Ambition displeases when it has been sated... Having reached the peak, it aspires to descend.
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.
It is ambition, but a generous ambition, that seeks to improve one's status without harm to others.
Rarely, if ever, can ambition be satisfied with no harm to another.
I have no ambitions nor desires.
To be a poet is not my ambition,
It's simply my way of being alone.
To reign is worth ambition though in Hell:
Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven.