Famous Quotes & Sayings

Anthony Trollope

It is a grand thing to rise in the world. The ambition to do so is the very salt of the earth. It is the parent of all enterprise, and the cause of all improvement.

Anthony Trollope

Your man with a thin skin, a vehement ambition, a scrupulous conscience, and a sanguine desire for rapid improvement is never a happy, and seldom a fortunate politician.

Abraham Lincoln

I affect no contempt for the high eminence he [Senator Stephen Douglas] has reached. So reached, that the oppressed of my species,might have shared with me in the elevation, I would rather stand on that eminence, than wear the richest crown that ever pressed a monarch's brow.

Abraham Lincoln

Twenty-two years ago Judge [then-Senator Stephen] Douglas and I first became acquainted. We were both young then; he a trifle younger than I. Even then, we were both ambitious; I, perhaps, quite as much so as he. With me, the race of ambition has been a failure--a flat failure; with him it has been one of splendid success.

Alexis de Tocqueville

No stigma attaches to the love of money in America, and provided it does not exceed the bounds imposed by public order, it is held in honor. The American will describe as noble and estimable ambition that our medieval ancestors would have called base cupidity.

Alexis de Tocqueville

What chiefly diverts the men of democracies from lofty ambition is not the scantiness of their fortunes, but the vehemence of the exertions they daily make to improve them.

Alexis de Tocqueville

Among the droves of men with political ambitions in the United States, I found very few with that virile candor, that manly independence of thought, that often distinguished Americans in earlier times and that is invariably the preeminent trait of great characters wherever it exists.

Alexis de Tocqueville

The First thing that strikes a traveler in the United States is the innumerable multitude of those who seek to emerge from their original condition; and the second is the rarity of lofty ambition to be observed in the midst of the universally ambitious stir of society. No Americans are devoid of a yearning desire to rise, but hardly any appear to entertain hopes of great magnitude or to pursue very lofty aims. All are constantly seeking to acquire property, power, and reputation.

Alexandra Roach

My ambition is to become one of those actresses that is like a chameleon that you don't recognize.

Lyon's biggest rival is Lyon itself. We need to stay vigilant. Our ambition is to win the treble.

Tom Cotton

Inflammatory passion and selfish interest characterizes most men, whereas ambition characterizes men who pursue and hold national office. Such men rise from the people through a process of self-selection, since politics is a dirty business that discourages all but the most ambitious.

Bob Edwards

In college, I got interested in news because the world was coming apart. The civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, the women's right movement. That focused my radio ambitions toward news.

Bob Dylan

People's lives are filled with vice and the trappings of it. Ambition, greed and selfishness all have to do with vice. Sooner or later, you have to see through it or you don't survive.

Bob Dylan

I had ambitions to set out and find, like an odyssey or going home somewhere... set out to find... this home that I'd left a while back and couldn't remember exactly where it was, but I was on my way there. And encountering what I encountered on the way was how I envisioned it all. I didn't really have any ambition at all. I was born very far from where I'm supposed to be, and so, I'm on my way home, you know?

Bob Dylan

Basically you have to suppress your own ambitions in order to be who you need to be.

Brendan Gleeson

I don't plan in terms of career ambitions. The only career ambition I have is to work with people who are going to bring you up and elevate your performance. They'll let you know things that you didn't know already and bring you places that you might not have gotten to otherwise.

Brendon Burchard

Ambition is the great fire, it's the liberator of the unconscious person. No goals, no growth; no clarity, no change.

Brendon Burchard

There's a starting place. And that starting place for everyone is ambition. We're all scared of that word today because they made it bad in the late '80s. As if desire is not a good thing.

Brendon Burchard

It takes an extraordinary amount of attention to manifest any ambition. But life intervenes - distractions and obligations pull us away from the ambition we originally had.

Brian Tracy

A person with average talent, ambition and education, can outstrip a genius in society, if that person has focused goals.

Jan Timman

I am still full of ambition.

James Weldon Johnson

But I must own that I also felt stirred by an unselfish desire to voice all the joys and sorrows, the hopes and ambitions, of the American Negro, in classic musical form.

Juvenal

To eat at another's table is your ambition's height. [Lat., Bona summa putes, aliena vivere quadra.]

Blaise Pascal

If we do not know ourselves to be full of pride, ambition, lust, weakness, misery, and injustice, we are indeed blind. And if, knowing this, we do not desire deliverance, what can we say of a man...?

Stevie Jackson

When you're 14, 15, and you get together and start making a noise, it is the world opening up. You have that indestructible feeling when you're young. But your ambitions when you are 13 are different when you're 25. By that time, your ambition isn't to be a star anymore; it's to make a living doing music.

Chris Evert

Once you've been number one, you can never be satisfied with less.

Dick Van Dyke

When I was a kid, I had ambitions for being a television announcer, which was before television took off, you know, in the late 40s. And just through necessity, going out looking for work, I was starting to sing, and dance, and act, and I never expected to do that, nor to have any success at it at least.

Craig Ferguson

I have no ambitions beyond being comfortable in what I do for a living - and earning a living.

Jorge Sampaio

should reflect with courage and ambition a growing demand regarding this issue by the international community.

Archie Panjabi

Luckily my parents were not against my ambition, they've always been very supportive. But they were adamant that I went to university first.

This proposal from the Bank does not suggest a strong ambition to re-direct financing away from existing fossil fuel patterns, or to deliver sustainable energy to the two billion people currently without.

This project is certainly very ambitious, but there must be a balance between your ambition and your resources.

Augusten Burroughs

This is how you survive the unsurvivable, this is how you lose that which you cannot bear to lose, this is how you reinvent yourself, overcome your abusers, fulfill your ambitions and meet the love of your life: by following what is true, no matter where it leads you.