Life Ambition Quotes

“Nor is it the spirit of those Christians - alas, they are many - whose ambition in life seems limited to building a nice middle-class Christian home, and making nice middle-class Christian friends, and bringing up their children in nice middle-class Christian ways, and who leave the sub-middle-class sections of the community, Christian and non-Christian, to get on by themselves.
The Christmas spirit does not shine out in the Christian snob. For the Christmas spirit is the spirit of those who, like their Master, live their whole lives on the principle of making themselves poor - spending and being spent - to enrich their fellowmen, giving time, trouble, care and concern to do good to others - and not just their own friends - in whatever way there seems need.”

— J.I. Packer

“Be free from vanity and pride. Be free from belief, disbelief, convictions, and parties. Be free from habit. Be free from ambition and greed. Be free from family and surroundings. Be free from fanaticism. Be free from fate; be master of your own life. Be free from death; life depends on the will of others, but death on our own will.”

— Sarah Bakewell

“This is true happiness: to have no ambition and to work like a horse as if you had every ambition. To live far from men, not to need them and yet to love them. To have the stars above, the land to your left and the sea to your right and to realize of a sudden that in your heart, life has accomplished its final miracle: it has become a fairy tale.”

— Nikos Kazantzakis

“The preacher must be surrendered to God in the holiest devotion. He is not a professional man, his ministry is not a profession; it is a divine institution, a divine devotion. He is devoted to God. His aim, aspirations, ambition are for God and to God, and to such prayer is as essential as food is to life.”

— E.M.Bounds

“I learned regret in the ruins of Tarbfhlaith. I regretted that ambition had ruled my heart instead of affection for my kin. And with the lesson of regret came the gratitude for having life still to move my lips and limbs, and to speak kind words to and embrace those I may not see again on this sweet-smelling earth. I learned that I cannot wait to love what is in my presence, for it or I may well be gone tomorrow. To some, such as Giannon, this lesson poisons the heart with bitterness. But such bitterness has no value and is, in fact, cowardly. For bitterness risks nothing.”

— Kate Horsley

“I adore good food as I adore all the other pleasant things of life, and because I have that gift I am able to look upon the future with equanimity."
"Why?" asked Alec.
"Because a love for good food is the only thing that remains with man when he grows old. Love? What is love when you are five and fifty and can no longer hide the disgraceful baldness of your pate. Ambition? What is ambition when you have discovered that honours are to the pushing and glory to the vulgar. Finally we must all reach an age when every passion seems vain, every desire not worth the trouble of achieving it; but then there still remain to the man with a good appetite three pleasures each day, his breakfast, his luncheon, and his dinner.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

“It is an awful, just sickening feeling, I discovered, to live with somebody, to exist in the midst of sharing a life, only to realize it is utterly doomed. It was botulism of the soul. I'd had such ambition for building a life together, because I wanted that strength of character and security. But I had overlooked the most important thing: he wasn't right for me. I wasn't right for him. Merely wanting us to be right and good together wasn't enough.”

— Augusten Burroughs

“Before we got married, I had tremendous ambition. Once we got married and I started having children, then I just thought that that was my real life. Steve was definitely more ambitious than I.”

— Eydie Gorme

“I have a personal ambition to live my life honestly and honor the true love that I've had and also the people I've had around me. I want to stay hopeful, even though I get scared about why we're even alive at all.”

— Lana Del Rey

“For everything that comes to us from chance is unstable, and the higher it rises, the more liable it is to fall. Moreover, what is doomed to perish brings pleasure to no one; very wretched, therefore, and not merely short, must the life of those be who work hard to gain what they must work harder to keep. By great toil they attain what they wish, and with anxiety hold what they have attained; meanwhile they take no account of time that will never more return. New engrossments take the place of the old, hope leads to new hope, ambition to new ambition. They do not seek an end of their wretchedness, but change the cause.”

— Seneca

“What dream, what hope, what despair drives us to the things we do, just to desert us when the deed is done? What hollow things are they, motive and reason, born at night to fade so quickly in the sunlight of consequence? What we do in life lives on inside us, long after ambition and fear lie frosted and opaqued on forgotten shores. What we do in life, more than what we think or say, is what we are.”

— Gregory David Roberts

“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?”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

“If the incarceration experience doesn't break your spirit, it changes you in a way that you lose many fears. You begin to realize that your life is not ruled by your ego and ambition and that it can end any day at any time. So why worry? You learn that just like on the street, there is life in prison, and random people get there based on the jeopardy of the system. The prisons are filled by people who crossed the law, as well as by those who were incidentally and circumstantially picked and crushed by somebody else's agenda. On the other hand, as a vivid benefit, you become very much independent of material property and learn to appreciate very simple pleasures in life such as the sunlight and morning breeze.”

— Michael Lewis

“'Titanic' made me want to tell stories ... To have all these characters and costumes and have ambition and think big and have dreams ... It came at a very troubled period of my life.”

— Xavier Dolan

“I'm not an ambitious person, there is no ambition in my life. I have a mission in my life. And my mission is to serve my country. And when I am working for my state, it means I am working for my country, or my nation.”

— Narendra Modi

“The idols of modern culture have had a profound influence on the shape of our work today. In traditional societies people found their meaning and sense of value by submitting their interests and sacrificing their desires to serve higher causes like God, family, and other people. In modern societies there is often no higher cause than individual interests and desires. This shift powerfully changed the role of work in people's lives-it now became the way we defined ourselves. Traditional cultures tended to see people's place on the social ladder as assigned by nature or convention, each family having its "proper place." That view had put too little stock in the role of individual talent, ambition, and hard work for determining the outcome of one's life. But modern society responded by putting too much stock in the autonomous person.”

— Timothy Keller

“You can spend the rest of your life fighting to be respected, accepted and understood by the people you have created a life with or you can start living a life where that isn't a daily goal and ambition in your relationship.”

— Shannon L. Alder

“Ambition had never troubled me, so I decided to begin by watching life at my leisure for a few years, waiting until I finally felt tempted to find some circle of influence for myself.”

— Stefan Zweig

“C.S. Lewis knew this. He believed that we were too easily satisfied with the "lesser joys" of life instead of pressing on to pure, full joy in Christ. He wrote, "We are halfhearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition [and food] when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased"7
Solomon,”

— Elyse M. Fitzpatrick

“Literature is fighting for its very life because compromise is mistook for ambition, and joining up is preferred to standing out ...”

— Ben Marcus

“Ours is one continued struggle against degradation sought to be inflicted upon us by the European, who desire to degrade us to the level of the raw Kaffir, whose occupation is hunting and whose sole ambition is to collect a certain number of cattle to buy a wife with, and then pass his life in indolence and nakedness.”

— Mahatma Gandhi

“The life which, if i were still a man with pride, honor, ambition and so forth, would seem like the bottom rung of degredation. It's a negative reality, just like death
a sort of heaven without the pain and terror of dying.”

— Henry Miller

“For while religion prescribes brotherly love in the relations among the individuals and groups, the actual spectacle more resembles a battlefield than an orchestra. Everywhere, in economic as well as in political life, the guiding principle is one of ruthless striving for success at the expense of one's fellow. men. This competitive spirit prevails even in school and, destroying all feelings of human fraternity and cooperation, conceives of achievement not as derived from the love for productive and thoughtful work, but as springing from personal ambition and fear of rejection.”

— Albert Einstein

“I found that married life gave me the necessary freedom to follow an ambition which had been with me since childhood; and so I started to write in earnest.”

— Jean Plaidy

“His mother's favorite, he possessed the self-confidence that told him he would achieve something worth while in life, and the ambition to do so, though for long the direction this would take remained uncertain.”

— Ernest Jones

“An objective is an ambition, and life without ambition is ... well, aimless wandering.”

— Alfred Wainwright

“Ambition is the desire to go forward and improve one's condition. It is a burning flame that lights up the life of the individual and makes him see himself in another state. To be ambitious is to be great in mind and soul. To want that which is worth while and strive for it. To go on without looking back, reaching to that which gives satisfaction.”

— Marcus Garvey

“Distance yourself from negative people who try to lower your motivation and decrease your ambition. Create space for positive people to come into your life. Surround yourself with positive people who believe in your dreams, encourage your ideas, support your ambitions, and bring out the best in you.”

— Roy Bennett

“I emphasize that I am full of ambition and hope and of full charm of life. But I can renounce all at the time of need, and that is the real sacrifice.”

— Bhagat Singh

“You can set unachievable goals, and you can end up missing out on your life because, in some ways, ambition is kind of living in the future.”

— Simon Le Bon

“My ambition was always to show aspects of daily life as if we were seeing them for the first time.”

— Brassai

“If a man is after money, he's money mad; if he keeps it, he's a capitalist; if he spends it, he's a playboy; if he doesn't get it, he's a never-do-well; if he doesn't try to get it, he lacks ambition. If he gets it without working for it; he's a parasite; and if he accumulates it after a life time of hard work, people call him a fool who never got anything out of life.”

— Vic Oliver

“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.”

— Rutherford B. Hayes

“Some are slaves of ambition or money, but others are interested in understanding life itself. These give themselves the name of philosophers , and they value the contemplation and discovery of nature beyond all other pursuits.”

— Pythagoras

“I can't wait for the iPhone 6. It's my only ambition in life to have it quickly.”

— Karl Lagerfeld

“My only ambition in life ... is to wear size 28 jeans.”

— Karl Lagerfeld

“Women are but the toys which amuse our lighter hours
ambition is the serious business of life.”

— Walter Scott

“Each child is poisoned by the society through teaching him ambition. Ambition is a poison far more dangerous than any alcohol can ever be, far more dangerous than marijuana or LSD, because ambition destroys your whole life. It keeps you moving in a false direction. It keeps you imagining, desiring, dreaming, it keeps you wasting your life. Ambition means a subtle creation of the ego, and once the ego is created you are in the grip of darkness. And the whole social structure depends on ambition.”

— Rajneesh

“The person who is free of sexuality, whose sexuality has become a transformed phenomenon, is also free of money, is also free of ambition, is also free of the desire to be famous. Immediately all these things disappear from his life. The moment sex energy starts rising upwards, the moment sex energy starts becoming love, prayer, meditation, then all lower manifestations disappear.”

— Rajneesh

“I know of nothing which I would choose to have as the subject of my ambition for life than to be kept faithful to my God till death.”

— Charles Spurgeon

“A spot whereon the founders lived and died
Seemed once more dear than life; ancestral trees,
Or gardens rich in memory glorified
Marriages, alliances, and families,
And every bride's ambition satisfied.”

— William Butler Yeats

“If your life is motivated by your ambition to leave a legacy, what you'll probably leave as a legacy is ambition.”

— Rich Mullins

“Change may be the vitalizing wind blowing through the house of life, but it is not an abiding force. We need permanent things to soak peace into us as well as progress - the beauty of the earth, seedtime and harvest, the smiles of lovers, the joy of the young in being alive, pride in craftsmanship. Why, oh why must we let ourselves forget these lasting treasures in an age of consuming ambition, speed madness and accumulated goods that leave us no chance to live? If we cannot be contented with a little no wealth will ever satisfy us.”

— Helen Keller