Ambition Quotes

I have learned to have very modest goals for society and myself things like clean air green grass children with bright eyes not being pushed around useful work that suits one's abilities plain tasty food and occasional satisfying nookie.

If you would hit the mark you must aim a little above it: Every arrow that flies feels the attraction of earth.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Ah but a man's reach should exceed his grasp or what's a heaven for?

Robert Browning

Before we set our hearts too much upon anything let us examine how happy they are who already possess it.

La Rochefoucauld

Ours is a world where people don't know what they want and are willing to go through hell to get it.

Accept the place the divine providence has found for you the society of your contemporaries the connection of events.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Those who aim at great deeds must also suffer greatly.

Plutarch

It is a mistake to look too far ahead. Only one link in the chain of destiny can be handled at a time.

Winston Churchill

Do not wish to be anything but what you are and try to be that perfectly.

St. Francis de Sales

This one thing I do forgetting those things which are behind and reaching forth unto those things which are before I press toward the mark!

Bible

Winning isn't everything but wanting to win is.

It is no longer clear which way is up even if one wants to rise.

Ambition is pitiless. Any merit that it cannot use it finds despicable.

Well is it known that ambition can creep as well as soar.

Make no little plans they have no magic to stir men's blood . . . Make big plans aim high in hope and work.

Daniel H. Burnham

Give way to the Better if way to the Better there be It exacts a full look at the Worst.

The significance of a man is not in what he attains but rather in what he longs to attain.

Once you say you're going to settle for second that's what happens to you in life I find.

A successful individual typically sets his next goal somewhat but not too much above his last achievement. In this way he steadily raises his level of aspiration.

All rising to great places is by a winding stair.

The only thing to know is how to use your neuroses.

Every ceiling when reached becomes a floor upon which one walks as a matter of course and prescriptive right.

We can always redeem the man who aspires and strives.

Goethe

When you are aspiring to the highest place it is honorable to reach the second or even the third rank.

Cicero

Hitch your wagon to a star.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Most people would succeed in small things if they were not troubled with great ambitions.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven.

When that the poor have cried Caesar hath wept: Ambition should be made of sterner stuff: Yet Brutus says he was ambitious And Brutus is an honourable man.

William Shakespeare

If you wish to reach the highest begin at the lowest.

Syrus

Ambition destroys its possessor.

Talmud

Ambition has but one reward for all: A little power a little transient fame A grave to rest in and a fading name!

Ambitious people understand intelligent people far better than intelligent people understand ambitious people; therefore, ambition will always triumph over intelligence. Once you appreciate this reality, civilization becomes clearer and unfortunately, more distressing.

D.A. Blankinship

A king of a kingdom no one fucking knows about! I'm the tree in the forest that silently falls--when no one is around to be crushed! [Lothaire, Enemy of Old]

Being with him made me want to make my own dreams, discover my own path. I was my best self when I was with him.

Heather Anastasiu

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

everyone endeavors as much as possible to make others love what he loves, and to hate what he hates... This effort to make everyone approve what we love or hate is in truth ambition, and so we see that each person by nature desires that other persons should live according to his way of thinking...

To die famous is the goal of the immortal. To die young is the goal of the healthy. To die memorably is the goal of the survivor.

Bauvard

And yet - and yet - one's kite will rise on the wind as far as ever one has string to let it go. It tugs and tugs and will go, and one is glad the further it goes, even if everybody else is nasty about it.

I thrice presented him a kingly crown. Which he did thrice refuse. Was this ambition?

William Shakespeare

Verily, I swear, 'tis better to be lowly born, and range with humble livers in content, than to be perk'd up in a glistering grief, and wear a golden sorrow.

William Shakespeare

By adherence to a special set of rules, the child of the shabby-genteel can sometimes leap across the time which has passed by his family and function in the real world without doing violence to the hopes his mother held out for him. But those who cannot live within this pattern are the freaks and poets, and they travel a different road to peace.

If a man wants his dreams to come true he must wake up.

Is it ever thus, at the end of things? Does any woman ever count the grains of her harvest and say: Good enough? Or does one always think of what more one might have laid in, had the labor been harder, the ambition more vast, the choices more sage?

Geraldine Brooks

From the very beginning Ihad felt a definite contact with Yeamon, a kind of tenuous understanding that talk is cheap in this league and that a man who knew what he was after had damn little time to find it, much less to sit back and explain himself.

Hunter S. Thompson

My ambition is not to leave behind me a pile of money for my heirs to quarrel about, but to find out what there is of interest in this world before I cross the border and begin to explore the other world.

George H. Hepworth

...it must be odd to have no ambition, not to want something more.

Alexander McCall Smith

The only way the weight of the world can break you down, is if you carry it the wrong way.

THE EMPRESS LO was not beautiful but she was ambitious and, sometimes, ambition can take you further than beauty. The women of the court never wondered how she got this far because as all women know, the rise to power is relatively simple ~ especially if it is a man who has control. ~ from the Three Lives of Empress Lo. Forthcoming.

Ambition should be made from sterner stuff.

William Shakespeare

The visions of a healthy brain,Give us pleasure over and again;For this home was done,From the daytime dreams of one.

Omar Kiam

There is something I want to do. But it's something to work towards, not something that should be handed to me on a plate. What's the point of doing something if you know you've got someone to rescue you if you fail? I like to work hard at something and then to reap the rewards. I take pride in what I do. What's the point if I know my rich husband will bail me out if I mess up?

Dorothy Koomson

The brown and charred rags that hung from the sides of it, I presently recognized as the decaying vestiges of books. They had long since dropped to pieces, and every semblance of print had left them. But here and there were warped boards and cracked metallic clasps that told the tale well enough. Had I been a literary man I might, perhaps, have moralized upon the futility of all ambition. But as it was, the thing that struck me with keenest force was the enormous waste of labour to which this sombre wilderness of rotting paper testified.

H.G.Wells

After much effort to live up to a glorious standard there came fatigue, wan hope, and boredom. I experienced extreme boredom. I saw others experiencing it too, many denying, by the way, that any such thing existed. And finally I decided that I would make boredom my subject matter. That I'd study it. That I'd become the world's leading authority on it. March, that was a red-letter day for humanity. What a field! What a domain! Titanic! Promethean! I trembled before it. I was inspired. I couldn't sleep. Ideas came in the night and I wrote them down, volumes of them. Strange that no one had gone after this systematically.Oh, melancholy, yes, but not modern boredom.

Frog in the mud is happier than the man, because it has no ambition to reach the stars!

Mehmet Murat ildan

Today's politicians are like policemen on traffic duty. They are just dealing with traffic right in front of them. Yet they want to be the Superintendent based on that alone. The politicians and the bigwigs in finance have no ambition. There are too many who confuse the power that they got by their position as their own ability.

Those who are crazy enough to think they can change the world usually do.

If you are not working towards something, your life will end with nothing.

Everyone was willing to take some small risk to lessen the damage of their ambition and disorder and lawlessness.

Kristin Cashore

Everyone— black as well as white— thinks it's going to be better over the next jump of land.

Ambition is the bridge between reality and living a dream.

Addoo S. Mukhtar

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