Inspiration can be a powerful catalyst for ambition, providing the motivation needed to chase dreams and achieve great heights. Whether you're embarking on a new venture, striving to reach a long-sought goal, or simply seeking a boost in your everyday life, a well-chosen quote can ignite that inner spark. Welcome to our carefully curated collection of the top 78 inspiring ambition quotes. These words of wisdom from remarkable individuals across history and various fields aim to fuel your drive, nurture your determination, and remind you of the boundless possibilities that lie ahead. Dive in and let the voices of these visionaries guide you on your journey toward greatness.
1. “At the age of six I wanted to be a cook. At seven I wanted to be Napoleon. And my ambition has been growing steadily ever since.” - Salvador Dali
2. “We have advantages. We have a cushion to fall back on. This is abundance. A luxury of place and time. Something rare and wonderful. It's almost historically unprecedented. We must do extraordinary things. We have to. It would be absurd not to.” - Dave Eggers
3. “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
4. “I would not sit waiting for some vague tomorrow, nor for something to happen. One could wait a lifetime, and find nothing at the end of the waiting. I would begin here, I would make something happen.” - Louis L'Amour
5. “The world looks very different to me now at twenty. I have outgrown my early opinions and ideals with my short dresses, just as Mrs. Walton said we would. Now the critics can say 'Thou waitest till thy woman's fingers wrought the best that lay within thy woman's heart.” - Annie Fellows Johnston
6. “Women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition.” - Timothy Leary
7. “Live for each second without hesitation” - Elton John
8. “Politeness. Now there's a poor man's virtue if ever there was one. What's so admirable about inoffensiveness, I should like to know. After all, it's easily achieved. One needs no particular talent to be polite. On the contrary, being nice is what's left when you've failed at everything else. People with ambition don't give a damn what other people think about them.” - Diane Setterfield
9. “If a man does not work passionately - even furiously - at being the best in the world at what he does, he fails his talent, his destiny, and his God.” - George Lois
10. “The others in the dorm thought I wanted to be a writer, because I was always alone with a book, but I had no such ambition. There was nothing I wanted to be. ” - Haruki Murakami
11. “A man’s worth is no greater than the worth of his ambitions.” - Marcus Aurelius Antoninus
12. “I'd rather be partly great than entirely useless.” - Neal Shusterman
13. “After visiting these two places (Berchtesgaden and the Eagle's lair on Obersalzberg) you can easily see how that within a few years Hitler will emerge from the hatred that surrounds him now as one of the most significant figures who ever lived. He had boundless ambition for his country, which rendered him a menace to the peace of the world, but he had a mystery about him in the way that he lived and in the manner of his death that will live and grow after him. He had in him the stuff of which legends are made.” - John Fitzgerald Kennedy
14. “Our ambition should be to rule ourselves, the true kingdom for each one of us; and true progress is to know more, and be more, and to do more.” - Oscar Wilde
15. “The first virtue of a young man today - that is, for the next fifty years perhaps, as long as we live in fear, and religion has regained its powers - is to be incapable of enthusiasm and not to have much in the way of brains.” - Stendahl (Marie-Henri Beyle)
16. “Because there was a hunger in me to see everything and do everything. I wanted to be everyone I saw. I wasn't enough for me. Can you understand that?” - Sidney Sheldon
17. “There is hope in dreams, imagination, and in the courage of those who wish to make those dreams a reality.” - Jonas Salk
18. “It is the age of ambition that proves the mettle of men” - José de Alencar
19. “The mayor was the most dangerous of individuals. He possessed, in equal amounts, unhealthy doses of charm and ambition. He was a driven opportunist.” - Marc Fitten
20. “If a person holds no ambitions in this world, he suffers unknowingly. If a person holds ambitions, he suffers knowingly, but very slowly.” - Alan Lightman
21. “Yet isn't it all—all of it, every single episode and detail of the Clinton saga—exactly like that? And isn't some of it a little bit more serious? For Sen. Clinton, something is true if it validates the myth of her striving and her 'greatness' (her overweening ambition in other words) and only ceases to be true when it no longer serves that limitless purpose. And we are all supposed to applaud the skill and the bare-faced bravado with which this is done. In the New Hampshire primary in 1992, she knowingly lied about her husband's uncontainable sex life and put him eternally in her debt. This is now thought of, and referred to in print, purely as a smart move on her part. In the Iowa caucuses of 2008, he returns the favor by telling a huge lie about his own record on the war in Iraq, falsely asserting that he was opposed to the intervention from the very start. This is thought of, and referred to in print, as purely a tactical mistake on his part: trying too hard to help the spouse. The happy couple has now united on an equally mendacious account of what they thought about Iraq and when they thought it. What would it take to break this cheap little spell and make us wake up and inquire what on earth we are doing when we make the Clinton family drama—yet again—a central part of our own politics?” - Christopher Hitchens
22. “I would rather be a little nobody, then to be a evil somebody.” - Abraham Lincoln
23. “It is true of the Nation, as of the individual, that the greatest doer must also be a great dreamer.” - Theodore Roosevelt
24. “There are two goddesses in your heard. The Goddess of Wisdom and the Goddess of Wealth. Everyone thinks they need to get wealth first, and wisdom will come. So they concern themselves with chasing money. But they have it backwards. You have to give your heart to the Goddess of Wisdom, giver her all your love and attention, and the Goddess of Wealth will become jealous, and follow you.” - Joe Vigil
25. “The biggest changes in a women's nature are brought by love; in man, by ambition” - Tagore Rabindranath
26. “Every man has his secret desire, I suppose, and mine is someday to own a farm.” - A. G. Street
27. “To wish a healthy man to die is the wish from a mind of sickness. To wish an ailing man to die is the wish of the ambitious.” - Roman Payne
28. “I’ve decided the act that cannot wait / is the important will to create / But, ah, if my belly is ignored / the pantry door I shall implore / But I’ve been known to reach the bed / ideas still famished in my head.” - Roman Payne
29. “The Artist always has the masters in his eyes.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson
30. “The credit belongs to those who are actually in the arena, who strive valiantly; who know the great enthusiasums, the great devotions, and spend themselves in a worthy cause; who at best know the triumph of high achievement; and who, at worst, if they fail, fail while daring greatly, so that their place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.” - Theodore Roosevelt
31. “There was no more dangerous kind of madman than one who devoted a good brain and a courageous heart to unhealthy ambitions.” - Michael Moorcock
32. “Isana laughed. "And you, lady? Are you a woman of conscience or of ambition?"The lady smiled. "That's a question rarely asked here at court.""And why is that?""Because a woman of conscience would tell you that she is a person of conscience. A woman of ambition would tell you that she is a person of conscience—only much more convincingly.” - Jim Butcher
33. “I did it again. Lying guilty in a hotel room for a woman I will fail for.” - J.M. August
34. “Persistence. Perfection. Patience. Power. Prioritize your passion. It keeps you sane.” - Criss Jami
35. “He had little respect for anyone who was not willing to put in the effort required to survive and thrive. Not everyone needed the same driving ambition that had fueled him. That had led him to being possibly the richest man in London without a title in his lineage -- all earned in under a decade. That had given him the power to change lives. But a person needed to have the drive to change his own life.” - Anne Mallory
36. “In my terms, I settled for the realities of life, and submitted to its necessities: if this, then that, and so the years passed. In Adrian's terms, I gave up on life, gave up on examining it, took it as it came. And so, for the first time, I began to feel a more general remorse - a feeling somewhere between self-pity and self-hatred - about my whole life. All of it. I had lost the friends of my youth. I had lost the love of my wife. I had abandoned the ambitions I had entertained. I had wanted life not to bother me too much, and had succeeded - and how pitiful that was.” - Julian Barnes
37. “And what, O Queen, are those things that are dear to a man? Are they not bubbles? Is not ambition but an endless ladder by which no height is ever climbed till the last unreachable rung is mounted? For height leads on to height, and there is not resting-place among them, and rung doth grow upon rung, and there is no limit to the number.” - H. Rider Haggard
38. “We've had enough." He took back the report and jammed it under his arm. "We've had a bellyful, in fact.""And like everyone who's had enough," said Control as Alleline noisily left the room, "he wants more.” - John le Carré
39. “You could never understand why I grind like I doMakiyah & Jalani why I grind like I do” - Nicki Minaj
40. “People with ambition don't give a damn what other people think of them.” - Diane Setterfield
41. “The children are innocent until proven guilty. For their sake, not ours, we must soldier on, muddling our way toward frugality, simplicity, liberty, community, until some kind of sane and rational balance is achieved between our ability to love and our cockeyed ambition to conquer and dominate everything in sight. No wonder the galaxies recede from us in every direction, fleeing at velocities that approach the speed of light. They are frightened. We humans are the Terror of the Universe.” - Edward Abbey
42. “Follow your star, it's never too late, even if it doesn't quite happen as you expect.” - Jemima Pett
43. “It occurred to me that the voracious ambition of humans is never sated by dreams coming true, because there is always the thought that everything might be done better and again. aa” - John Green
44. “The piercing fanfare of the brass against the brutal boom and rattle of the drums surged through the air. At the head of the Ferris band marched the drum majorette. A crimson and white shako crowned her long dark hair which flew out behind her and across her radiant face flushed with excitement. Her blue eyes flashed and her smile registered triumph at having been chosen.” - Clark Zlotchew
45. “He built up a situation that was far enough from the truth. It never occurred to him that Helen was to blame. He forgot the intensity of their talk, the charm that had been lent him by sincerity, the magic of Oniton under darkness and of the whispering river. Helen loved the absolute. Leonard had been ruined absolutely, and had appeared to her as a man apart, isolated from the world. A real man, who cared for adventure and beauty, who desired to live decently and pay his way, who could have travelled more gloriously through life than the Juggernaut car that was crushing him.” - E.M. Forster
46. “You shouldn't do that," said Laura. "You could set yourself on fire.” - Margaret Atwood
47. “Il y avait des hommes si ambitieux qu'ils auraient torché les chefs, pour les entendre seulement dire merci.” - Émile Zola
48. “From my boyhood I have had an intense and overwhelming conviction that my real vocation lay in the direction of literature. I have, however, had a most unaccountable difficulty in getting any responsible person to share my views.- Cyprian Overbeck Wells: A Literary Mosaic” - Arthur Conan Doyle
49. “Is it ever thus, at the end of things? Does any woman ever count the grains of her harvest and say: Good enough? Or does one always think of what more one might have laid in, had the labor been harder, the ambition more vast, the choices more sage?” - Geraldine Brooks
50. “I love living in the ghetto!" #PoorMindSet” - Habeeb Akande
51. “everyone endeavors as much as possible to make others love what he loves, and to hate what he hates... This effort to make everyone approve what we love or hate is in truth ambition, and so we see that each person by nature desires that other persons should live according to his way of thinking...” - Baruch Spinoza
52. “Thus, Marlowe posed the silent question: could aspiring Icarus be happy with a toilsome life on land managing a plough with plodding oxen having once tasted the weightless bliss of flight?” - E.A. Bucchianeri
53. “This is the age of the specialist, and years ago Rollo had settled on his career. Even as a boy, hardly capable of connected thought, he had been convinced that his speciality, the one thing he could do really well, was to inherit money.” - P.G. Wodehouse
54. “Never give up. It's like breathing—once you quit, your flame dies letting total darkness extinguish every last gasp of hope. You can't do that. You must continue taking in even the shallowest of breaths, continue putting forth even the smallest of efforts to sustain your dreams. Don't ever, ever, ever give up.” - Richelle E. Goodrich
55. “He'd been given an assignment to write about teen beauty pageants [...], which he'd accepted because he enjoyed blood sports as much as the next person.” - David Baldacci
56. “The finest of athletes have, along with skill, a few more essential qualities: to conduct their life with dignity, with integrity, with courage and modesty. All these, are totally compatible with pride, ambition, determination and competitiveness” - Donald Bradman
57. “Those with less curiosity or ambition just mumble that God works in mysterious ways. I intend to catch him in the act.” - Damien Echols
58. “Prosperity cannot be experienced by living detached from Nature. Everything else is only a gradation of materialistic, earthly ambitions. We came from the stars and there lies the path to our substantive evolution.” - Grigoris Deoudis
59. “Ambition: it is the last infirmity of noble minds.” - J. M. Barrie
60. “If you are not working towards something, your life will end with nothing.” - Habeeb Akande
61. “Everyone— black as well as white— thinks it's going to be better over the next jump of land.” - Stephen King
62. “There comes a time in everyone’s life—and I do mean in everyone’s life—when you ask yourself what it is that you’ve been doing with your life. Sometimes you even realize that whatever you’ve been doing all your life, you’ve been doing it wrong. Dead wrong… Son, you want that realization to hit you when you’re 70? Or 50? Or when you’re still young, with your whole life still ahead of you?” - Ali Sheikh
63. “Ambition should be made from sterner stuff.” - William Shakespeare
64. “I want to be known as unknown.” - CQAnonymous
65. “It is the most ambitious and driven among us who are the most sorely in need of having our reckless hopes dampened through immersive dousings in the darkness which religions have explored. This is a particular priority for secular Americans, perhaps the most anxious and disappointed people on earth, for their nation infuses them with the most extreme hopes about what they may be able to achieve in their working lives and relationships.” - Alain De Botton
66. “Statesmen are grocers, ambitious clowns.” - Dejan Stojanovic
67. “To conceive the horror of my sensations is, I presume, utterly impossible; yet a curiosity to penetrate the mysteries of these awful regions predominates even over my despair, and will reconcile me to the most hideous aspect of death.” - Edgar Allan Poe
68. “Employing your imagination is the first step to the fulfillment of any dream.” - Richelle E. Goodrich
69. “We like to stress the commonness of heroes. Essences seem undemocratic. We feel oppressed by the call to greatness. We regard an interest in glory or perfection as a sign of mental unhealthiness, and have decided that high achievers, who are called overachievers, owe their surplus ambition to a defect in mothering (either too little or too much). We want to admire but think we have a right not to be intimidated. We dislike feeling inferior to an ideal. So away with ideals, with essences. The only ideals allowed are healthy ones -- those everyone may aspire to, or comfortably imagine oneself possessing.” - Susan Sontag
70. “Ambition is not what a man would do, but what a man does, for ambition without action is fantasy.” - Bryant McGill
71. “A king of a kingdom no one fucking knows about! I'm the tree in the forest that silently falls--when no one is around to be crushed! [Lothaire, Enemy of Old]” - Kresley Cole
72. “It was such a feeling of developing your inner self to the people who liked to dig deeper and deeper until you cannot fathom the deepest evil in you.” - Fernando Lachica
73. “Without drive you will never get anywhere in life.” - Habeeb Akande
74. “Ambitious people understand intelligent people far better than intelligent people understand ambitious people; therefore, ambition will always triumph over intelligence. Once you appreciate this reality, civilization becomes clearer and unfortunately, more distressing.” - D.A. Blankinship
75. “Ambition was a dull pain, like a continually broken heart.” - Enid Shomer
76. “Ambition is the bridge between reality and living a dream.” - Addoo S. Mukhtar
77. “Everyone was willing to take some small risk to lessen the damage of their ambition and disorder and lawlessness.” - Kristin Cashore
78. “Roger was not personally ambitious; he mainly wanted life not to make too many demands on him.” - John Lanchester
