Quotes about Ambition

"I've got a great ambition to die of exhaustion rather than boredom."
-- Angus Grossart

"Intelligence without ambition is a bird without wings."
-- C. Archie Danielson

"Ambition is a poor excuse for not having sense enough to be lazy."
-- Charlie McCarthy

"Most people would succeed in small things if they were not troubled with great ambitions."
-- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

"Big results require big ambitions."
-- James Champy

"I had no ambition to make a fortune. Mere money-making has never been my goal, I had an ambition to build."
-- John D. Rockefeller

"A noble man compares and estimates himself by an idea which is higher than himself; and a mean man, by one lower than himself. The one produces aspiration; the other ambition, which is the way in which a vulgar man aspires."
-- Joseph Conrad

"Ambition is pitiless. Any merit that it cannot use it finds despicable."
-- Joseph Joubert

"Very few people are ambitious in the sense of having a specific image of what they want to achieve. Most people's sights are only toward the next run, the next increment of money."
-- Judith M. Bardwick

"I want to work with the top people, because only they have the courage and the confidence and the risk-seeking profile that you need."
-- Laurel Cutler

"Without ambition one starts nothing. Without work one finishes nothing. The prize will not be sent to you. You have to win it. The man who knows how will always have a job. The man who also knows why will always be his boss. As to methods there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"What I aspired to be and was not, comforts me."
-- Robert Browning

"Like dogs in a wheel, birds in a cage, or squirrels in a chain, ambitious men still climb and climb, with great labor, and incessant anxiety, but never reach the top."
-- Robert Burton

"Ambition is an idol, on whose wings great minds are carried only to extreme; to be sublimely great or to be nothing."
-- Robert Southey

"Ambition is like love, impatient both of delays and rivals."
-- Sir John Denham

"Ambition is the germ from which all growth of nobleness proceeds."
-- Thomas Dunn English

"Ambition is a lust that is never quenched, but grows more inflamed and madder by enjoyment."
-- Thomas Otway

"Ambition never comes to an end."
-- Yoshida Kenko