Our Ambition Quotes

#1. 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

#2. Our ambition should be to rule ourselves, the true kingdom for each one of us; and true progress is to know more, and be more, and to do more.

John Lubbock

#3. We have our ambition for the future and God. And thus we put God as a plus sign after something else we want.

Aiden Wilson Tozer

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. As the country now turns a new leaf, our ambition is to give hope to each and every Afghan.

Hamid Karzai

#7. But we need to show that the EU can modernise itself, can adapt to the needs of its citizens, can take their views into account. That will be our ambition for the UK Presidency.

John Hutton

#8. To reach the height of our ambition is like trying to reach the rainbow; as we advance it recedes.

Edmund Burke

#9. We must be willing to place all that we have
not just our possessions (they may be the easiest things of all to give up), but also our ambition and pride and stubbornness and vanity
we must place it all on the altar of God, kneel there in silent submission, and willingly walk away.

Jeffrey R. Holland

#10. Throughout our history, Microsoft has won by making big, bold bets. I believe that now is not the time to scale back the scope of our ambition or the scale of our investment. While our opportunities are greater than ever, we also face new competitors, faster-moving markets and new customer demands.

Steve Ballmer

#11. This was our ambition: to be small and clear and free.
Alas, the summer's energy wanes quickly,
A moment and it is gone. And no longer
May we make the necessary arrangements, simple as they are.
Our star was brighter perhaps when it had water in it.

John Ashbery

#12. We [H&M] believe that growth, profit and sustainability are not contradictory. Our ambition is to be a fair and profitable company, because otherwise we couldn't open any new stores, we couldn't produce new designs and no new jobs would be created. H&M would soon cease to exist.

Karl-Johan Persson

#13. I don't think that ambition should not be in the dictionary of entrepreneurs. But our ambition should be realistic. You have to realise that you can't do everything.

Mukesh Ambani

#14. If we are going to realise our ambition of ending the harmful practices of FGM and forced marriage, the role of young people in pushing for change is crucial. We also need to ensure that everyone, from government to civil society, is playing their part.

Theresa May

#15. I think part of being a parent, to love one's child, is to accept them as they come - not to see them as instruments of our ambition or as creatures to be molded, as if they were themselves commodities.

Michael Sandel

#16. The society that denies its poverty and injustice has lost a part of its freedom as well. If we deny our dissatisfaction, our anger, our pain, our ambition, we will suffer. If we deny our values, our beliefs, our longings, or our goodness, we will suffer.

Jack Kornfield

#17. If boyhood and youth are but vanity, must it not be our ambition to become men?

Vincent Van Gogh

#18. Women cannot compete with men in physical prowess. And why in the name of all that is sane should we? Why not rather have our ambition go into sport for health, endurance, and the mere love of it?

Michael Sokolove

#19. I believe that all technological societies tend to self-destruct. The reason is that the very things that make us a successful technological society, such as our curiosity, our ambition and determination, will also cause us to fall.

Pete Seeger

#20. While we may not live to see the full realization of our ambition, we will have the satisfaction of knowing that the world we leave to our children will be better off for what we did.

Barack Obama

#21. If we go too far down the road of choosing the genetic traits of children, my worry is that parenting will be less a kind of school for humility than it should be, and we will become too accustomed to regarding children as instruments of our ambition and of our desires.

Michael Sandel

#22. If we deny our anger, our pain, our ambition, or our goodness, we will suffer.

M. Scott Peck

#23. Europeans should be patient and try to find a formula to resolve this nuclear issue. We are determined to remove any ambiguities over our nuclear ambitions and also protect our right.

Hamid-Reza Assefi

#24. Once we take our eyes away from ourselves, from our interests, from our own rights, privileges, ambitions - then they will become clear to see Jesus around us.

Mother Teresa

#25. Giving in to the forces of low ambition would be an act of climate appeasement. This is our Munich moment.

Chris Huhne

#26. 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

#27. 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

#28. Never be too absorbed by your own ambitions to encourage those of your family.

Wes Fesler

#29. Perhaps our national ambition to standardize ourselves has behind it the notion that democracy means standardization. But standardization is the surest way to destroy the initiative, to denumb the creative impulse above all else essential to the vitality and growth of democratic ideals.

Ida Tarbell

#30. 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

#31. There are some who become spies for money, or out of vanity and megalomania, or out of ambition, or out of a desire for thrills. But the malady of our time is of those who become spies out of idealism.

Max Lerner

#32. 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

#33. Without a vision to guide our path, and without ambition that knows no limits, we can never build a bright future for generations to come.

Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum

#34. 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

#35. 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

#36. 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

#37. What's important is the ambition that results from our weakness.

Sharon Creech

#38. 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

#39. We all wind up the same way, no matter what our goals or ambitions are. We have nothing at all to say about how we got into this world or how are going to leave it.

William Friedkin

#40. Real life is about accepting ups and downs, the good and the bad, the possibility of failure as well as the ambition to succeed. Atheism speaks to the truth about our human nature because it recognizes all this and does not seek to shield us from the truth by myth and superstition

Julian Baggini

#41. One of our daughters is now a physician; another is a vice president of a major entertainment company; and the third is a clinical therapist. They place no limits on their ambitions, but for them, those ambitions also have had to fit within the context of having children.

Tom Brokaw

#42. In our personal ambitions we are individualists. But in our seeking for economic and political progress as a nation, we all go up or else all go down as one people.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

#43. Will we ever understand the price of ambition, or ever apply our heart to life with submission?

Francisco Leon

#44. When Jesus is truly our Lord, He directs our lives and we gladly obey Him. Indeed, we bring every part of our lives under His lordship - our home and family, our sexuality and marriage, our job or unemployment, our money and possessions, our ambitions and recreations.

John Stott

#45. Astronomy was born of superstition; eloquence of ambition, hatred, falsehood, and flattery; geometry of avarice; physics of an idle curiosity; and even moral philosophy of human pride. Thus the arts and sciences owe their birth to our vices.

Jean-Baptiste Rousseau

#46. The ambition of the greatest men of our generation has been to wipe every tear from every eye. That may be beyond us, but so long as there are tears and suffering, so long our work will not be over.

Jawaharlal Nehru

#47. Feminist art may ... though perhaps our imaginations are so mutilated now that we are incapable even of the ambition, introduce a new theme ... should we call it 'joy'?

Andrea Dworkin

#48. Human ambitions are like Japanese carp; they grow proportional to the size of their environment. Our achievements grow according to the size of our dreams and the degree to which we are in touch with our mission.

Keith Ferrazzi

#49. Most of us have spent our lives caught up in plans, expectations, ambitions for the future; in regrets, guilt or shame about the past. To come into the present is to stop the war.

Jack Kornfield

#50. The big house and the nice suits and the other things that our money culture says you should buy ... betrays a poverty of ambition.

Barack Obama

#51. Among precautions against ambition, it may not be amiss to take precautions against our own. I must fairly say, I dread our own power and our own ambition: I dread our being too much dreaded.

Edmund Burke

#52. How difficult the task to quench the fire and the pride of private ambition, and to sacrifice ourselves and all our hopes and expectations to the public weal! How few have souls capable of
so noble an undertaking!

Abigail Adams

#53. To be ambitious of true honor and of the real glory and perfection of our nature is the very principle and incentive of virtue; but to be ambitious of titles, place, ceremonial respects, and civil pageantry, is as vain and little as the things are which we court

Philip Sidney

#54. 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

#55. Our hopes, desires and ambitions are powerful forces existing within us for the shaping of the future. They are the generating forces that create the future.

Daisaku Ikeda

#56. Certain is it that there is no kind of affection so purely angelic as of a father to a daughter. In love to our wives there is desire; to our sons, ambition, but to our daughters there is something which there are no words to express.

Joseph Addison

#57. When you don't have crazy ambitions, you're always happy just kind of getting by. Our expectations were always kept low. And so I feel like we appreciate it all the more to have all this good fortune come our way, which we hadn't really been planning.

Ty Burrell

#58. The quest of the alchemists to turn lead into gold is a metaphor for our attempts to turn the base metal of ourselves, that person hooked on consumerism, filled with angst and ambition, into the gold of what we can be and really are.

Chloe Thurlow

#59. To feel ambition and to act upon it is to embrace the unique calling of our souls. Not to act upon that ambition is to turn our backs on ourselves and on the reason for our existence.

Steven Pressfield

#60. In ambition, as in love, the successful can afford to be indulgent toward their rivals. The prize our own, it is graceful to recognize the merit that vainly aspired to it.

Christian Nestell Bovee

#61. Whether we fall by ambition, blood, or lust
Like diamonds we are cut with our own dust

John Webster

#62. Our Exhibitions [The Royal Academy] have ... a mischievous tendency, by seducing the Painter to an ambition of pleasing indiscriminately the mixed multitude of people who resort to them.

Joshua Reynolds

#63. All our dreams are small and silly until they are big and obvious.

Vatsal Surti

#64. The voracious ambition of humans is never sated by dreams coming true, because there is always the thought that everything might be done better and again. -The Fault In Our Stars

John Green

#65. The United States must also continue to push the United Nations Security Council for strong action to thwart Iran's nuclear ambitions. In the meantime, it is our job to take meaningful steps to eliminate the threats posed by Iran.

Allyson Schwartz

#66. Life has a time limit. And we are changing all the time. So are our ambitions, desires, and purposes . . . The important thing is to find something that never changes in you.

Fumio Obata

#67. Our dreams have to be bigger. Our ambitions higher. Our commitment deeper. And our efforts greater. This is my dream for Reliance and for India.

Dhirubhai Ambani

#68. Fears, even the most basic ones, can totally destroy our ambitions. Fear, if left unchecked, can destroy our lives. Fear is one of the many enemies lurking inside us.

Jim Rohn

#69. If it is true that love is the pursuit in another of qualities we lack in ourselves, then in our love of someone from another culture, one ambition may be to weld ourselves more closely to values missing from our own culture.

Alain De Botton

#70. The saints differ from us in their exuberance, the excess of our human talents. Moderation is not their secret. It is in the wildness of their dreams, the desperate vitality of their ambitions, that they stand apart from ordinary people of good will.

Phyllis McGinley

#71. Ambition, I have come to believe, is the most primal and sacred fundament of our being. To feel ambition and to act upon it is to embrace the unique calling of our souls. Not to act upon that ambition is to turn our backs on ourselves and on the reason for our existence. Those

Steven Pressfield

#72. In terms of putting the cast together, no problems. You know, the only problem always is just price-point. Our ambitions as we get older, all of us, is to try and do more.

Eric Fellner

#73. Independence is not a whim or an ambition. It is the necessary condition of our survival as an ethnic group.

Aslan Maskhadov

#74. Our own grandchildren may demonstrate that-sometimes- Gigantic is Beautiful.

Arthur C. Clarke

#75. The utter folly of our time is lamentable, that men should think to assist God with human help and to protect the Church of Christ by worldly ambition.

Hilary Of Poitiers

#76. When routine bites hard, and ambitions are low. When resentment rides high, but emotion won't grow ... and we're changing our ways, taking different roads. Love will tear us apart.

Ian Curtis

#77. We can each define ambition and progress for ourselves. The goal is to work toward a world where expectations are not set by the stereotypes that hold us back, but by our personal passion, talents and interests.

Sheryl Sandberg

#78. Even if we've never been inside a synagogue or a mosque or a church - even if we have, and vowed never to go back - deep down in our striving hearts, beneath all the ambition and the fear, we suspect that we were made for a different sort of life.

Heather Choate Davis

#79. In youth our most bitter disappointments, our brightest hopes and ambitions, are known only to ourselves. Even our friendship and love we never fully share with another; there is something of every passion, in every situation, we conceal.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

#80. When we make our art a practice, when we make our workspace sacred and enter it daily with respect and high intention, then we elevate our actions (even if they're taking place within the profane arena of commerce) beyond ego and above gimme-gimme ambition.

Steven Pressfield

#81. My principal motive is the belief that we can still make admirable sense of our lives even if we cease to have ... an ambition of transcendence.

Richard Rorty

#82. Delicate, gracious, and eloquent, John Brandi's poems reveal that he remains an extraordinary profound poet of prayer and praise. His is the most honorable and heroic of ambitions - to dress our broken world in the clothes of language, trust, and hope.

David St. John

#83. 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

#84. Ambition becomes displeasing when it is once satiated; there is a reaction; and as our spirit, till our last sigh, is always aiming toward some object, it falls back on itself, having nothing else on which to rest; and having reached the summit, it longs to descend.

Pierre Corneille

#85. Our zeal works wonders, whenever it supports our inclination toward hatred, cruelty, ambition.

Michel De Montaigne

#86. America is a Nation with a mission - and that mission comes from our most basic beliefs. We have no desire to dominate, no ambitions of empire. Our aim is a democratic peace - a peace founded upon the dignity and rights of every man and woman.

George W. Bush

#87. Why should we stunt our ambitions and impoverish our lives in order to be insulted and looked down upon in our old age?

Joseph A. Schumpeter

#88. Women are but the toys which amuse our lighter hours
ambition is the serious business of life.

Walter Scott

#89. Worldly ambition is founded on pride or envy, but emulation, or laudable ambition, is actually founded in humility; for it evidently implies that we have a low opinion of our present attainments, and think it necessary to be advanced.

Joseph Hall

#90. We got to roll with the punches, play all of our hunches, make the best of whatever comes your way. Forget that blind ambition, learn to trust your intuition - plowing straight ahead, come what may.

Jimmy Buffett

#91. Richard, marked for misery and defeat, acknowledged that power which sentiment possesses to exalt us - to convince us that our minds, endowed with a soaring, restless aspiration, can find no repose on earth except in love.

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

#92. What we have, what we wish we had - ambitions fulfilled, ambitions disappointed, investments won, investments lost, elections won, elections lost - these things may occupy our attention, but they do not define us.

Mitt Romney

#93. In life, everything just happens, and I believe even before we are born that our role in life has already been determined. My main ambition is to continue to write music, which helps me to evolve in a spiritual sense and hopefully to inspire others.

Gerry Rafferty

#94. We may never be martyrs but we can die to self, to sin, to the world, to our plans and ambitions. That is the significance of baptism; we died with Christ and rose to new life.

Vance Havner

#95. The world has nothing to fear from military ambition in our Government.

James K. Polk

#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. What better can any of us do than to reach for our own stars ... and know which they are?

Dorothy Canfield Fisher

#98. Let some holy ambition invade our souls, so that, dissatisfied with mediocrity, we shall eagerly desire the highest things and shall toil with all our strength to obtain them, since we may if we wish.

Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola

#99. We have made it our overriding ambition to escape work, and as a consequence have debased work until it is only fit to escape from. We have debased the products of work and have been, in turn, debased by them.
(pg. 43, "The Unsettling of America")

Wendell Berry

#100. The comfort zone takes our greatest aspirations and turns them into excuses for not bothering to aspire.

Peter McWilliams