Ambition Quotes - Page 33

Take away ambition and vanity, and where will be your heroes and patriots?

When I graduated from law school in 1959, there wasn't a single woman on any federal bench. It wouldn't be a realistic ambition for a woman to want to become a federal judge.

Truth is the mother of joy. Truth civilizes, ennobles and purifies. The grandest ambition that can enter the soul is to know the truth.

It has always seemed absurd to suppose that a god would choose for his companions, during all eternity, the dear souls whose highest and only ambition is to obey.

They [i.e. ambitious men] may not cease, but as a dog in a wheel, a bird in a cage, or a squirrel in a chain, so Budaeus compares them; they climb and climb still, with much labour, but never make an end, never at the top.

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

Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, said Browning, and so it has - extended by the length of an artist's brush.

I think your ambition for something changes as you go.

Let me offer you, metaphorically, two magic wands that have sweeping powers to change society. With one wand you could wipe out all racism and discrimination from the hearts and minds of white America. The other wand you could wave across the ghettoes and barrios of America and infuse the inhabitants with Japanese or Jewish values, respect for learning, and ambition. ... I suggest that the best wand for society and for those who live in the ghettoes and barrios would be the second wand.

Presumably there is indeed no purpose in the ultimate fate of the cosmos, but do any of us really tie our life's hopes to the ultimate fate of the cosmos anyway? Of course we don't; not if we are sane. Our lives are ruled by all sorts of closer, warmer, human ambitions and perceptions.

The writer has a grudge against society, which he documents with accounts of unsatisfying sex, unrealized ambition, unmitigated loneliness, and a sense of local and global distress.

When ambition enters, creativity disappears - because an ambitious man cannot be creative, because an ambitious man cannot love any activity for its own sake. While he is painting he is looking ahead; he is thinking, 'When am I going to get a Nobel Prize?' When he is writing a novel, he is looking ahead. He is always in the future - and a creative person is always in the present.

The whole society depends on creating ambition in you. Ambition means a conflict, ambition means that whatsoever you are, you are wrong - you have to be somewhere else. Wherever you are, you are wrong - you have to be somewhere else. A constant madness to be somewhere else, to be somebody else, is what ambition is.

The truth is really an ambition which is beyond us.

There are only two things that can destroy a healthy [hu]man: love trouble, ambition, and financial catastrophe. And that's already three things, and there are a lot more.

I love music so much, and as long as I got all this enthusiasm and ambition, and passion for this music; as long as I'm having' fun - I'm gonna keep doin' it.

Our ambition should be to rule ourselves, the true kingdom for each one of us; and true progress is to know more, and be more, and to do more.

Our thoughts are like roots which reach out in every direction into the cosmic ocean of formless energy, and these thought-roots set in motion vibrations like themselves and attract the affinities of our desires and ambitions.

Men's bodies are our women's works of art. Given to us power of control, we will never carelessly throw them in to fill up the gaps in human relationships made by international ambitions and greeds ... War will pass when intellectual culture and activity have made possible to the female an equal share in the governance of modern national life; it will probably not pass away much sooner; its extinction will not be delayed much longer.

My ambition in high school was to be a high school coach and teacher, and that's still what I do: teach.

Do not let great ambitions overshadow small success.

Ambition is not a vice of little people.

We are accustomed to repeating the cliché, and to believing, that 'our most precious resource is our children.' But we have plenty of children to go around, God knows, and as with Doritos, we can always make more. The true scarcity we face is practicing adults, of people who know how marginal, how fragile, how finite their lives and their stories and their ambitions really are but who find value in this knowledge, even a sense of strange comfort, because they know their condition is universal, is shared.

The loss of seriousness seems to me to be, in effect, a loss of hope. I think that the thing that made people rise to real ambition, real gravity was the sense of posterity, for example - a word that I can remember hearing quite often when I was a child and I never hear anymore. People actually wanted to make the world good for people in generations that they would never see. It makes people think in very large terms to try to liberate women, for example, or to try to eliminate slavery.

What am I? Nothing. What would I be? Everything.