Famous Quotes & Sayings

Steven Brust

A young man without ambition is an old man waiting to be.

Steven Pinker

Of course genes can’t pull the levers of our behavior directly. But they affect the wiring and workings of the brain, and the brain is the seat of our drives, temperaments and patterns of thought. Each of us is dealt a unique hand of tastes and aptitudes, like curiosity, ambition, empathy, a thirst for novelty or for security, a comfort level with the social or the mechanical or the abstract. Some opportunities we come across click with our constitutions and set us along a path in life.

Robert Browning

Ambition is not what man does... but what man would do.

Robert Browning

What I aspired to be and was not, comforts me.

Robbie Williams

I have only one ambition, which is to be famous.

Richard Steele

Vanity makes people ridiculous, pride odious, and ambition terrible.

Samuel Adams

Were the talents and virtues which heaven has bestowed on men given merely to make them more obedient drudges, to be sacrificed to the follies and ambition of a few? Or, were not the noble gifts so equally dispensed with a divine purpose and law, that they should as nearly as possible be equally exerted, and the blessings of Providence be equally enjoyed by all?

Joe Greene

Whatever you think of Facebook, you cannot fault it for lack of ambition.

Georg Solti

The experience awakened 'my tremendous musical ambition, which has never subsided to this day.

Geoffrey Boycott

I've known people with exceptional talent - and some have wasted it. Ambition spurs a man on.

Garrison Keillor

When you're in your 20s, your 30s, even, you have - at least, I had - vast ambitions, and you sit around mooning about these things, and you're depressed, because you haven't done them. And it takes you a long time to come to the realization that if you can't be John Updike, well, then, you can't.

Henry Ford

To lift farm drudgery off flesh and blood and lay it on steel and motors has been my most constant ambition

Helen McCrory

I was lucky to learn early in life that you need money for food and shelter, but there's no ambition in having money in the bank for the sake of it!

Helen Mirren

Where does this guy's ambition go? That's very peculiar. I think he's a very disturbing person, I think he's a very disturbing politician. Personally, I feel his interest is a self-interest

Hilary Mantel

My first career ambitions involved turning into a boy; I intended to be either a railway guard or a knight errant.

Heraclitus

The results are in great need greater ambition.

Henry Ward Beecher

Your honors here may serve you for a time, as it were for an hour, but they will be of no use to you beyond this world. Nobody will have heard a word of your honors in the other life. Your glory, your shame, your ambitions, and all the treasures for which you push hard and sacrifice much will be like wreaths of smoke. For these things, which you mostly seek, and for which you spend your life only tarry with you while you are on this side of the flood.

Henry Ward Beecher

A man without ambition is worse than dough that has no yeast in it to raise it.

Henry Ward Beecher

Ambition is the way in which a vulgar man aspires.

Henry Ward Beecher

An ambition which has conscience in it will always be a laborious and faithful engineer, and will build the road, and bridge the chasms between itself and eminent success by the most faithful and minute performances of duty.

Henry James

If the artist is necessarily sensitive, does that sensitiveness form in its essence a state constantly liable to shade off into the morbid? Does this liability, moreover, increase in proportion as the effort is great and the ambition intense?

Henry Drummond

To become Christ-like is the only thing in the whole world worth caring for, the thing before which every ambition of man is folly and all lower achievement vain.

Raymond Burr

Nature has a way sometimes of reminding Man of just how small he is. She occasionally throws up terrible offsprings of our pride and carelesness, to remind us of how puny we really are in the face of a tornado, an earthquake, or a Godzilla. The reckless ambitions of Man are often dwarfed by their dangerous consequences. For now, Godzilla -- that strangely innocent and tragic monster -- has gone to earth. Whether he returns or not, or is never again seen by human eyes, the things he has taught us remain.

Toby Young

My life's ambition is to play a James Bond villain. I have the cat and the eye-patch, so I'm just waiting for the call. For some reason, though, the phone hasn't rung.

Joseph Hall

Worldly ambition is founded on pride or envy, but emulation, or laudable ambition, is actually founded in humility; for it evidently implies that we have a low opinion of our present attainments, and think it necessary to be advanced.

Joseph Hall

Ambition is torment enough for an enemy; for it affords as much discontentment in enjoying as in want, making men like poisoned rats, which, when they have tasted of their bane, cannot rest till they drink, and then can much less rest till they die

Mary Roberts Rinehart

there comes a time when ambition ceases to burn, or romance to stir, and the highest cry of the human heart is for peace.

Nicole Krauss

I was never a man of great ambition I cried too easily I didn't have a head for science Words often failed me While others prayed I only moved my lips

John Webster

Ambition, madam, is a great man's madness.

John Strachan

Trusting in Christ, we may boldly join in the combat, and enlist ourselves among that disinterested band, who fight not for human ambition, or human praise, but for the honour of our Saviour, and the salvation of men.

John Stott

There is something inherently inappropriate about cherishing small ambitions for God.

John Steinbeck

Look at them. There are your true philosophers. I think that Mack and the boys know everything that has ever happened in the world and possibly everything that will happen. I think they survive in this particular world better than other people. In a time when people tear themselves to pieces with ambition and nervousness and covetousness, they are relaxed. All of our so-called successful men are sick men, with bad stomachs, and bad souls, but Mack and the boys are healthy and curiously clean. They can do what they want. They can satisfy their appetites without calling them something else.

Martin Luther

God uses lust to impel men to marry, ambition to office, avarice to earning, and fear to faith. God led me like an old blind goat.