Without ambition one starts nothing. Without work one finishes nothing. The prize will not be sent to you. You have to win it.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Big results require big ambitions.
—Heraclitus
If I fail it is only because I have too much pride and ambition.
—Julius Caesar
Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.
—Mark Twain
Like all of us sinners, General Betrishchev was endowed with many virtues and many defects. Both the one and the other were scattered through him in a sort of picturesque disorder. Self-sacrifice, magnanimity in decisive moments, courage, intelligence–and with all that, a generous mixture of self-love, ambition, vanity, petty personal ticklishness, and a good many of those things which a man simply cannot do without.
—Nikolai Gogol
Stay away from those small people who want to deprive you of your ambitions. Instead, befriend great people.
—Taras Shevchenko