Famous Quotes & Sayings

Steven Pinker

Of course genes can’t pull the levers of our behavior directly. But they affect the wiring and workings of the brain, and the brain is the seat of our drives, temperaments and patterns of thought. Each of us is dealt a unique hand of tastes and aptitudes, like curiosity, ambition, empathy, a thirst for novelty or for security, a comfort level with the social or the mechanical or the abstract. Some opportunities we come across click with our constitutions and set us along a path in life.

Robert Browning

Ambition is not what man does... but what man would do.

Robert Browning

What I aspired to be and was not, comforts me.

Robbie Williams

I have only one ambition, which is to be famous.

Richard Steele

Vanity makes people ridiculous, pride odious, and ambition terrible.

Samuel Adams

Were the talents and virtues which heaven has bestowed on men given merely to make them more obedient drudges, to be sacrificed to the follies and ambition of a few? Or, were not the noble gifts so equally dispensed with a divine purpose and law, that they should as nearly as possible be equally exerted, and the blessings of Providence be equally enjoyed by all?

T. Boone Pickens

On a scale from 1-10, my ambition is probably 11 or 12.

T. S. Eliot

Ambition fortifies the will of man to become ruler over other men: it operates with deception, cajolery, and violence, it is the action of impurity upon impurity.

T. S. Eliot

After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions Guides us by vanities.

Susan Sontag

When something is just bad, it's often because it is too mediocre in its ambition. The artist hasn't attempted to do anything really outlandish.

Rose Macaulay

To lunch with the important ... that should be the daily goal of those for whom life is not a playground but a ladder.

Ronaldo

I am very ambitious. I want to enjoy this and then really go for it.

Romola Garai

Female ambition is such a complicated thing to play because it is an aggressive quality, and people respond very badly to women exhibiting any kind of aggression.

Tracey Ullman

I've never looked ahead very much in my life. I've never had any grand plan from the outset. I had no burning ambition to do what I do

Robert Green Ingersoll

It has always seemed absurd to suppose that a god would choose for his companions, during all eternity, the dear souls whose highest and only ambition is to obey.

Robert Green Ingersoll

If the account given in Genesis is really true, ought we not, after all, to thank this serpent? He was the first schoolmaster, the first advocate of learning, the first enemy of ignorance, the first to whisper in human ears the sacred word liberty, the creator of ambition, the author of modesty, of inquiry, of doubt, of investigation, of progress and of civilization.

Sugar Ray Leonard

My ambition is not to be just a good fighter. I want to be great, something special.

Steve Case

I'm probably never going to be satisfied with anything we do. I think there's always the possibility of doing better. And I'd say we're doing better than we were a year ago, in terms of delivery and quality of service, but nowhere near what we should be doing .

Steve Coogan

Most of all I don't want to be bored. That's why I'd rather do something that has some sort of ambition, that risks failing, rather than make safer, more comfortable choices.

Stephen Spender

Although Poets are vain and ambitious, their vanity and ambition are of the purest kind attainable in this world. They are ambitious to be accepted for what they altimately are as revealed in their poetry.

Stephen Fry

As I go clowning my sentimental way into eternity, wrestling with all my problems of estrangement and communion, sincerity and simulation, ambition and acquiescence, I shuttle between worrying whether I matter at all and whether anything else matters but me.

Sri Aurobindo

To play with baubles is our ambition, not to deal with grave questions in a spirit of serious energy. But while we are playing with baubles, with our Legislative Councils, our Simultaneous Examinations, our ingenious schemes for separating the judicial from the executive functions, while we, I say, are finessing about trifles, the waters of the great deep are being stirred and that surging chaos of the primitive man over which our civilised societies are superimposed on a thin crust of convention, is being strangely and ominously agitated.

Rutherford B. Hayes

My ambition for station was always easily controlled. If the place came to me it was welcome. But it never seemed to me worth seeking at the cost of self-respect, or independence. My family were not historic; they were well-to-do, did not hold or seek office. It was easy for me to be contented in private life. An honor was no honor to me, if obtained by my own seeking.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg

When I graduated from law school in 1959, there wasn't a single woman on any federal bench. It wouldn't be a realistic ambition for a woman to want to become a federal judge.

Roger Milla

Dont just go there and play. Go there and play with pride and show your ambitions.

Roger Staubach

It's okay to have personal ambitions, but you have to take someone with you.

W. H. Auden

Routine, in an intelligent man, is a sign of ambition.

William Congreve

Love's but the frailty of the mind, When 'tis not with ambition joined; A sickly flame, which if not fed expires; And feeding, wastes in self-consuming fires.

Tory Burch

Ambition is not a four-letter word and women have to embrace that.

Tory Burch

Women have to embrace ambition if they want to. I had a lot of trouble taking compliments in the beginning, and it's really important for women to embrace their title.

Tory Burch

There’s always a stigma attached to the word ‘ambition’ and women. I’ve embraced it. Ambition is NOT a four-letter word and women have to embrace that.

Van Morrison

My ambition when I started out was to play two or three gigs a week. And that's what I'm doing.

Vladimir Putin

Nuclear weapons and other weapons are the means to protect our sovereignty and legitimate interests, not the means to behave aggressively or to fulfil some non-existent imperial ambitions.