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Ambition Quotes

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Ambition Quotes

“India, she now knew, would not be content staying in the background, was nobody's wallpaper, insisted in interjecting itself into everyone's life, meddling with it, twisting it, molding it beyond recognition. India, she had found out, was a place of political intrigue and economic corruption, a place occupied by real people with their incessantly human needs, desires, ambitions, and aspirations, and not the exotic, spiritual, mysterious entity that was a creation of the Western imagination.”

PeopleNeedsHumansRealSpiritualPoliticalDesireFoundImaginationEconomicCreationAmbitionIndiaWesternCorruptionBackgroundsMysteriousRecognitionAspirationStayingEntityIntrigueExoticHuman NeedsIncessantlyMeddlingMolding
Author:Thrity Umrigar
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“We are accustomed to repeating the cliché, and to believing, that 'our most precious resource is our children.' But we have plenty of children to go around, God knows, and as with Doritos, we can always make more. The true scarcity we face is practicing adults, of people who know how marginal, how fragile, how finite their lives and their stories and their ambitions really are but who find value in this knowledge, even a sense of strange comfort, because they know their condition is universal, is shared.”

PeopleKnowsBelieveChildrenStoriesFacesValuesKnow HowConditionsStrangeComfortAmbitionAdultsResourcesUniversalOur ChildrenPlentyFragileFiniteAccustomedGod KnowsScarcityDoritos
Author:Michael Chabon
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“The world is full of people who are determined to be somebody or to give trouble. They want to get ahead, to stand out. Such ambition has no use for a gung fu man, who rejects all forms of self-assertiveness and competition”

PeopleMenWorldWantGivingSelfUseFormTroubleAmbitionCompetitionDeterminedRejectsStanding OutGet AheadAssertiveness
Book:Bruce Lee The Tao of Gung Fu: A Study in the Way of Chinese Martial Art
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“The search for the purpose of life has puzzled people for thousands of years. That’s because we typically begin at the wrong starting point—ourselves. We ask self-centered questions like What do I want to be? What should I do with my life? What are my goals, my ambitions, my dreams for my future? But focusing on ourselves will never reveal our life’s purpose.”

PeopleWantShouldYearsSelfDreamPurposeAsksGoalOur LivesAmbitionStartingPurpose Of LifeShould ISelf CenteredMy FutureStarting PointMy AmbitionPuzzled
Book:What on Earth Am I Here For?
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“As I glanced at the phraseology of the research report, dull and unfathomable to outsiders like me, I thought that if you have the ambition to become a villain, the first thing you should do is learn to be impenetrable. Don’t act like Blofeld—monocled and ostentatious. We journalists love writing about eccentrics. We hate writing about impenetrable, boring people. It makes us look bad: the duller the interviewee, the duller the prose. If you want to get away with wielding true, malevolent power, be boring.”

PeopleIfsWantShouldWritingFirstsLooksHateAmbitionResearchBoringLike MeJournalistDullProseReportsGet AwayVillainOutsidersUnfathomableOstentatious
Book:Jon Ronson's Adventures With Extraordinary People
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“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. When you are seeking to bring big plans to fruition it is important with whom you regularly associate. Hang out with friends who are like-minded and who are also designing purpose-filled lives. Similarly be that kind of a friend for your friends.”

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Author:Mark Twain
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“We can say without exaggeration that the present national ambition of the United States is unemployment. People live for quitting time, for weekends, for vacations, and for retirement; moreover, this ambition seems to be classless, as true in the executive suites as on the assembly lines. One works not because the work is necessary, valuable, useful to a desirable end, or because one loves to do it, but only to be able to quit - a condition that a saner time would regard as infernal, a condemnation.”

PeopleEndsStatesSeemsAbleLinesUnitedUnited StatesConditionsAmbitionRegardValuableQuittingExecutivesRetirementWeekendVacationUnemploymentDesirableOne LoveAssemblyExaggerationCondemnationAssembly Line
Book:Bringing It to the Table: On Farming and Food
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“When you visit countries that don't nurture these kinds of ambitions, you can feel th absence of hope...people are reduced to worrying only about that day's shelter or the next day's meal. It's a shame, even a tragedy, how many people do not get to think about the future. Technology coupled with wise leadership not only solves these problems but enables dreams of tomorow.”

PeopleThinkingFeelsKindCountryProblemDreamNextTechnologyWorryWiseAmbitionTragedyShameSolveAbsenceMealsShelterNurtureNext Day
Author:Neil deGrasse Tyson
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“When I was little, my ambition was to grow up to be a book. Not a writer. People can be killed like ants. Writers are not hard to kill either. But not books: however systematically you try to destroy them, there is always a chance that a copy will survive and continue to enjoy a shelf-life in some corner on an out-of-the-way library somehwere in Reykjavik, Valladolid or Vancouver.”

PeopleWayTryingLittlesBookHardGrowsEnjoyChanceGrowing UpAmbitionLibraryCornersCopiesShelvesAntsMy AmbitionVancouverShelf LifeReykjavik
Book:A Tale of Love and Darkness
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“Character grows in the soil of experience with the fertilization of example, the moisture of ambition, and the sunshine of satisfaction. Character cannot be purchased, bargained for, inherited, rented or imported from afar. It must be home-grown. Purely intellectual development without commensurate internal character development makes as much sense as putting a high-powered sports car in the hands of a teenager who is high on drugs. Yet all too often in the academic world, that's exactly what we do by not focusing on the character development of young people.”

PeopleWorldCharacterHomeHandsYoungGrowsSportsCarExampleDevelopmentDrugAmbitionIntellectualSatisfactionTeenagerSoilInternalsSunshineAcademicCharacter DevelopmentAfarMoistureSports CarsIntellectual DevelopmentFertilization
Author:Stephen Covey
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“If you can once engage people's pride, love, pity, ambition on your side, you need not fear what their reason can do against you.”

PeopleIfsNeedsReasonSidesCan DoPrideAmbitionPityEngagementYour Side
Book:The Works of Lord Chesterfield: Including His Letters to His Son, Etc : to which is Prefixed, an Original Life of the Author
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“One of the most fashionable notions of our times is that social problems like poverty and oppression breed wars. Most wars, however, are started by well-fed people with the time on their hands to dream up half-baked ideologies or grandiose ambitions, and to nurse real or imagined grievances.”

PeopleWellsWarRealProblemDreamHandsSocialHalfLibertyPovertyAmbitionNotionOppressionIdeologyOur TimeFedsNurseFashionableGrievanceSocial ProblemsGrandiose
Book:Controversial Essays
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“Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambition.”

PeopleInspirationalTryingMotivationalCareersLearningAdvicePositiveAmbitionSuicideEntrepreneurEntrepreneurshipAspirationAmbitiousRecipe For SuccessGreat PeopleGood AdviceMy AmbitionSuicidal ThoughtsFamous InspirationalBe InspiredMotivational SuccessDoing Your BestBelittleKnowledge EducationInspirational GoalEducation And KnowledgeStudents And EducationCreativity And WritingAchieve GreatnessTry Your BestPower Of AttractionStrong InspirationalGoals And MotivationMotivational CareerMotivational JobReaching SuccessDeep MeaningInspired To WorkGoals And AmbitionsLife AmbitionOpportunity For SuccessFeeling StuckCareer MotivationGreatness Of ManGreatest MotivationalFeeling GreatSurround Yourself With Positive PeopleInspiration And MotivationDare To TryWorkplace MotivationWorkplace MotivationalCareer OpportunitiesAmbitions And DreamsAmbitious GoalsEncourage StudentsPushing Ourselves
Book:Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
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“Greek myths are heroic, noble and tragic; but the American Dream is heroic, comical, and uplifting. Americans are a people in whom overweening ambition is rewarded, not punished. The Wright Brothers did not have their wings melt when they flew too high. Perhaps their wings were more soundly built than those of Icarus.”

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Author:John C. Wright
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“There is another more subtle way in which the innocence of childhood is lost: when the child is infected with the desire to become somebody. Contemplate the crowds of people who are striving might and main to become, not what Nature intended them to be- musicians, cooks, mechanics, carpenters, gardeners, inventors- but "somebody": to become successful, famous, powerful; to become something that will bring not quiet and self-fulfillment, but self-glorification and self-expansion”

PeopleWayChildrenSelfMightDesireLostPowerfulSuccessfulChildhoodQuietAmbitionMusicianStriveCrowdsInnocenceCooksFulfillmentSubtleContemplatingExpansionMechanicInventorGardenerCarpenterBecoming SuccessfulGlorificationSelf FulfillmentSelf Glorification
Book:The Way to Love: Meditations for Life
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“The men and woman who make the best boon companions seem to have given up hope of doing something else...some defect of talent or opportunity has cut them off from their pet ambition and has thus left them with leisure to take an interest in their lives of others. Your ambition may be, it makes him keep his thoughts at home. But the heartbroken people - if I may use the word in a mild, benevolent sense - the people whose wills are subdued to fate, give us consolation, recognition, and welcome.”

PeopleIfsMenGivingHeartMayUseHomeSeemsOpportunityLeftGivenInterestCuttingFateTalentHe ManAmbitionWelcomeRecognitionPetCompanionLeisureDefectsConsolationHeartbrokenGiven UpLives Of OthersBenevolentBoon
Author:John Jay Chapman
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“The most effectual means of preventing the perversion of power into tyranny are to illuminate, as far as practicable, the minds of the people at large, and more especially to give them knowledge of those facts which history exhibits, that possessed thereby of the experience of other ages and countries, they may be enabled to know ambition under all its shapes, and prompt to exert their natural powers to defeat its purposes.”

PeopleKnowsGivingMindMayMeanCountryFactsAgePurposeNaturalShapesAmbitionDefeatTyrannyCivil RightsPossessedExhibitsPreventingPromptsPerversion
Book:The Real Thomas Jefferson
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“Every child is born sane, and then, slowly slowly, we civilize him - we call it the process of civilization. We prepare him to become part of the great culture, the great church, the great state to which we belong. Our whole politics is stupid, and then HE becomes stupid. Our whole education is ugly. Our politics means nothing but ambition, naked ambition - ambition for power. And only the lowest kind of people become interested in power.”

PeopleKindMeanChildrenStatesWholeCultureProcessBornChurchStupidCivilizationAmbitionUglyNakedSaneLowest
Author:Rajneesh
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“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.”

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Author:Vic Oliver
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“It is a good idea to be ambitious, to have goals, to want to be good at what you do, but it is a terrible mistake to let drive and ambition get in the way of treating people with kindness and decency. The point is not that they will then be nice to you. It is that you will feel better about yourself.”

PeopleWayWantLoveInspirationalFeelsIdeasDreamGoalMistakeKindnessNiceTerribleAmbitionTreatsBe GoodAbout YourselfGood IdeasInteractionAmbitiousFeel BetterBeing NiceDecencyInteractingInteracting With Others
Author:Robert Solow
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“Besides the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation, the existence of subordinate governments, to which the people are attached, and by which the militia officers are appointed, forms a barrier against the enterprises of ambition, more insurmountable than any which a simple government of any form can admit of.”

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Book:The Federalist, on the New Constitution, Written in the Year 1788
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“Ordinary people do not question the commonly accepted version of reality. They conform to the standard values of subduing enemies and cherishing friends and family. Materialism, ambition and mundane achievements are the worldly hallmarks of success. We experience the phenomenal world and our minds as solid and truly existent. Very few people doubt these assertions and question their solidity. Yet, the process of disbelief is the first step on the spiritual path.”

PeopleWorldMindFirstsRealitySpiritualValuesProcessStepsEnemyPathDoubtAchievementAmbitionStandardsOrdinaryAcceptedVersionsMaterialismCherishFirst StepsConformFamily And FriendsWorldlyOrdinary PeopleMundaneDisbeliefAssertionPhenomenalSpiritual PathHallmarkSolidity
Author:Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche
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“Inspiration comes unawares, from unaccountable sources that have nothing to do with planning or intelligence. Let it cool ever so slightly, and you are left, pen or brush in hand, with no inspiration at all. Gifted people need not, therefore, make a song and dance about being or supposing themselves superior. They simply happened to be born with that fortunate, subconscious equipment of theirs, and the mystery exists independently of intelligence or ambition.”

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Author:Maurice Chevalier
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“I don’t think that anyone has really told (people) what design is. It doesn’t occur to most people that everything is designed--that every building and everything they touch in the world is designed. Even foods are designed now. So in the process of helping people understand this, making them more aware of the fact that the world around us is something that somebody has control of, perhaps they can feel some sense of control, too. I think that’s a nice ambition.”

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Author:Bill Moggridge
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