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.
My ambition is to unfold the sources of India in the profound plane of human nature.
Gratitude looks to the past and love to the present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead.
Ambition, enterprise, effort and success are largely states of mind; happiness is the United States.
Most men become successful and famous, not through ambition, but through ability and character.
Whether we fall by ambition, blood, or lust,
Like diamonds, we are cut with our own dust.