AMBITION QUOTES II
quotations about ambition
Mama exhorted her children at every opportunity to "jump at de sun." We might not land on the sun, but at least we would get off the ground.
ZORA NEALE HURSTON
Dust Tracks on a Road
I would like to think that ambition is a gift if looked at from a Christian perspective. It seems to me that God was ambitious when He made the world and all that is in it. His plans for us are ambitious. He sees us redeemed to Himself--worshipping Him in this life and for eternity. How amazing--creatures who follow the flesh can, by His power of transformation, be made into spiritual beings--saints actually. That is ambition! Was not Christ ambitious when He went to the cross? His act would redeem mankind--or those who believed on His name. It is a message that is not accepted by everyone, of course, though His ambition is for everyone to come to the Father through Him.
DIANE GLANCY
"Dreams Are Dangerous; They Uncover Your Bones", Ambition: Essays by members of The Chrysostom Society
'Tis immortality to die aspiring.
GEORGE CHAPMAN
Conspiracy of Charles, Duke of Byron
I go dreaming into the future, where I see nothing, nothing. I have no plans, no idea, no project, and, what is worse, no ambition. Something -- the eternal "what's the use?" -- sets its bronze barrier across every avenue that I open up in the realm of hypothesis.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour
Ambition if it feeds at all, does so on the ambition of others.
SUSAN SONTAG
The Benefactor
Ambition like a liquid ruby stains.
SAMUEL R. DELANY
Babel-17
Ambition can creep as well as soar.
EDMUND BURKE
Letters on a Regicide Peace
Ambition -- it is the last infirmity of noble minds.
J.M. BARRIE
The Twelve-Pound Look
There is scarce any passion so heartily decried by moralists and satirists, as AMBITION; and yet, methinks, ambition is not a vice but in a vicious mind: in a virtuous mind it is a virtue, and will be found to take its color from the character in which it is mixed. Ambition is a desire of superiority; and a man may become superior, either by making others less or himself greater.
FULKE GREVILLE
Maxims, Characters, and Reflections
Ambition fortifies the will of man to become ruler over other men: it operates with deception, cajolery, and violence, it is the action of impurity upon impurity.
T. S. ELIOT
Murder in the Cathedral
An ambition to excel in petty things obstructs the progress to nobler aims.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
Ambition first sprung from your blest abodes; The glorious fault of Angels and of Gods.
ALEXANDER POPE
Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady
It's no secret ambition bites the nails of success.
U2
"The Fly"
Ambition is the mind's immodesty.
WILLIAM DAVENANT
attributed, Day's Collacon
A man's worth is no greater than the worth of his ambitions.
MARCUS AURELIUS
Meditations
Ambition is a drug that makes its addicts potential madmen.
EMIL CIORAN
History & Utopia
Of all the passions which have ever called into action the tongue, the pen, or the sword, which have overturned the throne, and shaken the altar to its base, ambition is the first and mightiest. It uses crime as a means, virtue as a mask. It respects nothing sacred.
F. A. LANGE
The History of Materialism
Without a goal, a life is nothing. Sometimes the goal becomes a man's entire life, an all-consuming passion. But once that goal is achieved, what then? Oh, poor man, what then?
BRIAN HERBERT & KEVIN J. ANDERSON
Dune: House Atreides
Ambition often puts men upon doing the meanest offices; so climbing is performed in the same posture with creeping.
JONATHAN SWIFT
"Thoughts on Various Subjects"
Two men are equally free from the rage of ambition; are they therefore equal in merit? Perhaps not; one may be above ambition, the other below it.
FULKE GREVILLE
Maxims, Characters and Reflections