Ambition—it is the last infirmity of noble minds.
—J. M. Barrie
Ambition often puts men upon doing the meanest offices; so climbing is performed in the same posture with creeping.
—Jonathan Swift
All ambitions are lawful except those that climb upward on the miseries or credulities of mankind.
—Joseph Conrad
Dreams, goals, ambitions—these are the stuff man uses for fuel.
—L. Ron Hubbard
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
He who blinded by ambition, raises himself to a position whence he cannot mount higher, must thereafter fall with the greatest loss.
—Niccolo Machiavelli
A man without ambition is dead. A man with ambition but no love is dead. A man with ambition and love for his blessings here on earth is ever so alive. Having been alive, it won't be so hard in the end to lie down and rest.
—Pearl Bailey
Though ambition itself be a vice, yet it is often times the cause of virtues.
—Quintilian
Men are more often bribed by their loyalties and ambitions than by money.
—Robert Jackson
Ambition drove many men to become false; to have one thought locked in the breast, another ready on the tongue.
—Sallust
Ambition, the soldier's virtue, rather makes choice of loss, than gain which darkens him.
—William Shakespeare
I have no spur to prick the sides of my intent, but only vaulting ambition, which o'erleaps itself, and falls on the other.
—William Shakespeare
I hold ambition of so light a quality that is is but a shadow's shadow.
—William Shakespeare
Lowliness is young ambition's ladder,
Whereto the climber-upward turns his face;
But when he once attains the upmost round,
He then unto the ladder turns his back,
Looks in the clouds, scorning the base degrees
By which he did ascend
—William Shakespeare
Virtue is choked with foul ambition.
—William Shakespeare