Daily Inspiration Quote by James M. Barrie

“Last infirmity” is a deliciously backhanded pairing: Barrie takes a word we usually reserve for weakness, then welds it to “noble minds,” as if virtue itself comes with a chronic condition. The line works because it refuses the easy moral binary. Ambition isn’t framed as vulgar grasping, the vice of small souls; it’s the stubborn residue left over after a person has conquered cruder appetites. If you’ve outgrown greed, lust, and vanity, you may still crave the cleaner high of becoming exceptional.

Barrie’s intent is not to scold ambition so much as to puncture the comforting myth that goodness is self-purifying. The “last” part is the sting. It suggests a hierarchy of self-deceptions: the better you are, the more refined your remaining flaw becomes. Ambition, in this reading, is ego with manners. It can masquerade as service, artistry, leadership, even sacrifice. That’s the subtext: noble people don’t stop wanting; they just learn to want in ways that look respectable, even holy.

Context matters. Barrie wrote in a late-Victorian/Edwardian world obsessed with advancement and reputation, when “making one’s mark” was both a social commandment and a private anxiety. As a playwright moving through celebrity and class currents, he knew how aspiration could be simultaneously engine and trap. The quote lands because it treats ambition as the most socially rewarded sickness: the one society calls “drive” until it corrodes the soul, then calls it “hubris” after the fall.