Quotes

Quotes about Ambition


Ambition is a lust that is never quenched, but grows more inflamed and madder by enjoyment.

Thomas Otway

When ambition ends, happiness begins.

Hungarian Proverb

Though ambition in itself is a vice, it often is also the parent of virtue.

Edgar Quinet

Most people would succeed in small things if they were not troubled with great ambitions.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.

Mark Twain

Live neither in the past nor in the future, but let each day's work absorb your entire energies, and satisfy your widest ambition.

Sir William Osler

I had no ambition to make a fortune. Mere money-making has never been my goal, I had an ambition to build.

John D. Rockefeller

Ambition breaks the ties of blood, and forgets the obligations of gratitude.

Sir Walter Scott

Ambition is an idol, on whose wings great minds are carried only to extreme; to be sublimely great or to be nothing.

Robert Southey

Ambition often puts men upon doing the meanest offices; so climbing is performed in the same position with creeping.

Jonathan Swift

Where there are large powers with little ambition... nature may be said to have fallen short of her purposes.

Sir Henry Taylor

Oh that I were seated as high as my ambition, I'd place my naked foot on the necks of monarchs.

Horace Walpole

Feminist art is not some tiny creek running off the great river of real art. It is not some crack in an otherwise flawless stone. It is, quite spectacularly I think, art which is not based on the subjugation of one half of the species. It is art which will take the great human themes --love, death, heroism, suffering, history itself --and render them fully human. It may also, though perhaps our imaginations are so mutilated now that we are incapable even of the ambition, introduce a new theme, one as great and as rich as those others --should we call it "joy"?.

Andrea Dworkin

It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what other men say in whole books - what other men do not say in whole books.

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

It is my ambition to say in ten sentences; what others say in a whole book.

Friedrich Nietzsche

It is the nature of ambition to make men liars and cheats, to hide the truth in their breasts, and show, like jugglers, another thing in their mouths.

William S. Sallust

A young man's ambition is to get along in the world and make a place for himself-half your life goes that way, till you're 45 or 50. Then, if you're lucky, you make terms with life, you get released. -Robert Penn Warren.

Robert Penn Warren

He who sacrifices his conscience to ambition burns a picture to obtain the ashes.

Chinese Proverb

In a cottage I live, and the cot of content, Where a few little rooms for ambition too low, Are furnish'd as plain as a patriarch's tent, With all for convenience, but nothing for show: Like Robinson Crusoe's, both peaceful and pleasant, By industry stor'd, like the hive of a bee; And the peer who looks down with contempt on a peasant. Can ne'er be look'd up to with envy by me.

John Collins (1)

Ambition is like a frog sitting on a Venus Flytrap. The flytrap can bite and bite, but it won't bother the frog because it only has little tiny plant teeth. But some other stuff could happen and it could be like ambition.

Jack Handy

Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved. -Helen Keller.

Helen Keller

Ambition has its disappointments to sour us, but never the good fortune to satisfy us. Its appetite grows keener by indulgence and all we can gratify it with at present serves but the more to inflame its insatiable desires.

Benjamin Franklin

Discontent is something that follows ambition like a shadow.

Henry H. Haskins

I used to think I had ambition . . . but now I'm not so sure. It may have been only discontent. They're easily confused.

Rachel Field

What seems to be generosity is often no more than disguised ambition, which overlooks a small interest in order to secure a great one.

Francois, Duc De La Rochefoucauld

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