Quotes & Sayings About Ambition

Prayer, faith, and vision, plus real effort too.
Blend them together for one potent brew.
The magical spell to your dreams coming true. — Richelle E. Goodrich

I say that ambition is absurd, and yet I remain in its thrall. It's like being a slave all your life, then learning one day that you never had a master, and returning to work all the same. — Tom Rachman

In essence, I set myself the objective of doing what I feel is right without having any ambition. — Andrea Bocelli

When I was 11 years old, I thought, 'All I really wanna be able to do is my own comic book,' and I'm doing it. I don't have any other real ambitions. I have nothing to conquer at all. — Chris Ware

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

Here you can easily understand the futility of ambitions and achievements, futility of success and failures, futility of wealth and possessions. — Girdhar Joshi

I'm supporting the School for Creative Startups because the project's ambition - to boost innovation and the culture of entrepreneurship - is something I feel strongly about. — Natalie Massenet

Knowing the path through the forest doesn't make the trip any less daunting. Knowing the steps to your dreams doesn't make the climb any less of a challenge. — Richelle E. Goodrich

There is something I want to do. But it's something to work towards, not something that should be handed to me on a plate. What's the point of doing something if you know you've got someone to rescue you if you fail? I like to work hard at something and then to reap the rewards. I take pride in what I do. What's the point if I know my rich husband will bail me out if I mess up? — Dorothy Koomson

The favorites of fortune or of fame topple from their pedestals before our eyes without diverting us from ambition. — Luc De Clapiers

Wisdom is corrupted by ambition, even when the quality of the ambition is intellectual. For ambition, even of this quality, is but a form of self-love ... — Henry Taylor

What a great pleasure to work for your living? — Lailah Gifty Akita

The availability of cheap effective lighting alone, following Thomas Edison's invention of the incandescent bulb in 1879, greatly extended the range of waking human consciousness, effectively adding more hours onto the day - for work, for entertainment, for study, for discovery, for consumption. Subsequently, one development led to another, and to yet another, fueled by a corporate economy in developed nations, and then later by the arms race, and then the space race, as human ambition literally outgrew the planet. It seemed that there was no limit on what humanity could achieve. But there was a flaw at the heart of that expansive optimism - namely, that humanity cannot exist as a thing apart from nature; it has no destiny but annihilation apart from the land that gave it birth. — Clark Strand

Remember that life holds out many pleasing deceits to us by the vanity of glory; for that when we are beginning to live, then we are dying. There is, therefore, nothing more profitless than ambition. — Theophrastus

Step into the future with focus
knowing that the only way to kill your
dream is trying to find another. — Moffat Machingura

What is your greatest ambition in life?'
'To become immortal ... and then die. — Jean-Luc Godard

A young man's ambition, can there be a more fleeting prospect? — David Baldacci

Ambition, if it feeds at all, does so on the ambition of others. — Susan Sontag

If you have a burning ambition and desire, absolutely anything can be achieved. — Jahangir Khan

The fierce ambitions of Carver Dana Andrews, son of a Baptist preacher, might well have been imagined by Horatio Alger, Jr.
or Samuel Goldwyn
but not the hidden costs behind those achievements. Carl Rollyson compassionately captures the man behind the movie star. — Marion Meade

I'm not in the Shakespeare stakes. I have no ambition. — Ian Fleming

Five great enemies of peace inhabit us: avarice, ambition, envy, anger and pride. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

No one should be surprised at the difficulty of faith, if there is some part of his life where he is consciously resisting or disobeying the commandment of Jesus. Is there some part of your life which you are refusing to surrender at his behest, some sinful passion, maybe, or some animosity, some hope, perhaps your ambition or your reason? ... How can you hope to enter into communion with him when at some point in your life you are running away from him? — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

I never had any ambition to be a star, or whatever it is called, and I'm still embarrassed at the word. — John Hurt

I've wanted to win at everything, every day, since I was a kid. And time doesn't change a person, it just helps you get a handle on who you are. Even at age 41, I still hate losing
I'm just more gracious about it. I'm also aware that setbacks have an upside; they fuel new dreams. — Dara Torres

Who's Kreacher?"
"The house-elf who lives here," said Ron. "Nutter. Never met one like him."
"He is not a nutter," said Hermione.
"His life's ambition is to have his head cut off and stuck up on a plaque like his mother", said Ron. "Is that normal, Hermione? — J.K. Rowling

We must passionately learn, unlearn and relearn. — Lailah Gifty Akita

It was true that I didn't have much ambition, but there ought to be a place for people without ambition, I mean a better place than the one usually reserved. How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so? — Charles Bukowski

Like a goddess on her azure hill, the star of my ambition, the mistress of my dream; a thing apart, that we can worship, but not touch; a wild desire, that, in the madness of the thought, soars higher in its dignity, and leaves me weeping in the dust. — William Batchelder Greene

Our bodies are shaped to bear children, and our lives are a working out of the processes of creation. All our ambitions and intelligence are beside that great elemental point. — Saint Augustine

If you want a nation to have space exploration ambitions, you've got to send humans. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

To become Christ-like is the only thing in the whole world worth caring for, the thing before which every ambition of man is folly and all lower achievement vain. — Henry Drummond

What better can any of us do than to reach for our own stars ... and know which they are? — Dorothy Canfield Fisher

Hasty climbers have sudden falls. — Robert Greene

I came to New York to be a fine artist - that was my ambition. — David Byrne

I've learned a great deal about a certain type of filmmaking. But I have ambitions toward another type of filmmaking that I haven't been allowed to engage in yet. — Shia Labeouf

Power is a beautiful thing. — A.H. Septimius

Maybe we should just love one another, even if we don't completely understand the things that people bear in their dark, strange hearts, even if the stars that other men and women are following seem invisible to us. If we make ourselves open to the humanity of others first, maybe understanding will follow. An incomprehensible theory of the universal isn't necessary if your only ambition is to embrace another soul. What you need, maybe all you need, in fact, is the willingness to love. — Jennifer Finney Boylan

My main ambition is to be of use to my country and my people. — Dmitry Medvedev

Few and fewer pigeons visit us every year. Our forests furnish no mast for them. So, it would seem, few and fewer thoughts visit each growing man from year to year, for the grove in our minds is laid waste
sold to feed unnecessary fires of ambition, or sent to mill
and there is scarcely a twig left for them to perch on. — Henry David Thoreau

Good only for destruction - has destroyed all that was valuable in the monarchy - is destroying France with daemonic energy - this tawdry, theatrical empire - a deeply vulgar man - nothing French about him - insane ambition - the whole world one squalid tyranny. His infamous treatment of the Pope! — Patrick O'Brian

I didn't recognize it as such then, because I was only thirteen years old, but later I found it a bit ironic that my first time seeing a woman in all her form and glory and saggy drug-tainted tits, arrived at the same exact time as my first introduction to death. — Dave Matthes

It is indolence ... Indolence and love of ease; a want of all laudable ambition, of taste for good company, or of inclination to take the trouble of being agreeable, which make men clergymen. A clergyman has nothing to do but be slovenly and selfish; read the newspaper, watch the weather, and quarrel with his wife. His curate does all the work and the business of his own life is to dine. — Jane Austen

I know what you want. One month after the ascension of Philippe the Gullible, M. Laclos found in a gutter, deceased. Blamed on a traffic accident. Two months after, King Philippe found in a gutter, deceased - it really is a bad stretch of road. Philippe's heirs and assigns having coincidentally expired, end of the monarchy, reign of M.Danton. — Hilary Mantel

Secular self-assertion, perhaps inevitably, developed more slowly; it was one thing to act in 'unfeminine' ways if divinely inspired, not quite so easy to act unconventionally out of personal ambition. — Margaret Walters

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

One thing that struck me about going to those tech conferences was all the enthusiasm for free culture, and remixing, and social media, but people's greatest ambition was to be sponsored by Chipotle or something equivalent to that. It was this weird mix of collaborative, utopian claims and this total acquiescence to commercial imperatives. — Astra Taylor

It is a mighty error to suppose that none but violent and strong passions, such as love and ambition, are able to vanquish the rest. Even idleness, as feeble and languishing as it is, sometimes reigns over them; it usurps the throne and sits paramount over all the designs and actions of our lives, and imperceptibly wastes and destroys all our passions and all our virtues. — Francois De La Rochefoucauld

Intelligence without ambition is a bird without winds. — Salvador Dali

These are the men who, without virtue, labour, or hazard, are growing rich, as their country is impoverished; they rejoice, when obstinacy or ambition adds another year to slaughter and devastation; and laugh, from their desks, at bravery and science, while they are adding figure to figure, and cipher to cipher, hoping for a new contract from a new armament, and computing the profits of a siege or tempest. — Samuel Johnson

Just because you have the resources today doesn't mean the timing is right. No doubt, ambition and energy have led to the creation of many great businesses and careers, but timing is critical. — Nick Vujicic

Medicine was certainly intended to be a career. I wanted to become a psychiatrist, an adolescent ambition which, of course, is fulfilled by many psychiatrists. — J.G. Ballard

I had a family, I had children, I got married. My ambition changed. — Penelope Ann Miller

Motivation fades because it's emotion driven. Mobilization doesn't fade because it's ambition driven. Connect with your passion! - L. R. W. Lee — L.R.W. Lee

I see the people that do the real work, and what in a way is really sad is that the people that are often the most giving, hardworking, and capable of making this world better don't really have the ambition and ego to be a leader - they don't see any interest in the rewards, they don't care if their names ever appear in the press, they actually enjoy the process of helping others, they are truly in the moment. — Richard Linklater

I never had a driving ambition to be a star. — Michael Learned

You can have ambition
But not too much
You should aim to be successful
But not too successful
Otherwise you will threaten the man — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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

Ambition is a tunnel that you run through that doesn't end. — Curtis Jackson

Cha-Cha favored short, earnest prayer, and he often wondered what took others so long., It had something to do with excess supplication, he suspected. He never presented a long list of specific requests to God, had always felt uncomfortable with the presumptuousness of "Ask and you shall receive." This might have been a result of pride, or his own middling ambition, but mostly Cha-Cha's prayers were a series of thank-yous and I'm sorrys. — Angela Flournoy

One needs more than ambition and talent to make a success of anything, really. There must be love and a vocation. — Jessye Norman

Polybius foresaw Rome's decadence. "All things are subject to decay and change," he wrote. "When a state, after having passed with safety through many and great dangers, arrives at the highest degree of power, and possesses an entire and undisputed sovereignty, it is manifest that the long continuance of prosperity must give birth to costly and luxurious manners, and that the minds of men will be heated with ambitious contests, and become too eager and aspiring in the pursuit of dignities. And as those evils are continually increased, the desire of power and rule, and the imagined ignominy of remaining in a subject state, will first begin to work the ruin of the republic; arrogance and luxury will afterwards advance it; and in the end the change will be completed by the people; when the avarice of some is found to injure and oppress them, and the ambition of others swells their vanity, and poisons them with flattering hopes. — Anonymous

Ambition had never troubled me, so I decided to begin by watching life at my leisure for a few years, waiting until I finally felt tempted to find some circle of influence for myself. — Stefan Zweig

Mountains are not stadiums where I satisfy my ambition to achieve, they are the cathedrals where I practice my religion. — Anatoli Boukreev

People with ambition want Paolo Di Canio. — Paolo Di Canio

I had rather be a meteor, single, alone.'

Plus Paris itself was noisome. Even with its glittering bridges and orangeries, even if the birthplace of ballet.

'I had rather been a meteor, than a star in a crowd. — Danielle Dutton

I've got a great ambition to die of exhaustion rather than boredom. — Thomas Carlyle

To appear unambitious amongst the ambitious is to invite loathing or fear. To be in the game, but not playing with intent to win, is to be the enemy. — Josephine Hart

Elections to office, which are the great objects of ambition, I look at with terror! — John Adams

The growth of New England was a result of the aggregate efforts of a busy multitude, each in his narrow circle toiling for himself, to gather competence or wealth. The expansion of New France was the achievement of a gigantic ambition striving to grasp a continent. It was a vain attempt. — Francis Parkman

Justice, humanity, or political wisdom, are qualities they are too little acquainted with in themselves, to appreciate them in others. Valor will acquire their esteem, and liberality will purchase their suffrage; but the first of these merits is often lodged in the most savage breasts; the latter can only exert itself at the expense of the public; and both may be turned against the possessor of the throne, by the ambition of a daring rival. — Edward Gibbon

A piercing satire, a poignant family drama and an investigation of the competing claims of honesty, loyalty, ambition and love. — A.O. Scott

I have never tried, in even one single little instance, to help cultivate the cultivated classes. I was not equipped for it either by native gifts or training. And I never had any ambition in that direction, but always hunted for bigger game
the masses. - Mark Twain, a Biography — Mark Twain

One fall day in Boston, a tall mechanical engineering student named Joe entered the student union at Harvard University. He was all ambition and acne — Dan Ariely

It seems idle to rail at ambition merely because it is a boundless passion; or rather is not this circumstance an argument in its favor? If one would be employed or amused through life, should we not make choice of a passion that will keep one long in play? — William Shenstone

American exceptionalism is grounded in the founding of the United States upon an idea, rather than upon the ambitions of men. — Monica Crowley

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

Ambition can take the place of everything - even sex. — Bruce Forsyth

I was four when I announced my ambition to write, eight when I began publishing such claims. — Taiye Selasi

The ambition of an England manager should be to become England manager — Graham Taylor

The greatness of the object enabled my mind to support what my strengths of body was scarce equal to. — Barbara W. Tuchman

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

When something is just bad, it's often because it is too mediocre in its ambition. The artist hasn't attempted to do anything really outlandish. — Susan Sontag

The claim that science can disprove God's existence is an honest ambition but it is a statement that is actually impossible to back up. This is because the task of proving something like science is unprovable by scientific methods. How do you prove an idea like "science"? What container do you use to measure it? What laws of science do you use to prove science? That's the first reason why the worldview of scientism, the belief that science proves everything, fails to work out in real life. Science cannot prove everything because it cannot even prove itself. — Jon Morrison

There is a great deal of illusion in a work of art; one could go farther and say that it is illusory in and of itself, as a "work." Its ambition is to make others believe that it was not made but rather simply arose, burst forth from Jupiter's head like Pallas Athena fully adorned in enchased armor. But that is only a pretense. No work has ever come into being that way. It is indeed work, artistic labor for the purpose of illusion-and now the question arises whether, given the current state of our consciousness, our comprehension, and our sense of truth, the game is still permissible, still intellectually possible, can still be taken seriously; whether the work as such, as a self-sufficient and harmonically self-contained structure, still stands in a legitimate relation to our problematical social condition, with its total insecurity and lack of harmony; whether all illusion, even the most beautiful, and especially the most beautiful, has not become a lie today. — Thomas Mann

If the account given in Genesis is really true, ought we not, after all, to thank this serpent? He was the first schoolmaster, the first advocate of learning, the first enemy of ignorance, the first to whisper in human ears the sacred word liberty, the creator of ambition, the author of modesty, of inquiry, of doubt, of investigation, of progress and of civilization. — Robert G. Ingersoll

To write rhythmic prose one must go deep into oneself and find the anonymous and multiple rhythm of the blood. Prose needs to be built like a cathedral. There, one is truly without a name, without ambition, without help; on scaffoldings, alone with one's consciousness. — Rainer Maria Rilke

I told myself that I was going to live the rest of my life as if it were Saturday. — Chip Gaines

Ambition is a dream with a V8 engine. Ain't nowhere else in the world where you can go from driving a truck to cadillac overnight — Elvis Presley

I didn't have that intense ambition to be a musician or an actress. I just enjoyed it. And by enjoying it, because I loved it, it enabled me to get better at what I was doing, because there was a love behind it. — Lauryn Hill

I always got the feeling with John Paul that if he could have narrowed down the people he met and blessed those he loved the most, they would not be cardinals, princes, or congressman, but nuns from obscure convents and Down syndrome children, especially the latter. Because they have suffered, and because in some serious and amazing way the love of God seems more immediately available to them. Everyone else gets themselves tied up in ambition and ideas and bustle, all the great distractions, but the modest and unwell are so often unusually open to this message: God loves us, his love is all around us, he made us to love him and be happy — Peggy Noonan

Tell the students to give up their small ambitions and come eastward to preach the gospel of Christ. — Francis Xavier

Ambition rarely has anything to do with talent. Luck is best, and talent limps along a little bit behind luck. — Charles Bukowski

Humility is often only the putting on of a submissiveness by which men hope to bring other people to submit to them; it is a morecalculated sort of pride, which debases itself with a design of being exalted; and though this vice transform itself into a thousand several shapes, yet the disguise is never more effectual nor more capable of deceiving the world than when concealed under a form of humility. — Francois De La Rochefoucauld

To me there never has been a higher source of honour or distinction than that connected with advances in science. I have not possessed enough of the eagle in my character to make a direct flight to the loftiest altitudes in the social world; and I certainly never endeavored to reach those heights by using the creeping powers of the reptile, who in ascending, generally chooses the dirtiest path, because it is the easiest. — Humphry Davy

and it was the pride and ambition of the Jewish people to co-operate in the front ranks to carry on the former glory of the fame of Viennese culture. — Stefan Zweig

I would not sit waiting for some vague tomorrow, nor for something to happen. One could wait a lifetime, and find nothing at the end of the waiting. I would begin here, I would make something happen. — Louis L'Amour

He had ambitions, at one time, to become a sex maniac, but he failed his practical. — Les Dawson

You will never know how high you can climb until you reach the top. — K.L. Toth

Ambition was the old dream of his youth and childhood, a dream which he did not confess even to himself, though it was so strong that now his passion was even doing battle with his love — Leo Tolstoy