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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"Do not imagine that an integral being has the ambition of enlightening the unaware or raising worldly people to the divine realm. To her, there is no self and other, and hence no one to be raised; no heaven and hell, and hence no destination."
"The only way to coast is downhill."
"Obviously, there is little you can learn from doing nothing."
"Action often precedes the feeling."
"When I pitched headforemost into the world I landed in the crib of Negroism."
"Duty does not require any person to submit to the destruction of his personal ambitions and the right to live his own life in his own way."
"I can't wait for the iPhone 6. It's my only ambition in life to have it quickly."
"I'm told [ Zulfikar Ali] Bhutto is ambitious. I hope he's very ambitious; ambition may help him see reality."
"You have never been poor, and never known what ambition is."
"A man's life is of more value than a woman's. It has larger issues, wider scope, greater ambitions. Our lives revolve in curves of emotions. It is upon lines of intellect that a man's life progresses. I have just learnt this, and much else with it, from Lord Goring. And I will not spoil your life for you, nor see you spoil it as a sacrifice to me, a useless sacrifice."
"But what of life whose bitter hungry sea Flows at our heels, and gloom of sunless night Covers the days which never more return? Ambition, love and all the thoughts that burn We lose too soon, and only find delight In withered husks of some dead memory."
"It is not good for man to cherish a solitary ambition. Unless there be those around him, by whose example he may regulate himself, his thoughts, desires, and hopes will become extravagant, and he the semblance, perhaps the reality, of a madman"
"... anybody with the brains and energy to become a teacher ought to want to become something better."
"If you want a nation to have space exploration ambitions, you've got to send humans."
"The universe for me was other planets and other star systems and other galaxies. I enjoyed tracking it, but it had no specific influence on my ambitions for that reason. It wasn't really far enough away from Earth to matter to me."
"I don't have specific television ambitions in the sense that I remain fundamentally and academic, and so, my innermost ambitions are what's the next discovery I can make; that's in my direct center."
"To view space as, "Well, let's go to Mars now," or "Let's do this now," maybe we should rethink of space as our backyard and have a suite of launch vehicles that can enable any ambition a person has regarding space. It's the same way you can go to buy a car: I want to go offroading, I'll buy this model. I'm a city driver, that's this model. I want to use less fuel, well, that's this model. They're not selling you one car, you have options. So when I think of space, I think of having options."
"My ambition from the very beginning was to make a good part for myself, something differently to what lately I've been doing."
"You know, I think when I reflect on it, I think there's certainly a sense of history. When you have ambitions to play this game, you want to be one of the best ever, and you want to play so well and be so effective that you want people to remember your name 100 years from now."
"I didn't have that intense ambition to be a musician or an actress. I just enjoyed it. And by enjoying it, because I loved it, it enabled me to get better at what I was doing, because there was a love behind it."
