Life & Wisdom Quote by Samuel Johnson

Ambition, in Johnson's hands, isn't a vice you renounce so much as a fever that burns itself out. The line turns the usual moral lecture inside out: the "wise man" doesn't become modest because he learns a pious lesson about contentment; he becomes immune because he's taken ambition seriously enough to see its cheap substitutes. The cure is exposure. Let ambition run to its logical conclusion and it stops mistaking promotion for purpose.

Johnson is also making a sharp class-aware point about the 18th-century marketplace of status. "Riches, office, fortune and favour" reads like a capsule inventory of the era's reward system: money, government appointment, social luck, patronage. These are the currencies of advancement in a world where literary careers often depended on powerful sponsors and where public life was thick with sinecures and political bargaining. Johnson knew that economy intimately; he wrote for patrons, battled poverty, and watched talent get translated into access. The list is not abstract, it's an x-ray of how society tries to buy off a restless mind.

The subtext is an argument about scale. Ambition isn't merely wanting "more"; it's wanting something that ordinary prizes can't touch: intellectual seriousness, moral stature, lasting work. That "aim is so exalted" both elevates and isolates the wise man, implying a kind of principled dissatisfaction. Johnson's irony is quiet but pointed: the world offers trinkets and calls them fulfillment; the truly ambitious person is too far gone to be bribed.