O sacred hunger of ambitious minds! [ Spenser ]
Banish the canker of ambitious thoughts. [ William Shakespeare, Henry VI ]
No man is born without ambitious worldly desires. [ Carlyle ]
The ambitious do not belong to themselves: they are the slaves of the world.
The tallest trees are most in the power of the winds, and ambitious men of the blasts of fortune. [ Wm. Penn ]
He is an unfortunate and on the way to ruin who will not do what he can, but is ambitious to do what he cannot. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
The ambitious deceive themselves when they propose an end to their ambition; for that end, when attained, becomes a means. [ Rochefoucauld ]
Many are ambitious of saying grand things, that is, of being grandiloquent. Eloquence is speaking out - a quality few esteem, and fewer aim at. [ Hare ]
Like dogs in a wheel, birds in a cage, or squirrels in a chain, ambitious men still climb and climb, with great labour and incessant anxiety, but never reach the top. [ Burton ]
Dreams, indeed, are ambition; for the very substance of the ambitious is merely the shadow of a dream. And I hold ambition of so airy and light a quality, that it is but a shadow's shadow. [ William Shakespeare ]
He that is ambitious for his son, should give him untried names, For those have served other men, haply may injure by their evils; Or otherwise may hinder by their glories; therefore set him by himself. To win for his individual name some clear praise. [ Tupper ]
Mutability is the badge of infirmity; it is seldom that a man continues to wish and design the same thing two days alike; now he is for marrying, and now a mistress is preferred to a wife; now he is ambitious and aspiring, presently the meanest servant is not more humble than he; this hour he squanders his money away, the next he turns miser; sometimes he is frugal and serious, at other times profuse, airy, and gay. [ Charron ]