Perhaps the reward of the spirit who tries is not the goal but the exercise.
-E. V. Cooke
High aims form high characters, and great objects bring out great minds.
-Tryon Edwards
Aim at the sun, and you may not reach it; but your arrow will fly far higher than if aimed at an object on a level with yourself.
-Joel Hawes
No bird soars too high if he soars with his own wings.
-William Blake
We grow small trying to be great.
-E. Stanley Jones
Hitch your wagon to a star.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
You can't hold a man down without staying down with him.
-Booker T. Washington
Where ambition can cover its enterprises, even to the person himself, under the appearance of principle, it is the most incurable and inflexible of passions.
-David Hume
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
Ambition is not a vice of little people.
-Michel de Montaigne
Ambition is the last refuge of failure.
-Oscar Wilde
The men who succeed are the efficient few. They are the few who have the ambition and will power to develop themselves.
-Herbert N. Casson
Some folks can look so busy doing nothin' that they seem indispensable.
-Kin Hubbard
Too low they build who build below the skies.
-Edward Young
The tallest trees are most in the power of the winds, and ambitious men of the blasts of fortune.
-William Penn
Ambition should be made of sterner stuff.
-William Shakespeare
A life spent in constant labor is a life wasted, save a man be such a fool as to regard a fulsome obituary notice as ample reward.
-George Jean Nathan
It is the constant fault and inseparable evil quality of ambition, that it never looks behind it.
-Seneca
Ambition often puts men upon doing the meanest offices: so climbing is performed in the same posture with creeping.
-Jonathan Swift
Ambition has one heel nailed in well, though she stretch her fingers to touch the heavens.
-William Lilly
Ambition is so powerful a passion in the human breast, that however high we reach we are never satisfied.
-Niccolo Machiavelli
He who surpasses or subdues mankind, must look down on the hate of those below.
-Lord Byron
If you wish to reach the highest, begin at the lowest.
-Publilius Syrus
Ambition is a lust that is never quenched, but grows more inflamed and madder by enjoyment.
-Thomas Otway
It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are thoroughly alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger after them.
-George Eliot
The noblest spirit is most strongly attracted by the love of glory.
-Cicero
Ambition is the germ from which all growth of nobleness proceeds.
-Thomas Dunn English
There are glimpses of heaven to us in every act, or thought, or word, that raises us above ourselves.
-Arthur P. Stanley
All ambitions are lawful except those which climb upward on the miseries or credulities of mankind.
-Joseph Conrad
When you are aspiring to the highest place, it is honorable to reach the second or even the third rank.
-Cicero
Nothing is too high for the daring of mortals: we storm heaven itself in our folly.
-Horace
A noble man compares and estimates himself by an idea which is higher than himself; and a mean man, by one lower than himself. The one produces aspiration; the other ambition, which is the way in which a vulgar man aspires.
-Henry Ward Beecher
Most people would succeed in small things if they were not troubled with great ambitions.
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