Top 40 Ambition Quotes (2023 Update)

1. “Big results require big ambitions.”

— Heraclitus

Also featured in: Inspirational Entrepreneurship Quotes, Business Quotes

2. “Comfort kills ambition. Get uncomfortable and get used to it in your pursuit of your goals and dreams.”

— Robert T. Kiyosaki

3. “My ambition cannot be stopped!”

— Cao Cao

4. “Do it, and then you will feel motivated to do it.”

— Zig Ziglar

Also featured in: Action Quotes

5. “As long as I have a want, I have a reason for living. Satisfaction is death.”

— George Bernard Shaw

6. “Criticism is the price of ambition.”

— Robin S. Sharma

7. “If you want to reach a goal, you must ‘see the reaching’ in your own mind before you actually arrive at your goal.”

— Zig Ziglar

8. “If I fail it is only because I have too much pride and ambition.”

— Julius Caesar

9. “At least eighty percent of millionaires are self-made. That is, they started with nothing but ambition and energy, the same way most of us start.”

— Brian Tracy

10. “Make mistakes of ambition and not mistakes of sloth. Develop the strength to do bold things, not to suffer.”

— Niccolò Machiavelli

11. “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

Also featured in: Progress Quotes

12. “Your ambition should be to get as much life out of living as you possibly can, as much enjoyment, as much interest, as much experience, as much understanding. Not simply be what is generally called a ‘success.’”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

13. “Anyone can be an entrepreneur. All it takes is a little drive and ambition.”

— Robert T. Kiyosaki

14. “You can start right where you stand and apply the habit of going the extra mile by rendering more service and better service than you are now being paid for.”

— Napoleon Hill

Also featured in: Character Quotes

15. “My ambition is handicapped by laziness.”

— Charles Bukowski

16. “The biggest changes in a women’s nature are brought by love; in man, by ambition.”

— Rabindranath Tagore

17. “Routine, in an intelligent man, is a sign of ambition.”

— W.H. Auden

Also featured in: Intelligent Quotes

18. “Ambition is not a vice of little people.”

— Michel de Montaigne

19. “I think my greatest ambition in life is to pass on to others what I know.”

— Frank Sinatra

20. “We pay a price for everything we get or take in this world; and although ambitions are well worth having, they are not to be cheaply won, but exact their dues of work and self denial, anxiety and discouragement.”

— L.M. Montgomery

Also featured in: Anxiety Quotes

21. “My main ambition in life is to be on the Devil’s most wanted list.”

— Leonard Ravenhill

22. “Nothing else so destroys the power to stand alone as the habit of leaning upon others. If you lean, you will never be strong or original. Stand alone or bury your ambition to be somebody in the world.”

— Orison Swett Marden

Also featured in: Being Strong Quotes

23. “To make a great dream come true, you must first have a great dream.”

— Hans Selye

24. “I’m going to let love lead the way, always. And I was born with this blind – blind ambition, and it’s kind of gotten me here to this point. And I think that I’ll stick to it.”

— Katy Perry

25. “When I was young, my ambition was to be one of the people who made a difference in this world. My hope is to leave the world a little better for having been there.”

— Jim Henson

26. “Ambition means tying your well-being to what other people say or do. Self-indulgence means tying it to the things that happen to you. Sanity means tying it to your own actions.”

— Marcus Aurelius

27. “The only way to coast is downhill.”

— Zig Ziglar

28. “Ambition, fueled by compassion, wisdom and integrity, is a powerful force for good that will turn the wheels of industry and open the doors of opportunity for you and countless others.”

— Zig Ziglar

29. “To seek solitude like a wild animal. That is my only ambition.”

— Dalai Lama XIV

30. “All progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

— George Bernard Shaw

Also featured in: Progress Quotes

31. “Happiness is man’s greatest aim in life. Tranquility and rationality are the cornerstones of happiness.”

— Epicurus

32. “Your ambition outweighed your talent.”

— Casey Stoner

33. “Welcome to the graveyard of ambition.”

— David Nicholls

34. “Learning to code is useful no matter what your career ambitions are.”

— Arianna Huffington

35. “When ambition ends, happiness begins.”

— Thomas Merton

36. “Weakness of attitude becomes weakness of character.”

— Albert Einstein

Also featured in: Attitude Quotes, Character Quotes

37. “For me, ambition has become a dirty word. I prefer hunger. To be hungry- great. To have hopes, dreams- great.”

— Johnny Depp

38. “Nothing leads so straight to futility as literary ambitions without systematic knowledge.”

— H. G. Wells

39. “Here we may reign secure; and in my choice To reign is worth ambition, though in hell: Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven.”

— John Milton

Also featured in: Choices Quotes, Crazy Quotes

40. “History consists, for the greater part, of the miseries brought upon the world by pride, ambition, avarice, revenge, lust, sedition, hypocrisy, ungoverned zeal, and all the train of disorderly appetite.”

— Edmund Burke