Quotes About Ambition

How to find joy? Let your ambition disappear; ambition is the barrier. Ambition means an ego trip: "I want to be this, I want to be that - more money, more power, more prestige."

Worldly ambition is founded on pride or envy, but emulation, or laudable ambition, is actually founded in humility; for it evidently implies that we have a low opinion of our present attainments, and think it necessary to be advanced.

I have been absolutely hag-ridden with ambition. If I could wish to have anything in the world it would be to be free of ambition.

Ambition is a commendable attribute, without which no man succeeds. Only inconsiderate ambition imperils.

Ambition is not a weakness unless it be disproportioned to the capacity. To have more ambition than ability is to be at once weak and unhappy.

Nobody sits alone accompanied only by a stewing ambition that won't see fruit for years. Ambition is something you turn into publicity before there's anything to publicize.

Companies that succeed are driven by internal ambition. Stock price doesn’t drive them. Ambition and values drive them.

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.

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.

Liberalism is the party of upstarts who have insinuated themselves between the people and its big men. Liberals feel themselves as isolated individuals, responsible to nobody. They do not share the nation’s traditions, they are indifferent to its past and have no ambition for its future. They seek only their own personal advantage in the present. Their dream is the great International, in which the differences of peoples and languages, races and cultures will be obliterated.

Our friendship was like our writing in some ways. It was the only thing that was interesting about our otherwise dull lives. We were better off when we were together. Together we were a small society of ambition and high ideals. We were tender and patient and kind. We were not like the world at all.

You must bring every particle of your energy, unanswerable resolution, your best efforts, your persistent industry to your task or the best will not come out of you. You must back up your ambition by your whole nature, by unbounded enthusiasm and a determination to win which knows no failure.

Moscow, breathing fire like a human volcano with its smoldering lava of passion, ambition and politics, its hurly-burly of meetings and entertainment, Moscow is less than twenty miles away. It's always thirsting for something new, the newest events, the latest sensation.

Study rather to fill your mind than your coffers; knowing that gold and silver were originally mingled with dirt, until avarice or ambition parted them.

Besides the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation, the existence of subordinate governments, to which the people are attached, and by which the militia officers are appointed, forms a barrier against the enterprises of ambition, more insurmountable than any which a simple government of any form can admit of.

Ambition is not a dirty word. Piss on compromise. Go for the throat.

It is indolence... Indolence and love of ease; a want of all laudable ambition, of taste for good company, or of inclination to take the trouble of being agreeable, which make men clergymen. A clergyman has nothing to do but be slovenly and selfish; read the newspaper, watch the weather, and quarrel with his wife. His curate does all the work and the business of his own life is to dine.

All should be taught that the highest ambition is to be happy, and to add to the well-being of others; that place and power are not necessary to success; that the desire to acquire great wealth is a kind of insanity. They should be taught that it is a waste of energy, a waste of thought, a waste of life, to acquire what you do not need and what you do not really use for the benefit of yourself or others.

History consists, for the greater part, of the miseries brought upon the world by pride, ambition, avarice, revenge, lust, sedition, hypocrisy, ungoverned zeal, and all the train of disorderly appetite.

When once ambition has passed its natural limits, its progress is boundless.

Nothing truly valuable arises from ambition or from a mere sense of duty; it stems rather from love and devotion towards men and towards objective things.

Independence is not a whim or an ambition. It is the necessary condition of our survival as an ethnic group.

To survive there, you need the ambition of a Latin-American revolutionary, the ego of a grand opera tenor, and the physical stamina of a cow pony.

Rational thinking is an important aspect of human nature, but we have imagination, we have ambition, we have irrational fear, we are swayed by other people, we get indoctrinated and we get influenced by advertising.

Even as a kid in drawing class, I had real ambition. I wanted to be the best in the class, but there was always some other feller who was better; so I thought, It cant be about being the best, it has to be about the drawing itself, what you do with it. Thats kind of stuck with me.

Combine a certain amount of indifference with your ambition. Be carefully careless. If you don't succeed today, there is always tomorrow.

Ambition is violence, the very effort to succeed in the world is violent.

If love is a yearning to be like (even to become) the beloved, then hatred, it must be said, can be engendered by the same ambition, when it cannot be fulfilled.

Love makes money-grabbing seem contemptible; love makes class prejudice impossible; love makes selfish ambition a thing to be despised; love converts enemies into friends.

I leave to others the sublime delights of riding in the storm, better pleased with sound sleep & a warmer berth below it encircled, with the society of neighbors, friends & fellow laborers of the earth rather than with spies & sycophants ... I have no ambition to govern men. It is a painful and thankless office.

Ambition aspires to descend

Gather up your pity and turn it to ambition.

... no young colored person in the United States today can truthfully offer as an excuse for lack of ambition or aspiration that members of his race have accomplished so little, he is discouraged from attempting anything himself. For there is scarcely a field of human endeavor which colored people have been allowed to enter in which there is not at least one worthy representative.

I believe unless we have ambition to accomplish things and to do things that we amount to but very little in the battle of life.

I have lost the consolation of faith/ though not the ambition to worship

I never underestimated myself. And I never saw anything wrong with ambition.

My ambition really was, even as a child, to be a writer, a commentator, and a teacher, but a teacher of Talmud.

And if we now cast our eyes over the nations of the earth, we shall find that, instead of possessing the pure religion of the Gospel, they may be divided either into infidels, who deny the truth; or politicians who make religion a stalking horse for their ambition; or professors, who walk in the trammels of orthodoxy, and are more attentive to traditions and ordinances of men than to the oracles of truth.

Whatever you think of Facebook, you cannot fault it for lack of ambition.

To write rhythmic prose one must go deep into oneself and find the anonymous and multiple rhythm of the blood. Prose needs to be built like a cathedral. There, one is truly without a name, without ambition, without help; on scaffoldings, alone with one's consciousness.

THE NAME OF THE WIND has everything fantasy readers like, magic and mysteries and ancient evil, but it's also humorous and terrifying and completely believable. As with all the very best books in our field, it's not the fantasy trappings (wonderful as they are) that make this novel so good, but what the author has to say about true, common things, about ambition and failure, art, love, and loss.

If I fail it is only because I have too much pride and ambition.

I confess . . . that I am not myself very much concerned with the question of influence, or with those publicists who have impressed their names upon the public by catching the morning tide and rowing very vast in the direction in which the current was flowing; but rather that there should always be a few writers preoccupied in penetrating to the core of the matter, in trying to arrive at the truth and to set it forth, without too much hope, without ambition to alter the immediate course of affairs, and without being downcast or defeated when nothing appears to ensue.

Only through sheer ambition did I end up playing on [Bob Dylan sessions] and the fact that I could do that is a testament to how disorganized it really was.

I like charcoal drawing a lot. I'm not very good, but I always find myself buying canvases and paints whenever I'm on location, because I always have this ambition to fill the hotel room I'm in and turn it into an art studio.

The perfect equation is form equals content. The style of the film reflects the story, and that's what you're always aiming for. You're not always necessarily successful at it, but that's the ambition that you're trying to do.

I knew I could sing. That one thing I did believe in was that I could sing, but then constantly getting rejected, it started to get me down. But my voice was always there and my dream and my ambition was always there when I went through bad times.

I just aspire to pick people up. That's my ambition.