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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"Actually, my ambition at eight or nine years old was to be one of Little Richard's sax players, and that's when I got my first saxophone, a Selmer. It was a strange Bakelite material - that creamy plastic with all the gold keys on it. I had to get a job as a butcher's delivery boy to start paying for it."
"Seeking can become stressful when you apply the same laws that you apply in the material world - hard work, exacting plans, driving ambition, and attachment to outcome."
"My ambition in the Army was to make everybody I worked for regretful when I was ordered to other duty."
"Potential is an excuse to procrastinate; Ambition is a means to thrive."
"Great writers know what to cut out. It's the same in life. Clear ambitions. Clear relationships. This is the stuff of good story."
"I loved the excitement and the pleasures of life in New York, the opportunities for advancement, the pursuit of ambition, the theaters, the places of amusement, and such nights as the last I spent with you just as I was leaving for the West."
"I don't want to go to Portsmouth or any other club that has no ambitions."
"I mean a man whose hopes and aims may sometimes lie (as most men's sometimes do, I dare say) above the ordinary level, but to whom the ordinary level will be high enough after all if it should prove to be a way of usefulness and good service leading to no other. All generous spirits are ambitious, I suppose, but the ambition that calmly trusts itself to such a road, instead of spasmodically trying to fly over it, is of the kind I care for."
"In particular, it is absurd to hope to banish envy of other people's possessions or fortunes, if only because the spirit of envy can lead to emulation and ambition and have positive consequences."
"We're going to try and recruit the very best people we can and produce the best papers we can, and publish them to the highest standards we can ."
"The idea of putting out an album is quite exciting because it's sharing your creativity with people. There's no ambition to be famous. I couldn't care less about that."
"I'm quite happy with the music carrying on. I've never been one to clamor for fame. It just got dumped in my lap. The ambition is definitely not fame. The ambition is to be creative."
"You know, I stumble about what I'm going to do. I don't plan. I've never had ambitions."
"I would rather not have upset him, but I couldn't see any reason to change my life. Looking back on it, I wasn't unhappy. When I was a student, I had lots of ambitions like that. But when I had to give up my studies I learned very quickly that none of it really mattered."
"I have given up the ambition to be a great scholar. I want to be more- simply a human. . . . We are not true humans, but beings who live by a civilization inherited from the past, that keeps us hostage, that confines us. No freedom of movement. Nothing. Everything in us is killed by our calculations for our future, by our social position and cast. You see, I am not happy-yet I am happy. I suffer, but that is part of life. I live, I don't care about my existence, and that is the beginning of wisdom."
"First ambitions are best. We are less brave later."
"You will follow me, if we are what we are, you and I, if we live, if the world exists, if you know the meaning of this moment and can't let it slip by, as others let it slip, into the senselessness of the unwilled and unreached."
"In proportion to the mental energy he spent, the man who creates a new invention receives but a small percentage of his value in terms of material payment, no matter what fortune he makes, no matter what millions he earns. But the man who works as a janitor in the factory producing that invention, receives an enormous payment in proportion to the mental effort that his job requires of him. And the same is true of all men between, on all levels of ambition and ability."
"Learning to code is useful no matter what your career ambitions are."
"It's been a lifetime ambition of mine to play an 007 villain."
