Quotes About Desire And Ambition

#1. A democratic constitution, not supported by democratic institutions in detail, but confined to the central government, not only is not political freedom, but often creates a spirit precisely the reverse, carrying down to the lowest grade in society the desire and ambition of political domination.

John Stuart Mill

#2. I'm over the Oscar thing. I feel that if you really want an Oscar, you're in trouble. It's like wanting to be married - you'll take anybody. If you want the Oscar really badly, it becomes a naked desire and ambition. It becomes very unattractive. I've seen it.

Bill Murray

#3. When a man is occupied with striving to satisfy his desire and ambition, all his thoughts must be mortal.

Timaeus

#4. Wherever there is desire and ambition, you are in bondage.

Rajneesh

#5. I feel that if you really want an Oscar, you're in trouble. It's like wanting to be married - you'll take anybody. If you want the Oscar really badly, it becomes a naked desire and ambition. It becomes very unattractive.

Bill Murray

#6. To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition, the end to which every enterprise and labor tends, and of which every desire prompts the prosecution.

Samuel Johnson

#7. Unless we know ourselves to be full of pride, ambition, concupiscence, weakness, wretchedness and unrighteousness, we are truly blind. And if someone knows all this and does not desire to be saved, what can be said of him?

Blaise Pascal

#8. The difference between a confident person and an unconfident person is simply that the confident person acts on their ambitions and desires and doesn't let fear of failure stop them.

Katty Kay

#9. You see, that hunger inside us, that ambition, or whatever you may choose to call it, is a compass really, a compass of true desire. And if you will be happy, you must follow that desire, no matter which way the needle points.

Kathe Koja

#10. 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

#11. Ambition. An overmastering desire to be vilified by enemies while living and made ridiculous by friends when dead.

Ambrose Bierce

#12. Now, again, he paused, and into the breach thus made, leapt Ambition, the harridan, and Poetry, the witch, and Desire of Fame, the strumpet; all joined hands and made of his heart their dancing ground.

Virginia Woolf

#13. A thirsty ambition for truth and virtue, and a frenzy to conquer all lies and vices which are not recognized as such nor desire to be; herein consists the heroic spirit of the philosopher.

Johann Georg Hamann

#14. The True Person governs by emptying the heart of desire and filling the belly with food, weakening ambitions and strengthening bones.

Laozi

#15. Who has courage to say no again and again to desires, to despise the objects of ambition, who is a whole in himself, smoothed and rounded.

Horace

#16. it was the meaning of more than the game of pool, more than the five-by-ten-foot microcosm of ambition and desire. It seemed to him as if all men must know this because it is in every meeting and every act, in the whole gigantic hustle of men's lives.

Walter Tevis

#17. We have discussed your definition, analyzed its ramifications to a reasonable depth, and accept it," said the expendable.
"Meaning I gave you what you wanted?"
"Ambition and desire are human traits. You gave us what we lacked.

Orson Scott Card

#18. If you have a burning ambition and desire, absolutely anything can be achieved.

Jahangir Khan

#19. True ambition is not what we thought it was. True ambition is the profound desire to live usefully and walk humbly under the grace of God.

Bill Wilson

#20. But I must own that I also felt stirred by an unselfish desire to voice all the joys and sorrows, the hopes and ambitions, of the American Negro, in classic musical form.

James Weldon Johnson

#21. According to its doctors, my one intransigent desire is to have been a Confederate general, and because I could not or would not become anything else, I set up for poet and beg an to invent fictions about the personal ambitions that my society has no use for.

Allen Tate

#22. Our ambitions are bold and so must be our desire to change and evolve our culture.

Satya Nadella

#23. Time, the cradle of hope, but the grave of ambition, is the stern corrector of fools, but the salutary counselor of the wise, bringing all they dread to the one, and all they desire to the other.

Charles Caleb Colton

#24. The difference between greed and ambition is a greedy person desires things he isn't prepared to work for.

Habeeb Akande

#25. No man who acts from a sense of duty ever puts the lesser duty above the greater. No man has the desire and the ability to work onhigh things, but he has also the ability to build himself a high staging.

Henry David Thoreau

#26. Driving by my ambitions, desire higher positions, to see eternally and my mission, to be more than just a rap musician.

Tupac Shakur

#27. The primary motivation in the world of television is fear. People are scared to death. Ambition and enthusiasm and interest and the desire to excel are secondary. Because fear is an enormous motivating force, many in the medium are afraid to make decisions, take chances, do anything innovative.

Sally Quinn

#28. Desires and wishes don't lead to success. Plans and efforts do. Create a vision, chalk out an action plan, put in your best efforts and give yourself a headstart in achieving your dreams.

Roopleen

#29. I do feel that I have unfinished business in the Premier League and now is the right time to return. I considered all the other offers very carefully and I firmly believe that Chelsea is the best choice. They match my footballing ambitions with their hunger and desire to win trophies.

Cesc Fabregas

#30. What if God were not exactly truth, and if this could be proved? And if he were instead the vanity, the desire for power, the ambitions, the fear, and the enraptured and terrified folly of mankind?

Friedrich Nietzsche

#31. A creative writing workshop will contain students whose ambitions and abilities, whose conceptions of literature itself, are so diverse that what they have in common - the desire to write - could almost be considered meaningless.

Rachel Cusk

#32. Ambition, as that passion is generally understood,- a strong desire to rise above others, to occupy the first place, - formed no part of Lafayette's character. In him the passion was nothing more than a constant and irresistible wish to do good.

Marquis De Lafayette

#33. A BURNING DESIRE TO BE, AND TO DO is the starting point from which the dreamer must take off. Dreams are not born of indifference, laziness, or lack of ambition.

Napoleon Hill

#34. To wish is of little account; to succeed you must earnestly desire; and this desire must shorten thy sleep.

Ovid

#35. Money was evil, beauty vain, and both were transitory. Ambition was pride, desire for gain was avarice, desire of the flesh was lust, desire for honor, even for knowledge and beauty, was vainglory. Insofar as these diverted man from seeking the life of the spirit, they were sinful.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#36. Humans are lonely creators. Humans always desire and yearn for others. Humans thirst for ambitions. When things don't go their way, they start thirsting for it even more.

Jeon In-hwa

#37. With many sovereign states, with no system of law enforceable among them, with each state judging its grievances and ambitions according to the dictates of its own reason or desire - conflict, sometimes leading to war, is bound to occur.

Kenneth Waltz

#38. What is ambition but desire of greatness? And what is greatness but extent of power?

Thomas Higgons

#39. She's a mystery, a cipher, something nearly extinct these days: a person not controlled by ambition or greed or a crass need for attention, but by a desire to experience life completely and to make life a little easier for the people around her

Rebecca Miller

#40. 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

#41. 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

#42. 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

#43. The love of freedom, so often invigorated and disgraced by private ambition, was reduced, among the licentious Franks, to the contempt of order, and the desire of impunity.

Edward Gibbon

#44. My ambition is limited to the desire to capture something transient, and yet, this ambition is excessive.

Berthe Morisot

#45. If we do not know ourselves to be full of pride, ambition, lust, weakness, misery, and injustice, we are indeed blind. And if, knowing this, we do not desire deliverance, what can we say of a man ... ?

Blaise Pascal

#46. If you get someone right out of college - and I meet a lot of them - you're not going to get a lot of experience at all, so you have to feel the ambition and desire, which is based on a lot of factors.

Mickey Drexler

#47. Every man has his secret desire, I suppose, and mine is someday to own a farm.

A.G. Street

#48. It is my earnest desire that some of you should carry on this scientific work and keep for your ambition the determination to make a permanent contribution to science.

Marie Curie

#49. It is my ambition as a Dichter to maintain, for a small number of people who may happen to understand me and be accessible to my influence, a transcendent life, or at least the desire for it, in the midst of the money-and-war-culture which the world has become.

Hermann Hesse

#50. 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

#51. 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

#52. No matter what face he wears, Satan has one overmastering ambition, one burning desire-to dethrone the Almighty and to place himself upon the highest throne of the universe.

Adrian Rogers

#53. No, it wasn't quite true that John had no conscience at all. Everyone had one. But there were many voices in his head that had an easier time reaching him: his ambition, his desire for fame and success - and for revenge.

Cornelia Funke

#54. I wanted to smell the guitars. It's hard to explain but they have a smell. And the best way I could ever describe it would be to say they smell like potential. Ambition and desire. If such things had a smell.

Barbara Hall

#55. Your Heart's Desire is the Voice of God, and that Voice must be obeyed sooner or later.

Emmet Fox

#56. The strongest passions and most dangerous weaknesses of the human breast; ambition, avarice, vanity, the honorable or venal love of fame, are all in conspiracy against the desire and duty of peace

James Madison

#57. I've experienced love and ambition and desire in my life, but never in the same way as in a family.

Claire Denis

#58. Your man with a thin skin, a vehement ambition, a scrupulous conscience, and a sanguine desire for rapid improvement is never a happy, and seldom a fortunate politician.

Anthony Trollope

#59. 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

#60. The real purpose of the martial arts must be to purge oneself of petty ambitions and desire, to obtain control of one's own character.

Morihei Ueshiba

#61. Yes the truth is that men's ambition and their desire to make money are among the most frequent causes of deliberate acts of injustice.

Aristotle.

#62. I had given up ( around 1950, fh) any ambition of making a career as an artist ... ..I had lost all interest in the art shown in galleries and museums, and I no longer aspired to fit in that world. I loved the paintings done by children, and my only desire was to do the same for my own pleasure.

Jean Dubuffet

#63. 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

#64. I have no desire to write my own biography, as long as I have strength and means to do better work.

Charles Babbage

#65. Tales of power and ambition and intrigue and betrayal and desire - when you're telling those in a big way, you automatically want to go to Shakespeare.

Beau Willimon