We grow small trying to be great.

E. Stanley Jones
   

Beware of ambition!  It's one of the true double-edged swords. . . . depending
upon how we define it, it may be one of our great motivators that helps us to
grow and learn and become who we're meant to be, or one of our great destroyers
that holds us down and turns us into something we never imagined, in our worst
nightmares, that we ever would become as human beings.
   

It is the nature of ambition to make people liars and cheats, to hide the
truth in their breasts, and show, like jugglers, another thing in their
mouths, to cut all friendships and enmities to the measure of their own
interest, and to make a good countenance without the help of good will.

Sallust

   

The very substance of the ambitious is merely the shadow of a dream.

William Shakespeare
   

   

To be ambitious of true honor and of the real glory and perfection
of our nature is the very principle and incentive of virtue; but
to be ambitious of titles, place, ceremonial respects, and civil pageantry,
is as vain and little as the things are which we court.

Philip Sidney
   
It is the constant fault and inseparable evil
quality of ambition, that it never looks behind it.

Seneca
  

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

Niccolò Machiavelli
   

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.

Tony deMello
   

Noble people compare and estimate themselves by an idea
which is higher than themselves; and a mean person,
by one lower than him- or herself. The one produces aspiration;
the other ambition, which is the way in which a vulgar person aspires.

Henry Ward Beecher
   

   

Ambition is a lust that is never quenched, but grows
more inflamed and madder by enjoyment.

Thomas Otway
   
All ambitions are lawful except those which
climb upward on the miseries or credulities of humankind.

Joseph Conrad
  
Ambition is the last refuge of failure.

Oscar Wilde

Most people would succeed in small things if
they were not troubled with great ambitions.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Ambition is like hunger; it obeys no law but its appetite.

Henry Wheeler Shaw
It is by attempting to reach the top at a single leap that so much misery is produced in the world.

William Cobbett

What is ambition but desire of greatness?
  And what is greatness but extent of power?

Sir Thomas Higgons
   
Like dogs in a wheel, birds in a cage, or squirrels in a chain,
ambitious people still climb and climb, with great labor,
and incessant anxiety, but never reach the top.

Robert Burton
  
   

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Ambition makes the same mistake concerning power that avarice
makes concerning wealth.  She begins by accumulating power as a means
to happiness, and she finishes by continuing to accumulate it as an end.

Charles Caleb Colton
    

Wisdom is corrupted by ambition, even when the quality of the ambition is intellectual.
For ambition even of this quality, is but a form of self-love.

Henry Taylor
   

Over a year of one-sentence reminders
of ways that we can
make the most of our lives each day that we live.
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A novel of life and learning; Walker's fascinating journey will remind you of all that is good in this world.
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When David agrees to give 70-year-old Hector a ride west, he never thinks that the man will become so important to him.
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"Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers," wrote Wordsworth over 150 years ago.  And we're still doing the same.
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The desire to reach for the stars is ambitious.
The desire to reach hearts is wise.

Maya Angelou

   
Oh, it's delightful to have ambitions. I'm so glad I have such a lot.
And there never seems to be any end to them-- that's the best of it.
Just as soon as you attain to one ambition you see another one
glittering higher up still. It does make life so interesting.

L.M. Montgomery
Anne of Green Gables
   

Intelligence without ambition is a bird without wings.

Salvador Dalí

   

   

The biggest changes in a women's nature are brought by love; in man, by ambition.

Rabindranath Tagore