Ambition Quotes - Page 51

I tell you that as long as I can conceive something better than myself I cannot be easy unless I am striving to bring it into existence or clearing the way for it.

A person’s first duty, a young person’s at any rate, is to be ambitious, and the noblest ambition is that of leaving behind something of permanent value.

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.

We continue to recognize the greater ability of some to earn more than others. But we do assert that the ambition of the individual to obtain for him a proper security is an ambition to be preferred to the appetite for great wealth and great power.

On why I don't trust democracy without extremely powerful systems of accountability and recall What seems to be generosity is often only disguised ambition - which despises small interests to gain great ones.

Our aversion to lying is commonly a secret ambition to make what we say considerable, and have every word received with a religious respect.

When ambitious men find an open passage, they are rather busy than dangerous; and if well watched in their proceedings, they will catch them selves in their own snare, and prepare a way for their own destruction.

The monk, the inquisitor, and the Jesuit were lords of Spain,- sovereigns of her sovereign, for they had formed the dark and narrow mind of that tyrannical recluse. They had formed the minds of her people, quenched in blood every spark of rising heresy, and given over a noble nation to a bigotry blind and inexorable as the doom of fate. Linked with pride, ambition, avarice, every passion of a rich, strong nature, potent for good and ill, it made the Spaniard of that day a scourge as dire as ever fell on man.

A government by the passions of the multitude, or, no less correctly, according to the vices, and ambitions of their leaders is a democracy.

I'd love for my ambition and will and intellect and sense of humour to define me as well. I'm definitely responsible for the image that I put out there. But it does become frustrating, because I don't want 'sexy' to be my defining characteristic.

The fuel of ambition is not the problem; it is the focus of ambition that frees or betrays us.

Ambition is vital, but dangerous: it is a keen motive and a driving force, but over what edge can it drive the artist?

Hit that back-stabber where it hurts, right in the ambition.

I played football when I was little. I didn't want to be an actress at all, I wanted to be a majorette in an Australian circus. That was my ambition.

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.

People who think that Sylvia Plath was a poor, sensitive poet are not getting that she had great amounts of ambition and anger that moved her along, or she wouldn't have been able to fight against that depression to produce such an incredible body of work by the age of thirty.

I'm not a political person. I usually beware of political persons. I know many, but I'm not one of them. I have no political ambitions.

At the core of everything I do, is not my ambition but my desire to make music. Somewhere along the line I stumbled onto something that was bigger, different than anything I had ever imagined, which was actually being involved with other people. I just don't live the average artist's life.

I started, with three friends, this website called Crowdrise that's sort of the Facebook for personal philanthropy, a place where anybody can have a permanent microsite of their own to stage creative fundraising projects for the charities and causes that they care about. And we did it with serious intent but without any ambition.

The object of ambition, unlike that of love, never being wholly possessed, ambition is the more durable passion of the two.

Philosophy, while it soothes the reason, damps the ambition.

Tell a scoundrel, three or four times a day, that he is the pink of probity, and you make him at least the perfection of "respectability" in good earnest. On the other hand, accuse an honorable man, too petinaciously, of being a villain, and you fill him with a perverse ambition to show you that you are not altogether in the wrong.

Aim High, Drive hard.

The ambitions we have will become the stories we live.

Hard, withering toil only can achieve a name; and long days and months and years must be passed in the chase of that bubble, reputation, which, when once grasped, breaks in your eager clutch into a hundred lesser bubbles, that soar above you still.