Selected ambition quotes

1. If boyhood and youth are but vanity, must it not be our ambition to become men?

2. What am I in the eyes of most people - a nonentity, an eccentric, or an unpleasant person - somebody who has no position in society and will never have; in short, the lowest of the low. All right, then - even if that were absolutely true, then I should one day like to show by my work what such an eccentric, such a nobody, has in his heart. That is my ambition, based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Though I am often in the depths of misery, there is still calmness, pure harmony and music inside me. I see paintings or drawings in the poorest cottages, in the dirtiest corners. And my mind is driven towards these things with an irresistible momentum.

3. If you find yourself born in Barnsley and then set your sights on being Virginia Woolf it is not going to be roses all the way.

4. Limited in his nature, infinite in his desires, man is a fallen god who remembers the heavens.

5. We stole their babes and mothers, chiefs and braves Although we held the whip, you knew we were The real slaves To alchemy, human alchemy.

6. Politicians also have no leisure, because they are always aiming at something beyond political life itself, power and glory, or happiness.

7. All I want is a little more than I'll ever get.

8. I'm just moving clouds today, tomorrow I'll try mountains.

9. Attempt the impossible in order to improve your work.

10. I am doomed to an eternity of compulsive work. No set goal achieved satisfies. Success only breeds a new goal. The golden apple devoured has seeds. It is endless.

11. I wanted to be the first to win three Oscars, but Miss Hepburn has done it. Actually it hasn't been done. Miss Hepburn only won half an Oscar. If they'd given me half an Oscar I would have thrown it back in their faces. You see, I'm an Aries. I never lose.

12. This has always been a motto of mine: Attempt the impossible in order to improve your work.

13. The Smashing Pumpkins was never meant to be a small band. It was going to either be a big band, or a no band.

14. That something so obvious as the vanity of the world should be so little recognized that people find it odd and surprising to be told that it is foolish to seek greatness; that is most remarkable.

15. You just wait. I'm going to be the biggest Chinese Star in the world.

16. The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition.

17. When you have a dream, you've got to grab it and never let go.

18. My guiding star always is, Get hold of portable property.

19. It seems beyond the comprehension of people that someone can be born to draw comic strips, but I think I was. My ambition from earliest memory was to produce a daily comic strip.

20. The office of the Vice-President is a greater honor than I ever dreamed of attaining.

21. I always wanted to be a rock star. That was my childhood dream. That's what I told everybody I was going to be when I grew up.

22. It took me years to figure out that you don't fall into a tub of butter, you jump for it.

23. After a while the press of business in the province put an end to our philosophizing, and I returned with increased determination to my plans to fly to the Moon.

24. Are we not madder than those first inhabitants of the plain of Sennar? We know that the distance separating the earth from the sky is infinite, and yet we do not stop building our tower.

25. The hardest thing is to go to sleep at night, when there are so many urgent things needing to be done. A huge gap exists between what we know is possible with today's machines and what we have so far been able to finish.

26. Men who undertake considerable things, even in a regular way, ought to give us ground to presume ability.

27. Well is it known that ambition can creep as well as soar.

28. Applause is the spur of noble minds, the end and aim of weak ones.

29. Some day I'm going to climb Everest.

30. Ambition! powerful source of good and ill!

31. Young women with ambitions should be very crafty and cautious, lest mayhap they be caught in the soft, silken mesh of a happy marriage, and go down to oblivion, dead to the world.

32. No one ever gets far unless he accomplishes the impossible at least once a day.

33. I want to do everything in the world that can be done.

34. The growth of New England was a result of the aggregate efforts of a busy multitude, each in his narrow circle toiling for himself, to gather competence or wealth. The expansion of New France was the achievement of a gigantic ambition striving to grasp a continent. It was a vain attempt.

35. The Spanish voyager, as his caravel ploughed the adjacent seas, might give full scope to his imagination, and dream that beyond the long, low margin of forest which bounded his horizon lay hid a rich harvest for some future conqueror; perhaps a second Mexico with its royal palace and sacred pyramids, or another Cuzco with its temple of the Sun, encircled with a frieze of gold. Haunted by such visions, the ocean chivalry of Spain could not long stand idle.

36. If it had been possible to build the Tower of Babel without climbing it, it would have been permitted.

37. The concept of Queen is to be regal and majestic. Glamour is part of us, and we want to be dandy.

38. My nature is that I have to excite myself with a big challenge.

39. A man is a man to the extent that he is a superman. A man should be defined by the sum of those tendencies which impel him to surpass the human condition.

40. I'm in a weird band. We've done very well. The American Dream is alive and well.

41. We must not take up arms for vain prospects of grandeur, nor the allurements of conquest.

42. In early life he may have been a sincere republican; but he hated anarchy and disorder, and, before his campaign in Italy was over, he had begun to plan to make himself ruler of France. He worked systematically to transform the people's earlier ardor for liberty into a passion for military glory and plunder.

43. Cherish your visions and your dreams as they are the children of your soul, the blueprints of your ultimate achievements.

44. It was the verdict of ancient writers that men afflict themselves in evil and weary themselves in the good, and that the same effects result from both of these passions. For whenever men are not obliged to fight from necessity, they fight from ambition; which is so powerful in human breasts, that it never leaves them no matter to what rank they rise. The reason is that nature has so created men that they are able to desire everything but are not able to attain everything: so that the desire being always greater than the acquisition, there results discontent with the possession and little satisfaction to themselves from it. From this arises the changes in their fortunes; for as men desire, some to have more, some in fear of losing their acquisition, there ensues enmity and war, from which results the ruin of that province and the elevation of another.

45. He who blinded by ambition, raises himself to a position whence he cannot mount higher, must thereafter fall with the greatest loss.

46. As a wit, if not first, in the very first line.

47. God knows; I won't be an Oxford don anyhow. I'll be a poet, a writer, a dramatist. Somehow or other I'll be famous, and if not famous, I'll be notorious. Or perhaps I'll lead the life of pleasure for a time and then-who knows?-rest and do nothing. What does Plato say is the highest end that man can attain here below? To sit down and contemplate the good. Perhaps that will be the end of me too.

48. We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

49. Ambition is the last refuge of the failure.

50. His was a life which lacked, perhaps, the sublimer emotions which raised Man to the level of the gods, but it was undeniably an extremely happy one. He never experienced the thrill of ambition fulfilled, but, on the other hand, he never knew the agony of ambition frustrated. His name, when he died, would not live for ever in England's annals; he was spared the pain of worrying about this by the fact that he had no desire to live for ever in England's annals. He was possibly as nearly contented a human being can be in this century of alarms and excursions.

51. She's all for not letting the sun go down without having started something calculated to stagger humanity.

52. Give me a museum and I'll fill it.

53. The young do not know enough to be prudent, and so they attempt the impossible, and achieve it, generation after generation.

54. I don't know why I have these dreams. I've never wanted to be Pope. In fact, I have a greater affinity to Martin Luther.

55. The truth is really an ambition which is beyond us.

56. Who shoots at the mid-day sun, though he be sure he shall never hit the mark, yet as sure he is he shall shoot higher than who aims but at a bush.

57. A rolling stone gathers no moss.

58. The will-to-live becomes the will-to-power.

59. Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a heaven for?

60. Like dogs in a wheel, birds in a cage, or squirrels in a chain, ambitious men still climb and climb, with great labor, and incessant anxiety, but never reach the top.

61. 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.

62. Mankind was never so happily inspired as when it made a cathedral.

63. Most of our pocket wisdom is conceived for the use of mediocre people, to discourage them from ambitious attempts, and generally console them in their mediocrity. And since mediocre people constitute the bulk of humanity, this is no doubt very properly so.

64. The best things in life are nearest: Breath in your nostrils, light in your eyes, flowers at your feet, duties at your hand, the path of right just before you. Then do not grasp at the stars, but do life's plain, common work as it comes, certain that daily duties and daily bread are the sweetest things in life.

65. Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.

66. Women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition.

67. I shall not rest until, once again, the destinies of our people and our party are joined together again in victory at the next general election Labour in its rightful place in government again.

68. I have never been in doubt since I was old enough to think intelligently that I would someday be made President.

69. Before Mozart, all ambition turns to despair.

70. We plan to eliminate the state of Israel and establish a purely Palestinian state. We will make life unbearable for Jews by psychological warfare and population explosion. . . . We Palestinians will take over everything, including all of Jerusalem.

71. The idea that I should become President seems to me too visionary to require a serious answer. It has never entered my head, nor is it likely to enter the head of any other person.

72. Fortune hath somewhat the nature of a woman; if she be too much wooed, she is the farther off.

73. There are those who say that I wish to rule the world, but both my thoughts and my deeds demonstrate the contrary.

74. 'The great thing is that he's always looking to improve. How good can he be? Well, we're talking about a guy who is Hall of Fame caliber.' --Lou Piniella

75. Like my body?... I was honored to be on our.. next performer's new video... And if I ever record an album.. I want this guy to produce m-mine.. and make me beautiful duets.. 'cause he's freakin' genius!... Make some noise for my boy! Kanye West!

76. It was a fixed maxim in this reign, as well as in some of the subsequent, that no native of the island should ever be advanced to any dignity, ecclesiastical, civil, or military. The king therefore, upon Stigand's deposition, promoted Lanfranc, a Milanese monk, celebrated for his learning and piety, to the vacant see. This prelate was rigid in defending the prerogatives of his station; and after a long process before the pope, he obliged Thomas, a Norman monk, who had been appointed to the see of York, to acknowledge the primacy of the archbishop of Canterbury. Where ambition can be so happy as to cover its enterprizes, even to the person himself, under the appearance of principle, it is the most incurable and inflexible of all human passions. Hence Lanfranc's zeal in promoting the interests of the papacy, by which he himself augmented his own authority, was indefatigable; and met with proportionable success. The devoted attachment to Rome continually encreased in England; and being favoured by the sentiments of the conquerors, as well as by the monastic establishments formerly introduced by Edred and by Edgar, it soon reached the same height, at which it had, during some time, stood in France and Italy. It afterwards went much farther; being favoured by that very remote situation, which had at first obstructed its progress; and being less checked by knowledge and a liberal education, which were still somewhat more common in the southern countries.

77. At twenty you know you're not going to be a rock star... by twenty-five you know you're not going to be a dentist or a professional... by thirty, a darkness starts moving in - you wonder if you're ever going to be fulfilled, let alone wealthy or successful... by thirty-five, you know, basically, what you're going to be doing the rest of your life; you become resigned to your fate.

78. The vicar's right; he says that we Are ever wayward, weak and blind; He tells us in his homily Ambition ruins all mankind;

79. A man like me troubles himself little about the lives of a million men

80. Think big, or go home.

81. Think and grow rich.

82. Julius Caesar