Top 100 Great Ambition Quotes
#1. Few are more unhappy than those who have great ambition, but little energy to urge it into activity.
Norm MacDonald
#2. 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
#3. Great ambition without contribution is without significance.
The Emperor's Club
Steve William Laible
#4. The honey-bee's great ambition is to be rich, to lay up great stores, to possess the sweet of every flower that blooms. She is more than provident. Enough will not satisfy her, she must have all she can get by hook or crook.
John Burroughs
#5. If only I could sit and patch them up for him. That was my great ambition.
Kiera Cass
#6. Great ambition is the passion of a great character. Those endowed with it may perform very good or bad acts. All depends on the principles which direct them.
Napoleon Bonaparte
#7. If you have a great ambition, take as big a step as possible in the direction of fulfilling it. The step may only be a tiny one, but trust that it may be the largest one possible for now.
Mildred H. McAfee
#8. Great ambition, the desire of real superiority, of leading and directing, seems to be altogether peculiar to man, and speech is the great instrument of ambition.
Adam Smith
#9. I was never a man of great ambition
I cried too easily
I didn't have a head for science
Words often failed me
While others prayed I only moved my lips
Nicole Krauss
#10. Anyone with great ambition, great vision, and great passion can be a great person.
Debasish Mridha
#11. That was my great ambition. Not to be Illea's princess. To be Aspen's.
Kiera Cass
#12. The greatest evil which fortune can inflict on men is to endow them with small talents and great ambition.
Luc De Clapiers
#13. I've got a great ambition to die of exhaustion rather than boredom.
Thomas Carlyle
#14. I don't have any great ambition to go out and make money. But I am still fascinated in starting up businesses and starting it in a way and running in a way that I want to do it.
Michael Birch
#15. The great ambition of women is to inspire love.
Moliere
#16. Great Ambition, unchecked by principle, or the love of Glory, is an unruly Tyrant ...
Alexander Hamilton
#17. By Gryffindor, the bravest were Prized far beyond the rest; For Ravenclaw, the cleverest Would always be the best; For Hufflepuff, hard workers were Most worthy of admission; And power-hungry Slytherin Loved those of great ambition.
J.K. Rowling
#18. Men of great ambition have sought happiness . . . and have found fame.
Napoleon Bonaparte
#19. Ambition is the incentive that makes purpose GREAT and ACHIEVEMENT greater!
Orison Swett Marden
#20. My life is great. It's just not exceptional. And there was a time when it could have been." "You killed your ambition, didn't you?" "It died of natural causes. Of neglect.
Blake Crouch
#21. 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
#22. Artistic ambition is important. And it seems it would be a great time to do some theatre, like a new extreme.
Emile Hirsch
#23. 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
#24. We need spirited, energetic and strong young people whose hearts are filled with life, enthusiasm, zeal and dynamism; whose souls are full of ambition, aspiration and vigor and have great goals, rising and aspiring to reach them until they eventually arrive at their destination.
Hassan Al-Banna
#25. As great a picture can be made as one's mental capacity-no greater. Art cannot be taught; it must be self-inspiration, though the imagination may be fired and the ambition and work directed by the advice and example of others.
Edward Weston
#26. Moderation has been called a virtue to limit the ambition of great men, and to console undistinguished people for their want of fortune and their lack of merit.
Benjamin Disraeli
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. Ambition is an idol, on whose wings great minds are carried only to extreme; to be sublimely great or to be nothing.
Shakti Gawain
#30. 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
#33. Fear is a great robber of power. It paralyzes the thinking faculties, ruins spontaneity, enthusiasm, and self confidence. It has a blighting effect upon all one's thoughts, moods, and efforts. It destroys ambition and efficiency.
Orison Swett Marden
#34. My great joy is to give form to reality. Music is a great release, a great enjoyment to me. Eventually I'd like to write something of great importance. That's my ambition-to write something worthwhile.
Jim Morrison
#35. 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
#36. If the artist is necessarily sensitive, does that sensitiveness form in its essence a state constantly liable to shade off into the morbid? Does this liability, moreover, increase in proportion as the effort is great and the ambition intense?
Henry James
#37. As Christians, I challenge you. Have a great aim - have a high standard - make Jesus your ideal ... make Him an ideal not merely to be admired but also to be followed.
Eric Liddell
#38. News-hunters have great leisure, with little thought; much petty ambition to be considered intelligent, without any other pretension than being able to communicate what they have just learned.
Johann Georg Ritter Von Zimmermann
#39. Down deep in every soul has a hidden longing, impulse, and
ambition to do something fine and enduring ... If you are willing,
great things are possible to you.
Grenville Kleiser
#40. My biggest ambition over everything is to have kids. It feels great. I'd love a big family.
Rafe Spall
#41. Nature is my religion. And my desire ... my ambition ... the great goal I wish to achieve is to take my readers with me into the heart of this Nature. I love it, and I feel that they must love it ... if I can only get the two acquainted.
James Oliver Curwood
#44. At the beginning of the 20th century, the ambition of the great painters was to make paintings that were like music, which was then considered as the noblest art.
Brian Eno
#45. Cable is a dynamic and highly innovative industry, providing cutting edge services and content that Americans love. The broadband platform the industry has deployed is a critical part of the infrastructure needed to realize our national ambition to be a great nation in the Information Age.
Michael K. Powell
#46. If you cannot do great things in life, make sure you do the small things in a great way.
Habeeb Akande
#47. I think 'Game of Thrones' was extraordinary. I want to do some period pieces. It would be lovely to tell great stories, that is my main ambition. And to be working with amazing creators.
Stana Katic
#48. Modeling is a great beginning, but it's also a kind of trap if you have any ambition or a mind that needs to be stimulated.
Maud Adams
#49. I am actuated by an ambition which I believe to be an honourable one - the ambition of serving the great cause of truth, while endeavouring to forward the literature of the country.
Edgar Allan Poe
#50. Boys, be ambitious. Be ambitious not for money, not for selfish aggrandizement, not for the evanescent thing which men call fame. Be ambitious for the attainment of all that a man can be.
William Clark
#51. People who think that Sylvia Plath was a poor, sensitive poet are not getting that she had great amounts of ambition and anger that moved her along, or she wouldn't have been able to fight against that depression to produce such an incredible body of work by the age of thirty.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
#52. On why I don't trust democracy without extremely powerful systems of accountability and recall What seems to be generosity is often only disguised ambition - which despises small interests to gain great ones.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld
#54. The thrust of ambition is, and always has been, great, but among the bright-eyed it had once a more adventurous and individualistic air, a much more bracing rivalry.
Louis Kronenberger
#55. Ambition is the driving engine behind every great success.
Debasish Mridha
#56. Lycurgus, Numa, Moses, Jesus Christ, Mohammed, all these great rogues, all these great thought-tyrants, knew how to associate the divinities they fabricated with their own boundless ambition.
Marquis De Sade
#57. Nothing motivates a great employee more than a mission that's so important that it supersedes everyone's personal ambition.
Ben Horowitz
#58. when you see the problem as a more of you and less of people, you will find a distinctive solution to the recurring hurdles. Attitudinal and mindset change can cause a great change
Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
#59. If at great things thou would'st arrive, Get riches first, get wealth, and treasure heap, Not difficult, if thou hearken to me; Riches are mine, fortune is in my hand, They whom I favor thrive in wealth amain, While virtue, valor, wisdom, sit in want.
John Milton
#60. And all my endeavours are unlucky explorers come back, abandoning the expedition; the specimens, the lilies of ambition still spring in their climate, still unpicked; but time, time is all I lacked to find them, as the great collectors before me.
Gavin Douglas
#62. Without ambition, no goal can be met.
Kya Aliana
#63. For me, ambition has become a dirty word. I prefer hunger. To be hungry- great. To have hopes, dreams- great.
Johnny Depp
#64. Nothing great could ever be achieved, without personal force, determined spirit and self-confidence.
Lailah Gifty Akita
#65. If our mission is grand & our vision is glorious, we need great values that match our ambition or else, we toil in vain...
Assegid Habtewold
#66. be much more friendly to such things that matter most .Things that will propel your vision and ambition to higher heights. Things that will help you enlarge your tentacles. Do not look down on small things however
Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
#67. One of the great ambitions is to discover the diversity of the world, to discover who inhabits the world.
Theodore Zeldin
#68. We spend a lot of time bickering at great cost, and very little time actually coming up with solutions. And I think we misuse our ambition for our own gains and rarely for the betterment of ourselves, and people around us and our environment. And I think that's sort of pathetic and desperate.
Dave Matthews
#69. If you have drive,
your ambition is great.
If you have discipline,
your willpower is great.
If you have determination,
your focus is great.
Matshona Dhliwayo
#70. The ambition of most beings is just to stay alive, overeat, spend too much, and avoid hard work. I'm happy that I can achieve much more than that ... and we all die sooner or later. A death in service of a great ideal is a fine thing.
Karen Traviss
#71. Ambition is the weakness of all the great spirits who in acceptance will find the joy & the despair the seek. The physician can only cure when he is willing to assume your disease. To be shunned is to be God a little...
Kenneth Patchen
#72. Men seek to be great; they would have offices, wealth, power, and fame. They think that to be great is to possess one side of nature,
the sweet, without the other side,
the bitter.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#74. One of the great tragedies we witness almost daily is the tragedy of men of high aim and low achievement. Their motives are noble. Their proclaimed ambition is praiseworthy. Their capacity to achieve is great. But their discipline is weak. They succumb to indolence. Appetite robs them of will.
Gordon B. Hinckley
#75. Moderation is represented as a virtue in order to restrain the ambition of great men, and to console those of a meaner condition in their lesser merit and fortune.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld
#76. Five great enemies of peace inhabit us: avarice, ambition, envy, anger and pride.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#77. 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
#78. I haven't got ambitions. Actually, I'm determined not to die until I get very old. I want to be a great-great-great-grandmother.
Charlotte Rampling
#79. Only those with great ambitions know what great fears drive them forward.
Peter Ackroyd
#80. It doesn't matter how great your shoes are if you don't accomplish anything in them.
Martina Boone
#81. I've put out a lot of little roots these two years," Anne told the moon, "and when I'm pulled up they're going to hurt a great deal. But it's best to go, I think, and, as Marilla says, there's no good reason why I shouldn't. I must get out all my ambitions and dust them.
L.M. Montgomery
#82. His struggle to mold me in his image had been successful after all. The old walrus in fact managed to instill in me a great and burning ambition; it had simply found expression in an unintended pursuit. He never understood that the Devils Thumb was the same as medical school, only different.
Jon Krakauer
#83. What did you have in you? - some childish notions, a few half-baked sentiments, a lot of undigested beauty, a great black mass of ignorance, a heart filled to bursting with love, and an ambition as big as your love and as futile as your ignorance.
Jack London
#84. The ambition which he felt astir at times in the darkness of his soul sought no outlet. A dusk like that of the outer world obscured his mind as he heard the mare's hoofs clattering along the tramtrack on the Rock Road and the great can swaying and rattling behind him.
James Joyce
#85. Make sure that your ambitions are really lofty - not just seem to be. Sometimes instead of engaging in those so called "mountaintop employments of great value," we spend our time in digging a pit and then falling therein, so that our temporary joy may become a permanent and bitter loss.
Sterling W. Sill
#86. You want to know the great thing about today, it doesn't care about what you did or didn't do yesterday or what you're going to do tomorrow, it only cares about what you do right now.
Noel DeJesus
#87. Bill Clinton was a very, very good speaker. But like many people who are great speakers and great thinkers and have a lot of energy and ambition, he talked too much.
Robert Reich
#88. The message for all students should be: Put down the bong and get to work, because the number of curious, eager-to-learn peers around the world with the means and ambition to get a great college education is about to increase a thousandfold.
Kevin Carey
#89. Ambition is the necessary spur of a great mind to great action; when acting upon a weak mind it impels it to absurdity, or sours it with discontent.
Frances Wright
#91. To his doctrines I owe my great and glorious ambition for the sex to which I proudly belong and whose independence I shall defend until my dying day.
Rosa Bonheur
#92. The great corporations of this country were not founded by ordinary people. They were founded by people with extraordinary intelligence, ambition, and aggressiveness.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
#94. The results are in great need greater ambition.
Heraclitus
#95. Level 5 leaders channel their ego needs away from themselves and into the larger goal of building a great company. It's not that Level 5 leaders have no ego or self-interest. Indeed, they are incredibly ambitious-but their ambition is first and foremost for the institution, not themselves.
James C. Collins
#96. There may be in every government a few choice spirits, who may act from more worthy motives. One great error is that we suppose mankind more honest than they are. Our prevailing passions are ambition and interest ...
Alexander Hamilton
#97. I'm going to be a great film star. That is, if booze and sex don't get me first.
Jay Presson Allen
#98. Among the droves of men with political ambitions in the United States, I found very few with that virile candor, that manly independence of thought, that often distinguished Americans in earlier times and that is invariably the preeminent trait of great characters wherever it exists.
Alexis De Tocqueville
#99. The start of a film is like a gateway, a formal entrance-point. The first three minutes of a film make great demands on an audience's patience and credulity. A great deal has to be learnt very rapidly about place and attitude, character and intent and ambition.
Peter Greenaway
#100. Stay away from people who belittle your ambition, small people do that, but great people make you like to be great!
Mark Twain
