Ambition Quotes

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.

~ Saul Bellow

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.

~ Jirō Shirasu

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

~ Steve Jobs

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

~ Habeeb Akande

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.

~ Stephen King

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

~ Enid Shomer

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

Look beyond what you can see, Think Potential

~ Samer Chidiac

Without drive you will never get anywhere in life.

~ Habeeb Akande

Roger was not personally ambitious, he mainly wanted life not to make too many demands on him.

~ John Lanchester

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

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]

~ Kresley Cole

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

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.

~ D.h. Lawrence

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.

~ Murray Kempton

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

~ Habeeb Akande

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

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.

~ Lionel Suggs

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.

~ Hope Barrett

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

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

~ Thomas Hardy

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

~ Kahlil Gibran

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

~ John F. Kennedy

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.

~ Kurt Lewin

The most absurd and reckless aspirations have sometimes led to extraordinary success.

~ Vauvenargues

All rising to great places is by a winding stair.

~ Francis Bacon

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

~ Arthur Adamov

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

~ Aldous Huxley