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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"Helping children at a level of genuine intellectual inquiry takes imagination on the part of the adult. Even more, it takes the courage to become a resource in unfamiliar areas of knowledge and in ones for which one has no taste. But parents, no less than teachers, must respect a child's mind and not exploit it for their own vanity or ambition, or to soothe their own anxiety."
"not only have children most certainly a right to their own ambitions, but their own lack of ambitions."
"Put aside ambition for public recognition, and simply do what you do because it feels good inside."
"It is one thing to see the forward path and another to be able to take it. But it is better to have an ambitious plan than none at all."
"Hope is a punishable offense. The verdict is always death; one more death of the heart."
"If a man is after money, he's money mad; if he keeps it, he's a capitalist; if he spends it, he's a playboy; if he doesn't get it, he's a never-do-well; if he doesn't try to get it, he lacks ambition. If he gets it without working for it; he's a parasite; and if he accumulates it after a life time of hard work, people call him a fool who never got anything out of life."
"Wake up, dream, have the ambition to do the things you have always dreamed of, go farther than any man has ever been before, go as far as it is possible for any man to go, what have you got to lose? Nothing can stop the man with the right mental attitude from achieving his goal; nothing on earth can help the man with the wrong mental attitude."
"Ambition is a tricky little animal to tame. It is very skillful at concealing itself from its master."
"But there is no substance under the things I have gathered together about me. I am hollow, and my structure of pleasures and ambitions has no foundation. I am objectified in them. But they are all destined by their very contingency to be destroyed. And when they are gone there will be nothing left of me but my own nakedness and emptiness and hollowness, to tell me that I am a mistake."
"The dead don't stay interested in us living people for very long. Gradually, gradually, they let go hold of the earth . . . and the ambitions they had . . . and the things they suffered . . . and the people they loved. They get weaned away from the earth - that's the way I put it - weaned away."
"My life's ambition is to play a James Bond villain. I have the cat and the eye-patch, so I'm just waiting for the call. For some reason, though, the phone hasn't rung."
"Only ambition is fired by the coincidences of success and easy accomplishment."
"There can be no fairer ambition than to excel in talk; to be affable, gay, ready, clear, and welcome."
"Jesus, all for Jesus, all I am and have and ever hope to be. All of my ambitions, hopes and plans, I surrender these into Your hands... For it's only in Your will that I am free."
"It is remarkable, in cats, that the outer life they reveal to their master is one of perpetual confident boredom. All they betray of the hidden life is by means of symbol; if it were not for the recurring evidence of murder – the disemboweled rabbits, the headless flickers, the torn squirrels – we should forever imagine our cats to be simple pets whose highest ambition is to sleep in the best soft chair, whose worst crime is to sharpen their claws on carpeting."
"The natural ambition of woman is through marriage to climb up, leaning upon a man; but those days are gone. You shall be great without the help of any man, just as you are."
"Without cunning, there is no innovation. Without ambition, there is no accomplishment."
"You don't come to live here unless the delusion of a reality shaped around your own desires isn't a strong aspect of your personality. A reality shaped around your own desires - there is something sociopathic in that ambition."
"The True Person governs by emptying the heart of desire and filling the belly with food, weakening ambitions and strengthening bones."
"Ambition means tying your well-being to what other people say or do. Self-indulgence means tying it to the things that happen to you. Sanity means tying it to your own actions."
