“Moderation has been called a virtue to limit the ambition of great men, and to console undistinguished people for their want of fortune and their lack of merit.”

— Benjamin Disraeli

Not Disraeli but La Rochefoucauld; it is Maxim 308 in his Reflections.
Misattributed

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Benjamin Disraeli 306

British Conservative politician, writer, aristocrat and Pri… 1804–1881

Related quotes

“Moderation has been called a virtue to limit the ambition of great men, and to console undistinguished people for their want of fortune and their lack of merit.”

François de La Rochefoucauld book Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims

On a fait une vertu de la modération pour borner l’ambition des grands hommes, et pour consoler les gens médiocres de leur peu de fortune, et de leur peu de mérite.
Maxim 308.
Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims (1665–1678)

“The moderation of great men only sets a limit to their vices. The moderation of weak men is mediocrity.”

Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues (1715–1747) French writer, a moralist

La modération des grands hommes ne borne que leurs vices. La modération des faibles est médiocrité.
Source: Reflections and Maxims (1746), p. 168.

“And heaven had wanted one immortal song.
But wild Ambition loves to slide, not stand,
And Fortune's ice prefers to Virtue's land.”

John Dryden Absalom and Achitophel

Pt. I, lines 197–199. Compare Knolles, History (under a portrait of Mustapha I): "Greatnesse on Goodnesse loves to slide, not stand,/ And leaves, for Fortune’s ice, Vertue’s ferme land".
Absalom and Achitophel (1681)

“If great renown is won by true merit, and if virtue is considered in itself and apart from success, then all that we praise in any of our ancestors was Fortune's gift.”
Si veris magna paratur fama bonis et si successu nuda remoto inspicitur virtus, quidquid laudamus in ullo maiorum, fortuna fuit.

Marcus Annaeus Lucanus book Pharsalia

Book IX, line 593 (tr. J. D. Duff).
Pharsalia

“In England, success in the profession of the law leads to some very great objects of ambition; and yet how few men, born to easy fortunes, have ever in this country been emminent in that profession?”

Adam Smith (1723–1790) Scottish moral philosopher and political economist

Source: (1776), Book V, Chapter I, Part III, p. 824.

“At court, far from regarding ambition as a sin, people regard it as a virtue, or if it passes for a vice, then it is regarded as the vice of great souls, and the vices of great souls are preferred to the virtues of the simple and the small.”

Louis Bourdaloue (1632–1704) French serman writer

as quoted in The Bourgeois: Catholicism vs. Capitalism in Eighteenth-Century France (1927), p. 137

“He will be a man with strength of a myriad elephants, a great and royal rsi, of great fortune, great power, and great intelligence. And 100 powerful sons will be his, but because of his mother’s lack of virtue, he shall be born blind.”

Vyasa central and revered figure in most Hindu traditions

Vyasa’s curse to the first widowed wife of his half brother on the son to be born to them. His mother [Satyavati] had asked him to produce heirs to the throne with the two widows of his half-brother. The first princess closed her eyes as Vyasa was in fearful ascetic condition when he slept with her. In due time Dhritarshtra was born blind. Quoted in p. 58.
Sources, Seer of the Fifth Veda: Kr̥ṣṇa Dvaipāyana Vyāsa in the Mahābhārata