Ambition Quotes

I have no spurTo prick the sides of my intent, but onlyVaulting ambition, which o'erleaps itselfAnd falls on the other.

~ William Shakespeare

I think I benefited from being equal parts ambitious and curious. And of the two, curiosity has served me best.

~ Michael J. Fox

Grab it while you can because tomorrow could suck you dry.

~ Nora Roberts

I've been very lucky at what's happened in my career to date, but playing something as far from me as possible is an ambition of mine - anything from a mutated baddy in a comic book action thriller, to a detective. If anything, I'd like Gary Oldman's career: he's the perfect example of it. I've love to have a really broad sweep of characters - to be able to do something edgy, surprising and unfashionable.

~ Benedict Cumberbatch

I’m tough, I’m ambitious, and I know exactly what I want. If that makes me a bitch, okay.

~ Madonna

Ambition is all very well, my lad, but you must cloak it.

~ Jonathan Stroud

Isana laughed. And you, lady? Are you a woman of conscience or of ambition?The lady smiled. That's a question rarely asked here at court.And why is that?Because a woman of conscience would tell you that she is a person of conscience. A woman of ambition would tell you that she is a person of conscience—only much more convincingly.

~ Jim Butcher

Miss Tick sniffed. 'You could say this advice is priceless,' she said. 'Are you listening?''Yes,' said Tiffany.'Good. Now ... if you trust in yourself ...''Yes?''... and believe in your dreams ...''Yes?''... and follow your star ...' Miss Tick went on.'Yes?''... you'll still get beaten by people who spent THEIR time working hard and learning things and weren't so lazy. Goodbye.

~ Terry Pratchett

There was no more dangerous kind of madman than one who devoted a good brain and a courageous heart to unhealthy ambitions.

~ Michael Moorcock

I don't want to rot like mangoes at the end of the season, or burnout like the sun at the and of the day. I cannot live like the gardener, the cook and water-carrier, doing the same task everyday of my life... I want to be either somebody or nobody. I don't want to be anybody.

~ Ruskin Bond

Why do men like me want sons? he wondered. It must be because they hope in their poor beaten souls that these new men, who are their blood, will do the things they were not strong enough nor wise enough nor brave enough to do. It is rather like another chance at life; like a new bag of coins at a table of luck after your fortune is gone.

~ John Steinbeck

His resolve is not to seem, but to be, the best.

~ Aeschylus

You will follow me, if we are what we are, you and I, if we live, if the world exists, if you know the meaning of this moment and can't let it slip by, as others let it slip, into the senselessness of the unwilled and unreached.

~ Ayn Rand

I was ambitious and desperate to direct my first film, so I capitulated and blew it. Never again. Never fucking again.

~ Craig Ferguson

This is the age of the specialist, and years ago Rollo had settled on his career. Even as a boy, hardly capable of connected thought, he had been convinced that his speciality, the one thing he could do really well, was to inherit money.

~ P.g. Wodehouse

My second wife left me because she said I was too ambitious. She didn't realize that it is only the dying who are free from ambition. And they probably have the ambition to live. Some men disguise their ambition--that's all. I was in a position to help this young man my wife loved. He soon showed his ambition then. There are different types of ambition - that is all, and my wife found she preferred mine. Because it was limitless. They do not feel the infinite is an unworthy rival, but for a man to prefer the desk of an assistant manager - that is an insult.

~ Graham Greene

I want to be known as unknown.

~ Cqanonymoud

More than ambition, more than ability, it is rules that limit contribution; rules are the lowest common denominator of human behavior. They are a substitute for rational thought.

~ Hyman G. Rickover

He built up a situation that was far enough from the truth. It never occurred to him that Helen was to blame. He forgot the intensity of their talk, the charm that had been lent him by sincerity, the magic of Oniton under darkness and of the whispering river. Helen loved the absolute. Leonard had been ruined absolutely, and had appeared to her as a man apart, isolated from the world. A real man, who cared for adventure and beauty, who desired to live decently and pay his way, who could have travelled more gloriously through life than the Juggernaut car that was crushing him.

~ E.m. Forster

This is a woman whose belly is filled with pride. She has been eating nothing but her own ambition for nearly thirty years.

~ Philippa Gregory

The mayor was the most dangerous of individuals. He possessed, in equal amounts, unhealthy doses of charm and ambition. He was a driven opportunist.

~ Marc Fitten

Follow your star, it's never too late, even if it doesn't quite happen as you expect.

~ Jemima Pett

The first virtue of a young man today - that is, for the next fifty years perhaps, as long as we live in fear, and religion has regained its powers - is to be incapable of enthusiasm and not to have much in the way of brains.

~ Stendhal

The children are innocent until proven guilty. For their sake, not ours, we must soldier on, muddling our way toward frugality, simplicity, liberty, community, until some kind of sane and rational balance is achieved between our ability to love and our cockeyed ambition to conquer and dominate everything in sight. No wonder the galaxies recede from us in every direction, fleeing at velocities that approach the speed of light. They are frightened. We humans are the Terror of the Universe.

~ Edward Abbey

It's a shame that we humans are never able to pull in the same direction . . . [n]ot even when confronted by infinity.

~ Gentry Lee

Relinquish! What! my vocation? My great work? My foundation laid on earth for a mansion in heaven? My hopes of being numbered in the band who have merged all ambitions in the glorious one of bettering their race - of carrying knowledge into the realms of ignorance - of substituting peace for war - freedom for bondage - religion for superstition - the hope of heaven for the fear of hell? Must I relinquish that? It is dearer than the blood in my veins. It is what I have to look forward to, and to live for.

~ Charlotte Brontë

It is indeed strange, given the heavy emphasis placed by chroniclers on Churchill's sheer magnitude of personality, that the ingredient of pure ambition should be so much ignored or even disallowed.

~ Christopher Hitchens

To want something desperately, to be tested, to feel that life will be impossible if the object of one's desires is not achieved, is always dangerous for the soul. Some people attempt to climb Everest because, as they say, it is there; others want nothing but wealth and care little how or where they collect it; others still, with less avaricious tastes - perhaps desiring nothing more than freedom from fear - are blinded by the same personal sun that shines on all human ambition. At some time or another it burns most of us.

~ Bryan Forbes

On some days it felt like we owned the Earth, and the only place left to expand to was the next planet down the line.

~ Yudhanjaya Wijeratne

Some of the best of us are quite unambitious.

~ Anthony Powell

When ambition exceeds ability, you are going to experience hardship. We have the choice to fear it or embrace it.

~ Kevin Jorgenson

Talent helps, but it won't take you as far as ambition.

~ Paul Arden

Don't wish it was easier, wish you were better. Don't wish for less problems, wish for more skills. Don't wish for less challenges, wish for more wisdom. The major value in life is not what you get. The major value in life is what you become. Success is not to be pursued; it is to be attracted by the person you become.

~ Jim Rohn

The last goose in the column is flying just as high.

~ Marty Rubin

If you don't have the ambition to be the very best at what you do, then what's the point? If you aim for greatness but keep missing -- fine. At least you had the guts to aim. There's honour in failing that way. But there's nothing honourable about settling for mediocrity.

~ Benjamin Wood

The ambition of men compels them to break even the most heartfelt vows.

~ A.h. Septimius

Time flies when you're fulfilling your ambitions in a completely unexpected way.

~ J.c. Lillis

Ambition is a stairway that never ends.

~ Joyce Rachelle

What strange and thoughtless creatures we were, back in those days. We would go up to the rooftops to smoke, Wurth and I; and there in the company of other insomniac souls we would look out at the vast expanse of lights and glamour. We watched the towers as they climbed higher, and higher, as humanity reached for the skies.

~ Yudhanjaya Wijeratne

What I was sure of was that Tommy had something I'd never seen in anyone else: a blind and unhinged and totally unfounded ambition. He was so out of touch, so lacking in self-awareness, yet also wildly captivating. That night there was this aura around Tommy- an aura of the possible.

~ Greg Sestero