Ambition Quotes - Page 36

• 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 Ward Beecher

  Bridges, Faithful, Minutes

  Henry Ward Beecher (1858). “Life Thoughts”, p.64

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• Here's the difficulty about suicide: it is an act of ambition that can be committed only when one has passed beyond ambition.

  Cesare Pavese

  Suicide, Difficulty, Committed

  Cesare Pavese, Alma Elizabeth Murch (1961). “This Business of Living”, p.73, Transaction Publishers

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• They that soar too high, often fall hard.

  William Penn

  Fall, Soar, Hard

  William Penn (1726). “A Collection of the Works of William Penn: To which is Prefixed a Journal of His Life, with Many Original Letters and Papers Not Before Published”, p.849

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• According to a British poll, you've only got a one in five chance of achieving your childhood career ambition. Which probably explains why you don't run into that many cowboys, princesses, or space rangers.

  Jay Leno

  Running, Princess, Cowboy

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• It is sometimes said that because of our past we, as a people, expect too much and set our sights too high. That is not the way I see it. Rather it seems to me that throughout my life in politics our ambitions have steadily shrunk. Our response to disappointment has not been to lengthen our stride but to shorten the distance to be covered. But with confidence in ourselves and in our future what a nation we could be!

  Margaret Thatcher

  Disappointment, Distance, Past

  The Lady's Not For Turning, delivered 10 October 1980, Conservative Party Conference, Brighton

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• Men are naturally lazy, and require some great stimulus to goad their flagging ambitions and enable them to overcome the inertia which comes from ease and the consciousness of inherited wealth. Whatever lessens in a young man the feeling that he must make his way in the world cripples his chance of success. Poverty has ever been the priceless spur that has goaded man up to his own loaf.

  Orison Swett Marden

  Men, Feelings, Lazy

  Orison Swett Marden (2006). “Rising in the World, Or Architects of Fate”, p.429, Cosimo, Inc.

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• 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.

  Orison Swett Marden

  Ocean, Roots, Desire

  Orison Swett Marden (2016). “The Miracle of Right Thought”, p.16, FV Éditions

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• It seems idle to rail at ambition merely because it is a boundless passion; or rather is not this circumstance an argument in its favor? If one would be employed or amused through life, should we not make choice of a passion that will keep one long in play?

  William Shenstone

  Passion, Play, Long

  William Shenstone (1804). “Essays on Men and Manners”, p.99

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• Young women with ambitions should be very crafty and cautious, lest mayhap they be caught in the soft, silken mesh of a happy marriage, and go down to oblivion, dead to the world.

  Elbert Hubbard

  Happy Marriage, World, Oblivion

  Elbert Hubbard, Bert Hubbard (1923). “Selected writings of Elbert Hubbard: his mintage of wisdom, coined from a life of love, laughter and work”

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• It was men's ambitions, they said, that had perverted all the arts to ends of gain.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Art, Men, Gains

  Ursula K. Le Guin (2016). “The Found and the Lost: The Collected Novellas of Ursula K. Le Guin”, p.488, Simon and Schuster

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• Wherever moral ambition exists, there right exists. And moral ambition itself must be presumed present in subconsciousness, even when the conscious self seems to reject it, so long as society has resources for bringing it into action; in much the same way that the life-saver presumes life to exist in the drowned man until he has exhausted his resources for recovering respiration.

  William Ernest Hocking

  Men, Self, Long

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• Usually when I drank too much, I could guess why I did so, the objective being to murder a state of consciousness that I didn't have the courage to sustain--a fear of heights, which sometimes during the carnival of the 1960s accompanied my attempts to transform the bourgeois journalist into an avant-garde novelist. The stepped-up ambition was a commonplace among the would-be William Faulkners of my generation; nearly always it resulted in commercial failure and literary embarrassment.

  Lewis H. Lapham

  Height, Too Much, Novelists

  "The war on drugs and alcohol is a war against human nature" by Lewis Lapham, www.theguardian.com. December 10, 2012.

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• History teaches us these lessons for the interveners: leave your prejudices at home, keep your ambitions low, have enough resources to do the job, do not lose the golden hour, make security your first priority, involve the neighbours.

  Paddy Ashdown

  Jobs, Home, Priorities

  "Lessons in Foreign Intervention". news.bbc.co.uk. June 11, 2007.

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• Only those with great ambitions know what great fears drive them forward.

  Peter Ackroyd

  Knows, Great Ambition

  "The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde". Book by Peter Ackroyd, 1983.

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• The chief difference between me and others is that I have plenty of time not only because I am without a multitude of responsibilities and without daily tasks, which demand attention: But also because I am basically without ambition. Neither the present nor the future has claims on me.

  Eric Hoffer

  Responsibility, Daily Tasks, Differences

  "Eric Hoffer and the Art of the Notebook" by Tom Bethell in Harper's Magazine, July 2005.

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• 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.

  Edgar Allan Poe

  Country, Believe, Literature

  Edgar Allan Poe (1966). “The letters of Edgar Allan Poe”, Gordian Pr Inc

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• May each of my grandsons know, at an early age, what his life's ambition is -- and may he be successful in his pursuit of that goal.

  Bette Davis

  Successful, Goal, Age

  "Savitch Remembered Crim In Will". Book by Cathy Collison, November 16, 1983.

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• If there is to be no satisfaction in pleasure, none in wisdom, none in ambition, none in the golden mean, what then? Ah, where then? In duty. In doing right because it is right.

  Lyman Abbott

  Mean, Golden, Satisfaction

  Lyman Abbott (1900). “Problems of Life: Selections from the Writings of Rev. Lyman Abbott”

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• To play with baubles is our ambition, not to deal with grave questions in a spirit of serious energy. But while we are playing with baubles, with our Legislative Councils, our Simultaneous Examinations, our ingenious schemes for separating the judicial from the executive functions, - while we, I say, are finessing about trifles, the waters of the great deep are being stirred and that surging chaos of the primitive man over which our civilised societies are superimposed on a thin crust of convention, is being strangely and ominously agitated.

  Sri Aurobindo

  Men, Primitive Man, Play

  "New Lamps for Old". Nine articles by Sri Aurobindo in the "Indu Prakash" (a Bombay daily newspaper), December 4, 1893.

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• I had no ambition when I was a kid other than to play guitar and get in a rock 'n' roll band. I don't really like to be the guy in the white suit at the front. Like in the Beatles, I was the one who kept quiet at the back and let the other egos be at the front.

  George Harrison

  Kids, Rocks, Guitar

  Interview with Selina Scott on West 57th Street, December 12, 1987.

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• The difference between tragedy and comedy is the difference between experience and intuition. In the experience we strive against every condition of our animal life: against death, against the frustration of ambition, against the instability of human love. In the intuition we trust the arduous eccentricities we're born to, and see the oddness of a creature who has never got acclimatized to being created.

  Christopher Fry

  Animal, Frustration, Differences

  "Comedy". Vogue, January, 1951.

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• I think continually of those who were truly great . Who, from the womb, remembered the soul 's history Through corridors of light where the hours are suns , Endless and singing. Whose lovely ambition Was that their lips, still touched with fire , Should tell of the spirit clothed from head to foot in song .

  Stephen Spender

  Song, Thinking, Feet

  Stephen Spender (2015). “Selected Poems of Stephen Spender”, p.23, Faber & Faber

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• To the lazy man the world appears bereft of all blessings; if poor, he has no friends; if rich, he has no ambition; he aims at nothing, and generally hits his mark.

  James Ellis

  Blessing, Men, Lazy Man

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• The ambitious sacrifices all to what he terms honor, as the miser all to money.

  Johann Kaspar Lavater

  Sacrifice, Honor, Ambitious

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• Methinks I am like a man, who having struck on many shoals, and having narrowly escap'd shipwreck in passing a small frith, has yet the temerity to put out to sea in the same leaky weather-beaten vessel, and even carries his ambition so far as to think of compassing the globe under these disadvantageous circumstances.

  David Hume

  Men, Thinking, Sea

  David Hume (2016). “A Treatise of Human Nature: Revision of Great Book”, p.248, VM eBooks

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