Daily Inspiration Quote by J. M. Barrie

Ambition is framed here as a kind of elegant illness: the final “infirmity” that clings even to people we’d like to believe are above petty appetite. Barrie’s phrasing does two sly things at once. It flatters the ambitious by calling them “noble,” then quietly indicts them by treating their striving as a lingering weakness rather than a virtue. The line works because it refuses the modern self-help halo around ambition; it makes success-seeking sound less like grit and more like a symptom you outgrow too late.

The word “last” sharpens the barb. Barrie isn’t condemning early-life hunger for recognition; he’s pointing at what remains after wisdom, kindness, and self-control are supposedly in place. That’s the subtext: even the best-crafted moral identity can keep a private annex where the ego still negotiates for applause. Ambition becomes the polished vice that survives refinement, the one you can rationalize as duty or destiny.

Context matters because Barrie writes in a late-Victorian/Edwardian milieu obsessed with respectability, progress, and social climbing, while his fiction (especially Peter Pan’s refusal to grow up) keeps circling adulthood’s bargains and self-mythologies. Read that way, the line is less a blanket scold than a psychological observation: nobility isn’t immunity; it’s often the very staging that lets ambition dress itself up as something higher. Barrie’s intent feels diagnostic, not puritanical: beware the craving that can hide inside your best qualities and claim it’s there for noble reasons.