Ambition begets vexations.
Singhalese (on ambition)
Ambition destroys its possessor.
Hebrew (on ambition)
Ambition is a good servant but a bad master.
unknown
Go for it.
American (on ambition)
If you would get ahead, be a bridge.
Welsh (on ambition)
Great ambition is the passion of a great character. Those endowed with it may perform very good or very bad acts. All depends on the principles which direct them.
Napoleon Bonaparte
Ambition is a dream with a V8 engine.
Elvis Presley
Ambition is the germ from which all growth of nobleness proceeds.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ambition is like love, impatient both of delays and rivals.
Sir John Denham
Ambition is a lust that is never quenched, but grows more inflamed and madder by enjoyment.
Thomas Otway
Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.
Mark Twain
Ambition beats genius 99% of the time
Jay Leno
A man without ambition is like a beautiful worm
it can creep, but it cannot fly.
Henry Ward Beecher
Ambition first sprung from your blest abodes; The glorious fault of Angels and of Gods.
Alexander Pope
Ambition is to the mind what the cap is to the falcon; it blinds us first, and then compels us to tower, by reason of our blindness. But alas, when we are at the summit of a vain ambition, we are also at the depth of real misery. We are placed where time cannot improve, but must impair us; where chance and change cannot befriend, but may betray us; in short, by attaining all we wish, and gaining all we want, we have only reached a pinnacle where we have nothing to hope, but everything to fear.
Charles Caleb Colton
Ambition is an idol, on whose wings great minds are carried only to extreme, to be sublimely great, or to be nothing.
Thomas Southerne
Ambition is an uncomfortable companion many times. He creates a discontent with present surroundings and achievements; he is never satisfied but always pressing forward to better things in the future. Restless, energetic, purposeful, it is ambition that makes of the creature a real man.
Lyndon B. Johnson
Ambition is so powerful a passion in the human breast, that however high we reach we are never satisfied.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Ambition is a Dead Sea fruit, and the greatest peril to the soul is that one is likely to get precisely what he is seeking.
Edward Dahlberg
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
Where ambition can cover its enterprises, even to the person himself, under the appearance of principle, it is the most incurable and inflexible of passions.
David Hume
It is the nature of ambition to make men liars and cheats, to hide the truth in their breasts, and show, like jugglers, another thing in their mouths, to cut all friendships and enmities to the measure of their own interest, and to make a good countenance without the help of good will.
Sallust
Ambition. An overmastering desire to be vilified by enemies while living and made ridiculous by friends when dead.
Ambrose Bierce
Ambition often puts Men upon doing the meanest offices; so climbing is performed in the same position with creeping.
Jonathan Swift
Ambition is a poor excuse for not having sense enough to be lazy.
Edgar Bergen
Ambition is putting a ladder against the sky.
Anonymous
Say what we will, we may be sure that ambition is an error. Its wear and tear on the heart are never recompensed.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Ambition and the belly are the two worst counselors.
German Proverb
It will not be amiss to distinguish the three kinds and, as it were, grades of ambition in mankind. The first is of those who desire to extend their own power in their native country, a vulgar and degenerate kind. The second is of those who labor to extend the power and dominion of their country among men. This certainly has more dignity, though not less covetousness. But if a man endeavor to establish and extend the power and dominion of the human race itself over the universe, his ambition (if ambition it can be called) is without doubt both a more wholesome and a more noble thing than the other two.
Francis Bacon
Ambition is a gilded misery, a secret poison, a hidden plague, the engineer of deceit, the mother of hypocrisy, the parent of envy, the original of vices, the moth of holiness, the blinder of hearts, turning medicines into maladies, and remedies into diseases.
Thomas Brooks
Love, a pleasant folly; ambition, a serious stupidity.
Nicolas Chamfort
Most people would succeed in small things, if they were not troubled with great ambitions.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Ambition has but one reward for all: A little power, a little transient fame, A grave to rest in, and a fading name!
William Winter
Though ambition in itself is a vice, yet it is often the parent of virtues.
Quintilian
The very substance of the ambitious is merely the shadow of a dream.
William Shakespeare
