Famous Quotes & Sayings

Theodore Zeldin

To be a catalyst is the ambition most appropriate for those who see the world as being in constant change, and who, without thinking that they can control it, wish to influence its direction.

Theodore Zeldin

One of the great ambitions is to discover the diversity of the world, to discover who inhabits the world.

Theodore Roosevelt

I was a reasonably good student in college ... My chief interests were scientific. When I entered college, I was devoted to out-of-doors natural history, and my ambition was to be a scientific man of the Audubon, or Wilson, or Baird, or Coues type-a man like Hart Merriam, or Frank Chapman, or Hornaday, to-day.

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.

The first part was getting all of the freshmen and sophomores out this year and then keeping them out. For whatever reason, we've had the glue that has been keeping them together. We're trying to capitalize on that energy and ambition and they're learning a lot.

Neale Donald Walsch

Here is the Divine Dichotomy... The way to 'get there' is to 'be there'. Just be where you choose to get!' It's that simple.

Joseph Addison

There is a kind of grandeur and respect which the meanest and most insignificant part of mankind endeavor to procure in the little circle of their friends and acquaintance. The poorest mechanic, nay, the man who lives upon common alms, gets him his set of admirers, and delights in that superiority which he enjoys over those who are in some respects beneath him. This ambition, which is natural to the soul of man, might, methinks, receive a very happy turn; and, if it were rightly directed, contribute as much to a person's advantage, as it generally does to his uneasiness and disquiet.

Joseph Addison

It is observed by Cicero, that men of the greatest and most shining parts are most actuated by ambition.

Joseph Addison

Content has a kindly influence on the soul of man, in respect of every being to whom he stands related. It extinguishes all murmuring, repining, and ingratitude toward that Being who has allotted us our part to act in the world. It destroys all inordinate ambition; gives sweetness to the conversation, and serenity to all the thoughts; and if it does not bring riches, it does the same thing by banishing the desire of them.

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.

James Russell Lowell

Greatly begin. Though thou have time, but for a line, be that sublime. Not failure, but low aim is crime.

Liberty Hyde Bailey

A garden requires patient labor and attention. Plants do not grow merely to satisfy ambitions or to fulfill good intentions. They thrive because someone expended effort on them.

Louise J. Kaplan

For a woman ... to explore and express the fullness of her sexuality, her ambitions, her emotional and intellectual capacities, her social duties, her tender virtues, would entail who knows what risks and who knows what truly revolutionary alteration to the social conditions that demean and constrain her. Or she may go on trying to fit herself into the order of the world and thereby consign herself forever to the bondage of some stereotype of normal femininity - a perversion, if you will.

George Barna

The visionary who is serving God ceases to live for personal ambitions, but rather for God's ambitions.

Dorothy Dix

(A girl's) chief ambition then, as now, was to get married and have a home and children.

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.

Mahatma Gandhi

Cent percent swadeshi gives sufficient scope for the most insatiable ambition for service and a satisfaction of every kind of talent.

Mahatma Gandhi

In battling against untouchability, and in dedicating myself to that battle, I have no less an ambition than to see a full regeneration of humanity.

John Adams

A constitution founded on these principles introduces knowledge among the people, and inspires them with a conscious dignity becoming freemen; a general emulation takes place, which causes good humor, sociability, good manners, and good morals to be general. That elevation of sentiment inspired by such a government, makes the common people brave and enterprising. That ambition which is inspired by it makes them sober, industrious, and frugal.

John Adams

Ambition is the subtlest beast of the intellectual and moral field. It is wonderfully adroit in concealing itself from its owner.

John Adams

Elections to office, which are the great objects of ambition, I look at with terror!

John Adams

A pen is certainly an excellent instrument to fix a man's attention and to inflame his ambition.

Eric Idle

Talent is always more interesting - ambition is not interesting. If you have talent, you have to find ways of expressing it, but you may not be a success in the world's terms.

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.