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.
Most people would succeed in small things, if they were not troubled with great ambitions.
Full of hopes beyond their power though not beyond their ambition.
The very substance of the ambitious is merely the shadow of a dream.
For all may have,
If they dare try, a glorious life, or grave.
Though ambition in itself is a vice, yet it is often the parent of virtues.