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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		  1
  Ambitious as the devil.
            —Beaumont and Fletcher		  2
  Ambition is like hunger; it obeys no law but its appetite.
            —Josh Billings		  3
  To reach the height of our ambition is like trying to reach the rainbow; as we advance it recedes.
            —W. T. Burke		  4
  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		  5
  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)		  6
  Ambition is like love, impatient both of delays and rivals.
            —Sir John Denham		  7
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		  8
  As ambitious as Lady Macbeth.
            —James Huneker		  9
  Ambition, like a torrent, never looks back.
            —Ben Jonson		  10
  Ambition, like love, can abide no lingering; and ever urgeth on his own successes, hating nothing but what may stop them.
            —Sir Philip Sidney		  11
                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		  12
 
 
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