Ambition Quotes - Page 85

Success achieved by the most contemptible means cannot but destroy the soul. ... It helps to cover up the inner corruption and gradually dulls one's scruples, so that those who begin with some high ambition cannot, even if they would, create anything out of themselves.

Sometimes, I think there's a lack of ambition in me. But then sometimes, I think, no, you can, like William Blake said, you know, see heaven in a grain of sand. If you look really, really closely at a situation, you can find almost endless interest in it.

Artistic ambition is important. And it seems it would be a great time to do some theatre, like a new extreme.

Detailed descriptions, abstract ambitions, relevant observations, your's and mine.

I wish I had a little more ambition. But then what would I do? Turn down more roles with more vehemence? Me no likey worky.

But is it such a bad thing to live like this for just a little while? Just for a few months of one's life, is it so awful to travel through time with no greater ambition than to find the next lovely meal? Or to learn how to speak a language for no higher purpose than that it pleases your ear to hear it? Or to nap in a garden, in a patch of sunlight, in the middle of the day, right next to your favourite fountain? And then to do it again the next day?

In youth our most bitter disappointments, our brightest hopes and ambitions, are known only to ourselves. Even our friendship and love we never fully share with another; there is something of every passion, in every situation, we conceal.

A mind always in contact with children and servants, whose aspirations and ambitions rise no higher than the roof that shelters it, is necessarily dwarfed in its proportions.

The critics could never mortify me out of heart - because I love poetry for its own sake, - and, tho' with no stoicism and some ambition, care more for my poems than for my poetic reputation.

I'm not a political person, and their ambitions are not mine. They want power. I don't want power.

Palestine is an extremely familiar place to me. Someone like me who lives everywhere in the world cannot be contained. If my hope and ambitions are in the right place, you can judge that in my films. I want to make films that diffuse any local notion. Cinema criss-crosses borders and check points. If the film is good, then it's universal.

They build too low who build beneath the skies.

What we set out to do with this movie [Leaves of Grass] was to create something that was funny and serious and had large tonal ambitions. A movie that could be poignant and funny, and suddenly quite violent. To have a character utterly sideswiped, and to learn that life is about balance.

The love of freedom, so often invigorated and disgraced by private ambition, was reduced, among the licentious Franks, to the contempt of order, and the desire of impunity.

Emulation, even in brutes, is sensitively "nervous." See the tremor of the thoroughbred racer before he starts. The dray-horse does not tremble, but he does not emulate. It is not his work to run a race. Says Marcus Antoninus, "It is all one to a stone whether it be thrown upward or downward." Yet the emulation of a man of genius is seldom with his contemporaries, that is, inwardly in his mind, although outwardly in his act it would seem so. The competitors with whom his secret ambition seems to vie are the dead.

The same sun which gilds all nature, and exhilarates the whole creation, does not shine upon disappointed ambition.

Among precautions against ambition, it may not be amiss to take precautions against our own. I must fairly say, I dread our own power and our own ambition: I dread our being too much dreaded.

To reach the height of our ambition is like trying to reach the rainbow; as we advance it recedes.

I am actuated by an ambition which I believe to be an honourable one — the ambition of serving the great cause of truth, while endeavouring to forward the literature of the country.

That has always been my biggest ambition. To bring people together. To achieve a family spirit. Because then, you can actually do anything, because people are open to what they feel is real.

My ambition in the Army was to make everybody I worked for regretful when I was ordered to other duty.

I am aware that there is a world out there that functions without regard to me. There are wars and budgets and bombings and vast dimensions of wealth and greed and ambition and corruption. And yet I don't feel a part of that world, and I wouldn't know how to join if I tried.

What better can any of us do than to reach for our own stars ... and know which they are?

If your ambition comes at the price of an unbalanced life, that there's nothing else that gives you comfort but success, it's not worth it.

Potential is an excuse to procrastinate; Ambition is a means to thrive.