Quotes & Sayings About Having Too Much Ambition

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

The idols of modern culture have had a profound influence on the shape of our work today. In traditional societies people found their meaning and sense of value by submitting their interests and sacrificing their desires to serve higher causes like God, family, and other people. In modern societies there is often no higher cause than individual interests and desires. This shift powerfully changed the role of work in people's lives - it now became the way we defined ourselves. Traditional cultures tended to see people's place on the social ladder as assigned by nature or convention, each family having its "proper place." That view had put too little stock in the role of individual talent, ambition, and hard work for determining the outcome of one's life. But modern society responded by putting too much stock in the autonomous person. — Timothy Keller

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So much of being a grown-up is about managing or quelling desires. For food, for drink, for sex, for good times; if you're a woman, I maintain, for ambition. You should not want too much. It is strange, then, to be in a position where society demands you should have an appetite for something. And yet here was a rare instance where I was appetite-free, and the world seemed to be saying, "You have to want this thing, if only so that we can help you work through your feelings about not having it! — Courtney Hodell

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

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

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

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