Ambition Quotes - Page 37

• It is quite possible that someone is insane and they think they have a chance. Not insane in the clinical sense, but they may have such a strong political ambition that they blind themselves to reality.

  Davy Crockett

  Strong, Reality, Thinking

  9 Copy quote

• To all our means of culture is added the powerful incentive to personal ambition, no post of honor is so high but the poorest may hope to reach it.

  James A. Garfield

  Powerful, Mean, Presidential

  4 Copy quote

• There is nothing else that so kills the ambitions of a person as criticisms from superiors. I never criticize anyone. I believe in giving a person incentive to work. So I am anxious to praise but loath to find fault. . . . I have yet to find a person, however great or exalted his station, who did not do better work and put forth greater effort under a spirit of approval than he would ever do under a spirit of criticism.

  Charles R. Schwab

  Believe, Giving, Effort

  "How to win friends & influence people". Book by Dale Carnegie, October 1936.

  27 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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.

  Robert Green Ingersoll

  Money, Insanity, Desire

  Robert Green Ingersoll (1907). “The works of Robert G. Ingersoll”, p.978, Library of Alexandria

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• History by apprising them [the people] of the past will enable them to judge of the future. . . . It will qualify them as judges of the actions and designs of men: it will enable them to know ambition under every disguise it may assume; and knowing it, to defeat its views.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Life, Past, Men

  Thomas Jefferson (2010). “The Works of Thomas Jefferson: Notes on Virginia II, Correspondence 1782-1786”, p.64, Cosimo, Inc.

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• You haven't changed. You may say: 'I'm full of love, I'm full of truth, I'm full of knowledge, I'm full of wisdom.' I say: 'That's all nonsense. Do you behave? Are you free of fear? Are you free of ambition, greed, envy and the desire to achieve success in every field? If not, you are just playing a game. You are not serious.'

  Jiddu Krishnamurti

  Truth, Fear, Games

  Jiddu Krishnamurti, Allan W. Anderson (1991). “A Wholly Different Way of Living”, p.243, Krishnamurti Foundation Trust Ltd.

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• To 'know your place' is a good idea in politics. That is not to say 'stay in your place' or 'hang on to your place', because ambition or boredom may dictate upward or downward mobility, but a sense of place - a feel for one's own position in the control room-is useful in gauging what you should try to do.

  William Safire

  Ideas, Boredom, Political

  6 Copy quote

• Never be too absorbed by your own ambitions to encourage those of your family.

  Wes Fesler

  Unity, Our Family

  4 Copy quote

• Power from any source tends to create an appetite for additional power. It was almost inevitable that the super-rich would one day aspire to control not only their own wealth, but the wealth of the whole world. To achieve this, they were perfectly willing to feed the ambitions of the power-hungry political conspirators who were committed to the overthrow of all existing governments and the establishment of a central worldwide dictatorship.

  W. Cleon Skousen

  Government, Political, Historical

  14 Copy quote

• Ambition, and Covetousnesse are Passions that are perpetually incumbent, and pressing.

  Thomas Hobbes

  Passion, Political, Incumbents

  7 Copy quote

• After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions Guides us by vanities.

  T. S. Eliot

  Lying, Knowledge, Thinking

  "Gerontion" l. 33 (1920)

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• I'd love for my ambition and will and intellect and sense of humour to define me as well. I'm definitely responsible for the image that I put out there. But it does become frustrating, because I don't want 'sexy' to be my defining characteristic.

  Eva Mendes

  Sexy, Doe, Want

  "Eva Mendes Doesn't Want to Just Be 'Sexy'" by Gillian Koenig, people.com. July 13, 2010.

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• If any of you have a desire to be mediocre, you will probably find that you have already achieved your ambition.

  Hugh B. Brown

  Desire, Mediocre, Ifs

  29 Copy quote

• There is the tendency to place ourselves and our ambitions at the center of our lives. This is very human, but it is not Christian.

  Pope Francis

  Christian, Tendencies, Humans

  12 Copy quote

• What, or who, led you to take up photography, and about what date ?
  George Bernard Shaw – I always wanted to draw and paint. I had no literary ambition. I aspired to be a Michelangelo, not a Shakespeare. But I could not draw well enough to satisfy myself; and the instruction I could get was worse than useless. So when dry plates and push buttons came into the market I bought a box camera and began pushing the button. It was in 1898.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Photography, Buttons, Cameras

  4 Copy quote

• It is remarkable what a woman can accomplish with just a little ambition.

  Elizabeth Arden

  Littles, Accomplish, Remarkable

  8 Copy quote

• Although Poets are vain and ambitious, their vanity and ambition are of the purest kind attainable in this world. They are ambitious to be accepted for what they altimately are as revealed in their poetry.

  Stephen Spender

  Vanity, Ambitious, World

  28 Copy quote

• The treasury of America lies in those ambitions, those energies, that cannot be restricted to a special favored class. It depends upon the inventions of unknown men, upon the originations of unknown men, upon the ambitions of unknown men. Every country is renewed out of the ranks of the unknown, not out of the ranks of those already famous and powerful and in control.

  Woodrow Wilson

  Country, Powerful, Lying

  Woodrow Wilson, Ronald J. Pestritto (2005). “Woodrow Wilson: The Essential Political Writings”, p.112, Lexington Books

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I think we are destroying the minds of America and that has been one of my lifelong ambitions.

  John Kricfalusi

  Thinking, America, Mind

  9 Copy quote

• The longing for peace is rooted in the hearts of all men. But the striving, which at present has become so insistent, cannot lay claim to such an ambition as leading the way to eternal peace, or solving all disputes among nations.

  Alva Myrdal

  Heart, Men, Way

  Alva Myrdal's Nobel Lecture in Oslo, Norway, www.nobelprize.org. December 11, 1982.

  52 Copy quote

  Show source

• I had given up ( around 1950, fh) any ambition of making a career as an artist…..I had lost all interest in the art shown in galleries and museums, and I no longer aspired to fit in that world. I loved the paintings done by children, and my only desire was to do the same for my own pleasure.

  Jean Dubuffet

  Art, Children, Museums

  36 Copy quote

• My love for my children makes me glad that I am what I am, and keeps me from desiring to be otherwise; and yet, when I sometimes open a little box in which I still keep my fast yellowing manuscripts, the only tangible remnants of a vanished dream, a dead ambition, a sacrificed talent, I cannot repress the thought, that after all I have chosen the lesser part, that I have sold my birthright for a mess of pottage

  James Weldon Johnson

  Dream, Children, Tangible

  James Weldon Johnson (2009). “James Weldon Johnson: The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man”, p.199, ReadHowYouWant.com

  24 Copy quote

  Show source

• But I must own that I also felt stirred by an unselfish desire to voice all the joys and sorrows, the hopes and ambitions, of the American Negro, in classic musical form.

  James Weldon Johnson

  Voice, Joy, Musical

  James Weldon Johnson, Sondra K. Wilson (1995). “The Selected Writings of James Weldon Johnson: Social, political, and literary essays”, p.334, Oxford University Press on Demand

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• Women are but the toys which amuse our lighter hours---ambition is the serious business of life.

  Walter Scott

  Serious Business, Toys, Hours

  Walter Scott (1845). “Ivanhoe: A Romance”, p.376

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• I had still the ambition, formed in Sligo in my teens, of living in imitation of Thoreau on Innisfree, a little island in Lough Gill, and when walking through Fleet Street very homesick I heard a little tinkle of water and saw a fountain in a shop window which balanced a little ball upon its jet, and began to remember lake water. From the sudden remembrance came my poem Innisfree.

  William Butler Yeats

  Life, Lakes, Islands

  William Butler Yeats (2010). “Autobiographies: The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats”, p.139, Simon and Schuster

  9 Copy quote

  Show source