Ambition Quotes - Page 2

Ambition was a dull pain, like a continually broken heart.

In the closeness of the passage, the queen could smell the other woman's perfume, a musky scent that spoke of moss and earth and wildflowers. Under it, she smelled ambition.

George R.R. Martin

The finest of athletes have, along with skill, a few more essential qualities: to conduct their life with dignity, with integrity, with courage and modesty. All these, are totally compatible with pride, ambition, determination and competitiveness

Donald Bradman

In the days when I was ambitious I worked out a very pretty little plan for conquering the whole earth and rearranging things as they ought to be; and when, in the end, everything became so good it almost began to be boring, then I was going to stuff my pockets with as much money as I could lay hands on and creep away, vanish in some cosmopolis and sit at a corner cafe and drink absinthe and enjoy seeing how everything went to the devil as soon as I wasn't on the scene any more.

Hjalmar Söderberg

Ambition is a drug that turns it's addicts into potential madmen.

Emil M. Cioran

Look beyond what you can see, Think Potential

Samer Chidiac

Without drive you will never get anywhere in life.

Habeeb Akande

Talented people hit targets no one else can hit. Ambitious people aim to hit targets no one else can see.

Addoo S. Mukhtar

There comes a time in everyone’s life—and I do mean in everyone’s life—when you ask yourself what it is that you’ve been doing with your life. Sometimes you even realize that whatever you’ve been doing all your life, you’ve been doing it wrong. Dead wrong… Son, you want that realization to hit you when you’re 70? Or 50? Or when you’re still young, with your whole life still ahead of you?

Ali Sheikh

It was such a feeling of developing your inner self to the people who liked to dig deeper and deeper until you cannot fathom the deepest evil in you.

Fernando Lachica

I believe we are powerful, but we don't use our minds to full capacity. Your mind is powerful enough to help you attain whatever you want.

Michael Jackson

Spending time with people without ambition is a self-destruction.

Amen Muffler

The older I get, the more I see how much motivations matter. The Zune was crappy because the people at Microsoft don't really love music or art the way we do. We won because we personally love music. We made the iPod for ourselves, and when you're doing something for yourself, or your best friend or family, you're not going to cheese out. If you don't love something, you're not going to cheese out. If you don't love something, you're not going to cheese out. If you don't love something, you're not going to go the extra mile, work the extra weekend, challenge the status quo as much.

Walter Isaacson

Author says he suffered from both "a craving to be famous" and "a horror of being known to like being known.

T.E. Lawrence

You may delay your ambition, but never forget your ambition.

Amit Kalantri

I believe at least in one of the chief tenets of the Christian faith--contentment with a lowly place. I am a doctor and I know that ambition--the desire to succeed--to have power--leads to most ills of the human soul. If the desire is realized it leads to arrogance, violence and final satiety; and if it is denied--ah! if it is denied--let all the asylums for the insane rise up and give their testimony! The are filled with human beings who were unable to face being mediocre, insignificant, ineffective and who therefore created for themselves ways of escape from reality so to be shut off from life itself forever.

Agatha Christie

I know what you want. One month after the ascension of Philippe the Gullible, M. Laclos found in a gutter, deceased. Blamed on a traffic accident. Two months after, King Philippe found in a gutter, deceased— it really is a bad stretch of road. Philippe’s heirs and assigns having coincidentally expired, end of the monarchy, reign of M.Danton.

Hilary Mantel

Theories cannot claim to be indestructible. They are only the plough which the ploughman uses to draw his furrow and which he has every right to discard for another one, of improved design, after the harvest. To be this ploughman, to see my labours result in the furtherance of scientific progress, was the height of my ambition, and now the Swedish Academy of Sciences has come, at this harvest, to add the most brilliant of crowns.

Paul Sabatier

Alice knows those stories. The routiers and condottieri of the Free Companies, who fight the wars of whichever prince will pay their fees, and amuse themselves in between times, are said to commit every kind of crime: from eating meat in Lent to slitting open pregnant women to kill their unborn and unbaptised children. The countryside of the southern lands is supposed to be full of their victims: a sea of vagabonds - priests without parishes; destitute peasants; artisans looking for work. ‘So you’, Alice says, ‘were one of the famous sons of iniquity…’ The Pope calls them that when they rob churches. But the Pope also uses them regularly. Alice knows she sounds a little breathless. She can’t altogether keep the admiration out of her voice. If she’d been a man, she thinks, she might have done exactly the same thing as Wat, to better herself fast.

Vanora Bennett

That's what you got for being a servant of no ambition: a shrunken life, hung up like a gibbet as a warning to others.

Emma Donoghue

Grandma sees these things when she talks about them and gestures with her hands like she's painting brush strokes in the air. The way Grandma paints her dreams for me, there's a low sky.

Heidi W. Durrow

At last a lifetime ambition of mine to become a pimp was satisfied.

Jack Woodford

An empty bottle of Jack is almost just as beautiful as a new and unopened bottle...in the same sense as looking down at muddied feet, and looking back the way you came. The journey you've taken to get to this point, the experiences and sights and music listened to, the shit scrolled down on paper. An empty bottle may hold more promise than a full one in that regard...

Dave Matthes

I am told by people all the time that they simply do not have time to read and listen to all the material they have purchased or subscribed to. But time is democratic and just. Everyone has the same amount. When I choose to read with my mid morning coffee break and you choose to blather about trivia with friends, when I choose to study for an hour sitting on my backyard deck at day's end but you choose to watch a TIVO'd American Idol episode, we reveal much. When someone says he does not have the time to apply himself to acquiring the know-how required to create sufficient value for his stated desires, he is a farmer surrounded by ripe fruit and vegetables, whole grains, and a herd of cattle on his own property who dies of starvation, unable to organize his time and discipline himself to eat.

Dan S. Kennedy

...you cannot value dreams according to the odds of their coming true. The real value is in stirring within us the will to aspire.

Sonia Sotomayor

Ambition’ is ‘greed’ rebranded.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

We had made the error of staying small – and there is no more unforgivable crime in America.

Pat Conroy

Ambition is greed without makeup.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Some men escape the grip. Maybe their wives have no social ambitions; maybe they've hit a sentence or two in a 'dangerous book' that pleased them; maybe they started on the treadmill as I did and were knocked off. Anyway, they're the congressmen you can't bribe, the Presidents who aren't politicians, the writers, speakers, scientists, statesmen who aren't just populate grab-bags for a half-dozen women and children.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

It never occurs to her that she will not be a writer and only occasionally does it occur to her, depressingly, that she is going to grow into a woman, not a man.

Jean Stafford

A lot of people see it as a kind of failure to stay in the place where you’re from, especially if you’re from the Midwest. Like ambition is geographic.

Leah Stewart

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

Nothing becomes some women more than the prick of ambition. Love, on the contrary, may make them very dull.

Françoise Sagan

She raised herself up on an elbow, stroked my forehead & said in a hushed half-whisper, 'You will be famous.' "The seed was planted. Ambition fed on the compost of my vanity.

F.R. Tallis

Yes, but the artist?" said Nigel almost fiercely. "He's different, you know he is. He's driven by some compulsion: if he can't do what he knows he has to do with his life he might as well be dead. He's got to break through the world's indifference, or else break himself against it. He can't help it.

Mary Stewart

True ambition is trying to paint yourself out of a corner

Josh Stern

Maybe that was the trouble. She got the first and biggest share of everything – first whack at the new clothes and the biggest part of any special treat. Hazel never had to grab for anything and she was soft.

Carson McCullers

I'm nothing but my ambition to become more than the marionette others created me to be.

Jennifer Megan Varnadore

A longing for the extraordinary had grabbed ahold of her and was burning her up inside, so hot and fierce that her heart had gone stone cold toward everything and everybody standing in her way. That was Mama. Fire and ice.

D. Anne Love

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

Universities, he (William Dershowitz) says, have been absorbed into the commercial ethos. Instead of being intervals of freedom, they are breeding grounds for advancement. Students are too busy jumping through the next hurdle in the résumé race to figure out what they really want. They are too frantic tasting everything on the smorgasbord to have life-altering encounters. They have a terror of closing off options. They have been inculcated with a lust for prestige and a fear of doing things that may put their status at risk.

David Brooks

Keep your eyes on the stars and your feet on the ground

Theodore Roosevelt

Let your ambitions fly. Let nothing hold you back.

Nabil N. Jamal

A man shrinks or expands into the degree and nature of his ambition. Ambition needs to be cultivated and refined, and yet has no teachers.

Neel Burton

He shed a lake of blood and murdered a king for a cold, lonely throne.

Jayne Castel

Minor talents or failing talents ask much of those who associate with them. They suck, they cling, they sour, they devour, and they can kill their hosts. Disappointment is a deadly companion. We didn't yet know how many of us would end up in its grip, because we were all still striving, and some of us thought we were thriving.

Margaret Drabble

It is better to die than carry the burden of expectations, you die every moment then, bearing situations you are not supposed to put up with.

Aporva Kala

The worst president is closer by nature to the best then either is to anyone who has not gone through what it requires to become president.

George Friedman

Ambition is enthusiasm with a purpose.

Frank Tyger

I know what other people think about me,” Rusty told her. “ ‘That Rusty,’ they say. ‘Charming and handsome,’ they say first, of course—they’re not blind. Then they add, ‘All the ambition and drive of a chocolate sundae.’

Sarah Rees Brennan

Leadership is not about your ambition. It is about bringing out the ambitions of your team.

Cheryl A. Bachelder

Ambition is a path, not a destination, and it is essentially the same path for everybody. No matter what the goal is, the path leads through Pilgrim's Progress regions of motivation, hard work, persistence, stubbornness, and resilience under disappointment. Unconsidered, merely indulged, ambition becomes a vice; it can turn a man into a machine that knows nothing but how to run. Considered, it can be something else - pathway to the stars, maybe.

Wallace Stegner

I don't care much whether I ever get to know anything - but I want to work out something in figures - something that hasn't got to do with human beings. I don't want people particularly. In some ways, Henry, I'm a humbug - I mean, I'm not what you all take me for. I'm not domestic, or very practical or sensible, really.And if I could calculate things, and use a telescope, and have to work out figures, and know to a fraction where I was wrong, I should be perfectly happy, and I believe I should give William all he wants.

Virginia Woolf

Like overzealous religious converts, climbers originally from the lower rungs of society tend to go overboard when they ape the upper class.

Maureen Corrigan

Distraught with the comprehension of his demise, a shovel stood dormant, in the ditch of her own digging. Now sheltered from the glare of greed and ambition, were the distasteful thoughts sprinkled in fool’s gold.

Don Swann II

For he, who has never sailed through storms, can never trust sailors of such ships.

Ashish Jaiswal

But ambition is a funny thing: it creeps in when you least expect it and keeps you moving, even when you think you want to stay put.

Lena Dunham

The problem with telling people that they can do anything they want to do is that it is objectively, factually inaccurate. Otherwise the whole world would just be ballet dancers and pop stars.

David Nicholls

At the end of the day let their be no regrets, only a desire to do more tomorrow than you did today.

Noel DeJesus

The British have always been madly overambitious, and from one angle it can seem like bravery, but from another it looks suspiciously like a lack of foresight.

Ben Aaronovitch

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Ambition Quotes - Page 2

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