Famous Quotes & Sayings

Sam Donaldson

But as a young kid, I never did, really have an ambition to be a farmer. I never thought, gee, I would like to farm, and I want to raise these crops. I didn't quite know what I wanted to do.

Raymond Loewy

I sought excitement and, taking chances, I was all ready to fail in order to achieve something large.

Carrie Fisher

Ambition is exhausting. It makes you friends with people for the wrong reasons, just like drugs.

Jenny Offill

Some women make it look so easy, the way they cast ambition off like an expensive coat that no longer fits.

Louise J. Kaplan

For a woman ... to explore and express the fullness of her sexuality, her ambitions, her emotional and intellectual capacities, her social duties, her tender virtues, would entail who knows what risks and who knows what truly revolutionary alteration to the social conditions that demean and constrain her. Or she may go on trying to fit herself into the order of the world and thereby consign herself forever to the bondage of some stereotype of normal femininity - a perversion, if you will.

Dorothy Dix

(A girl's) chief ambition then, as now, was to get married and have a home and children.

Henry Adams

If any one of us has had an ambition higher than that of making money; a motive better than that of expediency; a faith warmer than that of reasoning; a love purer than that of the self; he has been slow to express it; still slower to urge it.

John Adams

A constitution founded on these principles introduces knowledge among the people, and inspires them with a conscious dignity becoming freemen; a general emulation takes place, which causes good humor, sociability, good manners, and good morals to be general. That elevation of sentiment inspired by such a government, makes the common people brave and enterprising. That ambition which is inspired by it makes them sober, industrious, and frugal.

John Adams

Ambition is the subtlest beast of the intellectual and moral field. It is wonderfully adroit in concealing itself from its owner.

John Adams

A pen is certainly an excellent instrument to fix a man's attention and to inflame his ambition.

Jon Landau

My ambition was to be a record producer, and I had started doing that in the late '60s with my work with the MC5 and my friend Livingston Taylor.

Luigi Pirandello

Our spirits have their own private way of understanding each other, of becoming intimate, while our external persons are still trapped in the commerce of ordinary words, in the slavery of social rules. Souls have their own needs and their own ambitions, which the body ignores when it sees that it's impossible to satisfy them or achieve them.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Ambition is the death of thought.

Octavia Butler

I'm a pessimist if I'm not careful, a feminist, a Black,...an oil-and-water combination of ambition, laziness, insecurity, certainty, and drive.

Jules Verne

We now know most things that can be measured in this world, except the bounds of human ambition!

Margaret Thatcher

Object to merit and distinction, and you're setting your face against quality, independence, originality, genius against all the richness and variety of life. When you hold back the successful, you penalize those who need help.

Peter Ackroyd

I don't find myself interesting as a person and the details I find boring, quite frankly. You could sum it up in a few words or sentences really: came from nothing. Self-educated. Luck. Energy. Curiosity. Ambition. That's it. Nothing at all can illuminate the work as far as I can tell.

Leo Tolstoy

Every time I tried to express my most heartfelt desires to be morally good I met with contempt and ridicule; and as soon as I would give in to vile passions I was praised and encouraged. Ambition, love of power, self-interest, lechery, pride, anger, vengeance-all of it was highly esteemed.

Juliette Binoche

My only ambition is to be true every moment I am living.

Emanuel Celler

I didn't know then that I would never be able to leave the sounds and smells of these sights behind me, but I was fiercely conscious of one thing-my ambition.

John Constable

It is always my endeavour however in making a picture that it should be without a companion in the world. At least such should be a painters ambition.

Lucy Maud Montgomery

If it's IN you to climb you must -- there are those who MUST lift their eyes to the hills -- they can't breathe properly in the valleys.

Lloyd Blankfein

Ambition is your inner voice that tells you, you can, and should, strive to go beyond your circumstances or situation in life.