"The most important thing about having goals is having one." - Geoffrey F. Abert

"AMBITION, n. An overmastering desire to be vilified by enemies while living and made ridiculous by friends when dead." - Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

"Ambition is but avarice on stilts, and masked." - Walter Savage Londor

"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

"The ambitious climbs up high and perilous stairs, and never cares how to come down; the desire of rising hath swallowed up his fear of a fall." - THOMAS ADAMS, Diseases of the Soul

"Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp,
Or what's a heaven for?"
- ROBERT BROWNING, Andrea del Sarto

"Hitch your wagon to a star." - RALPH WALDO EMERSON, Society and Solitude

"Nothing is so commonplace as to wish to be remarkable." - OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, SR., The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table

"Not failure, but low aim, is crime." - JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL, For an Autograph

"Though ambition is itself a vice, it is often the parent of virtues." - QUINTILIAN, De Institutione Oratoria

"Fain would I climb, yet fear I to fall." - SIR WALTER RALEIGH, attributed

"Ambition, old as mankind, the immemorial weakness of the strong." - VITA SACKVILLE-WEST, No Signposts in the Sea

"Vaulting ambition, which o'erleaps itself
And falls on the other
side"
- SHAKESPEARE, Macbeth

"When that the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept: Ambition should be made of sterner stuff." - SHAKESPEARE, Julius Caesar

"And he that strives to touch the stars,
Oft stumbles at a straw."
- EDMUND SPENSER, The Shepherd's Calendar