Frank J. Wilstach, comp. A Dictionary of Similes. 1916.
Ambition
Ambition is like choler, which is a humor that maketh men active, earnest, full of alacrity, and stirring, if it be not stopped: but if it be stopped, and cannot have its way, it becometh a dust (hot and fiery) and thereby malign and venomous.
—Francis Bacon
Ambitious as the devil.
—Beaumont and Fletcher
Ambition is like hunger; it obeys no law but its appetite.
—Josh Billings
To reach the height of our ambition is like trying to reach the rainbow; as we advance it recedes.
—W. T. Burke
Like dogs in a wheel, birds in a cage or squirrels in a chain, ambitious men still climb and climb, with great labor and incessant anxiety, but never reach the top.
—R. H. Burton
As a tree the higher it is, the greater force the winde hath of it, and euerie little blast will bee puffing at it, so that the sooner and greater is the fall thereof: So the Ambitious man, the higher he climeth, the greater is his fall.
—Robert Cawdray (A Treasurie or Store-house of Similies, 1600)
Ambition is like love, impatient both of delays and rivals.
—Sir John Denham
Ambition, like a seeled [blind] dove mounts upward,
Higher and higher still, to perch on clouds,
But tumbles headlong down with heavier ruin.
—John Ford
As ambitious as Lady Macbeth.
—James Huneker
Ambition, like a torrent, never looks back.
—Ben Jonson
Ambition, like love, can abide no lingering; and ever urgeth on his own successes, hating nothing but what may stop them.
—Sir Philip Sidney
Ambition
Is like the sea wave, which the more you drink
The more you thirst—yea—drink too much, as men
Have done on rafts of wreck—it drives you mad.
—Alfred Tennyson