Quotes on Ambition

Ambition, I have come to believe, is the most primal and sacred and fundament of our being. To feel ambition and to act upon it is to embrace the unique calling of our souls. Not to act upon that ambition is to turn our backs on ourselves and on the reason for our existence.

Ambition is a Dead Sea fruit, and the greatest peril to the soul is that one is likely to get precisely what he is seeking.

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

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.

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.

Our duty is to be useful, not according to our desires but according to our powers.

The aphorism, the apothegm, in which I am the first among the Germans to be a master, are the forms of “eternity”; it is my ambition to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a book — what everyone else does not say in a book.

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

The novelist's ambition is not to do something better than his predecessors but to see what they did not see, say what they did not say.

In the realm of ideas everything depends on enthusiasm... in the real world all rests on perseverance.

Ambition drove many men to become false; to have one thought locked in the breast, another ready on the tongue.

Ambition is like love, impatient both of delays and rivals.

When I went back home, I was constantly being reminded, I'm an African woman, and so there are certain things I shouldn't do, certain ambitions that I should not entertain. That was a problem for me because I had never thought of myself as an African woman, never thought of myself as a woman to begin with. For me the limit was my capacity, my capability.

It is my ambition to be, as a private individual, abolished and voided from history, leaving it markless, no refuse save the printed books. [] It is my aim, and every effort bent, that the sum and history of my life, which in the same sentence is my obit and epitaph too, shall be them both: he made the books and he died.

Boys, be ambitious. Be ambitious not for money, not for selfish aggrandizement, not for the evanescent thing which men call fame. Be ambitious for the attainment of all that a man can be.

The greatest evil that fortune can bring to men is to endow them with feeble resources and yet to make them ambitious.

It is ordained that to the ambitious, who derive no satisfaction from the gifts of life and the beauty of the world, life shall be a cause of suffering, and they shall possess neither the profit nor the beauty of the world.

I don’t think that anyone has really told (people) what design is. It doesn’t occur to most people that everything is designed--that every building and everything they touch in the world is designed. Even foods are designed now. So in the process of helping people understand this, making them more aware of the fact that the world around us is something that somebody has control of, perhaps they can feel some sense of control, too. I think that’s a nice ambition.

Ambition is not a vice of little people.

I totally enjoy what I'm doing and bringing joy into people's lives. To me, and if I can bring one second of joy into a child or a grown-up's life, then I have achieved my lifetime ambition.

If men cease to believe that they will one day become gods then they will surely become worms.