Daily Inspiration Quote by Walter Scott

Ambition usually reads as a moral hazard: the fuel for ego, conquest, and shiny public rewards. Scott flips that suspicion into a Victorian-grade dare. If you aim at "true honor" rather than applause, ambition stops being the enemy of virtue and becomes its engine. The sentence works because it steals the rhetoric of striving - "principle", "incentive", "glory", "perfection" - and redirects it away from courtly vanity toward an internal standard. He is not telling you to renounce desire; he is telling you to upgrade it.

The key move is the double "true". Scott knows "honor" and "glory" are socially noisy words, easily counterfeited by rank, medals, gossip, and the flattering mirror of the crowd. By insisting on a truer version, he smuggles in a moral distinction between reputation and character. "Perfection of our natures" tightens the screw: virtue isn't just rule-following, it's self-cultivation, a craft project with ethical stakes.

Context matters. Scott, the great popularizer of chivalric romance and national myth, is writing in a Britain anxious about modernity: market ambition rising, old aristocratic codes wobbling, public life swelling with new money and new readers. His line rehabilitates ambition for a commercial age by yoking it to self-mastery. The subtext: you will pursue status anyway; the only question is whether you chase the cheap version or the one that makes you worth admiring even in private.