Ambition Quotes

Quotes tagged as "ambition" Showing 151-180 of 1,479
Carl von Clausewitz
“If the leader is filled with high ambition and if he pursues his aims with audacity and strength of will, he will reach them in spite of all obstacles.”
Carl Von Clausewitz

“So long as the man with ambition is a failure, the world will tell him to let go of his ideal; but when his ambition is realized, the world will praise him for the persistence and the determination that he manifested during his dark hours, and everybody will point to his life as an example for coming generations. This is invariably the rule. Therefore pay no attention to what the world says when you are down. Be determined to get up, to reach the highest goal you have in view, and you will.”
Christian D. Larson

L.M. Montgomery
“I've put out a lot of little roots these two years," Anne told the moon, "and when I'm pulled up they're going to hurt a great deal. But it's best to go, I think, and, as Marilla says, there's no good reason why I shouldn't. I must get out all my ambitions and dust them.”
L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Avonlea

John le Carré
“We've had enough." He took back the report and jammed it under his arm. "We've had a bellyful, in fact."
"And like everyone who's had enough," said Control as Alleline noisily left the room, "he wants more.”
John le Carré, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

Robert G. Ingersoll
“The grandest ambition that any man can possibly have, is to so live, and so improve himself in heart and brain, as to be worthy of the love of some splendid woman; and the grandest ambition of any girl is to make herself worthy of the love and adoration of some magnificent man. That is my idea. There is no success in life without love and marriage. You had better be the emperor of one loving and tender heart, and she the empress of yours, than to be king of the world. The man who has really won the love of one good woman in this world, I do not care if he dies in the ditch a beggar, his life has been a success.”
Robert G. Ingersoll, The Liberty Of Man, Woman And Child

“More than ambition, more than ability, it is rules that limit contribution; rules are the lowest common denominator of human behavior. They are a substitute for rational thought.”
Hyman G. Rickover

Philippa Gregory
“This is a woman whose belly is filled with pride. She has been eating nothing but her own ambition for nearly thirty years.”
Philippa Gregory, The White Queen

Marc Fitten
“The mayor was the most dangerous of individuals. He possessed, in equal amounts, unhealthy doses of charm and ambition. He was a driven opportunist.”
Marc Fitten

P.G. Wodehouse
“This is the age of the specialist, and years ago Rollo had settled on his career. Even as a boy, hardly capable of connected thought, he had been convinced that his speciality, the one thing he could do really well, was to inherit money.”
P.G. Wodehouse, The Man Upstairs and Other Stories

Margaret Atwood
“You shouldn't do that," said Laura. "You could set yourself on fire.”
Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

Toni Sorenson
“The truest of all truths is this: You are a child of God. Out of more than six billion people on earth now, He knows your name, what you fear and what you revere. He cares about the things you care about. He wants your happiness and success, and will reach to the farthest corner of the universe to see that you obtain your noblest dreams.”
Toni Sorenson

Paulo Coelho
“People need not fear the unknown if they have a capable of achieving what they need and what”
Paulo Coelho

John Fowles
“To write poetry and to commit suicide, apparently so contradictory, had really been the same, attempts at escape. And my feelings, at the end of that wretched term, were those of a man who knows he's in a cage, exposed to the jeers of all his old ambitions until he dies.”
John Fowles, The Magus

Stendhal
“The first virtue of a young man today - that is, for the next fifty years perhaps, as long as we live in fear, and religion has regained its powers - is to be incapable of enthusiasm and not to have much in the way of brains.”
Stendahl (Marie-Henri Beyle)

“Whatever you dream of, there will be fulfillment.”
Lailah Gifty Akita, Pearls of Wisdom: Great mind

Iain Pears
“He (William Cort) had some desire to be successful, but it did not burn so strongly in him that he was prepared to overcome his character to achieve it.”
Iain Pears, Stone's Fall

Graham Greene
“My second wife left me because she said I was too ambitious. She didn't realize that it is only the dying who are free from ambition. And they probably have the ambition to live. Some men disguise their ambition--that's all. I was in a position to help this young man my wife loved. He soon showed his ambition then. There are different types of ambition - that is all, and my wife found she preferred mine. Because it was limitless. They do not feel the infinite is an unworthy rival, but for a man to prefer the desk of an assistant manager - that is an insult.”
Graham Greene, Loser Takes All

Anne Mallory
“He had little respect for anyone who was not willing to put in the effort required to survive and thrive. Not everyone needed the same driving ambition that had fueled him. That had led him to being possibly the richest man in London without a title in his lineage -- all earned in under a decade. That had given him the power to change lives. But a person needed to have the drive to change his own life.”
Anne Mallory, Three Nights of Sin

Jemima Pett
“Follow your star, it's never too late, even if it doesn't quite happen as you expect.”
Jemima Pett

Tony Reinke
“Currently, the Library of Congress houses eighteen million books. American publishers add another two hundred thousand titles to this stack each year. This means that at the current publishing rate, ten million new books will be added in the next fifty years. Add together the dusty LOC volumes with the shiny new and forthcoming books, and you get a bookshelf-warping total of twenty-eight million books available for an English reader in the next fifty years! But you can read only 2,600 - because you are a wildly ambitious book devourer. ... For every one book that you choose to read, you must ignore ten thousand other books simply because you don't have the time (or money!).”
Tony Reinke, Lit!: A Christian Guide to Reading Books

Saul Bellow
“After much effort to live up to a glorious standard there came fatigue, wan hope, and boredom. I experienced extreme boredom. I saw others experiencing it too, many denying, by the way, that any such thing existed. And finally I decided that I would make boredom my subject matter. That I'd study it. That I'd become the world's leading authority on it. March, that was a red-letter day for humanity. What a field! What a domain! Titanic! Promethean! I trembled before it. I was inspired. I couldn't sleep. Ideas came in the night and I wrote them down, volumes of them. Strange that no one had gone after this systematically.

Oh, melancholy, yes, but not modern boredom.”
Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March

A.G. Street
“Every man has his secret desire, I suppose, and mine is someday to own a farm.”
A. G. Street, A.G. Street's Country Calendar

“I want to be known as unknown.”
CQAnonymoud

J.M. August
“I did it again. Lying guilty in a hotel room for a woman I will fail for.”
J.M. August

“Ambition's ambition is immortality. To create an eternal legacy.”
Renzo Dante (Saligiare)

Donald Hall
“Anyone ambitious, who lives to be old or even old, endures the inevitable loss of ambition’s fulfillment.”
Donald Hall, A Carnival Of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety

Dorothy Koomson
“I don't have the type of ambition that will make me do anything at any cost to get what I want. I don't want to be beholden to people. I don't want to open a shop with your money because I don't want to be indebted to you."
"I'm your husband; it's our money."
"Morally, legally, maybe yes, but in here," she put a hand to her head "and here," she lay the flat of her hand over her heart, "it's your money. You earned it or were given it way before you met me.”
Dorothy Koomson, The Woman He Loved Before

C.J. Sansom
“Never in England were there so many gentlemen and so little gentleness.”
C.J. Sansom, Tombland

Friedrich Nietzsche
Vanity and ambition as education. - So long as a man has not yet become an instrument of general human utility let him be plagued by ambition; if that goal has been attained, however, if he is working with the necessity of a machine for the good of all, then let him be visited by vanity; it will humanize him and make him more sociable, endurable and indulgent in small things, now that ambition (to render him useful) has finished roughhewing him.”
Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits