“Without ambition one starts nothing. Without work one finishes nothing. The prize will not be sent to you. You have to win it.”

People only see what they are prepared to see.

To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.

Nothing external to you has any power over you.

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

Let us be silent, that we may hear the whisper of God.

When you were born you were crying and everyone else was smiling. Live your life so at the end, your’re the one who is smiling and everyone else is crying.

I cannot remember the books I’ve read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.

Bad times have a scientific value. These are occasions a good learner would not miss.

You become what you think about all day long.

Of all the ways to lose a person, death is the kindest.

That which we persist in doing becomes easier to do, not that the nature of the thing has changed but that our power to do has increased.

Dare to live the life you have dreamed for yourself. Go forward and make your dreams come true.

It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.

In my walks, every man I meet is my superior in some way, and in that I learn from him.

What you do speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say.

People do not seem to realise that their opinion of the world is also a confession of their character.

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

To young girls and women everywhere: dream with ambition and know that there are no limits to what you can be.

My ambition is handicapped by laziness.

Big results require big ambitions.

My greatest ambition is to have a career without becoming a career woman.

It is my earnest desire that some of you should carry on this scientific work and keep for your ambition the determination to make a permanent contribution to science.

I’m an entrepreneur. ‘Ambitious’ is my middle name.

Climate change poses an existential threat to the planet that is no less dire than that posed by North Korea’s nuclear ambitions.