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Ambition Quotes

Shakespeare leads, followed by Milton, Pope, Cowper and the American educator William H. Crogman. The sourced lines are mostly unflattering. Wilde, in 1894, calls ambition the last refuge of the failure, and Bierce, in 1911, defines it as an overmastering desire to be vilified by enemies while living and made ridiculous by friends when dead. Burke, in Letters on a Regicide Peace (1796), puts it more neatly: ambition can creep as well as soar.

Flagged: a passage on moderation being a virtue to limit the ambition of great men, credited to Disraeli, is marked misattributed, and two passages of Dryden, one on ambition and gold, the other on the diadem as the centre of ambition, are disputed.

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Most quoted on ambition:

Only those with great ambitions know what great fears drive them forward.

Peter Ackroyd The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde (1983)

It had long been an ambition to find the line of force that might lead to the Holy Land in the time of Christ.

Stephen R. Lawhead The Bone House (2011)

“When integrity shapes our ideas, they rise above ambition and serve the common good.” K.P.

Kuruvilla Pandikattu

If royalty did not exist, the storm of strife would never subside, nor selfish ambition disappear. Mankind (is) under the burden of lawlessness and lust…

Abu'l-Fazl ibn Mubarak

ARCAFIM’s ambition is to make rural climate adaptation a recognizable, viable and sustainable business line for African financial institutions.”

Gérardine Mukeshimana

Nobody’s political ambition is worth the blood of any Nigerian.

Goodluck Jonathan

Here's the difficulty about suicide: it is an act of ambition that can be committed only when one has passed beyond ambition.

Cesare Pavese This Business of Living (1935)

It is always my endeavour however in making a picture that it should be without a companion in the world. At least such should be a painters ambition.

John Constable

Just being a mediocre driver has never been my ambition. That's not my style.

Michael Schumacher Schumacher (2006)

Contentment is great gain. Contentment is not a lack of ambition.

Chinonso Arubayi

Mohammedanism has the only organization and pretty nearly the only ambition hostile to us that is left in India.

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury

His rash ambition had climbed a height where it was difficult to stand with firmness, and impossible to fall without instant destruction.

Edward Gibbon The History of the Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire (1776)

L'ambition prend aux petites âmes plus facilement qu'aux grandes, comme le feu prend plus aisément à la paille, aux chaumières qu'aux palais.

Nicolas Chamfort

Amour, folie aimable; ambition, sottise sérieuse.

Nicolas Chamfort

Most of us find it starkly ludicrous that the height of all possible ambition, to the ungifted, must be to drape oneself in crowns and robes.

Scott Lynch The Republic of Thieves (2013)

"But if you say it's in your heart, you're going to make it. It's about having ambition and a goal, and this is also something else I can say - dream big."

Salima Mukansanga

My political ambition is not worth the blood of any Nigerian.

Goodluck Jonathan

Be ambitious, be wildly ambitious, because if you constantly run up against people who are telling you ‘no,’ ambition is the only thing that motors you through.

Alicia Menendez

The things we've done, they were our ambitions, say 9 months ago.

George Harrison

May each of my grandsons know, at an early age, what his life's ambition is -- and may he be successful in his pursuit of that goal.

Bette Davis

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