Ambition quotes
2.3K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside ambition — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"As I got older, then my particular ambitions started cohering around creating a world in which people of different races or backgrounds or faiths can recognize each other's humanity, or creating a world in which every kid, regardless of their background, can strive and achieve and fulfill their potential."
"It's been my ambition for about 30 years to do a full- length animation film."
"A heartfelt sense of aspiring cuts through negativity about yourself; it cuts through the heavy trips you lay on yourself."
"Marriage is part of a sort of 50′s revival package that's back in vogue along with neckties and naked ambition."
"Tell a scoundrel, three or four times a day, that he is the pink of probity, and you make him at least the perfection of "respectability" in good earnest. On the other hand, accuse an honorable man, too petinaciously, of being a villain, and you fill him with a perverse ambition to show you that you are not altogether in the wrong."
"I'm not a political person. I usually beware of political persons. I know many, but I'm not one of them. I have no political ambitions."
"Ambition has its disappointments to sour us, but never the good fortune to satisfy us. Its appetite grows keener by indulgence and all we can gratify it with at present serves but the more to inflame its insatiable desires."
"In all ages of the world, priests have been enemies to liberty; and it is certain, that this steady conduct of theirs must have been founded on fixed reasons of interest and ambition. Liberty of thinking, and of expressing our thoughts, is always fatal to priestly power, and to those pious frauds, on which it is commonly founded; and, by an infallible connexion, which prevails among all kinds of liberty, this privilege can never be enjoyed, at least has never yet been enjoyed, but in a free government."
"My ambition is to further create a signature sound, a signature spirit, that makes some kind of contribution to music in general."
"I always try to put myself in the way of surprise as much as possible. My ambition is to keep challenging myself. I like that journey of discovery."
"Jump out of bed and I stumble to the kitchen, pour myself a cup of ambition and yawn and stretch and try to come alive."
"The ambitions we have will become the stories we live."
"A gentleman of ambition is aware of the people he wishes to be associated with both socially and commercially. He knows that moving through different levels of society is akin to stepping through different rooms in an enormous house, each door leading to a grander environment than the last. He may, of course, settle for the comfort of any room he reaches. Alternatively, he may continue through successive doors to surround himself with even greater fineries and riches."
"While Microsoft does not share all of Oracle's ambitions for Java, we agree that it is a very valuable tool for software developers."
"The Greens will continue to champion a fairer society rather than simply the economy and to champion the parliament rather than simply the stock exchange ."
"In the temple of science are many mansions, and various indeed are they that dwell therein and the motives that have led them thither. Many take to science out of a joyful sense of superior intellectual power; science is their own special sport to which they look for vivid experience and the satisfaction of ambition; many others are to be found in the temple who have offered the products of their brains on this altar for purely utilitarian purposes."
"I have never belonged wholeheartedly to a country, a state, nor to a circle of friends, nor even to my own family. When I was still a rather precocious young man, I already realized most vividly the futility of the hopes and aspirations that most men pursue throughout their lives. Well-being and happiness never appeared to me as an absolute aim. I am even inclined to compare such moral aims to the ambitions of a pig."
"Just as soon as you attain to one ambition you see another one glittering higher up still. It does make life so interesting."
"It seems that ambition makes most people wish to be loved rather than to love others."
"...Holmes, who loathed every form of society with his whole Bohemian soul, remained in our lodgings in Baker Street, buried among his old books, and alternating from week to week between cocaine and ambition, the drowsiness of the drug, and the fierce energy of his own keen nature."
