High Ambition Quotes:

I've always had high ambitions and aspirations.

- James Dashner

topic: Ambition, Aspiration, High Ambition

It is not the critic who counts...The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena...

- Theodore Roosevelt

source: Address at the Sorbonne, Paris, 23 Apr. 1910. Richard M. Nixon quoted this passage in his address to the nation announcing his decision to resign the presidency, 8 Aug. 1974. See Theodore Roosevelt 1; Theodore Roosevelt 2; Theodore Roosevelt 5

topic: Men, Arena, Credit, Strong Man, Putting Yourself Out There

Nothing is too high for the daring of mortals: we storm heaven itself in our folly.

- Horace

topic: Ambition, Heaven, Storm, Life Ambition, My Ambition

No bird soars too high if he soars with his own wings.

- William Blake

topic: Love, Motivational, Cute, Importunate, Birds Wings

If the leader is filled with high ambition and if he pursues his aims with audacity and strength of will, he will reach them in spite of all obstacles.

- Carl von Clausewitz

topic: Leadership, Military, Ambition, Military Leader, Military Leadership

Ambition is so powerful a passion in the human breast, that however high we reach we are never satisfied.

- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

topic: Stars, Powerful, Passion, Life Ambition, My Ambition

Intelligence without ambition is a bird without wings.

- Salvador Dali

topic: Inspirational, Motivational, Art, Life Ambition, Surrealism

Not failure, but low aim, is crime.

- James Russell Lowell

topic: Inspirational, Educational, Failure, Martial Artist, Martial Arts Inspirational

Get going. Move forward. Aim High. Plan a takeoff. Don't just sit on the runway and hope someone will come along and push the airplane. It simply won't happen. Change your attitude and gain some altitude. Believe me, you'll love it up here.

- Donald Trump

topic: Inspirational, Positive, Success, Life Ambition, Encouraging Words

Laziness is the road to progress, but only when it is allied to intelligent thought and high ambition.

- Richard Koch

topic: Ambition, Intelligent, Progress, High Ambition

Success achieved by the most contemptible means cannot but destroy the soul. ... It helps to cover up the inner corruption and gradually dulls one's scruples, so that those who begin with some high ambition cannot, even if they would, create anything out of themselves.

- Emma Goldman

source: Alphonso Lingis, Emma Goldman (1996). “Red Emma Speaks: An Emma Goldman Reader”, Humanities Press International

topic: Success, Ambition, Mean, Scruples, High Ambition

All who have been great and good without Christianity would have been much greater and better with it. If there be, amongst the sons of men, a single exception to this maxim, the divine Socrates may be allowed to put in the strongest claim. It was his high ambition to deserve, by deeds, not by creeds, an unrevealed heaven, and by works, not by faith, to enter an unpromised land.

- Charles Caleb Colton

source: Charles Caleb Colton (1832). “Lacon: Or Many Things in Few Words, Addressed to Those who Think”, p.155

topic: Ambition, Son, Men, High Ambition

Science in England is not a profession: its cultivators are scarcely recognised even as a class. Our language itself contains no single term by which their occupation can be expressed. We borrow a foreign word [Savant] from another country whose high ambition it is to advance science, and whose deeper policy, in accord with more generous feelings, gives to the intellectual labourer reward and honour, in return for services which crown the nation with imperishable renown, and ultimately enrich the human race.

- Charles Babbage

topic: Country, Ambition, Race, Labourers, Savants

Oh, September! It is so soon for you to lose your friends to good work and strange loves and high ambitions. The sadness of that is too grown-up for you. Like whiskey and voting, it is a dangerous and heady business, as heavy as years. If I could keep your little tribe together forever, I would. I do so want to be generous. But some stories sprout bright vines that tendril off beyond our sight, carrying the folk we love best with them, and if I knew how to accept that with grace, I would share the secret.

- Catherynne M. Valente

topic: Ambition, Sadness, Sight, Together Forever, High Ambition

In a certain reign there was a lady not of the first rank whom the emperor loved more than any of the others. The grand ladies with high ambitions thought her a presumptuous upstart, and lesser ladies were still more resentful. Everything she did offended someone.

- Murasaki Shikibu

topic: Book, Ambition, Reign, Resentful, High Ambition