When I was young, I was amazed at Plutarch’s statement that the elder Cato began at the age of eighty to learn Greek. I am amazed no longer. Old age is ready to undertake tasks that youth shirked because they would take too long.
—W. Somerset Maugham
Ambition can creep as well as soar.
—Edmund Burke
There’s something different about you. I don’t know what it is, but it makes me want to change every bad thing about myself.
—K.A. Robinson in Torn
As a matter of principle, I never attend the first annual anything.
—George Carlin
It's hard to take over the world when you sleep 20 hours a day.
—Darby Conley
Deep down, all of us are probably aware that some kind of mystical evolution is our true task. Yet we suppress the notion with considerable force because to admit it is to admit that most of our political gyrations, religious dogmas, social ambitions, and financial ploys are not merely counterproductive but trivial.
—Tom Robbins
Happy and content one day, / ambition and desire eat you alive the next. / It's always been this way. Back and forth, / back and forth. That's the way it goes.
—David Budbill
While I was young, when I burned with the love of God, I thought I would convert the whole world to God. But soon I realized that it would be more than enough to convert the people who lived in my town, and I made an effort for a long time, but was not successful. Then I realized that my agenda was still too ambitious, and I focused on the people in my household. But I could not convert them either. Finally I realized: I must work on myself, if I'm really going to have something to offer God. But I didn't even accomplish this.
—Rabbi Chaim Halberstam of Sanz
God is not dead but alive and well and working on a much less ambitious project.
—Unknown
Too low they build, who build beneath the stars.
—Edward Young
Ambition is putting a ladder against the sky.
—American Proverb
The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition.
—Carl Sagan
Ambition is a poor excuse for not having sense enough to be lazy.
—Edgar Bergen
The nature of society is largely determined by the direction in which talent and ambition flow-by the tilt of the social landscape.
—Eric Hoffer
What seems to be generosity is often no more than disguised ambition, which overlooks a small interest in order to secure a great one.
—Francois de La Rochefoucauld