"Ambition, madam, is a great man's madness."
~
The Duchess of Malfi
by
John Webster
The wings of action and ambition could not long lie folded.
~
Shirley
by
Charlotte Bronte
Your man with a thin skin, a vehement ambition, a scrupulous conscience, and a sanguine desire for rapid improvement, is never a happy, and seldom a fortunate politician.
~
The Prime Minister
by
Anthony Trollope
You must take the world as you find it, with a struggle to be something more honest than those around you. Phineas, as he preached to himself this sermon, declared to himself that they who attempted more than this flew too high in the clouds to be of service to men and women upon earth.
~
Phineas Finn
by
Anthony Trollope
"Give me honorable enemies rather than ambitious ones, and I'll sleep more easily by night."
~
A Game of Thrones
by
George R. R. Martin
My own complete happiness, and the home-centred interests which rise up around the man who first finds himself master of his own establishment, were sufficient to absorb all my attention, while Holmes, who loathed every form of society with his whole Bohemian soul, remained in our lodgings in Baker Street, buried among his old books, and alternating from week to week between cocaine and ambition, the drowsiness of the drug, and the fierce energy of his own keen nature.
~
A Scandal in Bohemia
by
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Whether we fall by ambition, blood, or lust, Like diamonds, we are cut with our own dust.
~
The Duchess of Malfi
by
John Webster
I charge thee, fling away ambition:
By that sin fell the angels.
~
Henry VIII
by
William Shakespeare
"Reeling and Writhing, of course, to begin with,"' the Mock Turtle replied; "and then the different branches of Arithmetic--Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision."
~
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
by
Lewis Carroll
"To endure is greater than to dare; to tire out hostile fortune; to be daunted by no difficulty; to keep heart when all have lost it; to go through intrigue spotless; and to forgo even ambition when the end is gained--who can say this is not greatness."
~
The Virginians
by
William Makepeace Thackeray