Top 100 Ambition In Quotes
#1. As men advance in life, all passions resolve themselves into money. Love, ambition, even poetry, end in this.
Benjamin Disraeli
#2. I didn't decide to run for president to start a national crusade for the political reforms I believed in, or to run a campaign as if it were some grand act of patriotism. In truth, I wanted to be president because it had become my ambition to be president.
John McCain
#3. If there is to be no satisfaction in pleasure, none in wisdom, none in ambition, none in the golden mean, what then? Ah, where then? In duty. In doing right because it is right.
Lyman Abbott
#4. In spite of her vapourish airs (as the housewives of Yonville called them), Emma, all the same, never seemed gay, and usually she had at the corners of her mouth that immobile contraction that puckers the faces of old maids, and those of men whose ambition has failed.
Gustave Flaubert
#5. It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#6. If I had one singular galvanizing ambition in life, I would try to reverse engineer toward it, but I don't.
Chelsea Clinton
#7. Right now, I feel like I can take on the world. Ambition is the perfect word for where I am in my life right now.
Jordin Sparks
#8. I have an ambition to write a great book, but that's really a competition with myself. I've noticed that a lot of young writers, people in all media, want to be famous but they don't really want to do anything. I can't think of anything less worth striving for than fame.
Zadie Smith
#9. They are young, full of ambition and dreams; they are still unable to imagine that there might be a story in the world in which they are not the main characters.
Juan Gomez Barcena
#10. It's the lack of ambition that cripples most people, and makes them so pedestrian in the advertising/creative business
David Ogilvy
#12. The comfort zone is always the most desirable place to be. But in settling for comfort, there is a price to pay and it comes in the death of ambition, of hope, of youth and the death of self.
Simon Barnes
#13. The Champions League is a big ambition, and all the footballers want to play in it; it is a very important competition.
Fernando Torres
#14. Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility consider others better than yourselves.
Anonymous
#15. Be not content with the common place in character anymore than with the commonplace in ambition or intellectual attainment. Do not expect that you will make any lasting or very strong impression on the world through intellectual power without the use of an equal amount of conscience and heart.
William Jewett Tucker
#16. Those whom the world has delighted to honor have oftener been influenced in their doings by ambition and vanity than by patriotism.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld
#17. ["Ambition has been so strong as to make very miserable men take comfort that they were supreme in misery;
Francois De La Rochefoucauld
#18. How do you make it to the top when all you have is ambition and talent? You believe in yourself and surround yourself with other idealistic and talented friends that fuel each other and push against the establishment to take you seriously.
Tamra Davis
#19. I'm hopeful. I know there is a lot of ambition in Washington, obviously. But I hope the ambitious realize that they are more likely to succeed with success as opposed to failure.
George W. Bush
#20. I'm not in the Shakespeare stakes. I have no ambition.
Ian Fleming
#21. All I wanted to do was write - at the time, poems, and prose, too. I guess my ambition was simply to make money however I could to keep myself going in some modest way, and I didn't need much, I was unmarried at the time, no children.
Paul Auster
#22. 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
#23. Giving in to the forces of low ambition would be an act of climate appeasement. This is our Munich moment.
Chris Huhne
#24. Above average intelligence has always run in my family. Ambition, however, has always walked with a limp.
Jeff MacNelly
#26. I find myself really privileged to be able to go in and look at a set that the likes of Hollywood can provide, and say, 'My God, look at the craftsmanship in this; look at the ambition in it, the scale of it.'
Brendan Gleeson
#27. All it wants is to explode.'
'Nice to have an ambition in life, I suppose.
Philip Reeve
#28. Professional ambition is expected of men but is optional - or worse, sometimes even a negative - for women. "She is very ambitious" is not a compliment in our culture.
Sheryl Sandberg
#29. When you're in your 20s, your 30s, even, you have - at least, I had - vast ambitions, and you sit around mooning about these things, and you're depressed, because you haven't done them. And it takes you a long time to come to the realization that if you can't be John Updike, well, then, you can't.
Garrison Keillor
#30. My family had a lot of characteristics - achievements, ambitions, talents, expectations - that all seemed to be recessive in me.
Susanna Kaysen
#31. I think history is only ever invisible when it abets your sense of self, your desires, your ambitions, when it carries your life along in a kind of frictionless way.
Garth Greenwell
#32. What is your greatest ambition in life?'
'To become immortal ... and then die.
Jean-Luc Godard
#33. Enslave a man and you destroy his ambition, his enterprise, his capacity. In the constitution of human nature, the desire of bettering one's condition is the mainspring of effort. The first touch of slavery snaps this spring.
Horace Mann
#34. There are two great tragedies in life: one is to fail to achieve one's grandest ambitions, and the other one is to succeed.
Graham T. Allison
#35. Women show men beauty in things beyond their ambitions. Women tell men to stop and smell the roses.
Criss Jami
#36. The phlegamtic female is a weepy, bug-eyed, fat, lumpy, fleshy German. She looks like a sack of flour. She is born in order to become a mother-in-law. That is her whole ambition.
Anton Chekhov
#37. Most of our problems today are not that we don't know, but that we don't know how to put things together with the right zeal and grit to get something noble and leave noble footprints!
Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
#38. I'm living in the present. I have no ambition. It's true. But I want to live.
Gerard Depardieu
#39. I've always been most interested in the politics of everyday life: your relation to whatever you're doing, or what your ambitions are, where you live, where you find yourself in the social hierarchy.
Richard Linklater
#40. One of the many factors that separate children from adults is the apparent lack in children of teleological intent; that, beyond the immediate ambition of scoring a goal or finishing a drawing, they're not trying to get anywhere or achieve anything.
Robert Rowland Smith
#41. I don't find myself interesting as a person and the details I find boring, quite frankly. You could sum it up in a few words or sentences really: came from nothing. Self-educated. Luck. Energy. Curiosity. Ambition. That's it. Nothing at all can illuminate the work as far as I can tell.
Peter Ackroyd
#42. May each of my grandsons know, at an early age, what his life's ambition is
and may he be successful in his pursuit of that goal.
Bette Davis
#43. (I) want to do everything and see everything, sense everything and feel everything and taste everything; to know that life is an enormous experience and must be used. To be in the world, and of the world, and never to stand aside and watch.
Samuel Taylor
#44. Ambition drove many men to become false; to have one thought locked in the breast, another ready on the tongue.
Sallust
#45. I knew I could sing. That one thing I did believe in was that I could sing, but then constantly getting rejected, it started to get me down. But my voice was always there and my dream and my ambition was always there when I went through bad times.
Rebecca Ferguson
#46. Nothing else so destroys the power to stand alone as the habit of leaning upon others. If you lean, you will never be strong or original. Stand alone or bury your ambition to be somebody in the world.
Orison Swett Marden
#47. It would be suicide in the American academy to show too early an interest beyond your doctoral specialization: charges of everything from charlatanry to ambition would be levied and tenure denied. I've seen this first-hand.
Tony Judt
#48. In the same way Marxism robs workers of ambition, Feminism robs men and women of love.
Stefan Molyneux
#49. 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
#50. Seek happiness in tranquility and avoid ambition even if it be only the apparently innocent one of distinguishing yourself in science and discoveries.
Mary Shelley
#51. Mel is nuts. He puts on a suit and a tie and acts like a normal person so people think he's okay. He's definitely out in left field. He's got the ambition of a boy.
Dom DeLuise
#52. I think my mother had a lot of opportunity when she was a kid. She was a model, and she did a lot of things in her life, but she had no real ambition. I think my mother really did want a home and kids and all of that.
Kim Basinger
#53. I think it was [Jean-Luc] Godard who said that life is nothing but a bad copy of film, but then our ambition must be to make better films and better shapes of forms that are given in life.
Abbas Kiarostami
#54. Having a Great Ambition is also a Meditation. When our efforts are focussed sincerely, even during sleep, our brains will work on it, in the form of Dreams.
Dinesh Kumar Radhakrishnan
#55. I feel that your ambitions should always exceed the budget. That no matter what budget you're doing, you should be dreaming bigger than the budget you have, and then it's a matter of reigning it in to the reality. You try to make things count.
Guillermo Del Toro
#56. 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
#57. These are O Lord the humble desires of my most reasonable ambition and all I dare call happinesse on earth: wherein I set no rule or limit to thy hand or providence. Dispose of me according to the wisdome of thy pleasure. Thy will bee done, though in my owne undoing.
Thomas Browne
#58. 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
#59. I have a profound dislike for showing off one's material wealth. This is insensitive and it is not what human hearts are made for. But what I like about China and sometimes miss in Europe is the entrepreneurial spirit of our young people, their ambition and dynamism.
Zhang Xin
#60. If you can't write well then your ambition to become famous in this way will be frustrated. Either that or you have to get an amanuensis who will write for you.
Richard Lewontin
#61. A noble man compares and estimates himself by an idea which is higher than himself; and a mean man, by one lower than himself. The one produces aspiration; the other ambition, which is the way in which a vulgar man aspires.
Marcus Aurelius
#62. When doing family entertainment, you don't actually worry about kids. You know what you can't do. But in terms of sensibility and sophistication and wit and ambition, aim for your own taste level, and kids will - if they're interested in the subject matter - be glad that you did.
Nina Jacobson
#63. Love's but the frailty of the mind, When 'tis not with ambition joined; A sickly flame, which if not fed expires; And feeding, wastes in self-consuming fires.
William Congreve
#64. Love and friendship, two of life's abiding rewards, are endangered species in Hollywood. People crave both, mistaking alliance for friendship, lust for love, and ambition for both.
Lynda Obst
#65. Holmes, who loathed every form of society with his whole Bohemian soul, remained in our lodgings in Baker Street, buried among his old books, and alternating from week to week between cocaine and ambition, the drowsiness of the drug, and the fierce energy of his own keen nature.
Arthur Conan Doyle
#66. Your trouble, William, is that you have no ambition. You don't see that there is in life only ever one goal.' 'And what is that?'
More', George said simply. 'Just more of anything. More of everything.
Philippa Gregory
#67. Count Coudenhove-Kalergi put it succinctly in one of his speeches when he declared his ambition that Europe "supersedes democracy" and that democracy be replaced by a "social aristocracy of the spirit."52
Yanis Varoufakis
#68. An average person with average talent, ambition and education can outstrip the most brilliant genius in our society, if that person has clear, focused goals.
Brian Tracy
#69. Indeed, on the face of it, this man of abnormal strength and constitution and obscure ambition, whom Hugh would never know, could never deliver nor make agreement to God for, but in his way loved and desired to help, had triumphantly succeeded in pulling himself together.
Malcolm Lowry
#70. You cannot value dreams according to the odds of their coming true. The real value is in stirring within us the will to aspire.
Sonia Sotomayor
#71. If a person holds no ambitions in this world, he suffers unknowingly. If a person holds ambitions, he suffers knowingly, but very slowly.
Alan Lightman
#72. It is not sufficient for the young to devote their enthusiasm, their courage, their ambition, their self-sacrifice to the great ideas of the time; the young must not only preserve but increase their powers if they are to be really equal to their eternal task: that of drawing the age in advance.
Ellen Key
#73. 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
#74. It is the art of mankind to polish the world, and every one who works is scrubbing in some part.
Henry David Thoreau
#75. On ambition, goal setting and competition - it doesn't matter if you lose, but you can't win if you don't play the game.
Aaron Lauritsen
#76. Every actor's greatest ambition is to create his own, definite and original role, a character with which he will always be identified. In my case, that role was Dracula.
Bela Lugosi
#77. 'Chef' is a dish of arroz con pollo served with a smile but not much style. The critic in the film would give it a low grade, for agreeability without ambition.
Richard Corliss
#78. If you couldn't help harboring higher aspirations in life, you should at least harbor only simple desires, reduced in passion and ambition, as if you had been de-generized and now had only enough strength to be average.
Elif Shafak
#79. It had long been an ambition to find the line of force that might lead to the Holy Land in the time of Christ.
Stephen R. Lawhead
#80. Our highest ambition is to be included in the stream of American life, to be permitted to "play the game" as any other American; and is opposed to anything that aids in the exclusion; the face may be Africa, but the heart has the beat of Wall Street.
Chester Himes
#81. Nobody in Colonial America, to be sure, believed that society owed every child the ultimate in education, but intelligence, industry, and thrift combined with ambition got many a poor man's son into the colonial colleges.
Louis B. Wright
#82. You haven't done your best yet because you haven't seen the best you can do yet. You are where you are now because you haven't seen where you can be yet. If you see, your attitude, thought and tactics towards life will definitely change
Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
#83. Discontented inhabitants who willingly admit a foreign power either through excessive ambition or through fear, as was the case with the Etolians, who admitted the Romans into Greece. So it was with every province that the Romans entered: they were brought in by the inhabitants themselves.
Niccolo Machiavelli
#84. I never engaged in public affairs for my own interest, pleasure, envy, jealousy, avarice or ambition, or even the desire of fame
John Adams
#85. A young man's ambition is to get along in the world and make a place for himself-half your life goes that way, till you're 45 or 50. Then, if you're lucky, you make terms with life, you get released.
Robert Penn Warren
#86. His ambition is to be the spider in the World Wide Web.
John McCarthy
#87. Dream big & have huge ambition, but never forget life is lived in small moments and sustained by simple acts of love.
Cory Booker
#88. There is a native baseness in the ambition which seeks beyond its desert, that never shows more conspicuously than when, no matter how, it temporarily gains its object.
William Gilmore Simms
#89. We've had enough." He took back the report and jammed it under his arm. "We've had a bellyful, in fact."
"And like everyone who's had enough," said Control as Alleline noisily left the room, "he wants more.
John Le Carre
#90. The first virtue of a young man today - that is, for the next fifty years perhaps, as long as we live in fear, and religion has regained its powers - is to be incapable of enthusiasm and not to have much in the way of brains.
Stendhal
#91. Hit that back-stabber where it hurts, right in the ambition.
Eoin Colfer
#92. This is the posture of fortunes slave: one foot in the gravy, one foot in the grave.
James Thurber
#93. Some are slaves of ambition or money, but others are interested in understanding life itself. These give themselves the name of philosophers , and they value the contemplation and discovery of nature beyond all other pursuits.
Pythagoras
#94. 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
#95. It was the only ambition I ever had - not to be a dancer or Hollywood movie star, but to be a housewife in a good marriage.
Doris Day
#96. Things that I consider bad qualities, I always try and figure out where they are coming from. I don't consider ambition to be a bad one. It's served me very well in my life. Very well.
Rob Lowe
#98. The most important gift anyone can give a girl is a belief in her own power as an individual, her value without reference to gender, her respect as a person with potential.
Emilie Buchwald
#99. To be given a lead role in something as cool and fresh and crazy as 'Spartacus' was a real thrill. That had a lot to do with the evolution of my ambition as well.
Jai Courtney
#100. I believe unless we have ambition to accomplish things and to do things that we amount to but very little in the battle of life.
Heber J. Grant
