Success Quote by Oscar Wilde

Wilde flips a cultural compliment into a diagnosis. Ambition is supposed to be the engine of self-making; he reframes it as a hiding place, the final alibi a person clings to when the evidence of a life badly lived starts piling up. The sting is in the word "refuge": ambition isn’t presented as a daring appetite, but as shelter - something you retreat into, not something you stride toward. It suggests a particular species of failure: not the unlucky or the oppressed, but the person who has run out of real pleasures, real work, real affection, and substitutes a grand future narrative to excuse an impoverished present.

The line works because it performs the very Wildean move it describes: it weaponizes style against self-deception. Ambition, in his worldview, is often a socially approved form of vanity, a way to be admired for wanting rather than for being. You can fail at art, love, or integrity and still look "serious" if you look busy chasing status. Calling ambition a refuge exposes it as moral cosmetics.

Context matters. Wilde wrote in a late-Victorian culture obsessed with respectability and upward mobility, where "getting on" was treated as virtue. As a dramatist and dandy, he made a career out of puncturing that piety - and as a man later ruined by scandal and law, he understood how quickly society converts ambition into condemnation when you fall out of favor. The epigram is funny, but it’s also cruelly practical: a warning that aspiration can become a mask for emptiness, and that masks eventually fail.