about business, it creates anguish.

Am I a frustrated performer? My wife would say I am! I guess there has to be something of the performer in you if you build a global business.

I always want more, and that's just my life.

There are so many songs that I could not sing the way I wanted to. When such songs come on television or radio, I shut them off or leave the room.

I kind of felt like I was never good enough. I always wanted more.

Emotionally, my ambition is not yet sated. Emotionally, I still feel like a kid at the adult's table, yearning for recognition. I'm not sure where this all comes from but it is how I feel.

Gentlemen, we will chase perfection, and we will chase it relentlessly, knowing all the while we can never attain it. But along the way, we shall catch excellence.

But just because you can never reach it, doesn’t mean that it’s not worth looking for.

The ambitious deceive themselves in proposing an end to their ambition; that end, when attained, becomes a means.

So that in the first place, I put for a general inclination of all mankind a perpetual and restless desire of Power after power, that ceaseth only in Death. And the cause of this is not always that a man hopes for a more intensive delight than he has already attained to, or that he cannot be content with a moderate power: but because he cannot assure the power and means to live well, which he hath present, without the acquisition of more.

Never set goals you can reach in your lifetime.

Money doesn't excite me - my ideas excite me.

...it 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.

Success is the result of clear goal, unshakable confidence, proper planning, enthusiastic ACTION and consistent persistence.

We all have impossible dreams and we do what we can to pursue them.

Dream impossible dreams. When those dreams come true, make the next ones more impossible.

Don't fool yourself that you are going to have it all. You are not. Psychologically, having it all is not even a valid concept. The marvelous thing about human beings is that we are perpetually reaching for the stars. The more we have, the more we want. And for this reason, we never have it all.

Businesspeople are like sharks, not just because we're gray and slightly oily, or because our teeth trail the innards of those we have eviscerated, but because we must move forward or die.

I want to try the impossible to show that it can be done.