Famous Quotes & Sayings

Louisa May Alcott

Jo's ambition was to do something very splendid; what it was she had no idea, as yet, but left it for time to tell her…

Lionel Messi

My ambition is always to get better and better.

Leo Tolstoy

Patriotism in its simplest, clearest and most indubitable signification is nothing else but a means of obtaining for the rulers their ambitions and covetous desires, and for the ruled the abdication of human dignity, reason, conscience, and a slavish enthrallment to those in power.

Leo Tolstoy

Every time I tried to express my most heartfelt desires to be morally good I met with contempt and ridicule; and as soon as I would give in to vile passions I was praised and encouraged. Ambition, love of power, self-interest, lechery, pride, anger, vengeance-all of it was highly esteemed.

Lewis H. Lapham

What joins the Americans one to another is not a common ancestry, language or race, but a shared work of the imagination that looks forward to the making of a future, not backward to the insignia of the past. Their enterprise is underwritten by a Constitution that allows for the widest horizons of sight and the broadest range of expression, supports the liberties of the people as opposed to the ambitions of the state, and stands as premise for a narrative rather than plan for an invasion or a monument. The narrative was always plural; not one story, many stories.

Lewis H. Lapham

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.

Josephine Hart

To appear unambitious amongst the ambitious is to invite loathing or fear. To be in the game, but not playing with intent to win, is to be the enemy.

Juliette Binoche

My only ambition is to be true every moment I am living.

John Locke

Whensoever, therefore, the legislative shall transgress this fundamental rule of society, and either by ambition, fear, folly, or corruption, endeavour to grasp themselves, or put into the hands of any other, an absolute power over the lives, liberties, and estates of the people, by this breach of trust they forfeit the power the people had put into the hands... and it devolves to the people, who have a right to resume their original liberty, and... provide for their own safety and security.

John Lithgow

I always tell that to young people - go to college, do theater, work with an audience. Don't try to learn how to act in front of millions and millions of people. Don't make that your first ambition, to be on a sitcom or get into the movies. Learn who you are as an actor, and the best way to do that is to do it in front of an audience.

John Legend

I want you to live the best life you can. You can be world-changers. .. Pursue this life of love with focus and passion and ambition and courage. Give it your all. And that will be your path to true success.

John Kricfalusi

I think we are destroying the minds of America and that has been one of my lifelong ambitions.

That's my ambition: that you look at the pictures and realize what complex, fascinating, interesting people every single one of my subjects is.

Jodie Foster

I didn't have any ambition to produce big mainstream popcorn movies.

Jimmy Buffett

Forget that blind ambition, and learn to trust your intuition.

Jim Rohn

Your life, my life, the life of each one of us is going to serve as either a warning or an example. A warning of the consequences of neglect, self-pity, lack of direction and ambition... or an example of talent put to use, of discipline self-imposed, and of objectives clearly perceived and intensely pursued.

Jim Rohn

Fears, even the most basic ones, can totally destroy our ambitions. Fear, if left unchecked, can destroy our lives. Fear is one of the many enemies lurking inside us.

George MacDonald

Ambition is but the evil shadow of aspiration.

George Lois

If a man does not work passionately - even furiously - at being the best in the world at what he does, he fails his talent, his destiny, and his God.

Emanuel Celler

I didn't know then that I would never be able to leave the sounds and smells of these sights behind me, but I was fiercely conscious of one thing-my ambition.

Ellen Hopkins

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

Elizabeth Gilbert

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?

Joseph Hall

Worldly ambition is founded on pride or envy, but emulation, or laudable ambition, is actually founded in humility; for it evidently implies that we have a low opinion of our present attainments, and think it necessary to be advanced.

Joseph Hall

Ambition is torment enough for an enemy; for it affords as much discontentment in enjoying as in want, making men like poisoned rats, which, when they have tasted of their bane, cannot rest till they drink, and then can much less rest till they die

Joseph Conrad

All ambitions are lawful except those which climb upward on the miseries or credulities of mankind.

John Keats

Neither poetry, nor ambition, nor love have any alertness of countenance as they pass by me.

John D. Rockefeller

The person who starts out simply with the idea of getting rich won't succeed; you must have a larger ambition. There is no mystery in business success. If you do each day's task successfully, and stay faithfully within these natural operations of commercial laws which I talk so much about, and keep your head clear, you will come out all right.

Lloyd Blankfein

Is it possible to have too much ambition? Is it possible to be too successful?

Lloyd Blankfein

Ambition is your inner voice that tells you, you can, and should, strive to go beyond your circumstances or situation in life.

Lynette Fromme

Most minds think from A to B to G to O, or hold goals and ambitions to keep them going.

Lynda Obst

Love and friendship, two of life's abiding rewards, are endangered species in Hollywood. People crave both, mistaking alliance for friendship, lust for love, and ambition for both.

Lyndon B. Johnson

In Asia we face an ambitious and aggressive China, but we have the will and we have the strength to help our Asian friends resist that ambition. Sometimes our folks get a little impatient. Sometimes they rattle their rockets some, and they bluff about their bombs. But we are not about to send American boys 9 or 10,000 miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves.

Lucy Walker

Some documentaries are made by people who are driven more by one particular story, or have different backgrounds or ambitions, but I'm always looking for projects that let me be the best filmmaker I can be, and to be stretched and grow further.