Someone With Ambition Quotes & Sayings

When someone comes to you with big dreams, don't be too quick to belittle their ambition and dreams. Inspire and help them in any way you can. Even the beautiful butterfly was once a caterpillar. — Rita Zahara

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

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

In a certain reign there was a lady not of the first rank whom the emperor loved more than any of the others. The grand ladies with high ambitions thought her a presumptuous upstart, and lesser ladies were still more resentful. Everything she did offended someone. — Murasaki Shikibu

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

I am told by people all the time that they simply do not have time to read and listen to all the material they have purchased or subscribed to. But time is democratic and just. Everyone has the same amount. When I choose to read with my mid morning coffee break and you choose to blather about trivia with friends, when I choose to study for an hour sitting on my backyard deck at day's end but you choose to watch a TIVO'd American Idol episode, we reveal much. When someone says he does not have the time to apply himself to acquiring the know-how required to create sufficient value for his stated desires, he is a farmer surrounded by ripe fruit and vegetables, whole grains, and a herd of cattle on his own property who dies of starvation, unable to organize his time and discipline himself to eat. — Dan S. Kennedy

There's never been a game plan, and I suppose I've had an uneasy relationship with my ambition. Someone who had been in my year at drama school once said to me that I was terrifyingly ambitious back then. Which was not at all what I felt at the time - I felt paralysed with shyness, though that evaporated. — Jennifer Ehle

What do you mean I have to wait for someone's approval? I'm someone. I approve. So I give myself permission to move forward with my full support! — Richelle E. Goodrich

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

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

The main threads running through the lives of W. A. Clark and his daughter Huguette include the costs of ambition, the burdens of inherited wealth, the fragility of reputation, the folly of judging someone's life from the outside, and the tension between engaging with the world, with all its risks, and keeping a safe distance from danger. — Bill Dedman

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

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'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

Who's more likely to succeed - someone with high skill and no ambition, or no skill and high ambition? If you're an entrepreneur, you can hire as many skilled people for your business as you want. — Max McKeown

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

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

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

People can be threatened by someone with ambition, no matter how low the stakes or how small the rewards. And while lots of people will plant a smile on their face and say they're pleased, behind closed doors the whispers form a kind of toxic cloud of gas that goes out on the wind and finds you eventually. — Julia Kent

It's okay to have personal ambitions, but you have to take someone with you. — Roger Staubach

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

I suppose I was about 20, and a crowd of us had been to a village hop and came back to make midnight cups of coffee. I was in the kitchen helping to dish up and having a fierce argument with one of the boys in the crowd when someone else interrupted to say: 'Of course Margaret, you will go into politics won't you?' I stopped dead. Suddenly it was crystalised for me. I knew. — Margaret Thatcher

It seems to have been meeting Methodist missionaries from India that inspired Margaret with her ambition, curious in someone little more than a child, to join the Indian Civil Service After listening to them, she remembered, 'I wanted to be an Indian civil servant, because I thought that India was a remarkable place and I would love to be a part, a cog in the wheel, of this great empire. (page 6) — Charles Moore

Something I don't like seeing in other people is naked ambition, when somebody is really pushing hard to get to where they want to be. That's the way I look at that word - like you must be stepping on someone to get there. And I've never been comfortable with that. — Clive Owen

As regards the artists themselves, most of them gave up their freedom quite lightly, placing their art at the service of someone or something. As a rule, their concerns and their ambitions are those of any old careerist. I thus acquired a total distrust of art and artists, whether they were officially recognised or were endeavouring to become so, and I felt that I had nothing in common with this guild. I had a point of reference which held me elsewhere, namely that magic within art which I had encountered as a child. — Rene Magritte

I was an aspiring astrophysicist, and that's how I defined myself, not by my skin color. People didn't treat me as someone with science ambitions. They treated me as someone they thought was going to mug them, or who was a shoplifter. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Everyday that I procrastinate, everyday that I sit stagnant in fear, everyday that I fail to better myself, someone else out there with the same goals and dreams as me is doing the exact opposite. — Noel DeJesus

I have met your sister, and I have met Mehmed. They love themselves and their ambition above all else. They love what feeds their ambition, and when it stops feeding that, the love will turn to hate with more passion than either could ever love with. You love with all your heart, Radu, and deserve someone who can answer that with all of theirs. — Kiersten White

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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