Ambition Quotes

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

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

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 man of ambition thinks to find his good in the operations of others, the man of pleasure in his own sensations, but the man of understanding in his own actions.

~ Marcus Aurelius

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

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