The greatest evil which fortune can inflict on men is to endow them with small talents and great ambition.

Vice stirs up war, virtue fights.

Our failings sometimes bind us to one another as closely as could virtue itself.

You are not born for fame if you don't know the value of time.

When a thought is too weak to be expressed simply, it should be rejected.

To possess taste, one must have some soul.

We should expect the best and the worst of mankind, as from the weather.

All grand thoughts come from the heart.

If people did not compliment one another there would be little society.

Everyone is born sincere and die deceivers.

Clarity is the counterbalance of profound thoughts.

The art of pleasing is the art of deception.

There is nothing that fear and hope does not permit men to do.

The greatest achievement of the human spirit is to live up to one's opportunities and make the most of one's resources.

Men sometimes feel injured by praise because it assigns a limit to their merit; few people are modest enough not to take offense that one appreciates them.

The law cannot equalize mankind in spite of nature.

You must rouse into people's consciousness their own prudence and strength, if you want to raise their character.

The most absurd and reckless aspirations have sometimes led to extraordinary success.

The things we know best are the things we haven't been taught.

Lazy people are always anxious to be doing something.

The idle always have a mind to do something.

Great thoughts always come from the heart.

To achieve great things we must live as though we were never going to die.

One promises much, to avoid giving little.

The greatest evil which fortune can inflict on men is to endow them with small talents and great ambition.

Those who can bear all can dare all.

Wicked people are always surprised to find ability in those that are good.

Emotions have taught mankind to reason.

To achieve great things we must live as though we were never going to die.

It is not true that equality is a law of nature. Nature has no equality. Its sovereign law is subordination and dependence.

Focusing your life solely on making a buck shows a certain poverty of ambition. It asks too little of yourself. Because it's only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself that you realize your true potential.

Don't let ambition get so far ahead that it loses sight of the job at hand.

The truth is really an ambition which is beyond us.

Ambition can be a disease, and it feeds on itself.

My craziest ambition is to take John Madden's job and salary.

There has to be this pioneer, the individual who has the courage, the ambition to overcome the obstacles that always develop when one tries to do something worthwhile, especially when it is new and different.

To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition, the end to which every enterprise and labor tends, and of which every desire prompts the prosecution.

I'm just a ballplayer with one ambition, and that is to give all I've got to help my ball club win. I've never played any other way.

Ambition has one heel nailed in well, though she stretch her fingers to touch the heavens.

People in the U.K. cannot understand whether Blair has lost his mind or whether his ambition to be the second-most-powerful man in the world made him lose his mind.

One thing all stage mothers share is an overpowering ambition for their daughters.

Moderation has been called a virtue to limit the ambition of great men, and to console undistinguished people for their want of fortune and their lack of merit.

Me only have one ambition, y'know. I only have one thing I really like to see happen. I like to see mankind live together - black, white, Chinese, everyone - that's all.

You want the book to be special, and they are not always going to be special, but at least you want that to be the ambition. So the only way that happens is if you are not pressing to write a book.

The average Hollywood film star's ambition is to be admired by an American, courted by an Italian, married to an Englishman and have a French boyfriend.

I should have been smart enough to stay happy. But my ambition ruled my life.

Great ambition, the desire of real superiority, of leading and directing, seems to be altogether peculiar to man, and speech is the great instrument of ambition.

God like Us suffers the ambition to make a destiny more extraordinary than was conceived for Him, yes God is like Me, only more so.

I used to think I had ambition... but now I'm not so sure. It may have been only discontent. They're easily confused.