As fall the dews on quenchless sands,
Blood only serves to wash Ambition's hands!
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.
I charge thee, fling away ambition;
By that sin fell the angels.
They please, are pleas'd, they give to get esteem
Till, seeming blest, they grow to what they seem.
I see, but cannot reach, the height
That lies forever in the light.
But see how oft ambition's aims are cross'd,
And chiefs contend 'til all the prize is lost!
Nothing is too high for the daring of mortals: we would storm heaven itself in our folly.
Ambition first sprung from your blest abodes;
The glorious fault of Angels and of Gods.
I am not unambitious. I am just too ambitious for what you call ambitions.
All sins have their origin in a sense of inferiority, otherwise called ambition.
How like a mounting devil in the heart
Rules the unreined ambition!