Famous Quotes & Sayings

John Stott

There is something inherently inappropriate about cherishing small ambitions for God.

John Steinbeck

Look at them. There are your true philosophers. I think that Mack and the boys know everything that has ever happened in the world and possibly everything that will happen. I think they survive in this particular world better than other people. In a time when people tear themselves to pieces with ambition and nervousness and covetousness, they are relaxed. All of our so-called successful men are sick men, with bad stomachs, and bad souls, but Mack and the boys are healthy and curiously clean. They can do what they want. They can satisfy their appetites without calling them something else.

Martin Luther

God uses lust to impel men to marry, ambition to office, avarice to earning, and fear to faith. God led me like an old blind goat.

Martin Luther

Ambition begat simony; simony begat the pope and his brethren, about the time of the Babylonish captivity

Mark Steyn

Kafka would surely have been impressed by the twin ambitions of the modern empathetic state: the need to set up hyper-regulatory bodies preventing you from doing anything yourself, while simultaneously endowing lavish pseudo-agencies to hand out leaflets listing a 1-800 number you can dial to order more leaflets.

Mark Steyn

Long before they slump into poverty, great powers succumb to a poverty of ambition.

Seth Grahame-Smith

But I am happy. And happiness, I have decided, is a noble ambition.

Tobey Maguire

All the people throughout my life who were naysayers pissed me off, but they've all given me a fervor. An angry ambition that cannot be stopped-and I look forward to finding a therapist and working on that.

Rajneesh

Expectation brings frustration. Private ambitions bring failures.

Rajneesh

The family gives you ambition, and ambition is one of the hindrances for enlightenment. It gives you desires, it gives you a longing to be successful, and all these things create your tensions, your anxieties: how to be a celebrity?

Rajneesh

Wherever there is desire and ambition, you are in bondage.

Meredith Brooks

I know my ambitions are big, but you've got to have something after rock and roll.

Michael Moorcock

Here, I thought, I had found the human race in its final stages of decadence perverse, insouciant, without ambition. And I could not blame them. After all, they had no future.

Michael Moorcock

There was no more dangerous kind of madman than one who devoted a good brain and a courageous heart to unhealthy ambitions.

Theodore Roosevelt

It is true of the Nation, as of the individual, that the greatest doer must also be a great dreamer.

Kimi Raikkonen

Do you have any ambitions outside racing? My main ambition at the moment, whether inside or outside racing, is to become Formula 1 World Champion.

Michael Lindsay-Hogg

I didn't have the equipment for the regular world of being a lawyer. I didn't have the imagination for that. I did have a funny kind of ambition, but I didn't know where to put it.

Michael Atherton

The only positive benefit of the injury to Flintoff may be the end of his captaincy ambitions

Eric Hoffer

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.

Matthew Miller

You can still strike it rich with technology. If you have a smart idea, a lot of ambition and a lot of luck, Silicon Valley is where some billionaires are going to be made.

James F. Cooper

The common faults of American language are an ambition of effect, a want of simplicity, and a turgid abuse of terms.

Henry Adams

If any one of us has had an ambition higher than that of making money; a motive better than that of expediency; a faith warmer than that of reasoning; a love purer than that of the self; he has been slow to express it; still slower to urge it.

Henry David Thoreau

No man who acts from a sense of duty ever puts the lesser duty above the greater. No man has the desire and the ability to work onhigh things, but he has also the ability to build himself a high staging.

Plato

I know nothing more worthy of a man's ambition than that his son be the best of men.

Plato

One trait in the philosopher's character we can assume is his love of the knowledge that reveals eternal reality, the realm unaffected by change and decay. He is in love with the whole of that reality, and will not willingly be deprived even of the most insignificant fragment of it - just like the lovers and men of ambition we described earlier on.

If you can once engage people's pride, love, pity, ambition (or whatever is their prevailing passion) on your side, you need not fear what their reason can do against you.

Philip Seymour Hoffman

The ambition, the drive, the wanting to be the center of attention, the wanting to succeed... They're all inside me somewhere.

Lauryn Hill

I didn't have that intense ambition to be a musician or an actress. I just enjoyed it. And by enjoying it, because I loved it, it enabled me to get better at what I was doing, because there was a love behind it.

Lisa Kleypas

I loved him so much, loved his fearlessness, his strength, even the ambition that would someday take him away from me.

John Taylor Gatto

For reasons that are both fair and foul - but mostly for fair reasons - we have come under the domain of a scientific-management system whose ambitions are endless. They want to manage every second of our lives, every expenditure that we make. And the schools are the training ground to create a population that's easy to manage.

John Stuart Mill

A democratic constitution, not supported by democratic institutions in detail, but confined to the central government, not only is not political freedom, but often creates a spirit precisely the reverse, carrying down to the lowest grade in society the desire and ambition of political domination.

James Joyce

My mouth is full of decayed teeth and my soul of decayed ambitions.

James Richardson

I am not unambitious. I am just too ambitious for what you call ambitions.