"It's a shame that we humans are never able to pull in the same direction . . . [n]ot even when confronted by infinity."
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Ambition quotes
Ambition
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Ambition quotes (page 25 of 114)
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"When I was growing up, I said I wanted to be a model, but people said I had no chance and when I realized my ambition, people in the business still continued to state negative stuff."
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"Moderation cannot have the credit of combatiug and subduing ambition, they are never found together. Moderation is the languor and indolence of the soul, as ambition is its activity and ardor."
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"What we take for high-mindedness is very often no other than ambition well disguised, that scorns means interests, only to pursuegreater."
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"It is a mighty error to suppose that none but violent and strong passions, such as love and ambition, are able to vanquish the rest. Even idleness, as feeble and languishing as it is, sometimes reigns over them; it usurps the throne and sits paramount over all the designs and actions of our lives, and imperceptibly wastes and destroys all our passions and all our virtues."
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"I suppose I was about 20, and a crowd of us had been to a village hop and came back to make midnight cups of coffee. I was in the kitchen helping to dish up and having a fierce argument with one of the boys in the crowd when someone else interrupted to say: 'Of course Margaret, you will go into politics won't you?' I stopped dead. Suddenly it was crystalised for me. I knew."
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"If you leave your art, the world will beat you back to it. The world has not an ambition worth sharing, or a prize worth handling."
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"I had the lonely child's habit of making up stories and holding conversations with imaginary persons, and I think from the very start my literary ambitions were mixed up with the feeling of being isolated and undervalued. I knew that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts, and I felt that this created a sort of private world in which I could get my own back for my failure in everyday life."
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"It is the art of mankind to polish the world, and every one who works is scrubbing in some part."
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"For a companion, I require one who will make an equal demand on me with my own genius. Such a one will always be rightly tolerant.It is suicide, and corrupts good manners, to welcome any less than this. I value and trust those who love and praise my aspiration rather than my performance. If you would not stop to look at me, but look whither I am looking, and farther, then my education could not dispense with your company."
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"The results are in great need greater ambition."
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"What if God were not exactly truth, and if this could be proved? And if he were instead the vanity, the desire for power, the ambitions, the fear, and the enraptured and terrified folly of mankind?"
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"Every man has a secret ambition: To outsmart horses, fish and women."
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"Set yourself earnestly to discover what you are made to do, and then give yourself passionately to the doing of it."
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"It was very different when the masters of science sought immortality and power; such views, although futile, were grand: but now the scene was changed. The ambition of the inquirer seemed to limit itself to the annihilation of those visions on which my interest in science was chiefly founded. I was required to exchange chimeras of boundless grandeur for realities of little worth."
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"Ambitious men spend their youth in rendering themselves worthy of patronage; it is their great mistake. While the foolish creatures are laying in stores of knowledge and energy, so that they shall not sink under the weight of responsible posts that recede from them, schemers come and go who are wealthy in words and destitute of ideas, astonish the ignorant, and creep into the confidence of those who have a little knowledge."
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"I don't know many ambition- ridden people who really enjoy themselves. Even success doesn't seem to still the insatiable, gnawing hunger of their ambition. Ambition is a good gift, but it cannot be all."
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"Our hopes, desires and ambitions are powerful forces existing within us for the shaping of the future. They are the generating forces that create the future."
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"To seek solitude like a wild animal. That is my only ambition."
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"They assert that their program is purely peaceful. . . . We want them to demonstrate clearly in the actions they propose that they have truly abandoned any nuclear weapons ambition."
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