Top 100 Ambition In Quotes
#1. If I had one singular galvanizing ambition in life, I would try to reverse engineer toward it, but I don't.
Chelsea Clinton
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. All it wants is to explode.'
'Nice to have an ambition in life, I suppose.
Philip Reeve
#5. What is your greatest ambition in life?'
'To become immortal ... and then die.
Jean-Luc Godard
#6. 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
#7. The reading of great books has been a life-altering activity to me and, for better or worse, brought me singing and language-obsessed to that country where I make my living. Except for teaching, I've had no other ambition in life than to write books that mattered.
Pat Conroy
#8. I can't sing. Definitely no ambition in that area.
Corin Nemec
#9. My ambition in life: to become successful enough to resume my career as a neurasthenic.
Mason Cooley
#10. Who know but He, whose hand the lightning forms, Who heaves old ocean, and who wings the storms, Pours fierce ambition in a Caesar's mind.
Alexander Pope
#11. Ambition, in a private man is a vice, is in a prince the virtue.
Philip Massinger
#12. You might be a redneck if your biggest ambition in life is to git that big ole coon. The one what hangs 'round over yonder, back'ah Bubba's barn ...
Jeff Foxworthy
#13. 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
#14. The belief in their actions can mend constellations. The ambition in their thirst for knowledge can both create and destroy.
F.K. Preston
#15. I'm instinctively very suspicious and guarded, and I try to counteract it so much. I find reason allows you to be open, and my only sort of ambition in life is to try and be as open as possible.
James McAvoy
#16. With the attention I got on my wealth, I thought I would have become a source of resentment, but it is just the other way around - it just generates that much more ambition in many people.
Azim Premji
#17. Though ambition in itself is a vice, it often is also the parent of virtue.
Hosea Ballou
#18. I never wanted to be an actress. I didn't have any ambition in that area.
Pattie Boyd
#19. You can spend the rest of your life fighting to be respected, accepted and understood by the people you have created a life with or you can start living a life where that isn't a daily goal and ambition in your relationship.
Shannon L. Alder
#20. The great mass of human beings are not acutely selfish. After the age of about thirty they abandon individual ambition - in many cases, indeed, they almost abandon the sense of being individuals at all - and live chiefly for others, or are simply smothered under drudgery.
George Orwell
#21. My ambition in high school was to be a high school coach and teacher, and that's still what I do: teach.
Mike Krzyzewski
#22. Though ambition in itself is a vice, yet it is often the parent of virtues.
Quintilian
#23. The world has nothing to fear from military ambition in our Government.
James K. Polk
#24. Ambition, in one respect, is like a singer's voice; pitched at too high a key, it breaks and comes to nothing.
Christian Nestell Bovee
#25. My own ambition in the ring had always been skillful boxing, speed and defense - on the order of Mike Gibbons.
Gene Tunney
#26. Do not allow the voice of self doubt and fear to play louder than voice that helped create the ambition in the first place.
Emeka Egbuonu
#27. My main ambition in life is to be on the Devil's most wanted list.
Leonard Ravenhill
#28. What is your ambition in life today? Is it to get rich? Is it to make a name for yourself? Is it even to do some wonderful thing for God? Listen to me, beloved. The highest desire that can possess any human heart is a longing to see God.
J. Vernon McGee
#29. There are a lot of people who go to Washington or go to their state houses with a personal ambition in mind.
Mitt Romney
#30. Obscurity can be a fire of ambition in those who have stalwart souls.
Taylor Caldwell
#31. I think my greatest ambition in life is to pass on to others what I know.
Frank Sinatra
#32. I was lucky to learn early in life that you need money for food and shelter, but there's no ambition in having money in the bank for the sake of it!
Helen McCrory
#33. Raising ambition in 2014 is crucial for arriving at a meaningful climate agreement in 2015.
Ban Ki-moon
#34. My only ambition in life ... is to wear size 28 jeans.
Karl Lagerfeld
#35. The biggest ambition in my career is still to win the European Cup. I want to have a picture of that to look at later; I want to have that medal. You can have a contract that is better than your friends, but no player looks back and says: 'I won more money.'
Fernando Torres
#36. Most people try to avoid cliches. It's my ambition in life to try to get 'em right!
Philip Schultz
#37. I don't have a particular ambition in any medium. I just want to keep telling stories. If somebody pays me, also good.
Joss Whedon
#38. But if you harbor bitter envy and selfish ambition in your hearts, do not boast about it or deny the truth. Such 'wisdom' does not come down from heaven but is earthly, unspiritual, demonic. For where you have envy and selfish ambition, there you find disorder and every evil practice" (James 3:14
Craig Groeschel
#39. Sternly saving his greatest strength for the right wing, he did not yield to that vaulting ambition in his plan. But the lure of the left wing remained to tempt his successors.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#40. I can't wait for the iPhone 6. It's my only ambition in life to have it quickly.
Karl Lagerfeld
#41. I haven't ever had any ambition in my life. I just drift from day to day with a stupid grin on my face.
Ian Gillan
#42. When I was only eleven years old, I decided to become a writer. I told this ambition in a letter to Laura Ingalls Wilder; the die was cast. How could I go back on my word?
Sonia Levitin
#43. I'm not an ambitious person, there is no ambition in my life. I have a mission in my life. And my mission is to serve my country. And when I am working for my state, it means I am working for my country, or my nation.
Narendra Modi
#44. My ambition in the Army was to make everybody I worked for regretful when I was ordered to other duty.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
#45. As men advance in life, all passions resolve themselves into money. Love, ambition, even poetry, end in this.
Benjamin Disraeli
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. It's the lack of ambition that cripples most people, and makes them so pedestrian in the advertising/creative business
David Ogilvy
#55. 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
#56. The Champions League is a big ambition, and all the footballers want to play in it; it is a very important competition.
Fernando Torres
#57. Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility consider others better than yourselves.
Anonymous
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. ["Ambition has been so strong as to make very miserable men take comfort that they were supreme in misery;
Francois De La Rochefoucauld
#61. 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
#62. I'm not in the Shakespeare stakes. I have no ambition.
Ian Fleming
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. Giving in to the forces of low ambition would be an act of climate appeasement. This is our Munich moment.
Chris Huhne
#66. Above average intelligence has always run in my family. Ambition, however, has always walked with a limp.
Jeff MacNelly
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. My family had a lot of characteristics - achievements, ambitions, talents, expectations - that all seemed to be recessive in me.
Susanna Kaysen
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. Women show men beauty in things beyond their ambitions. Women tell men to stop and smell the roses.
Criss Jami
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. I'm living in the present. I have no ambition. It's true. But I want to live.
Gerard Depardieu
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. (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
#83. Ambition drove many men to become false; to have one thought locked in the breast, another ready on the tongue.
Sallust
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. In the same way Marxism robs workers of ambition, Feminism robs men and women of love.
Stefan Molyneux
#88. 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
#89. 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
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. 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
