Life & Wisdom Quote by Walter Savage Landor

Landor writes like a man who has watched too many bright young climbers turn into footnotes. The line is built as a cruel little inventory: ambition promises everything, then pays out in small change. "A little power" and "a little transient fame" don’t just diminish politics and celebrity; they shrink the self-image of the ambitious. Even at the height of winning, you’re still dealing in "little" - the word does the real work, puncturing the heroic narrative ambition depends on.

The turn is coldly procedural. Reward becomes accounting, and the final items on the list aren’t even rewards. A grave and a fading name are what you get no matter how hard you hustle, which is Landor’s sly reframing: ambition isn’t punished; it’s simply revealed as a bad bargain. The cadence helps. Each clause arrives with the steady inevitability of a tolling bell, and the exclamation point lands like a judge’s gavel, not an emotional outburst.

Context matters: Landor is a Romantic-era poet with a classical temper - suspicious of mass approval, allergic to vulgar success, and keenly aware of how reputations evaporate. He lived through an age of revolutions and Napoleonic glory, when "fame" could be manufactured fast and destroyed faster. The subtext is less "don’t strive" than "don’t confuse striving with permanence". Ambition, in Landor’s view, is a great engine for motion and a terrible foundation for meaning.