Ambition famous quotes
Last updated: Sep 5, 2024
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Without ambition no conquests are made, and no business created. Ambition is the root of all achievement.
-- James A. Champy -
To all our means of culture is added the powerful incentive to personal ambition, no post of honor is so high but the poorest may hope to reach it.
-- James A. Garfield -
I am sensible that my keenness of temper, and a vanity to be distinguished for the day, make me too often splash in life.... I amresolved to restrain myself and attend more to decorum.
-- James Boswell -
Level 5 leaders are differentiated from other levels of leaders in that they have a wonderful blend of personal humility combined with extraordinary professional will. Understand that they are very ambitious; but their ambition, first and foremost, is for the company's success. They realize that the most important step they must make to become a Level 5 leader is to subjugate their ego to the company's performance. When asked for interviews, these leaders will agree only if it's about the company and not about them.
-- James C. Collins -
The best CEOs in our research display tremendous ambition for their company combined with the stoic will to do whatever it takes, no matter how brutal (within the bounds of the company's core values), to make the company great. Yet at the same time they display a remarkable humility about themselves, ascribing much of their own success to luck, discipline and preparation rather than personal genius.
-- James C. Collins -
Level 5 leaders channel their ego needs away from themselves and into the larger goal of building a great company. It's not that Level 5 leaders have no ego or self-interest. Indeed, they are incredibly ambitious-but their ambition is first and foremost for the institution, not themselves.
-- James C. Collins -
Anybody who has political ambition has an Achilles heel.
-- James Callis -
To the lazy man the world appears bereft of all blessings; if poor, he has no friends; if rich, he has no ambition; he aims at nothing, and generally hits his mark.
-- James Ellis -
For the spear was a desert physician, That cured not a few of ambition, And drave not a few to perdition, With medicine bitter and strong.
-- James Elroy Flecker -
My mouth is full of decayed teeth and my soul of decayed ambitions.
-- James Joyce -
The world has nothing to fear from military ambition in our Government.
-- James K. Polk -
This source of corruption, alas, is inherent in the democratic system itself, and it can only be controlled, if at all, by finding ways to encourage legislators to subordinate ambition to principle.
-- James L. Buckley -
Ambition it is the last infirmity of noble minds.
-- James M. Barrie -
Besides the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation, the existence of subordinate governments, to which the people are attached, and by which the militia officers are appointed, forms a barrier against the enterprises of ambition, more insurmountable than any which a simple government of any form can admit of.
-- James Madison -
A people armed and free, forms a barrier against the enterprises of ambition and is a bulwark for the nation against foreign invasion and domestic oppression.
-- James Madison -
I wanted to be a doctor at one point and I also wanted to be a pilot. I think if you grow up in a dodgy area, reality often beats down those ambitions as you get older. But with me that never really happened.
-- James McAvoy -
The worst thing is to feel that as a photographer I'm benefiting from someone else's tragedy. This idea haunts me. It's something I have to reckon with every day, because I know that if I ever allow genuine compassion to be overtaken by personal ambition, I will have sold my soul. The only way I can justify my role is to have respect for the other person's predicament. The extent to which I do that is the extent to which I become accepted by the other and to that extent I can accept myself.
-- James Nachtwey -
Nature is my religion. And my desire...my ambition...the great goal I wish to achieve is to take my readers with me into the heart of this Nature. I love it, and I feel that they must love it......if I can only get the two acquainted.
-- James Oliver Curwood -
I had ambition not only to go farther than any man had ever been before, but as far as it was possible for a man to go.
-- James R Cook -
I am not unambitious. I am just too ambitious for what you call ambitions.
-- James Richardson -
Greatly begin. Though thou have time, but for a line, be that sublime. Not failure, but low aim is crime.
-- James Russell Lowell -
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
-- James Weldon Johnson -
But I must own that I also felt stirred by an unselfish desire to voice all the joys and sorrows, the hopes and ambitions, of the American Negro, in classic musical form.
-- James Weldon Johnson -
People want to be special. I think ambition can take in a whole package of things, power or sexual excitement.
-- James Wolcott -
I had a consuming ambition to possess a miller's thumb. I believe I have never since wanted anything more desperately than I wanted my right thumb to be flattened as my father’s had become, during his earlier years of a miller’s life.
-- Jane Addams -
For many, many years, I was always whipping up things in order to keep myself busy and moving ever forward and saying, 'What's next? What's next? What's next?' I like the equanimity that comes with my age. I don't have big highs, and I don't have big lows. Even if this job goes away tomorrow, the nonstop ambition is a thing of the past for me. I've mellowed
-- Jane Lynch -
I'm not driven by killer ambition. I'm not a workaholic. I'm a good team player. I don't have to be captain, but I do want to play on a winning team.
-- Jane Pauley -
It's not that I lack ambition. I am ambitious in the sense that I want to be more than I am now. But if I were truly ambitious, I think I'd already be more than I am now.
-- Jane Wagner -
Everything that anyone respects is what men naturally excel at: fighting, accruing wealth, playing at power....
-- Janet Morris -
As a shy kid growing up in Sheffield, I fantasized about how it would be great to be famous so I wouldn't actually have to talk to people and feel awkward. And of course, as we all know from fairy stories, when you achieve that ambition, you find out you don't want it.
-- Jarvis Cocker -
I would like to have insights into things like government, all those big ideas that you brought up that I simply don't have ideas about. I would like to be able to since so many people discuss them, but I don't want to work at them. I don't think my ambition is that strong in that direction.
-- Jasper Johns -
Security doesn't rob ambition; the illusion of security robs ambition.
-- Jay Samit -
Whether driven by ambition or circumstance, every career gets disrupted.
-- Jay Samit -
I had given up ( around 1950, fh) any ambition of making a career as an artist…..I had lost all interest in the art shown in galleries and museums, and I no longer aspired to fit in that world. I loved the paintings done by children, and my only desire was to do the same for my own pleasure.
-- Jean Dubuffet -
Everyone is ambition. The question is whether he is ambitious to be or to do.
-- Jean Monnet -
Certain dressmakers desire to pass for an artist. I have one ambition: that is to have good taste.
-- Jean Patou -
I found that married life gave me the necessary freedom to follow an ambition which had been with me since childhood; and so I started to write in earnest.
-- Jean Plaidy -
Astronomy was born of superstition; eloquence of ambition, hatred, falsehood, and flattery; geometry of avarice; physics of an idle curiosity; and even moral philosophy of human pride. Thus the arts and sciences owe their birth to our vices.
-- Jean-Baptiste Rousseau -
What is your greatest ambition in life?' 'To become immortal... and then die.
-- Jean-Luc Godard -
I think we still believe that ambition is for boys.
-- Jeanette Winterson -
I had the chance to be governor for eight years and I took a year to transition out and a year to transition in, so that's a decade of my life where I pursued my own ambitions and I thought it was time to rearrange my life to focus on other things.
-- Jeb Bush -
That is my ambition, to have killed more people-more helpless people-than any man or woman who has ever lived.
-- Jeffrey Dahmer -
Ambition is an expensive impulse, one that requires an enormous investment of emotional capital. Like any investment, it can pay off in countless different kinds of coin.
-- Jeffrey Kluger -
I do have big ambitions, but I think we all do. I just want to keep working hard and being happy.
-- Jennifer Lawrence -
Some women make it look so easy, the way they cast ambition off like an expensive coat that no longer fits.
-- Jenny Offill -
Humans are lonely creators. Humans always desire and yearn for others. Humans thirst for ambitions. When things don't go their way, they start thirsting for it even more.
-- Jeon In-hwa -
In the mind of all, fiction, in the logical sense, has been the coin of necessity;—in that of poets of amusement—in that of the priest and the lawyer of mischievous immorality in the shape of mischievous ambition,—and too often both priest and lawyer have framed or made in part this instrument.
-- Jeremy Bentham -
Ambition is a very dangerous thing because either you achieve it and your life ends prematurely, or you don't, in which case your life is a constant source of disappointment. You must never have ambition.
-- Jeremy Clarkson -
Envy is of all others the most ungratifying and disconsolate passion. There is power for ambition, pleasure for luxury, and pelf even for covetousness; but envy gets no reward but vexation.
-- Jeremy Collier -
Funeralese has had its ups and downs. The word 'morticians,' first used in Embalmers Monthly for February, 1895, was barred by the Chicago Tribune in 1932, 'not for lack of sympathy with the ambition of undertakers to be well regarded, but because of it. If they haven't the sense to save themselves from their own lexicographers, we shall not be guilty of abetting them in their folly.
-- Jessica Mitford -
One needs more than ambition and talent to make a success of anything, really. There must be love and a vocation.
-- Jessye Norman -
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 -
When I was young, my ambition was to be one of the people who made a difference in this world. My hope is to leave the world a little better for having been there.
-- Jim Henson -
Fears, even the most basic ones, can totally destroy our ambitions. Fear, if left unchecked, can destroy our lives. Fear is one of the many enemies lurking inside us.
-- Jim Rohn -
We got to roll with the punches, play all of our hunches, make the best of whatever comes your way. Forget that blind ambition, learn to trust your intuition - plowing straight ahead, come what may.
-- Jimmy Buffett -
Although the needs of babies have changed very little over the millennia, over the past decades, female equality in education and occupational opportunities has altered maternal expectations. This renders baby-care requirements discordant with ambition for many mothers, and produces heartfelt dilemmas for others.
-- Joan Raphael-Leff -
I am as one Who doth attempt some lofty mountain's height, And having gained what to the upcast eye The summit's point appear'd, astonished sees Its cloudy top, majestic and enlarged, Towering aloft, as distant as before.
-- Joanna Baillie -
My only ambition was to create an honest picture that would interpret nature as she really is, as she ought to be seen.
-- Joaquin Sorolla -
That's my ambition: that you look at the pictures and realize what complex, fascinating, interesting people every single one of my subjects is.
-- Jock Sturges -
I didn't have any ambition to produce big mainstream popcorn movies.
-- Jodie Foster -
With some basic skills, ambition and persistence, then there is little limit to what you can achieve, and by trying you can often surprise yourself.
-- Joe Gold -
Whatever you think of Facebook, you cannot fault it for lack of ambition.
-- Joe Greene -
I really never had any ambitions to be a standup comic. I was talked into it by guys that I used to work out with.
-- Joe Rogan -
A thirsty ambition for truth and virtue, and a frenzy to conquer all lies and vices which are not recognized as such nor desire to be; herein consists the heroic spirit of the philosopher.
-- Johann Georg Hamann -
We must listen and learn, show humility and seek again to talk for and to people's ambitions and concerns.
-- Johann Lamont -
My biggest ambition is to bring together what happens in the real world with what politicians talk about.
-- Johann Lamont -
It should be your care, therefore, and mine, to elevate the minds of our children and exalt their courage; to accelerate and animate their industry and activity; to excite in them an habitual contempt of meanness, abhorrence of injustice and inhumanity, and an ambition to excel in every capacity, faculty, and virtue. If we suffer their minds to grovel and creep in infancy, they will grovel all their lives.
-- John Adams -
We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge or gallantry would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution is designed only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for any other.
-- John Adams -
How do you whip up resentment against absentee landlords and pocketers of bribes when the highest ambition of the people is either to become the former or be in a position to receive the latter?
-- John Brunner -
The primary ambition of Nietzsche's critique of knowledge is ... to demonstrate that 'truths' are fictions masking moral commitments.
-- John Carroll -
Only think that I am now writing in a room full of Claudes... almost of the summit of my earthly ambitions.
-- John Constable -
It is always my endeavour however in making a picture that it should be without a companion in the world. At least such should be a painters ambition.
-- John Constable -
Ambition is the grand enemy of all peace.
-- John Cowper Powys -
The man who starts out simply with the idea of getting rich won't succeed, you must have a larger ambition.
-- John D. Rockefeller -
I had no ambition to make a fortune. Mere money-making has never been my goal, I had an ambition to build.
-- John D. Rockefeller -
The person who starts out simply with the idea of getting rich won't succeed; you must have a larger ambition. There is no mystery in business success. If you do each day's task successfully, and stay faithfully within these natural operations of commercial laws which I talk so much about, and keep your head clear, you will come out all right.
-- John D. Rockefeller -
Lincoln's stature and strength, his intelligence and ambition - in short, all the elements which gave him popularity among men in New Salem, rendered him equally attractive to the fair sex of that village.
-- John George Nicolay -
From early childhood I had always dreamed of becoming an explorer. Somehow I had acquired the impression that an explorer was someone who lived in the jungle with natives and lots of wild animals, and I couldn’t imagine anything better than that! Unlike other little boys, most of whom changed their minds about what they want to be several times as they grew older, I never wavered from this ambition.
-- John Goddard -
...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.
-- John Green -
It would be difficult to have any unfulfilled ambitions because I don't have any ambitions. I've never been that kind of performer.
-- John Hurt -
I never had any ambition to be a star, or whatever it is called, and I'm still embarrassed at the word.
-- John Hurt -
Going after anything worthwile in life entailed risk, of course. A man of ambition and courage didn't let that stop or delay him. A man accepted the dangers, the element of chance. If he didn't, he won nothing.
-- John Jakes -
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.
-- John Jay Chapman -
The imagination of a boy is healthy, and the mature imagination of a man is healthy; but there is a space of life between, in which the soul is in a ferment, the character undecided, the way of life uncertain, the ambition thick-sighted: thence proceeds mawkishness.
-- John Keats -
My passions are all asleep from my having slumbered till nearly eleven and weakened the animal fiber all over me to a delightful sensation about three degrees on this sight of faintness - if I had teeth of pearl and the breath of lilies I should call it languor - but as I am I must call it laziness. In this state of effeminacy the fibers of the brain are relaxed in common with the rest of the body, and to such a happy degree that pleasure has no show of enticement and pain no unbearable frown. Neither poetry, nor ambition, nor love have any alertness of countenance as they pass by me.
-- John Keats -
Neither poetry, nor ambition, nor love have any alertness of countenance as they pass by me.
-- John Keats -
I think we are destroying the minds of America and that has been one of my lifelong ambitions.
-- John Kricfalusi -
I want you to live the best life you can. You can be world-changers. .. Pursue this life of love with focus and passion and ambition and courage. Give it your all. And that will be your path to true success.
-- John Legend -
...ambition or contentment? This simple question led me back to a more balanced view of life and put me in touch with the Me I used to know...
-- John M. Geddes -
If at great things thou would'st arrive, Get riches first, get wealth, and treasure heap, Not difficult, if thou hearken to me; Riches are mine, fortune is in my hand, They whom I favor thrive in wealth amain, While virtue, valor, wisdom, sit in want.
-- John Milton -
With diadem and sceptre high advanced, The lower still I fall; only supreme In misery; such joy ambition finds.
-- John Milton -
I on the other side Us'd no ambition to commend my deeds; The deeds themselves, though mute, spoke loud the doer.
-- John Milton -
No man's ambitions (have) a right to stand in the way of performing a simple act of justice.
-- John Peter Altgeld -
There is something inherently inappropriate about cherishing small ambitions for God.
-- John Stott -
The command to judge not is not a requirement to be blind, but rather a plea to be generous. Jesus does not tell us to cease to be men... but to renounce the presumptuous ambition to be God.
-- John Stott
