"Most people would succeed in small things, if they were not troubled with great ambitions."
"For the modern psychologist, … industry has remained as the only virtue—with its satellites, ambition and success—a conception of virtue which the Ancients would never have hesitated to relegate to the lowest of men, to pariahs and to slaves."
"Ambition is but Avarice on stilts and masked."
"There ought to be a place for people without ambition, I mean a better place than the one usually reserved."
"The poor, by thinking unceasingly of money, reach the point of losing the spiritual advantages of non-possession, thereby sinking as low as the rich."
"Glory ought to be the consequence, not the motive, of our actions; and although it happen not to attend the worthy deed, yet it is by no means the less fair for having missed the applause it deserved."
"Ambition is the way in which a vulgar man aspires."