25 quotes on ambition

For no real reason, I was looking up quotes on ambition and quickly found a number worthy of keeping on hand.  I thought some were funny, some were thought-provoking, and the last one (check out the link) reminded me that ambition can come in all shapes, sizes and flavors.

“Without ambition one starts nothing. Without work one finishes nothing. The prize will not be sent to you. You have to win it. The man who knows how will always have a job. The man who also knows why will always be his boss. ”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition. ”
- Timothy Leary

“You can’t build a reputation on what you’re going to do.”
-Henry Ford

“To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition.”
- Samuel Johnson

“If you want more, you have to require more from yourself.”
- Dr Phil

“I had no ambition to make a fortune. Mere money-making has never been my goal, I had an ambition to build. ”
- John D. Rockefeller

“Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.”
- Mark Twain

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; because there is not effort without error and shortcomings; but who does actually strive to do the deed; who knows the great enthusiasm, the great devotion, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement and who at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly. So that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.”
- Theodore Roosevelt

“Nothing can stop the man with the right mental attitude from achieving his goal; nothing on earth can help the man with the wrong mental attitude.”
- Thomas Jefferson

“I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness.  If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them. ”
-Henry David Thoreau

“Most people would succeed in small things if they were not troubled with great ambitions.”
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

“If you believe that some day it’s going to happen, some day it probably will happen. You just have to make sure you’re there when it’s happening, and ideally you’re at the front of the parade, and the principle beneficiary of when it happens, but it’s not a kind of thing where you just sort of sit back and wait.”
- Steve Case

“At the age of six I wanted to be a cook. At seven I wanted to be Napoleon. And my ambition has been growing steadily ever since. ”
- Salvador Dali

“I’m hopeful. I know there is a lot of ambition in Washington, obviously. But I hope the ambitious realize that they are more likely to succeed with success as opposed to failure.”
- George W. Bush

“If I weren’t as talented as I am ambitious, I would be a gross monstrosity.”
- Madonna

“I am very ambitious. I want to enjoy this and then really go for it.”
- Ronaldo

“A slave has but one master; an ambitious man has as many masters as there are people who may be useful in bettering his position.”
- Jean de la Bruyere

“My ambition is to have beautiful encounters, not to make money.”
- Juliette Binoche

“It’s stasis that kills you off in the end, not ambition.”
- Bono

“Ambition is the path to success. Persistence is the vehicle you arrive in.”
- Bill Bradley

“My ambition is to be happy.”
- Penelope Cruz

“A wise man is cured of ambition by ambition itself; his aim is so exalted that riches, office, fortune and favour cannot satisfy him.”
- Samuel Johnson

“Ambition is so powerful a passion in the human breast, that however high we reach we are never satisfied.”
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

“Me only have one ambition, y’know. I only have one thing I really like to see happen. I like to see mankind live together – black, white, Chinese, everyone – that’s all.”
- Bob Marley

“Ambition has one heel nailed in well, though she stretch her fingers to touch the heavens.”
- Lao Tzu

“A man can’t just sit around.”
-  Larry Walters

Tags: life, money