Ambition famous quotes
Last updated: Sep 5, 2024
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Ambition often puts Men upon doing the meanest offices; so climbing is performed in the same position with creeping.
-- A. C. Benson -
Every man has his secret desire, I suppose, and mine is someday to own a farm.
-- A. Street -
It [idolatry] nourishes mans ambition to domineer over his fellow man. Idolatry, therefore, is the source of all social and moral evil in the world.
-- Abba Eban -
Mr. President, prime ministers, let us have ambitions: ambitions to move beyond the violence and occupation, to the day when two states, Palestine and Israel, can live together side by side in peace and security.
-- Abdallah II -
It's all about how can you take care of yourself when furthering your life's goals and ambitions, and purpose and whatever you choose - family, career - to maintain a really balanced, whole, healthy outlook.
-- Abigail Spencer -
Every man is said to have his peculiar ambition.
-- Abraham Lincoln -
Achievement results from work realizing ambition.
-- Adam Ant -
Great ambition, the desire of real superiority, of leading and directing, seems to be altogether peculiar to man, and speech is the great instrument of ambition.
-- Adam Smith -
Are you in earnest resolved never to barter your liberty for the lordly servitude of a court, but to live free, fearless, and independent? There seems to be one way to continue in that virtuous resolution; and perhaps but one. Never enter the place from whence so few have been able to return; never come within the circle of ambition; nor ever bring yourself into comparison with those masters of the earth who have already engrossed the attention of half mankind before you.
-- Adam Smith -
For a people, as for an individual, it is tragic to have ambitions and to lack both the means essential to their fulfillment and any hope of acquiring those means.
-- Adolf Hitler -
My only ambition when I came to Hollywood was to pay my rent.
-- Adrian Grenier -
Man is in pursuit of two goals: he is looking for happinesse and, being by essence empty ("étant vide par essence", Fr.), he is trying to fill (or take up, - "remplir", Fr.) his life; the latter reason play a more considerable role than we ordinarily think. What we take for vainglory, ambition, love of power and riches (or wealth), is often, indeed, a need to mask this emptiness, a need to let one's hair down (or to live it up), to put oneself on a false scent or trail. (de se donner le change", Fr.
-- African Spir -
Let the average man be put to the proof on the question of who is above, and his true position will be exposed. Let him be forced into making a choice between God and money, between God and men, between God and personal ambition, God and self, God and human love, and God will take second place every time.
-- Aiden Wilson Tozer -
If it is true that love is the pursuit in another of qualities we lack in ourselves, then in our love of someone from another culture, one ambition may be to weld ourselves more closely to values missing from our own culture.
-- Alain de Botton -
Envy: a confused, tangled guide to one's own ambitions.
-- Alain de Botton -
Put aside ambition for public recognition, and simply do what you do because it feels good inside.
-- Alan Cohen -
It's incredible considering the public perception that he was tight fisted and he was more than prudent, and lacked ambition to take Tottenham to where the fans wanted them to be.
-- Alan Hansen -
If a person holds no ambitions in this world, he suffers unknowingly. If a person holds ambitions, he suffers knowingly, but very slowly.
-- Alan Lightman -
Life is too brief and too rich to tiptoe through half-heartedly, rather than galloping at it with whooping excitement and ambition.
-- Alastair Humphreys -
The Four Conditions of Happiness: Life in the open air, Love for another being,Freedom from ambition,Creation
-- Albert Camus -
I would rather not have upset him, but I couldn't see any reason to change my life. Looking back on it, I wasn't unhappy. When I was a student, I had lots of ambitions like that. But when I had to give up my studies I learned very quickly that none of it really mattered.
-- Albert Camus -
Nothing truly valuable arises from ambition or from a mere sense of duty; it stems rather from love and devotion towards men and towards objective things.
-- Albert Einstein -
I feel that you are justified in looking into the future with true assurance, because you have a mode of living in which we find the joy of life and the joy of work harmoniously combined. Added to this is the spirit of ambition which pervades your very being, and seems to make the day's work like a happy child at play.
-- Albert Einstein -
Hitler appeared, a man with limited intellectual abilities and unfit for any useful work, bursting with envy and bitterness against all whom circumstance and nature had favored over him....In his desperate ambition for power he discovered that his speeches, confused and pervaded with hate as they were, received wild acclaim by those whose situation and orientation resembled his own. He picked up this human flotsam on the streets and in the taverns and organized them around himself. This is the way he launched his political career.
-- Albert Einstein -
Weakness of attitude becomes weakness of character.
-- Albert Einstein -
I met, not long ago, a young man who aspired to become a novelist. Knowing that I was in the profession, he asked me to tell him how he should set to work to realize his ambition. I did my best to explain. 'The first thing,' I said, 'is to buy quite a lot of paper, a bottle of ink, and a pen. After that you merely have to write.'
-- Aldous Huxley -
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 -
Movies have heart. Have mind. Have power. Have ambition.
-- Alejandro Jodorowsky -
Money is not everything. My ambition was football itself, not the money I'd make from it. If that brings me and my family a more comfortable lifestyle, then that's fine. But I don't spend my time between games and training sessions thinking about figures.
-- Alessandro Del Piero -
Although my other ambition was to be a musical theater star (and I would attend college on a voice scholarship), writing was never far from my mind.
-- Alex Flinn -
Ambition is sneered at by some bands. It seems like a pretty good thing to me.
-- Alex Kapranos -
The vigour of government is essential to the security of liberty. . . . a dangerous ambition more often lurks behind the specious mask of zeal for the rights of the people, than under the forbidding appearance of zeal for the firmness and efficiency of government.
-- Alexander Hamilton -
Ambition without principle never was long under the guidance of good sense.
-- Alexander Hamilton -
There may be in every government a few choice spirits, who may act from more worthy motives. One great error is that we suppose mankind more honest than they are. Our prevailing passions are ambition and interest...
-- Alexander Hamilton -
...great Ambition, unchecked by principle, or the love of Glory, is an unruly Tyrant...
-- Alexander Hamilton -
Let us recollect that peace or war will not always be left to our option; that however moderate or unambitious we may be, we cannot count upon the moderation, or hope to extinguish the ambition of others.
-- Alexander Hamilton -
A generation which has passed through the shop has absorbed standards and ambitions which are not of those of spaciousness, and cannot get away from them. Everything with them is done as though for sale, and they naturally have in view the greatest possible benefit, profit and that end of the stuff that will make the best show.
-- Alexander Herzen -
Who know but He, whose hand the lightning forms, Who heaves old ocean, and who wings the storms, Pours fierce ambition in a Caesar's mind.
-- Alexander Pope -
Oh, sons of earth! attempt ye still to rise. By mountains pil'd on mountains to the skies? Heav'n still with laughter the vain toil surveys, And buries madmen in the heaps they raise.
-- Alexander Pope -
I begin where most people end, with a full conviction of the emptiness of all sorts of ambition, and the unsatisfactory nature of all human pleasures.
-- Alexander Pope -
But see how oft ambition's aims are cross'd, and chiefs contend 'til all the prize is lost!
-- Alexander Pope -
Ambition first sprung from your blest abodes: the glorious fault of angels and of gods.
-- Alexander Pope -
Men would be angels, angels would be gods.
-- Alexander Pope -
To be in the music industry, to be in any kind of entertainment industry, you really, really have to be passionate about it and love it and persevere, because if that passion isnt there, its easy to give up. If you really want it, the ambition is there, itll come. Its definitely harder work than some people think.
-- Alexandra Chando -
My ambition is to become one of those actresses that is like a chameleon that you don't recognize.
-- Alexandra Roach -
I think all writers are always collecting characters as we go along. Not just characters of course, we're collecting EVERYTHING. Bits and pieces of story. An interesting dynamic between people. A theme. A great character back story. A cool occupation. The look of someone's eyes. A burning ambition. Hundreds of thousands of bits of flotsam and jetsam that we stick in the back of our minds like the shelves full of buttons and ribbons and fabrics and threads and beads in a costumer's shop.
-- Alexandra Sokoloff -
Maybe I'm wrong, but I think that the people who really enjoy chess are the dubs and the duffers, experts who have resigned their ambitions, those who play only for pastime, and, of course, the great fraternity of the kibbitzers.
-- Alfred Kreymborg -
So many worlds, so much to do, so little done, such things to be.
-- Alfred Lord Tennyson -
Wisdom alone is true ambition's aim, wisdom is the source of virtue and of fame; obtained with labour, for mankind employed, and then, when most you share it, best enjoyed.
-- Alfred North Whitehead -
There has to be this pioneer, the individual who has the courage, the ambition to overcome the obstacles that always develop when one tries to do something worthwhile, especially when it is new and different.
-- Alfred P. Sloan -
An objective is an ambition, and life without ambition is ... well, aimless wandering.
-- Alfred Wainwright -
If you don’t have ambition, you shouldn’t be alive
-- Aliko Dangote -
Golf is an open exhibition of overweening ambition, courage deflated by stupidity, skill soured by a whiff of arrogance.
-- Alistair Cooke -
According to its doctors, my one intransigent desire is to have been a Confederate general, and because I could not or would not become anything else, I set up for poet and beg an to invent fictions about the personal ambitions that my society has no use for.
-- Allen Tate -
I have the desire to work as an actress, but I have no ambition to be a star.
-- Ally Sheedy -
The longing for peace is rooted in the hearts of all men. But the striving, which at present has become so insistent, cannot lay claim to such an ambition as leading the way to eternal peace, or solving all disputes among nations.
-- Alva Myrdal -
Ambition. An overmastering desire to be vilified by enemies while living and made ridiculous by friends when dead.
-- Ambrose Bierce -
When I was little, my ambition was to grow up to be a book. Not a writer. People can be killed like ants. Writers are not hard to kill either. But not books: however systematically you try to destroy them, there is always a chance that a copy will survive and continue to enjoy a shelf-life in some corner on an out-of-the-way library somehwere in Reykjavik, Valladolid or Vancouver.
-- Amos Oz -
Mountains are not stadiums where I satisfy my ambition to achieve, they are the cathedrals where I practice my religion.
-- Anatoli Boukreev -
It was from my own early experience that I decided there was no use to which money could be applied so productive of good to girls and boys who have good within them and ability and ambition to develop it as the founding of a public library.
-- Andrew Carnegie -
My ambition is to construct a painting so that the whole of its surface is alive, however I look at it. Each mark, and the interval between each mark must give something back on its own terms.
-- Andrew Forge -
From the earliest ages of history to the present day there have never been thirteen millions of people associated in one political body who enjoyed so much freedom and happiness as the people of these United States. You have no longer any cause to fear dangers from abroad ... It is from within, among yourselves - from cupidity, from corruption, from disappointed ambition and inordinate thirst for power - that factions will be formed and liberty endangered ...
-- Andrew Jackson -
I never underestimated myself. And I never saw anything wrong with ambition.
-- Angela Merkel -
I don't believe you are simply born with the ambition of becoming chancellor. But if you want to make a difference, if you enjoy putting ideas into practice, then the post of chancellor has to be the one presenting the biggest opportunity of all.
-- Angela Merkel -
Squint your eyes and look closer I'm not between you and your ambition I am a poster girl with no poster I am thirty-two flavors and then some And I'm beyond your peripheral vision So you might want to turn your head Cause someday you might find you're starving and eating all of the words you said.
-- Ani DiFranco -
My biggest ambition is never to be bored. I'm not aggressive enough to strongly run after being an actress.
-- Anjelica Huston -
The failure of women to produce genius of the first rank in most of the supreme forms of human effort has been used to block the way of all women of talent and ambition for intellectual achievement.
-- Anna Garlin Spencer -
Whatever success I may have attained is due to the fact that since I was old enough to work at all, my ambition has never deserted me.
-- Anna Held -
An actor should always let humility outweigh ambition.
-- Anna Kendrick -
Humility was an important part of the way I grew up. And I found that to be less common when I moved to California. That's not to say humble people don't exist there, but ambition seems really important.
-- Anna Kendrick -
It is easier to kill than to heal. It is easier to destroy than to preserve. It is easier to tear down than to build. Those who feed on destructive emotions and ambitions and deny the responsibilities that are the price of wielding power can bring down everything you care for and would protect. Be on guard, always.
-- Anne Bishop -
Perhaps middle-age is, or should be, a period of shedding shells; the shell of ambition, the shell of material accumulations and possessions, the shell of the ego.
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh -
Just as soon as you attain to one ambition you see another one glittering higher up still. It does make life so interesting.
-- Anne Shirley -
I see much less of an ambition gap and much more of a workplace and society that isn't allowing us to use the talent that is multiplied well beyond this room ... There are millions of women out there who ... need more than, Honey, you can do it if you try hard enough.
-- Anne-Marie Slaughter -
Whatever ambivalence I felt about my own career, Frankie more than made up for it with his ambition and tenacity.
-- Annette Funicello -
The world looks very different to me now at twenty. I have outgrown my early opinions and ideals with my short dresses, just as Mrs. Walton said we would. Now the critics can say 'Thou waitest till thy woman's fingers wrought the best that lay within thy woman's heart.'
-- Annie Fellows Johnston -
Luckily my parents were not against my ambition, they've always been very supportive. But they were adamant that I went to university first.
-- Archie Panjabi -
Learning to code is useful no matter what your career ambitions are.
-- Arianna Huffington -
As a child, I had no idea that I would end up in the film industry. My ambitions changed from wanting to join the army like my grandfather to taking up merchant navy as a career to running for India, and finally, investment banking while I was a student of economics honour. But during my college days, I began to get offers for modelling.
-- Arjun Rampal -
I am doing what I want to do - painting pictures people want and understand. I have no burning ambition to create the kind of 'art' which the confused critics praise for its 'plastic significance,' 'fluid lines,' and 'inner awareness,' or 'must be understood on three levels.
-- Arnold Friberg -
The people who lived behind those clean lace curtains in row after row of identical boxes were newspaper readers, and every word in at any rate my newspaper must be clear and comprehensible to them, must be interesting to them, must encourage them to break away from littleness, stimulate their ambition, help them to want to build a better land.
-- Arthur Christiansen -
A writer's ambition should be to trade a hundred contemporary readers for ten readers in ten years' time and for one reader in a hundred years' time.
-- Arthur Koestler -
Liberalism is the party of upstarts who have insinuated themselves between the people and its big men. Liberals feel themselves as isolated individuals, responsible to nobody. They do not share the nation’s traditions, they are indifferent to its past and have no ambition for its future. They seek only their own personal advantage in the present. Their dream is the great International, in which the differences of peoples and languages, races and cultures will be obliterated.
-- Arthur Moeller van den Bruck -
As the components of your life are stripped away, after all the ambitions and hopes vaporize, you reach a self-reflective starkness-- the repetitious plucking of a single overwound string.
-- Arthur Nersesian -
To rise above the crowd, you must discipline yourself unceasingly to the strict demand and realities of your ambition.
-- Arturo Sandoval -
I go through stages. Randomly, I'll be attracted to a crazy rocker with tattoos. And I find that I'm extremely attracted to ambition and wit.
-- Ashley Greene -
Independence is not a whim or an ambition. It is the necessary condition of our survival as an ethnic group.
-- Aslan Maskhadov -
Don’t get depressed about not being where you want to be. This nagging feeling of anxiety is actually called ambition. Ambition is your friend.
-- Atom Egoyan -
My greatest ambition is to have a career without becoming a career woman.
-- Audrey Hepburn -
This is how you survive the unsurvivable, this is how you lose that which you cannot bear to lose, this is how you reinvent yourself, overcome your abusers, fulfill your ambitions and meet the love of your life: by following what is true, no matter where it leads you.
-- Augusten Burroughs -
Politically, the goal of today’s dominant trend is statism. Philosophically, the goal is the obliteration of reason; psychologically, it is the erosion of ambition.
-- Ayn Rand -
I cannot project the degree of hatred required to make those women run around in crusades against abortion. Hatred is what they certainly project, not love for the embryos, which is a piece of nonsense no one could experience, but hatred, a virulent hatred for an unnamed object...Their hatred is directed against human beings as such, against the mind, against reason, against ambition, against success, against love, against any value that brings happiness to human life. In compliance with the dishonesty that dominates today's intellectual field, they call themselves "pro-life.
-- Ayn Rand -
Capitalism demands the best of every man - his rationality - and rewards him accordingly. It leaves every man free to choose the work he likes, to specialize in it, to trade his product for the products of others, and to go as far on the road of achievement as his ability and ambition will carry him.
-- Ayn Rand -
Are you in a universe which is ruled by natural laws and, therefore, is stable, firm, absolute - and knowable? Or are you in an incomprehensible chaos, a realm of inexplicable miracles, an unpredictable, unknowable flux, which your mind is impotent to grasp? The nature of your actions - and of your ambition - will be different, according to which set of answers you come to accept.
-- Ayn Rand -
With the attention I got on my wealth, I thought I would have become a source of resentment, but it is just the other way around - it just generates that much more ambition in many people.
-- Azim Premji -
Music was what I always wanted to do and I was one of the lucky few to achieve my ambition and earn a living from it for which I'm very grateful.
-- Babyface -
Scoutmasters need to enter into boys' ambitions.
-- Baden Powell de Aquino -
Nothing arouses ambition so much in the heart as the trumpet-clang of another's fame.
-- Baltasar Gracian
