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:

Whenever men are not obliged to fight from necessity, they fight from ambition; which is so powerful in human breasts, that it never leaves them no matter to what rank they rise. The reason is that nature has so created men that they are able to desire everything but are not able to attain everything.

Niccolò Machiavelli Discourses on Livy (1517)

There are very few philosophers and artists who are absolutely detached from ambition and respect for power, from "people of position." And among those who are more delicate or more sated, snobism replaces ambition and respect for power in the same way superstition arises on the ruins of religious beliefs.

Marcel Proust notes to Sesame and Lilies by John Ruskin (1906)

But when a miser thinks of nothing but gain or money, or when an ambitious man thinks of nothing but glory, they are not reckoned to be mad, because they are generally harmful, and are thought worthy of being hated. But, in reality, Avarice, Ambition, Lust, &c., are species of madness, though they may not be reckoned among diseases.

Baruch Spinoza Ethics (1677)

The place-seeker will resort to methods from which self-respecting men would shrink with as much aversion as the ancient Jew shrank from contact with the leper. The true purpose of education is not office. "The true purpose of education," says one, "is to cherish and unfold the seed of immortality already sown within us; to develop to their fullest extent the capacities of every kind with which the God who made us has endowed us." He, therefore, who fixes a limit of any kind to his intellectual attainments dwarfs himself, and cramps the growth of that mind given to us by the Creator, and capable of indefinite expansion.

William H. Crogman Talks for the Times (1896)

The pugilist, whose highest ambition is to pound and bruise human flesh, and bear off from the prize-ring the victory and money staked thereon, subjects himself to the severest physical training in order to secure those ends, and naturally enough he always develops into a powerful animal, but an animal of less value than the horse or mule, whose powers of body contribute so much to human comfort. There have been pugilists on a more gigantic scale, with larger arenas for their operations, men like Julius Caesar, who conceived a passion for sovereign power.

William H. Crogman Talks for the Times (1896)