Ambitious famous quotes
Last updated: Sep 5, 2024
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You are ambitious, which, within reasonable bounds, does good rather than harm.
-- Abraham Lincoln -
To presume a want of motives for such contests . . . would be to forget that men are ambitious, vindictive, and rapacious.
-- Alexander Hamilton -
Aubrey obviously plays Karen's, Sarah Michelle Gellar's, younger sister. And, um, she's sort of always been the underdog in the family and somebody who is not as ambitious or driven as her sister, as Karen's character, so she's sort of always felt like she's had to follow in her sister's footsteps.
-- Amber Tamblyn -
Patriotism, n. Combustible rubbish ready to the torch of any one ambitious to illuminate his name. In Dr. Johnson's famous dictionary patriotism is defined as the last resort of a scoundrel. With all due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer I beg to submit it is the first.
-- Ambrose Bierce -
I never even dreamt of being a writer because I didn't feel allowed. When I was a child I was terribly ambitious, but I didn't know at all what this great thing would become.
-- Amelie Nothomb -
I'm planning my most ambitious tattoo yet. You can never have enough tats.
-- Amy Winehouse -
To not dare is to have already lost. We should seek out ambitious, even unrealistic projects, because things only happen when we dream.
-- Andree Putman -
I constantly felt (as I suppose many an ambitious girl has felt) a thumping from within unanswered by any beckoning from without.
-- Anna Julia Cooper -
No studio in Hollywood wanted 'Cold Mountain.' None. No one wanted 'Ripley,' no one wanted 'The English Patient.' That tells you there isn't really an appetite for ambitious movie-making out there.
-- Anthony Minghella -
Righteousness is a fuel that, when it has some pitch in it of ambitious rivalry and the damper's left open to envy's draught, makes a hot enough fire to cook somebody's goose in quite a hurry.
-- Ardyth Kennelly -
Man is by nature competitive, combative, ambitious, jealous, envious, and vengeful.
-- Arthur Keith -
In a way, writing is an incredible act of individualism, producing your language, and yet to use it from the heart of a crowd as opposed to as an individual performance is a conflicting thing. I do stand alone, and yet it's not about being an individual or being ambitious.
-- Arundhati Roy -
The realities of nature surpass our most ambitious dreams.
-- Auguste Rodin -
Many are ambitious of saying grand things, that is, of being grandiloquent.
-- Augustus Hare -
Thinking men cannot be ruled; ambitious men do not stagnate.
-- Ayn Rand -
Saving our planet requires you to be ambitious in what you aim, and, equally, in how hard you work to reach your goal.
-- Ban Ki-moon -
I've always liked working really hard and then doing nothing in particular. So, consequently, I didn't overexpose myself; I guess I maintained a kind of mystery. I wasn't ambitious.
-- Barbra Streisand -
The first Rudiments of Morality, broach'd by skilful Politicians, to render Men useful to each other as well as tractable, were chiefly contrived that the Ambitious might reap the more Benefit from, and govern vast Numbers of them with the greater Ease and Security.
-- Bernard de Mandeville -
Babylon 5 is probably the biggest, most ambitious television science fiction series ever made. It's one big novel told over five years with 110 different stories told within it.
-- Bill Mumy -
I was freakishly ambitious. I didn't want to be a child. I wanted my own flat, to work and be a grown up.
-- Billie Piper -
I-just-got-off-the-bus-and-I'm-really-excited-and-ambitious-and-I-took-an-acting-class-in-Des-Moines-and-I-know-I-really-need-an-agent-and-I-want-one-NOW
-- Bonnie Gillespie -
Strategy is about stretching limited resources to fit ambitious aspirations.
-- C. K. Prahalad -
If conversion to Christianity makes no improvement in a man's outward actions – if he continues to be just a snobbish or spiteful or envious or ambitious as he was before – then I think we must suspect that his 'conversion' was largely imaginary.
-- C. S. Lewis -
Was he smart enough? Introspective enough? Was it just enough to love him, or should I attach myself to someone who seemed farther ahead of me, someone smarter and more ambitious than me, who'd be sure to carry me along into the version of adulthood I thought I should be striving for?
-- Caroline Knapp -
The Connecticut Center for Science and Exploration will be a building that will connect the excitement of science to the surrounding streets, river and highway. These forms are ambitious and dynamic. They appear to reach out beyond their physical limits.
-- Cesar Pelli -
To be honest, I'm not as goal oriented and ambitious as I once was.
-- Chantal Kreviazuk -
The more delicate and ambitious the soul, the further do dreams estrange it from possible things.
-- Charles Baudelaire -
I used to think that driving, sleepless, ambitious labor was what you needed to succeed.
-- Charles Kuralt -
I'm not an overly ambitious person; I don't feel like I have to excel.
-- Chris Evert -
I think 'ambitious' is one of those adjectives used for women in a derogatory way.
-- Clare Balding -
Sooner or later even the most ambitious glutton must crawl away and seek the solace of the vomitorium.
-- Clive Barker -
I'm very specific and ambitious in plotting out my goals and never take no for an answer - so it's not like things just fall in my lap.
-- Darren Criss -
I'm ambitious in the sense that I raise the bar high for myself.
-- Darren Criss -
Further, Take heed that you faithfully perform the business you have to do in the world, from a regard to the commands of God; and not from an ambitious desire of being esteemed better than others.
-- David Brainerd -
People are renovating places and opening ambitious new venues. That's one thing that music does. It gets people out of their houses, and gets them hanging out together.
-- David Byrne -
Fortunately, President Kennedy and Robert Kennedy disagreed with the estimate and chose a course of action less ambitious and aggressive than recommended by their advisers.
-- David Kay -
Ambitious and thought-provoking, Higher Education in America represents an informed and informative addition to ongoing debates at the national, state, and institutional levels about the aims higher education ought to aspire to and how best to achieve them.
-- David M. Brown -
The purpose of life is the expansion of happiness. It is the goal of every other goal. Ben Henretig has embarked on an ambitious project to document a country and culture that has embraced Happiness as a part of its national policy
-- Deepak Chopra -
I have never been an ambitious person, and my participation in this industry is a fluke, but only male writers can afford to be coy and self-deprecating.
-- Diablo Cody -
I learnt the theory of movement, which I still teach sometimes. I was very, very ambitious to learn a skill.
-- Diane Cilento -
Bill and Hillary Clinton have one central idea in their uncluttered, ambitious minds: Hillary in 2008. Let Bush get re-elected, use the '04 primaries and general election to clean out the underbrush of competing Democratic candidates, and proceed unimpeded to the '08 nomination.
-- Dick Morris -
I am very, very competitive and ambitious. I would definitely fight hard for a role I believed in.
-- Edward Furlong -
The first step is crucial - keep it tiny. Do not be ambitious yet. That leads to failure. Consistency is what you’re shooting for here so make the hurdle as low as possible.
-- Eric Barker -
I have been ambitious to be a somebody from the time I was 5 years old
-- Ethel Merman -
I'm very ambitious, but I also love myself - which means I try to take care of myself.
-- Fergie -
In one point the plan was fatally defective, since it involved the deadly enmity of a race whose character and whose power were as yet but ill understood,--the fiercest, boldest, most politic, and most ambitious savages to whom the American forest has ever given birth.
-- Francis Parkman -
The ambitious deceive themselves in proposing an end to their ambition; that end, when attained, becomes a means.
-- Francois de La Rochefoucauld -
We do not need to have an agreed set of goals before we do something ambitious!
-- Freeman Dyson -
A person’s first duty, a young person’s at any rate, is to be ambitious, and the noblest ambition is that of leaving behind something of permanent value.
-- G. H. Hardy -
As a typically ambitious player, I did what all others of that ilk do: Everything I could do to gain advantage for my PCs and rise in level as rapidly as possible.
-- Gary Gygax -
The great works belong to no one nation, no one cultural tradition even. They are universal.I want an Australian vision of arts policy that is expansive, is embracing, is not narrow, is not parochial. For example, that Australians can do Shakespeare just as well as Englishmen can because we, like every civilised nation, partake of the great canonical works. It's not about Australian nationalism; it's about our identity as a culturally ambitious, culturally sophisticated nation.
-- George Brandis -
Ive always been ambitious to be very good at what I do.
-- Glenda Jackson -
All I want is that Americans still be able to read the alphabet in a hundred years. I am not very ambitious.
-- Gore Vidal -
The ambitious are criticized by those that have given up.
-- Grant Cardone -
I enjoy the fun of failure. It's fun to fail, I kept repeating. It's part of being ambitious; it's part of being creative. If something is worth doing, it's worth doing badly
-- Gretchen Rubin -
Did I have a heart to be contented? Well, no, not particularly. I had a tendency to be discontented: ambitious, dissatisfied, fretful, and tough to please...It's easier to complain than to laugh, easier to yell than to joke around, easier to be demanding than to be satisfied.
-- Gretchen Rubin -
Ambitious failure, magnificent failure, is a very good thing,
-- Guy Kawasaki -
I think I was able to endure risks not because I was ambitious about great stories but I was curious as a journalist.
-- Hark-Joon Lee -
I've never been ambitious about recording
-- Harry Dean Stanton -
I'm deeply ambitious and I always have been.
-- Hayley Atwell -
If a woman is sufficiently ambitious, determined and gifted, there is practically nothing she can't do.
-- Helen Lawrenson -
There are four varieties in society — the lovers, the ambitious, observers, and fools. The fools are the happiest.
-- Hippolyte Taine -
[French] authors are more afraid of offending delicacy and rules, than ambitious of sublimity.
-- Horace Walpole -
I never saw myself as being ambitious, I saw myself as being in love with the profession. I'm a people person. I love to get to know different kinds of people.
-- Jack Kelley -
I'd like to understand why it seems normal to look at astonishing achievements made by unapproachably ambitious, luminously pious, strangely obsessed artists, and toss them off with a few wry comments...
-- James Elkins -
We searchers are ambitious only for life itself, for everything beautiful it can provide...
-- James Kavanaugh -
But ambitious encroachments of the federal government, on the authority of the State governments, would not excite the opposition of a single State, or of a few States only. They would be signals of general alarm . . . But what degree of madness could ever drive the federal government to such an extremity.
-- James Madison -
I am not unambitious. I am just too ambitious for what you call ambitions.
-- James Richardson -
I'm very ambitious, musically - I want to create great things, not mediocre work.
-- James Vincent McMorrow -
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 -
I'm enthusiastic and ambitious, and I work hard.
-- Jason Statham -
Back in the mid-1970s, we adopted some fairly ambitious goals to improve efficiency of our cars. What did we get? We got a tremendous boost in efficiency.
-- Jay Inslee -
Everyone is ambition. The question is whether he is ambitious to be or to do.
-- Jean Monnet -
Are parents always more ambitious for their children than they are for themselves?
-- Jeffrey Archer -
I'm really ambitious about is being a really good comic and doing it for the rest of my life and getting really big. Not really famous because I want fame or attention, just a little freedom. So, that's where I'm ambitious.
-- Jen Kirkman -
The ambitious man has never found his true vocation...
-- Jiddu Krishnamurti -
It may sound ambitious, but I really hope that modern design will spread all around the globe.
-- Jil Sander -
Waiting for the Electricity is a wildly original and ambitious debut, a novel that tackles cultural clashes with satirical hilarity. I haven't read a first novel this promising since The Confederacy of Dunces.
-- Jill Ciment -
I tell myself I write because I want to say something true and original about the nature of evil. That is very ambitious - to say something about the human condition that hasn't been written before. Probably I will never succeed but that is what I strive to do.
-- Jo Nesbo -
Being a celebrity or anything else where you're really ambitious, it's really a game to see how successful you can get.
-- Joe Rogan -
[In eighteenth-century Britain] engineers for the most began as simple workmen, skilful and ambitious but usually illiterate and self-taught. They were either millwrights like Bramah, mechanics like Murdoch and George Stephenson, or smiths like Newcomen and Maudslay.
-- John Desmond Bernal -
I was pretty ambitious as a child to want to be a star with the talent I had, but I want to finish what I started and bring the fans along with me.
-- John Otway -
Wynton Marsalis' skills have grown as fast as his ambition, and he is the most ambitious younger composer in Jazz.
-- Jon Pareles -
As the books grew bigger and more ambitious, the situations in question sometimes became political ones, and so it became necessary to start painting in the social background on a scale which eventually became panoramic.
-- Jonathan Coe -
I think it should be ambitious and good music does deal with life and art and all these wonderful things.
-- Jonny Greenwood -
People seem to have this idea that I've always been very ambitious. Nothing could be further from the truth.
-- Judi Dench -
If ambitious fantasies make people blush, and sexual fantasies make people blush and feel guilty, fantasies of violence and death may make people blush and feel guilty-and frightened too.
-- Judith Viorst -
I thought he might hit me over the head, knowing that he wanted to do the whole show. He was young, ambitious, and a huge talent. But he was also very gentle, and we got along fine.
-- Jule Styne -
Here we all live in a state of ambitious poverty.
-- Juvenal -
I was never ambitious to be a good actor. I just love doing it and I seem to be quite suited for it.
-- Katherine Helmond -
I'd written Smashed not because I was ambitious and not because writing down my feelings was cathartic (it felt more like playing one's own neurosurgeon sans anesthesia). No. I'd made a habit--and eventually a profession--of memoir because I hail from one of those families where shows of emotions are discouraged.
-- Koren Zailckas -
It is the common failing of an ambitious mind to over-rate itself ...
-- Lady Caroline Lamb -
I'm much more ambitious than I'd like to admit.
-- Lauren Velez