Ambition

(101 votes)   A life spent in constant labor is a life wasted, save a man be such a fool as to regard a fulsome obituary notice as ample reward.

George Jean Nathan
1882-1958, American Critic

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(121 votes)   A noble man compares and estimates himself by an idea which is higher than himself; and a mean man, by one lower than himself. The one produces aspiration; the other ambition, which is the way in which a vulgar man aspires.

Joseph Conrad
1857-1924, Polish-born British Novelist

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(179 votes)   Ambition -- it is the last infirmity of noble minds.

Sir James M. Barrie
1860-1937, British Playwright

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(112 votes)   Ambition has its disappointments to sour us, but never the good fortune to satisfy us. Its appetite grows keener by indulgence and all we can gratify it with at present serves but the more to inflame its insatiable desires.

Benjamin Franklin
1706-1790, American Scientist, Publisher, Diplomat

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(67 votes)   Ambition has one heel nailed in well, though she stretch her fingers to touch the heavens.

William Lilly

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(70 votes)   Ambition is a poor excuse for not having sense enough to be lazy.

Charlie McCarthy

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(83 votes)   Ambition is an idol, on whose wings great minds are carried only to extreme; to be sublimely great or to be nothing.

Robert Southey
1774-1843, British Author

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(99 votes)   Ambition is like love, impatient both of delays and rivals.

Sir John Denham
1615-1668, British Poet, Dramatist

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(348 votes)   Ambition is not a vice of little people.

Michel Eyquem De Montaigne
1533-1592, French Philosopher, Essayist

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(430 votes)   Ambition is pitiless. Any merit that it cannot use it finds despicable.

Joseph Joubert
1754-1824, French Moralist

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(115 votes)   Ambition is so powerful a passion in the human breast, that however high we reach we are never satisfied.

Niccolo Machiavelli
1469-1527, Italian Author, Statesman

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(138 votes)   Ambition is the germ from which all growth of nobleness proceeds.

Thomas Dunn English
1819-1902, American Physician, Lawyer

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(108 votes)   Ambition makes the same mistake concerning power that avarice makes concerning wealth. She begins by accumulating power as a means to happiness, and she finishes by continuing to accumulate it as an end.

Charles Caleb Colton
1780-1832, British Sportsman Writer

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(72 votes)   Ambition often puts Men upon doing the meanest offices; so climbing is performed in the same position with creeping.

Jonathan Swift
1667-1745, Anglo-Irish Satirist

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(211 votes)   As falls the dew on quenchless sands, blood only serves to wash ambition's hands.

Lord Byron
1788-1824, British Poet

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