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More "Ambition" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... unlike many of his contemporaries, as for example the psalmists, he found little joy or inspiration in his religion. According to the conclusion, which he proclaimed in the beginning of his essay and held consistently throughout, all human striving and ambition, even life itself, are but superlative vanity, nor can man attain any permanent or complete satisfaction. The one positive teaching which Koheleth reiterates is that it is man's highest privilege to extract from passing experiences the small measure of joy and happiness that they offer, and therewith ...
— The Makers and Teachers of Judaism • Charles Foster Kent
... being at least more classical and definite than any other which modern euphuism has invented to convey the same meaning. Highly educated, and with natural abilities considerably above mediocrity, Mr. Cleveland early in life had glowed with the ambition of an author.... He had written well and gracefully—but his success, though respectable, did not satisfy his aspirations. The fact is, that a new school of literature ruled the public, despite the critics—a ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of the absurdity of this ambition. I lacked the ghost of an idea of how to set about the thing. But the general craziness of events had unhinged me. I was forming the habit of trusting to pure luck and vogue la galere! I can't swear that I hadn't visions of conquering all my adversaries in some miraculous ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... phenomenally short space of twenty-four hours. The children's favorite amusement is the "net." Sailors of the guard set up a full-rigged ship's mast, surrounded, about two feet from the ground, by a wide sweep of close-meshed rope netting well tarred. Boys and girls of ambition climb the rigging, swing, and drop into the net. The little ones never weary of dancing about on its yielding surface. A stalwart, gentle giant of a sailor watches over the safety of the merrymakers, and warns, teaches, or helps them, if ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... at an under rent, and for a long tenure, almost universally leads to poverty and ruin; and any person who knows the Irish character can easily account for this seeming anomaly. The love of display and the spirit of ambition which pervade all classes in Ireland, leads every one to assume a station, and incur an expenditure, far beyond what his circumstances would entitle him to. The shopkeeper styles himself a merchant, and must have a car and a country-house; the man who has a long lease of fifty or ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... by Henry III., to whose sister, the Countess Dowager of Pembroke, he paid his addresses, and was married, with the consent of her brother. For the favour thus shown him by his sovereign, he, however, proved ungrateful: his inordinate ambition, cloaked by a pretended zeal for reform, was the cause of those rebellions which, in the reign of Henry III., kept the kingdom in such a continued turmoil. The different oppressions and successes of the confederate barons, who at length got possession of the king's person, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 345, December 6, 1828 • Various
... matter where, if I be still the same, And what I should be, all but less than he Whom thunder hath made greater? Here at least We shall be free the Almighty hath not built Here for his envy, will not drive us hence; Here we may reign secure; and, in my choice, To reign is worth ambition, though in Hell: Better to reign in Hell than serve ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... Apollonius was a distinguished rhetorician, and had the reputation of being a man of a good disposition. Caesar is said to have had a great talent for the composition of discourses on political matters, and to have cultivated it most diligently, so as to obtain beyond dispute the second rank; his ambition to be first in power and arms, made him from want of leisure give up the first rank, to which his natural talents invited him, and consequently his attention to military matters and political affairs by which he got the supreme power, did not allow him to attain perfection ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... any influence besides, interfered to soothe the fierce passions and temper the violent acts of her lord. Her devotion to him was perfect: she partook his labours as far as he would permit her to do so, submitted to all his caprices, and, with a dark presentiment that his ambition would one day cast her aside, continued to centre the whole of her existence in the contemplation of ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart
... man's work was a failure, and the saddest kind of a failure, for he did not realize that he had failed until years afterward. He failed, not because he lacked ambition and enthusiasm; he had a large measure of both these indispensable qualities. He failed, not because he lacked education and a certain measure of what the world calls culture; from the standpoint of education, he was better qualified than most teachers in schools of that type. ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... was rendered famous as being the last residence of the unhappy Wolsey; "within its walls," says Gilpin, "was once exhibited a scene more humiliating to human ambition, and more instructive to human grandeur than almost any which history hath produced. Here the fallen pride of Wolsey retreated from the insults of the world, all his visions of ambition were now gone; his pomp and pageantry and crowded levees! On this spot he told the listening monks, the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume XII, No. 347, Saturday, December 20, 1828. • Various
... he stood in rank with every particle of his hair cut off, as if shaved, and his head as bare as a door knob. "What style is that, Ben?" the boys asked. "The 'horse thief' cut," he gravely announced. Their one ambition now, was to ...
— From the Rapidan to Richmond and the Spottsylvania Campaign - A Sketch in Personal Narration of the Scenes a Soldier Saw • William Meade Dame
... boy whose one ambition was to have people grow ashen and tremble at the mention of his name," McKnight jibed. But they were serious enough, both of them, under it all, and when they had told me what they planned, ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... sinner is to be compelled to labour, like a beast of burden, for no personal benefit to himself, but only for the good of the community—a world where there are to be no men, but only numbers—where there is to be no ambition and no hope and no fear,—but the Socialism of free men, working side by side in the common workshop, each one for the wage to which his skill and energy entitle him; the Socialism of responsible, thinking ...
— Diary of a Pilgrimage • Jerome K. Jerome
... cloudless skies, As man forever temp'rate, calm, and wise. If plagues or earthquakes break not heaven's design. Why then a Borgia, or a Cataline? Who knows but He whose hand the lightning forms, Who heaves old ocean, and who wings the storms; Pours fierce ambition in a Caesar's mind; Or turns young Ammon loose to scourge mankind? From pride, from pride our very reas'ning springs; Account for moral as for nat'ral things: Why charge we heaven in those, in these acquit? In both, to reason right, ...
— Lectures on Language - As Particularly Connected with English Grammar. • William S. Balch
... mate's name is Tomkins; he has served his six years three times over, and has now outgrown his ambition; which is fortunate for him, as his chances of promotion are small. He prefers a small vessel to a large one, because he is not obliged to be so particular in his dress—and looks for his lieutenancy whenever there shall be ...
— The Pirate and The Three Cutters • Frederick Marryat
... The ambition of a great mother centers on her son. Pythagoras was filled with the thought that he was different, peculiar, set apart to ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... Skookum, put up a number of ruffed grouse. These perched in the trees above their heads and the travellers stopped. While the dog held their attention Rolf with blunt arrows knocked over five that proved most acceptable as food. But his thoughts were now on deer, and his ambition was to go out alone and return with a ...
— Rolf In The Woods • Ernest Thompson Seton
... bishop he often wandered up into the neighbourhood of St. Mark's with a vague hope that he might see again the man who seemed to his boyish imagination a very king among men. It had long been Tode's secret ambition to grow into a big, strong man himself—bigger and stronger than the common run of men. Now, whenever he thought about it, he said to himself, "Just like ...
— The Bishop's Shadow • I. T. Thurston
... the background of things, unreal as a dream, hovered the unlovely figure of Nancy Simms, and nearer, but still almost as unreal, the bright, cold figure of Anne Champneys, that Anne Champneys who had wished to marry Berkeley Hayden to gratify pride and ambition. The woman kneeling by the window, watching the glory of the morning, looked back upon those two as a winged butterfly might remember its ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... country he exercised the powers of an absolute monarch. He was the fountain head of all government and the real chief of every department. The accounts of the government and his private accounts were treated by him as one and the same thing. His ambition to remain in power necessitated the expenditure of large sums which he obtained through improvident foreign loans and usurious contracts with local merchants. Those whom he favored grew rich; his enemies ...
— Santo Domingo - A Country With A Future • Otto Schoenrich
... the Peninsular war. This was, perhaps, the least selfish war of which history tells. It was not a war of aggrandisement or of conquest: it was waged to deliver not merely Spain, but the whole of Europe, from that military despotism with which the genius and ambition of Napoleon threatened to overwhelm the civilised world. And on what a scale Great Britain, when aroused, can fight, let the Peninsular war tell. At its close the fleets of Great Britain rode triumphant on every sea; ...
— Deeds that Won the Empire - Historic Battle Scenes • W. H. Fitchett
... hope and desire that the list of books he has given, limited as it is, may prove of value to those seeking self-education, and that the books may encourage the disheartened, stimulate ambition, and serve as stepping stones to higher ideals and ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... who practised it with impunity: it gave a finish to the character of a woman, proved she would sometimes act for herself, not always be in leading-strings; it gave a taste of power, gratified her ambition; in short, flirtation was the very acme of enjoyment, and gave a decided ton before ...
— The Mother's Recompense, Volume I. - A Sequel to Home Influence in Two Volumes. • Grace Aguilar
... another letter; and another yet, when you have looked into my Dictionary. If you find faults, I shall endeavour to mend them; if you find none, I shall think you blinded by kind partiality: but to have made you partial in his favour, will very much gratify the ambition of, Sir, your most obliged and ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... rich! Ah! my friend! 'tis not civil war that disunites us. It is that we are each of us twenty years older; it is that the honest emotions of youth have given place to suggestions of interest, whispers of ambition, counsels of selfishness. Yes, you are right; let us go, Porthos, but let us go well armed; were we not to keep the rendezvous, they would declare we were afraid. Halloo! Planchet! here! saddle our ...
— Twenty Years After • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... understands the mysteries of old-fashioned strawberry shortcake. If you hear her shrieking Suicidio! invoking Agamemnon, or appealing to the Casta Diva among the kettles and pots be not alarmed.... For the love you bear of good food, man, do not discourage your wife's ambition. The more she loves to sing, the better she ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... is monopolistic. It has been shown that pair marriage is monopolistic. It produces an exclusive family, and nourishes family pride and ambition. It is interwoven with capital, and we have hardly yet reached the point where we can see what it will become with great wealth, and under the treatment of a plutocratic class. From what has been said it is evidently most important that man and wife ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... account of his well-known laziness, so Turk and I continued to adorn the rear of the column. I reckon the foreman thought it better to have Turk and me late than no dinner. I tried a hundred different schemes to instill ambition and self-respect into that ox, but he was an old dog and contented with ...
— The Outlet • Andy Adams
... poet walked alone in a quiet valley. His heart was heavy, and the voices of Nature consoled him. His life had been a lonely and sad one. Many years ago a great grief fell upon him, and it took away all his joy and all his ambition. It was because he brooded over his sorrow, and because he was always faithful to a memory, that the townspeople deemed him a strange old poet; but they loved him and they loved his songs,—in his life and in his songs there was a gentleness, ...
— A Little Book of Profitable Tales • Eugene Field
... "it is not in this world that one receives the recompense of so many virtues; he has a more exalted ambition." ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... did he know of himself or the world, that, with small genuine impulse to action, and moved chiefly by the anticipated results of it, he saw success already his, and a grateful country at his feet. His inspiration was so purely ambition, that, even if, his mood unchanged, he were to achieve much for his country, she ...
— Heather and Snow • George MacDonald
... valiant genius and hard frugality which built up their fortunes; how many acknowledge the stern and heavy responsibility of their opportunities; how many refuse to dream their lives away in a Sybarite luxury; how many are smitten with the lofty ambition of achieving an enduring name by works of a permanent value; how many do not dwindle into dainty dilettanti, and dilute their manhood with factitious sentimentality instead of a hearty human sympathy; how many are not satisfied with having the fastest horses and the "crackest" carriages, and an ...
— The Potiphar Papers • George William Curtis
... first and most potent tendency of the human mind, ambition, becomes finally dominating. Here was Cowperwood at fifty-seven, rich beyond the wildest dream of the average man, celebrated in a local and in some respects in a national way, who was nevertheless feeling that by no means had his true aims been achieved. He was not ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... crust floated as far as the Shetland and Orkney islands. The King of Denmark named this fiery apparition "Nyoe," or "New Island," and doubtless prided himself not a little on this addition to his limited dominions. But, alas, for human ambition! About a year after the date of its first appearance, Nyoe sank into the depths out of which it arose, and its position is now marked only by a ...
— Wonders of Creation • Anonymous
... he added by way of soliloquy, as he stood looking after him. 'Although you ARE a damper to a honourable ambition. You little think it, but you was the first to dash my hopes. Pecksniff would have built me up for life, but your sweet temper pulled me ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... and learning; in adolescence, ambition; and in early manhood, love—no footlight passion." Chaffery was very solemn and insistent, with a lean extended finger, upon ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells
... civilisation that called loudest to him. He loved the life and he adored the man whom he thought was his father. To be the son and heir of Ahmed Ben Hassan seemed to him to be the highest pinnacle that any man's ambition could reach. He was perfectly indifferent to the flattery and attention that his money and his good looks brought him. My father entertained very largely and Ahmed became the fashion—'Le bel Arabe' he was called, and he enjoyed a succes fou which bored ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... cannot reasonably be doubted, that if Homer or Xenophon were to hear their works read by a professor of Greek, they would mistake them for the sounds of an unknown language. All this is true; but it is not the ambition of a gentleman to read Greek like an ancient Grecian, but to understand it as well as the generality of his contemporaries; to know whence the terms of most sciences are derived, and to be able, in some degree, to ...
— Practical Education, Volume II • Maria Edgeworth
... continued she, "to see and be acquainted early in life with superior people. It enables one to form a standard of excellence, and raises that standard high and bright. In men, the enthusiasm becomes glorious ambition to excel in arts or arms; in women, it refines and elevates the taste, and is so far a preventive against frivolous, vulgar company, and all their train of follies and vices. I can speak from my ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... whatever treaties they wished, not presenting them for ratification to the people's representatives, and yet binding every individual citizen to abide by the terms adopted. Such secret provisions have often been agreed to simply upon the whim or the ambition or the likes and dislikes of the rulers. They have sometimes been opposed to the true interests of the nations involved. They are undemocratic, and are not in accord with ...
— A School History of the Great War • Albert E. McKinley, Charles A. Coulomb, and Armand J. Gerson
... Senator Ward at one end of the table and Burleigh at the other, who finally started the topic of Miss Madison's intended salon, not only that those unacquainted with her ambition might be enlightened, but that the great intention should receive a concrete form without further delay. A half-hour later, when the women left the table, Betty had the satisfaction of knowing that whatever the final result of her venture, ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... succeeded in identifying during my sojourn at the village. There were more. I heard the calls and cries of others in the wood and various places, but refused, except in the case of the too elusive crake, to set down any in my list that I did not see. It was not my ambition to make a long list. My greatest desire was to see well those that interested me most. But those who go forth, as I did, to look for birds that are a sight for sore eyes, must meet with many a disappointment. In all those fruit and shade trees ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... said that if Athens, and Lacedmon could but make up their minds to be good friends and make a common cause, they would be masters of the world. The wealth, the science, the maritime enterprise, and daring ambition of the one, assisted by the population, the territory, the warlike spirit, and stern institutions of the other, could not fail to carry the whole world before them. That was a project hostile to the peace and prosperity of mankind, and ministering only to national vanity. ...
— The trade, domestic and foreign • Henry Charles Carey
... assembly for the election of decemvirs was proclaimed for the third market-day, the flame of ambition burst out so powerfully that even the first men of the state began to canvass individuals—fearing, I suppose, that the possession of such high authority might become accessible to persons not sufficiently worthy if the post were left unoccupied by themselves—humbly ...
— Roman History, Books I-III • Titus Livius
... words to say about our voyage; for I find it necessary to repress the ambition of some of my passengers," continued the captain. "Some of them wish to visit all the Philippine Islands, and there are about ...
— Four Young Explorers - Sight-Seeing in the Tropics • Oliver Optic
... his hair, which was now silvered with many streaks, had been raven black in its day. His carriage was upright and fearless, and he was very tall and powerfully proportioned. It was Bertram's keenest ambition to grow up in all points like his father, and he copied him, consciously and unconsciously, in a fashion that often raised a smile on his ...
— The Secret Chamber at Chad • Evelyn Everett-Green
... perfect, woman who unconsciously revealed to me the glory of human love, I had dedicated my life, and all my powers—poor enough, I fear—of mind and body to the service of the Church. I was ambitious in those days. Ambition is dead, killed by the knowledge of my own shortcomings. I have proved an unprofitable servant—for which may God in His great mercy forgive me. But, while my faith in myself has withered, my faith in Him has ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... the plan of exalting his own fortunes by trading on his sister's beauty. He worked upon the Duke of Bracciano's mind so cleverly, that he brought this haughty prince to the point of an insane passion for Peretti's young wife; and meanwhile so contrived to inflame the ambition of Vittoria and her mother, Tarquinia, that both were prepared to dare the worst of crimes in expectation of a dukedom. The game was a difficult one to play. Not only had Francesco Peretti first to be murdered, but the ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... in which they take overt expression. It needs no special knowledge to recognize the fact that the normal interests and enterprises of life are quickened and sustained when some great emotional drive can be roused in their support. Ambition, loyalty, love, or hate may stir men to and sustain them in long and difficult enterprises which they would neither undertake nor continue were these motive forces removed. The soldier does not fight persistently and well wholly, or often even in part, because he has ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... precision, and imagery of technical language that, created by simple men with keen eyes for the real aspect of the things they see in their trade, achieves the just expression seizing upon the essential, which is the ambition of the artist in words. Therefore the sailor will never say, "cast anchor," and the ship-master aft will hail his chief mate on the forecastle in impressionistic phrase: "How does the cable grow?" Because "grow" is the right word for the long drift of a cable ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... were not always wise, and were sometimes the better for being told the truth. At her niece's table she felt at liberty to speak her mind, which she invariably did, with a frankness that sometimes bordered on brutality. She had long ago outgrown the period where ambition or passion, or its partners, envy and hatred, were springs of action in her life, and simply retained a mild enjoyment in the exercise of an old habit, with no active malice whatever. The ruling passion merely grew stronger as the restraining ...
— The Marrow of Tradition • Charles W. Chesnutt
... work to be useful to all must cater for all, and include information which will be useful to the smaller storekeeper as well as the larger maker. To begin at the bottom, one can easily imagine a person whose only ambition is to make a little candy for the window fit for children. This could be done with a very small outlay for utensils. The next move is the purchase of a sugar boiler's furnace not very costly and certainly indispensable where quality and variety are required, it will be a ...
— The Candy Maker's Guide - A Collection of Choice Recipes for Sugar Boiling • Fletcher Manufacturing Company
... do decide to accept her," remarked Miss Whalley. "You forget that she is now Lady Evesham, my dear Mrs. Lorimer, and little likely to remember old friends now that she has attained the summit of her ambition." ...
— The Bars of Iron • Ethel May Dell
... portraits of old admirals, comprising the whole line of heroes who have trod the quarter-decks of British ships for more than two hundred years back. Next to a tomb in Westminster Abbey, which was Nelson's most elevated object of ambition, it would seem to be the highest need of a naval warrior to have his portrait hung up in the Painted Hall; but, by dint of victory upon victory, these illustrious personages have grown to be a mob, and ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... for walking the moonlit street with her hand in willing and undisguised captivity. She was a large and strong, but extremely neat, well-spoken, and good-looking Irish woman, who might have seemed at ease but for a faintly betrayed ambition. ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... our days (thank God for all His mercies!) everybody is not writing a book. There are people whose talk has inimitable touches, and whose lives are art, but who never sit down to a quire of foolscap. I believe that Congreve naturally was one of these, that his literary ambition was a result of accidental necessity, and that had he lived as a boy in the society he was of as a very young man—for all its literary ornaments—we should have had of him only odes and songs. His ...
— The Comedies of William Congreve - Volume 1 [of 2] • William Congreve
... mechanical engineering, and common sense told him that skilled labor rarely went begging if the laborer were worthy his hire. None the less, the prospect of touting for such employment affrighted him beyond words. He felt that he could not again abase himself for a few paltry shillings a week. The ambition to make of this misfortune a stepping-stone to better things rested on no greater security than his pride and yet it would not be wholly conquered. He spent a long morning by the riverside planning schemes so futile that even the boy's mind rejected ...
— Aladdin of London - or Lodestar • Sir Max Pemberton
... can give no security that they will be either good subjects, faithful servants of the public, or honest in their mutual dealings; since there is no other tie through which the pride, or lust, or avarice, or ambition of mankind will not certainly break one time ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IV: - Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Volume II • Jonathan Swift
... Basil, informer. Being. Boethius, life; the first scholastic; an independent philosopher; his philosophic ambition; his achievement; a Christian; perhaps a martyr; son-in-law of Symmachus; his wife; his sons; early training; youthful poetry; premature old age; his learning; his library; his lofty position; his principles; the champion of the oppressed; of ...
— The Theological Tractates and The Consolation of Philosophy • Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius
... Thurber, whose timid clasp upon his arm troubled him then and pained him now. He had so little to give in return for her devotion—therefore he had given nothing. He had said good-bye almost harshly—his ambition hardening his ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... was a man of genius and of soaring ambition—well-born, well-nurtured, but as the younger son of a younger son absolutely without patrimony. At his school and his university he had won his way through a course of honors, and he would disappoint all who knew him if he did not revive the traditions of his name and go ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... small, to make others happier and better, is the highest ambition, the most elevating hope, which can inspire a ...
— Life and Literature - Over two thousand extracts from ancient and modern writers, - and classified in alphabetical order • J. Purver Richardson
... truth, casting off from us all unrighteousness and iniquity, together with all covetousness, strife, evil manners, deceit, whispering, detractions; all hatred of God, pride and boasting; vain-glory and ambition; ...
— The Forbidden Gospels and Epistles, Complete • Archbishop Wake
... of December was the time appointed for the commencement of their revolutionary work, which was to be simultaneous all over the country. The profoundest secrecy was to be preserved, and the most influential men, whose ambition induced them to seek preferment, were alone to be made acquainted with the plot. No woman was to be privy to it, lest it should be divulged. The sound of the church bell was to be the signal, and at midnight all were to enter the Plaza at the same moment, seize the pieces of artillery, ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman
... of the Bishops of Rome. [Sidenote: Further claims to temporal authority.] Later, instead of advisers they claimed to be absolute judges in ecclesiastical matters, and when the temporal possessions of the Popedom made the chair of St. Peter an object of ambition to covetous, designing men, the character of Bishop was too often merged in that of Prince, and spiritual power ceased to satisfy those who thought it their duty or their interest to enforce what was in fact ...
— A Key to the Knowledge of Church History (Ancient) • John Henry Blunt
... towards the Louis Quinze. His step was light, his head laid slightly to one side, as if in pleased and inquiring reverie, and there was a lifting of one corner of the mouth, suggesting an amused disdain. Was it that disdain which comes from conquest not important enough to satisfy ambition? The social conquest of a village—to be conspicuous and attract the groundlings in this tiny theatre of life, that ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Durbach and General Solignac, went to him, and declared, that they were acquainted with his manoeuvres; that his ambition blinded him; that no compact could ever subsist between Louis XVIII. and the murderer of his brother; and that sooner or later France would take ...
— Memoirs of the Private Life, Return, and Reign of Napoleon in 1815, Vol. II • Pierre Antoine Edouard Fleury de Chaboulon
... Lambert at night. She endeavours to dazzle him by showing the regalia richly set out and adorned with lights. He puts by, however, crown and sceptre and rebukes her overweening ambition. Suddenly the Committee, who have been drinking deep, burst in upon them dancing a riotous dance. Loveless is hurriedly concealed under the coverlet of a couch, and Lady Lambert sits thereon seemingly at her devotions. Her ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... remain. In nineteen-six Brodrick found himself planted with apparent security on the summit of his ambition. He had a unique position, a reputation for caring, caring with the candid purity of high passion, only for the best. He counted as a power unapproachable, implacable to mediocrity. Authors believed in him, adored, feared, detested him, according to their quality. Other editors admired him cautiously; ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... removal, now that it begins to be like something, and now that there is a prospect of the Company getting its own again. And now that many of the inhabitants are themselves in a better condition than ever, this is evidently the cause of the ambition ...
— Narrative of New Netherland • Various
... name Meyer was prefixed to his own later, as a condition of inheriting certain property from a distant relative. As the boy showed talent for music at a very early age, he was put to the study of the pianoforte, and it was his ambition to distinguish himself as a virtuoso, which his talent undoubtedly permitted, if he had not been diverted from it by the success of his early attempts at opera. He was taught by a pupil of Clementi, and for a while by Clementi himself, as well as by other distinguished teachers, and if reports ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... you liked, say what you chose!—that was all. Of inward liberty, of freedom from mental or spiritual oppression, from passion, from prejudice, from envy, from jealousy, from selfishness, from unfairness, from ambition, from false admiration, from the power of public opinion, from any motive energy save that of love and truth—a freedom of which outward freedom is scarce the shadow—of such liberty, for all the good books he had read, for all the good poems he had admired, Richard ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... many things that I should have liked to tell him first. My clever sister taught him how to pronounce the name of the bishop who began building the cathedral; she led him over the crypt, and told him how old it was. He was interested in the crypt; he talked to Helena (not to me) of his ambition to write a work on cathedral architecture in England; he made a rough little sketch in his book of our famous tomb of some king. Helena knew the late royal personage's name, and Philip showed his sketch to her before he showed it to me. How can I blame him, ...
— The Legacy of Cain • Wilkie Collins
... spirit of "non-separateness" is inculcated as steadily from childhood up, as in the West the spirit of rivalry. Personal ambition, personal feelings and desires, are not encouraged to grow so rampant there. When the soil is naturally good, it is cultivated in the right way, and the child grows into a man in whom the habit of subordination of one's lower to one's higher Self is strong ...
— Studies in Occultism; A Series of Reprints from the Writings of H. P. Blavatsky • H. P. Blavatsky
... because the United States was preparing wisely for a long struggle and it seemed necessary that the foundations should be broad and deep. "America was straining her energies towards a goal," said the Director of Munitions, "toward the realization of an ambition which, in the production of munitions, dropped the year 1918 almost out of consideration altogether, which indeed did not bring the full weight of American men and materiel into the struggle even in 1919, but which left it for 1920, if the ...
— Woodrow Wilson and the World War - A Chronicle of Our Own Times. • Charles Seymour
... Janet Balchrystie cherished a great ambition. When the earliest blackbird awoke and began to sing, while it was yet gray twilight, Janet would be up and at her work. She had an ambition to be a great poet. No less than this would serve her. But not even her father had known, and no other had any chance of knowing. In the black leather ...
— Stories by English Authors: Scotland • Various
... the whole reign of Numa, there was neither war, nor sedition, nor innovation in the state, nor any envy or ill-will to his person, nor plot or conspiracy from views of ambition. Either fear of the gods that were thought to watch over him, or reverence for his virtue, or a divine felicity of fortune that in his days preserved human innocence, made his reign, by whatever means, a living example and verification of that saying which Plato, long afterwards, ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... applause, is gradually sullying some of the finest talents, once the chastest, too, upon the stage. In his Rosabelle (Mrs. Wilmot) he might see admirable comic powers, and great histrionic skill, which the public applause of years has not yet misled into the vulgar track—"the pitiful ambition of setting on some quantity of barren spectators ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 4, April 1810 • Various
... against every allurement of interest. Those examples are not furnished by the great alone; nor by those, whose activity in public affairs may render it suspected that they make such a character one of the rounds in their ladder of ambition; but by men more quiet, and more in the shade, on whom an unmixed sense of honor alone could operate. Such examples indeed are not furnished in great abundance amongst those who are the subjects of the author's panegyric. He must look ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... remarked Dic, speaking softly to the black waves of lustrous hair, "I must take Iago's advice and put money in my purse. I have always hoped to be something more than I am. Billy Little, who has been almost a father to me, has burned the ambition into me. But with all my yearning, life has never held a real purpose compared with that I now have in you. The desire for fame, Rita, the throbbing of ambition, the lust for gold and dominion, are considered by the world to be the great motives of human action. But, Rita, they ...
— A Forest Hearth: A Romance of Indiana in the Thirties • Charles Major
... but afterwards conformed, and managed to come out of all political troubles as the proprietor of a respectable family estate. Young women of such birth, living in a quiet country-house, and attending a village church hardly larger than a parlor, naturally regarded frippery as the ambition of a huckster's daughter. Then there was well-bred economy, which in those days made show in dress the first item to be deducted from, when any margin was required for expenses more distinctive of rank. Such reasons would have been enough to account for plain dress, quite ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... their grime. I fell upon him eagerly, but he could tell me nothing. He had left the Pottawatamies the day after the wedding, and had heard no rumors of any Englishman. I did not take him into my confidence. He had outlived the time when the abstract terms "ambition" and "patriotism" had meaning to him. The story of my hopes would have tinkled in his ears like the blarings of a child's trumpet. But in one matter ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... Saskatchewan, as Rector of our Cathedral. For three years you lived with us. The possibilities of our great West soon appealed to your enthusiastic heart. The various problems which here engage the attention of the Church fired your soul with noble ambition. I shall never forget the good you have done in the parish committed to your care. I shall be ever grateful for the zeal with which you devoted yourself, heart and soul, to the guidance of those under your charge. You found your happiness in making ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly
... glory, the haughty duke had beheld these changes of fortune with affected composure, and concealed, under a glittering and theatrical pomp, the dark designs of his restless genius. Torn by burning passions within, while all without bespoke calmness and indifference, he brooded over projects of ambition and revenge, and slowly, but surely, advanced towards his end. All that he owed to the Emperor was effaced from his mind; what he himself had done for the Emperor was imprinted in burning characters ...
— The History of the Thirty Years' War • Friedrich Schiller, Translated by Rev. A. J. W. Morrison, M.A.
... or hope or ambition of the cosmos, which we call attempted positivism: not to find out the new; not to add to what is called knowledge, but ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... of the mother and a whole-hearted acceptance of the new faith on the part of AEneas. Unlike most of his fellows in the college classrooms, he refused to regard an English curacy as the goal of his ambition. It seemed to him that his conversion ought not to end in his parading the streets of Liverpool in a black coat and a white tie. He wanted to return to his people and tell them in their own tongue the Gospel which he had ...
— Hyacinth - 1906 • George A. Birmingham
... Pisa, Genoa, Florence, Venice, and many others had early succeeded in throwing off their feudal burdens and had become independent, self-governing communities. Democracy flourished in them, as in the old Greek city-states. Noble birth counted for little; a man of ability and ambition might rise to any place. The fierce party conflicts within their walls stimulated mental activity and helped to make life full, varied, and intense. Their widespread trade and thriving manufactures made them prosperous. Wealth brought leisure, ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... habit, and the living God in their hearts. It will appear strange to you that he should rate these above wealth and a castle in Ireland and a seat in Parliament; but in fact he would. I know him. Think what you will of his ambition, it has this much of sincerity, that he is willing to pinch and starve for it. This, ...
— Hetty Wesley • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... of his career in Glasgow drew near, some of us could see that all through he had been preparing for some great work on which the whole ambition of his life was set. He always shrank from speaking about himself, and in those days was not in the habit of obtruding sacred things on his fellow-students. His views on personal dealing then were changing, and became very decided in after years. Earnest, honest, faithful to his convictions, ...
— James Gilmour of Mongolia - His diaries, letters, and reports • James Gilmour
... reversed in the case of John Wesley. Posterity has fully acquitted him of the charge of being actuated by a mere vulgar ambition, of desiring to head a party, of an undue love of power. It has at last owned that if ever a poor frail human being was actuated by pure and disinterested motives, that man was John Wesley. Eight years before his death he said, ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... make your son the excuse for your own vanity, pride, and ambition. What you did, Lady Lanswell, proved how little you loved your son; you parted us knowing that he loved me, knowing that his whole heart was bound up in me, knowing that he had but one wish, and it was ...
— A Mad Love • Bertha M. Clay
... and slavery so many of our unfortunate fellow-citizens; the relieving and restoring of which to the bosom of their families and friends are, with that of having an opportunity to chastise their cruel oppressors, objects of our greatest ambition and which we anticipate with all the ardor of officers, ...
— The Story of Commodore John Barry • Martin Griffin
... "It's a fine ambition," Thirlwell remarked. "However, it will cost you something, and you'll find some resistance from the people you want to help; but if the ore's as good as we think, you'll be able to carry ...
— The Lure of the North • Harold Bindloss
... school, the play-ground, the freedom of boyish sports, the early departure from home to college or business, the prizes offered to ambition, all exercise a powerful influence upon the boy, tending to modify the action of the mother's conscious training. More powerful than her intellectual and determined effort is usually her affectional influence, swaying him unconsciously and giving him always ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... precept had failed, Richard found himself converted by example. He contrasted himself in that stressful hour with great-souled Anthony Wilding, and saw himself as he was, a weakling, strong only in vicious ways. Repentance claimed him; repentance and a fine ambition to be worthier, to resemble as nearly as his nature would allow him this Anthony Wilding whom he took for pattern. He changed his ways, abandoned drink and gaming, and gained thereby a healthier countenance. Then in his zeal he overshot his mark. He developed a taste for Scripture-reading, ...
— Mistress Wilding • Rafael Sabatini
... In this ambition Mr. Sparling encouraged him, in fact did everything possible to aid the lad in acquiring a far-reaching knowledge of the vocation he had ...
— The Circus Boys on the Plains • Edgar B. P. Darlington
... to execute the laws-to preserve the Union by all constitutional means"—he concludes with the prayer, "May the great Ruler of Nations grant, that the signal blessings with which He has favored, ours may not, by the madness of party, or personal ambition be disregarded and lost; and may His wise providence bring those who have produced this crisis to see the folly before they feel the misery, of civil strife; and inspire a returning veneration for ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan
... the persistence of courage and the endurance of imagination to enter the continent and see the gates close behind him—Jacques Cartier, a master pilot of St. Malo, commissioned of his own intrepid desire and of the jealous ambition of King Francis I to bring fresh tidings of the mysterious "square gulf," which other Frenchmen, Denys and Aubert, may have entered a quarter of a century earlier, and which it was hoped might disclose a passage to ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... and more daring and showy than even his best friends are? What's his game? What does he expect to get out of it? He don't do it just for the fresh air and exercise. What would you say, now, Bill, that an ordinary man expects, generally speaking, for his efforts along the line of ambition and extraordinary hustling in the marketplaces, forums, shooting-galleries, lyceums, battle-fields, links, cinder-paths, and arenas of the civilized and vice ...
— Options • O. Henry
... those days! I remember that my aunt had sixty dollars which she had saved, little by little, by selling eggs and chickens. She had planned to use it to buy a tombstone for her mother and father—a long-cherished ambition. My uncle needed the most of it to help pay the note. We drove to Potsdam on that sad errand and what a time we had getting there and back in deep mud and sand and ...
— The Light in the Clearing • Irving Bacheller
... unscrupulous cad. I have kept an eye on him for years because he interests me. He has never run a straight course since he came into the field; he has consistently sacrificed truth, honour, and his best friend to his own ambition ever ...
— From One Generation to Another • Henry Seton Merriman
... refutation of any who should attempt to deny it. So that it was only for the structure of his own pieces that he had no thought to spare? This he left to the dominion of chance, which blew together the atoms of Epicurus. But supposing that, devoid of any higher ambition to approve himself to judicious critics and posterity, and wanting in that love of art which longs for self-satisfaction in the perfection of its works, he had merely labored to please the unlettered crowd; still this ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... who took pleasure in saying that Napoleon was incapable of tender sentiments, and that the happiness of being a father could not penetrate this heart so filled with ambition as to exclude all else. I can cite, among many others in my knowledge, a little anecdote which touched me exceedingly, and which I take much pleasure in relating, since, while it triumphantly answers the calumnies of which I have spoken, it also proves the special ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... house to be blown away every moment, and Zebbie was playing what he called "Bonaparte's Retreat." It all seemed to flash before me—I could see those poor, suffering soldiers staggering along in the snow, sacrifices to one man's unholy ambition. I verily believe we were all bewitched. I shouldn't have been surprised to have seen witches and gnomes come tumbling down the chimney or flying in at the door, riding on the crest of the storm. I glanced at Mrs. O'Shaughnessy. ...
— Letters of a Woman Homesteader • Elinore Pruitt Stewart
... glory I covet, nor riches I want, Ambition is nothing to me; The one thing I beg of kind heaven to grant, Is a ...
— Sweets for Leisure Hours - Amusing Tales for Little Readers • A. Phillips
... having dressed herself out in this sack, with a new laced cap, and some other ornaments which Tom had given her, repairs to church with her fan in her hand the very next Sunday. The great are deceived if they imagine they have appropriated ambition and vanity to themselves. These noble qualities flourish as notably in a country church and churchyard as in the drawing-room, or in the closet. Schemes have indeed been laid in the vestry which would hardly disgrace ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... not Ambition[363-13] mock their useful toil, Their homely joys and destiny obscure; Nor Grandeur hear, with a disdainful smile, The short and simple annals ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... chemists, instead of directing their ambition to the vain attempt of producing any of the original substances in nature, rather aim at analysing and imitating her operations, and have sometimes succeeded in forming combinations, or effecting decompositions, no instances of which occur in the chemistry of Nature. ...
— Conversations on Chemistry, V. 1-2 • Jane Marcet
... poverty. For three years in succession the highest prizes at the competitions rewarded him for his efforts; but these successes, far from elating him unduly, seemed to afford him but little satisfaction. "This is only glory," he thought; and his great ambition was to support himself. ...
— The Count's Millions - Volume 1 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... nations, of whom we shall have but a very imperfect idea, unless we have recourse to the inspired writers. They alone display, and bring to light, the secret thoughts of princes, their incoherent projects, their foolish pride, their impious and cruel ambition: they reveal the true causes and hidden springs of victories and overthrows; of the grandeur and declension of nations; the rise and ruin of states; and teach us, what indeed is the principal benefit to be derived from history, the judgment which the Almighty forms both ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... have lost a brother's favor through it. And yet——Ah well, you are, as I understand, a clerk, so I must think of you as one step further in orders, and make you my father-confessor. Know then that this man has been a suitor for my hand, less as I think for my own sweet sake than because he hath ambition and had it on his mind that he might improve his fortunes by dipping into my father's strong box—though the Virgin knows that he would have found little enough therein. My father, however, is a proud man, ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... not been used to this laborious life. Have you no further ambition, and do you like it?" asked Helen, flashing a quick ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... is a fight of men, not of children; not one of your European wars of paltry ambition, but a war of principle!' cried Cora, with that intensity of enthusiasm that has shed so much blood in the break-up ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of release, Whose cool hand stills the fever in the veins, And all the tumult of life's crowding cares— Ambition, envy, love and fear and hate, Hope's eager prophecies fulfilled too late, And fierce desires, and sorrows, and despairs— Thou wav'st thy mystic wand, and there remain Sleep and forgetfulness, ...
— The Coming of the Princess and Other Poems • Kate Seymour Maclean
... has exhibited a commendable ambition in his efforts to acquire a knowledge of music, devoting several hours each day to practice ...
— Music and Some Highly Musical People • James M. Trotter
... standpoint, the present building was comparatively recent. A thirty years' growth of ivy was scarcely able to atone for the unencrusted newness of the stones beneath. There was none of that narcotic suggestion of grey antiquity which in Oxford or Cambridge rebukes and stills a personal ambition. ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... and my ambition is the Victoria Cross, and I'll get that too before I'm done; you see if I don't! It's the ambition of my life, Peg. I lie awake and think of that little iron cross; I go to sleep and dream of it, and see the two words dancing before my eyes in letters ...
— About Peggy Saville • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey
... of Rome, Clovis, then chief of the Franks, conceived the ambition of erecting a kingdom upon the ruins of the Roman power. He attacked Syagrius, the Roman governor of Gaul, and at Soissons gained a decisive victory over his forces (A.D. 486). Thus was destroyed forever ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... Napoleon's escape and landing was received by the gallant —th with a fiery delight and enthusiasm, which everybody can understand who knows that famous corps. From the colonel to the smallest drummer in the regiment, all were filled with hope and ambition and patriotic fury; and thanked the French Emperor as for a personal kindness in coming to disturb the peace of Europe. Now was the time the —th had so long panted for, to show their comrades in arms that they could fight as well as the Peninsular veterans, ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... men from the substantial gates of the true hell. Whatever is a cause of insubordinate and discordant fruition in body or soul, individual or community, is a real gate of hell. All the moral and social evils, intemperance, war, ambition, avarice, the extremes of poverty and wealth, ignorance, bad example, despotism, disease, every form of vice or crime, all the influences that destroy or mar human virtue, excellence, and harmony, are so many open gates of hell, drawing ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... him that he had heard that it was intended for a Temple of Glory. "That's what people think, I know," said Napoleon; "but I mean it for a memorial in expiation of the murder of Louis XVI." He said to Metternich: "When I was young I favored the Revolution out of ignorance and ambition. When I came to the age of reason I followed its counsels and my own instinct, and crushed the Revolution." At another time he said: "The French throne was empty. Louis XVI. had not been able to hold it. If I had been in his place, in spite of the immense progress it had made in men's minds ...
— The Happy Days of the Empress Marie Louise • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... He who thought never to have a wife grew to know what the joy of it must be. He perceived all the subtle rapture of wedded souls. He learned what the love of children was, the pride of home, the unselfish ambition for success that spurs men on. All the emotions passed in procession at night before him, tricked ...
— A Mountain Woman and Others • (AKA Elia Wilkinson) Elia W. Peattie
... It is very odd that fine towns always are approached by dirty suburbs; a covert symbolical satire, perhaps, on the ways to success in fine towns. Avarice or ambition go through very mean little streets before they gain the place which they jostle the crowd to win,—in the Townhall or on 'Change. Happy the man who, like you, Tom, finds that there is a shorter and a cleaner ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... there silent for some few minutes hardly conscious that he was not alone, as he saw all his joys disappearing from before his mind's eye, one by one; his family pride, the pleasant high-toned duties of his station, his promised seat in Parliament and prosperous ambition, the full respect of all the world around him, his wealth and pride of place—for let no man be credited who boasts that he can part with these without regret. All these were gone. But there were losses more bitter than these. How could he think of his affianced ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... men of talent and ambition at the present day is the railroad service. The pay is large in many instances, while the service is continuous and honorable. Most of our railroad men began life on the farm. Of this class is the author of the accompanying books ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 1, January 5, 1884. - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... motive' but interst'; acknowledged no criterion' but success'; he worshiped no God' but ambition'; and with an eastern devotion', he knelt at the shrine of his idolatry'. Subsidiary to this, there was no creed' that he did not profess'; there was no opinion' that he did not promulgate': in the ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... doubt, because Atticus was in Rome a great deal during these years. We take up the correspondence, therefore, after an interval of two years, which in many respects were the most important in Cicero's life. In B.C. 64 he attained his chief ambition by being elected to the consulship, but we have little trace of his public actions that year, only the fragments of one speech remaining, in defence of Q. Gallius on a charge of ambitus. The animus of the popular party, however, is shewn by the prosecution of ...
— The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 - The Whole Extant Correspodence in Chronological Order • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... became a slow and learned game. The monarchies were united not only by a natural community of interests, but by family alliances. A marriage contract sometimes became the signal for an interminable war, whilst family connections often set a barrier to ambition. After the wars of religion came to an end in 1648, the only wars were those which were waged for an inheritance or a dependency, or against countries whose system of government exempted them from the common law of dynastic States, and made ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... Arthur' must henceforth be ranked amongst our national masterpieces. In it we behold the crowning achievement of the author's life. His ambition cannot rise to a greater altitude. He has accomplished that which once had its seductions for the deathless and majestic mind of Milton. He has now assumed a place among the ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... the ruler, in alliance with him, of my race in Saint Domingo—were brothers in soul, as we were apparently in duty and in fortune. Brothers in soul we were not, as it has been the heaviest grief of my life to learn. I spurn brotherhood of soul with one whose ambition has been for himself. Brothers in duty we were; and, if we should yet be brothers in fortune—if he should fall into the hands of a strong foe— But you are saying in your heart, 'No foreboding! ...
— The Hour and the Man - An Historical Romance • Harriet Martineau
... house, and supported in the other by as gallant a phalanx of Whig peers as ever were got together to fight against the instincts of their own order in compliance with the instincts of those below them. Lady Laura's father was in the Cabinet, to Lady Laura's infinite delight. It was her ambition to be brought as near to political action as was possible for a woman without surrendering any of the privileges of feminine inaction. That women should even wish to have votes at parliamentary elections was to her abominable, ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... exclaiming 'By Jupiter here it is at last!' There were other times when, being equally depressed, he would be seen to shake his head, and give up hope. To see him at those periods leaning on a chimneypiece, like as on an urn containing the ashes of his ambition, with the cheek that would not sprout, upon the hand on which that cheek had forced conviction, was a ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... attention; and he who hears only a "Will to Truth" in the background, and nothing else, cannot certainly boast of the sharpest ears. In rare and isolated cases, it may really have happened that such a Will to Truth—a certain extravagant and adventurous pluck, a metaphysician's ambition of the forlorn hope—has participated therein: that which in the end always prefers a handful of "certainty" to a whole cartload of beautiful possibilities; there may even be puritanical fanatics of conscience, who prefer to put their last trust ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... drove the Count and his soldiers against this wall of steel. At the approach of the peasants, the cities that were unable to resist them opened their gates and joined them. Wherever they appeared they pulled down the images and broke the crucifixes. Many nobles, some through fear and others from ambition, joined them. ...
— Count Ulrich of Lindburg - A Tale of the Reformation in Germany • W.H.G. Kingston
... existed the capacities of a great man, perfect health, wonderful energy, struggling aspirations toward the right—which he might hereafter have reached—generous impulses running wild, strong affections, and overweaning ambition, all turbulent ostentations almost barbaric, and all hurled into nothingness by the blow of ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens
... fixed. This true plot, in turn, can be expressed in yet more general terms, often as the primal truth which the story illustrates; this may be called the "theme" of the story. Thus in "The Ambitious Guest," the theme is "The futility of abstracted ambition;" or, in its most general terms, "The irony of fate." The true ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... and it is pathetic, but Charlotte's supreme ambition at that time was to keep a school, a school of her own, like her friend Miss Wooler. There was a great innocence and humility in Charlotte. She was easily taken in by any of those veiled, inimical spectres of ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... officers—Mr Vans Agnew, of the Civil Service, and Lieutenant Anderson, of the 1st Bombay European Fusiliers—and a considerable body of troops. Moolraj, however, had no intention of losing his government, and either prompted by his own ambition, or instigated by evil counsellors, he resolved to rebel. By bribes he won over the native troops who had accompanied the commissioners, and whom, there can be little doubt, he instigated his followers to murder. Both Mr Agnew and Lieutenant ...
— Our Soldiers - Gallant Deeds of the British Army during Victoria's Reign • W.H.G. Kingston
... look at to warn themselves what they would come to.... Poor mother ... and poor me.... But mother's getting better now she's being analysed. That wouldn't help me at all. I analyse myself too much already.... And I was so happy a few months ago. What a dreadful end to a good ambition. I shall never work again, I suppose, in any way that counts. So that's that.... Why do I want to work and to do something? Other wives and mothers don't.... Or do they, only they don't know it, because they don't analyse? I believe they do, lots of them. Or is it ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... respected in his native town of Orthez, when all at once he was tempted by the thought of titular rank, and from that time his life was one long misery. He took the name of one of his estates, he bought his title in Italy, and ordered his coat-of-arms from a heraldic agent in Paris, and now his ambition was to be treated as a real nobleman. The mere fact of dining with the eccentric Duke de Champdoce, who never invited any one to his table, was to him, as it were, a real patent ...
— The Champdoce Mystery • Emile Gaboriau
... indeed real and earnest. To have introduced something unscientific into that compendium of science—there's triumph enough for any ambition. Besides, see ...
— The Unspeakable Perk • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... the hands of the emperor, and were dragged as captives from town to town. But in the moment of his apparent triumph, the emperor was smitten with defeat. He saw the prey wrested from his grasp, and he was forced at last to grant toleration to the doctrines which it had been the ambition of his life to destroy. He had staked his kingdom, his treasures, and life itself, upon the crushing out of the heresy. Now he saw his armies wasted by battle, his treasuries drained, his many kingdoms threatened by revolt, ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White
... yashiki on pretext she entered the shop of a tradesman. To her delight she learned that the Waka Dono, Aoyama Shu[u]zen, as yet had no wife. She had a hundred yards to go, and her purpose and ambition had expanded widely in that short distance. Her application for an interview with his lordship was quickly granted. She had often been subject of talk and comment between Shu[u]zen and his subordinate officer. The do[u]shin happened ...
— Bakemono Yashiki (The Haunted House) - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 2 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... the vices opposed to magnanimity; and in the first place, those that are opposed thereto by excess. These are three, namely, presumption, ambition, and vainglory. Secondly, we shall consider pusillanimity which is opposed to it by way of deficiency. Under the first head there ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... not the case with the next pioneer in the same field, although he deserves great credit also. Peter Petersen Syv (1631-1702) was a very able philologist, who was also a minor poet of ambition. In 1695 he reprinted and edited Vedel's text, adding 100 more kjaempeviser which had been unknown to Vedel. But his work was not so well done; Syv was something of a pedant, and unfortunately either too critical or not critical enough. He ventured to ...
— Grimhild's Vengeance - Three Ballads • Anonymous
... anxiety to exaggerate the importance of the station in which they are placed; a cook, for example, has the most exalted idea of the art of cookery, and wishes to impress everyone with the same idea of its high importance, and all his ambition is to be considered a cook of the first-rate talent. In England it is different, one of the great objects with a tradesman is the hope, that by making his fortune he shall be enabled to get out of his class and take a higher walk in society. ...
— How to Enjoy Paris in 1842 • F. Herve
... and Dick told Murphy he feared Ned would not be up to the mark at the election; but Murphy, with a better knowledge of human nature, and the excitement of such a cause, said, "Never fear him—ambition is a long spur, my boy, and will stir the blood of a thicker-skinned fellow than your brother-in-law. When he comes to stand up and assert his claims before the world, he'll ...
— Handy Andy, Volume One - A Tale of Irish Life, in Two Volumes • Samuel Lover
... staid and regular farmer, the shooting of the corn in the still nights, as it swells with a respiring movement, distending the contracted sheaves which enclose it. In addition to this antipathy to the pursuits of his ancestors, Mark had a decided desire, a restless ambition, prompting him to see, and seek, and mingle with the world. He was fond, as our readers may have observed already, of his own eloquence, and having worn out the patience and forfeited the attention of all auditors at home, he was compelled, in order to the ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... your ruin!' You would not listen to me, and now the ruin has come. To play a part in politics you must have money: have we any? What! would you burn your sign, which cost six hundred francs, and renounce 'The Queen of Roses,' your true glory? Leave ambition to others. He who puts his hand in the fire gets burned,—isn't that true? Politics burn in these days. We have one hundred good thousand francs invested outside of our business, our productions, our merchandise. If you want to increase your fortune, do as they did ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... few words to say about our voyage; for I find it necessary to repress the ambition of some of my passengers," continued the captain. "Some of them wish to visit all the Philippine Islands, and there are about ...
— Four Young Explorers - Sight-Seeing in the Tropics • Oliver Optic
... minister to self-gratulation, but contentedly fills the lowly sphere, and 'the humblest duties on herself doth lay.' We need not pause to point out that such an ideal is dead against the fashionable maxims of this generation. Personal ambition is glorified as an element in progress, and to a world which believes in such a proverb as 'devil take the hindmost,' these two exhortations can only seem fanatical absurdity. And yet, perhaps, if we fairly take into account how the seeking after personal advancement and conspicuous ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... exceedingly anxious to imitate Lumley, who was unfortunately a great smoker; but Spooner, like myself, had been born with a dislike to smoke—especially tobacco smoke—and a liability to become sick when he indulged in the pipe. Hence, whilst foolish ambition induced him to smoke, outraged nature protested; and between the two the poor fellow had a bad time of it. He had a good deal of determination ...
— The Big Otter • R.M. Ballantyne
... out their positions, or husband their powers. They act because they are impelled: often in defiance of all prudent considerations! yet commonly with an amazing success. Thus General Booth has said that he was driven by "the impulses and urgings of an undying ambition" to save souls. What was this impulse and urge? It was the instinctive energy of a great nature in a sublimated form. The level at which this enhanced power is experienced will determine its value for life; but its character is much the same in the convert at ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... the flesh and the devil" but renunciation of same and the bringing of the Impersonal Ideal into his everyday life would lead him to it, then Maya will have fulfilled its purpose—which is to show man his divinity. "Kill out the desire for life. Kill out Ambition. Kill out desire for comfort; yet work as those who love life. Respect life as those who are ambitious. Be happy as those are who ...
— The Doctrine and Practice of Yoga • A. P. Mukerji
... act with severity even when severity was necessary. The very criminals condemned to death ran a good chance of reprieve when he had to sign their death-warrants. He had also that worst of faults (so called), in one fitted by nature to become great—want of ambition, a failing that in such a man marks him the possessor of an even and a philosophic mind. It was no seeking of his own that raised him out of obscurity, and when his work was done to comparative obscurity he elected to return, though whether a man of his ability and experience in South African ...
— Cetywayo and his White Neighbours - Remarks on Recent Events in Zululand, Natal, and the Transvaal • H. Rider Haggard
... why socialism has never had any great hold in England is because equality is only a word, and in no sense a real sentiment in England. The reason why members of the lowest class in England are not as a rule convinced socialists is because their one ambition is to become members of the middle-class, and to have property of their own; and while the sense of personal possession is so strong as it is, no socialism worthy of the name has a chance. It is possible ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... one apology for the production of a metrical essay, composed chiefly of imperfect and immature pieces:—the ambition to contribute towards the fund of Christmas entertainment, in which agreeable labour I see many popular names engaged,—and among them, one, the most deservedly popular in the literature of the day. The favour with which an influential portion of the press has received my 'Prison ...
— The Baron's Yule Feast: A Christmas Rhyme • Thomas Cooper
... Rapids, furnishes a brilliant example of this vocational directing. Mr. Davis begins his work through the theme writing and oral composition of the seventh and eighth grades. The purpose of the pupils' reading and discussion is to arouse their vocational ambition and to lead them to appreciate the value of further education and training for life. This study upon the part of the pupil is supplemented by talks given by Mr. Davis, prominent business and professional men and high school boys who have come back to finish their education after a few years ...
— The New Education - A Review of Progressive Educational Movements of the Day (1915) • Scott Nearing
... blockaded in Metz with the army, bound hand and foot, making no effort to break the wall of adamant that surrounded him; the doubtful relations that existed between him and Prince Frederick Charles, his indecision and fluctuating political combinations, his ambition to play a great role in history, but a role that he seemed not to have fixed upon himself; then all the dirty business of parleys and conferences, and the communications by means of lying, unsavory emissaries with Bismarck, King William and the Empress-regent, who in the ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... He understood,—no one better than he,—the tendency of all his family to an uprising in the world, which tendency was almost as strong in his mother as in his father. And he had been by no means without a similar ambition himself, though with him the ambition had been only fitful, not enduring. He had a brother, a clergyman, a busy, stirring, eloquent London preacher, who got churches built, and was heard of far and wide as a rising man, who had married ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope
... than we had ever before known in our lives. And most of them were worth knowing and the others worth some endeavor to make worth knowing. We were all pulling together down here—some harder than others, to be sure, but all with a distinct ambition that was dependent for success upon nothing but ...
— One Way Out - A Middle-class New-Englander Emigrates to America • William Carleton
... aid, Fairfax; encourage me; feed my vanity; let hungry ambition banquet and allow me to be a hero, lest I relent: for, were I not or Lucifer or Coke Clifton, 'tis certain I should not persevere. By the host of heaven, Fairfax, but she is a divine creature! She steals upon the soul! A heart of rock could not resist her! Nor are ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... It was as he wished it, Beatrice, for his one great ambition was fully granted—to know the reality of the upper world, the winds of heaven and the sun! Impossible for him to have survived the great change. Death was inevitable and right. He wanted rest, and rest is his, ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... perplexed. He had not once thought of the verses being paid for. He had thought that to see her poems in print might give Mercy a new incentive to work, might rouse in her an ambition, which would in part take the place of the stimulus which his teachings had given her. He very much disliked to tell her what he had done, and to give to her the money she had unwittingly earned. He feared that she would resent it; he feared that she would be too elated by it; ...
— Mercy Philbrick's Choice • Helen Hunt Jackson
... soul yearns and throbs and pulsates with an ambition to give the world a life-work that shall be marvelous in its scope, and weirdly entrancing in the vastness of ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers
... care of the rogue pony, Chinaman, devolved on myself. When the ponies went well, which was usually the case, when they did not suffer from the weather, we used to have long yarns about our respective services and mutual friends. Oates would often discuss the forthcoming southern journey, and his ambition was to reach the top of the Beardmore Glacier; he did not expect to be selected for the southern party, which was planned to contain four men only—two of these must have special knowledge of navigation, to check one another's observations—the ...
— South with Scott • Edward R. G. R. Evans
... and, to tell the truth, a B.A. has lost its charms for me. I long to devote my life more fully to literature. That is my first ambition, you know, and I seem to be wasting ...
— Beth Woodburn • Maud Petitt
... hold his audience by any means—does seem to have been his ambition: if the joke mars the part, down with the part; if the ludicrous scene interrupts the development of the plot, down with the plot. We have plenty of verbal evidence that the dramatist frequently chose to let his characters become caricatures; we have some ...
— Amphitryo, Asinaria, Aulularia, Bacchides, Captivi • Plautus Titus Maccius
... whose talents, had not been recognized at headquarters, I possessed an ambition which, fortunately for my standing with the lieutenant of the precinct, had not yet been expressed in words. Though I had small reason for expecting great things of myself, I had always cherished the ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... national scope or ambition took advantage of the new communication. Trade unions, benevolent associations, and professional societies multiplied their annual congresses and conventions, and increased the proportion of the population that knew something ...
— The New Nation • Frederic L. Paxson
... not trouble your majesty with my birth, which is not illustrious enough to merit your attention. For my situation, my parents, by their good economy, left me enough to live on like an honest man, free from ambition, or being ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 3 • Anon.
... He lost ambition in that line, and he soon became so overburdened with flesh that nothing save a question of life or death could have induced him to go ...
— Frank Merriwell's Races • Burt L. Standish
... moreover, well content with his lot; he dined very well, did as he liked, and slept all he could. Nenila Makarievna had introduced into her household 'foreign ways,' as the neighbours used to say; she kept few servants, and had them neatly dressed. She was fretted by ambition; she wanted at least to be the wife of the marshal of the nobility of the district; but the gentry of the district, though they dined at her house to their hearts' content, did not choose her husband, but first the retired premier-major Burkolts, and then the retired second major ...
— The Jew And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... onwards. Its attraction, therefore, lies rather in episodes—the rivalry of the sorceresses Katla and Geirrid; the circumventing of the (in this case rather sinned against than sinning) bersarks Hall and Leikner; the very curious ghost-stories; and the artful ambition of Snorri the Godi. Still, to make an attractive legend of a sort of "county history" may be regarded as a rare triumph, and the saga is all the more important because it shows, almost better than any other, the real motive of nearly all these stories—that they are real chansons ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... there are after all but a few kinds of human feelings. Some form of hunger, love, hate, fear, hope or ambition gives rise to every human ...
— How to Analyze People on Sight - Through the Science of Human Analysis: The Five Human Types • Elsie Lincoln Benedict and Ralph Paine Benedict
... of every God of you. Nay more: temples of Zeus, and Apollo, and Hera, temples of Hermes, are everywhere to be seen; but who ever saw a temple of Prometheus? You may judge from this, how far I have sacrificed the common cause to my private ambition. ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... I have never tried, in even one single little instance, to help cultivate the cultivated classes. I was not equipped for it either by native gifts or training. And I never had any ambition in that direction, but always hunted for bigger game—the masses. I have seldom deliberately tried to instruct them, but I have done my best to entertain them, for they can get instruction elsewhere.. .. My audience is ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... Jew-tradesman. Her beauty fascinated an imbecile old nobleman, who, having insulted the daughter with 'liberal' proposals, that were scornfully rejected, tempted the father with 'honorable' ones, which were eagerly accepted. The old Jew, in his ambition to become father-in-law to the old earl, forgot his religious prejudices and coaxed his daughter to sacrifice herself. And thus Berenice D'Israeli became Countess of Hurstmonceux. The old peer survived ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... her lot, she would abide by the choice. Yes, and she would do her duty also, whatever it might entail. Ralph should never know, never dimly suspect. And that other—he would never know either. His had been but a passing fancy. He trod the way of ambition, and there was no room in his life for anything besides. If she had shown him her heart, it had been but a momentary glimpse; and he had forgotten already. She was sure he had forgotten. And she had desired that he should ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... with alcohol, collapsing in a few hours. Two or three years later a travelling dentist visited the mine and put up his tent near the bunk-house. He was more or less of a charlatan, but he fired Mrs. McTeague's ambition, and young McTeague went away with him to learn his profession. He had learnt it after a fashion, mostly by watching the charlatan operate. He had read many of the necessary books, but he was too hopelessly stupid to get much benefit ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... between Mehemet and his sovereign, long foreseen, broke out in the year 1832. After the establishment of the Hellenic Kingdom, the island of Crete had been given to Mehemet in return for his services to the Ottoman cause by land and sea. This concession, however, was far from satisfying the ambition of the Viceroy, and a quarrel with Abdallah, Pasha of Acre, gave him the opportunity of throwing an army into Palestine without directly rebelling against his sovereign (Nov., 1831). Ibrahim, in command of his father's ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... to concern itself largely with groupings or alliances, which have in the main resulted from ambition, distrust, or fear. As has already been shown, the Partition of Africa was arranged without a resort to arms; but after that appropriation of the lands of the dark races, the white peoples in the south came into ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... comforts or accommodations; his fare was as simple, his dress as plain, his lodging as rude, as those of the meanest of his followers. To one end alone his attention was exclusively directed, on one acquisition alone his heart was set. Glory, military glory, was the ceaseless object of his ambition; all lesser desires were concentrated in this ruling passion; for this he lived, for ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... I do know, and you may not,' said Mr. Brownlow. 'I shall interest you by and by. I know that of the wretched marriage, into which family pride, and the most sordid and narrowest of all ambition, forced your unhappy father when a mere boy, you were the sole and ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... Dempsey had no other ambition than to be allowed to stagnate at a desk to the end of his life, and this modest ambition would have been realised had it not been for a slight accident—the single accident that had found its way into Dempsey's well-ordered and closely-guarded life. One ...
— The Untilled Field • George Moore
... laughed Mrs. Raeburn as she tried to pull him up. 'I have no ambition to herd sheep. You little wretch!' she continued in quite a different tone of voice; for Tim was in "full ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... who loves the calling and has an ambition to become a successful farmer should understand that no two of these essentials are sufficient, but that all three are necessary. Although this is so simple as to be almost axiomatic, it is indeed surprising ...
— The Young Farmer: Some Things He Should Know • Thomas Forsyth Hunt
... organise, to contend, to administer; he could make people work his will, believe in him, march before him and justify him. This was the art, as they said, of managing men—which rested, in him, further, on a bold though brooding ambition. It struck those who knew him well that he might do greater things than carry on a cotton-factory; there was nothing cottony about Caspar Goodwood, and his friends took for granted that he would somehow and somewhere write himself in bigger letters. But it was as if something ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James
... to the victorious Huayna Capac. This division of the Incarial Empire, was not at all to the liking of either Huascar or Atahualpa. They both wished to be sole Inca. Civil war was the result. Atahualpa, by treachery, had taken his brother prisoner, and would doubtless have achieved his ambition, but just then Pizarro invaded the country, and the reign ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... writers, unwilling to believe Christina base enough to marry Norby, regard the whole story of her consent as false. It seems impossible, however, that a false rumor should have been so generally believed by those who knew her. The more natural assumption is that her ambition caused her to accept the advances of her suitor even if she did not positively yield to ...
— The Swedish Revolution Under Gustavus Vasa • Paul Barron Watson
... in my regard for myself—for had I not longed to show off in her eyes? I suspect almost all silly actions have their root in selfishness, whether it take the form of vanity, of conceit, of greed, or of ambition. ...
— Ranald Bannerman's Boyhood • George MacDonald
... expert needle-woman should be an object of ambition to every fair one. Never is beauty and feminine grace so attractive, as when engaged in the honorable discharge of household duties, and domestic cares. The subjects treated of in this little manual are of vast importance, and to them we are indebted for a large amount of the ...
— The Ladies' Work-Table Book • Anonymous
... Diamond. The jewel was often stolen, but it had a knack of coming back again to the lap of Hlo-hlo. Thangobrind knew this, but he was no common jeweller and hoped to outwit Hlo-hlo, perceiving not the trend of ambition and lust and that they ...
— The Book of Wonder • Edward J. M. D. Plunkett, Lord Dunsany
... poisonous kiss of an old ugly serpent, and who, for one APPLE, DAMNED all mankind. I wish to divest myself, as far as possible, of that untutored custom. I have long since learned that the perfection of wisdom, and the end of true philosophy, is to proportion our wants to our possessions, our ambition to our capacities; we will then be a happy and a virtuous people." Ambulinia was sent off to prepare for a long and tedious journey. Her new acquaintances had been instructed by her father how to treat her, and in what manner, and to keep the anticipated visit entirely secret. Elfonzo ...
— The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... spare time in cinemas," said Crewe, "and when he is not there he is acting picture dramas. His ambition in life is to be a ...
— The Hampstead Mystery • John R. Watson
... well, I will leave off preaching, and perhaps you will allow me to conclude with a piece of advice that ought to be acceptable to one whose ambition it is to become a millionaire. You cannot have forgotten where you put your mother's head. Now, be a sensible boy for once, run away and find it, take it to Dr. Orsi up there in the museum and he will give you plenty of soldi for it—more ...
— Castellinaria - and Other Sicilian Diversions • Henry Festing Jones
... should be ambages in such a matter. The man who resolved to commit himself to such a task should come forward with apparent difficulty with great diffidence, and even with actual difficulty. He should keep himself almost hidden, as behind a mask, and should tell of his own ambition with doubtful, quivering voice. And the ambages should take time. He should approach the citadel to be taken with covered ways working his way slowly and painfully. But this young man, before he had been in the house three ...
— The Belton Estate • Anthony Trollope
... wrote to him often, without mentioning Sidonie, by the way. Risler supposed that some one had told Frantz of the disaster that had befallen him, and he too avoided all allusion to the subject in his letters. "Oh! when I can send for him to come home!" That was his dream, his sole ambition: to restore the factory and ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... millionaire. I too have denied myself, have worked and struggled to make a home for the girl I cared for. You have succeeded and you are happy. I can hold Edith's—I beg your pardon, my wife's hand in mine and I am happy. I have no ambition to be a millionaire. I was very ambitious ...
— A Millionaire of Yesterday • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... of, conte, are not likely to indulge in such an ambition," she said, with a faint sigh; "more especially," and her eyes flashed indignantly, "since Signor Ferrari thinks it his duty to mount guard over me. I suppose he wishes to keep me for himself—a most impertinent and foolish notion! There is only one thing to do—I ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... tears and his illnesses, his merciless exactions, his endless claim on mind and body and spirit—but perhaps the glowing beauty of a Rebecca, the buoyant indomitable spirit of a Ted, the sturdy charm of a small Robert, whose grip on life, whose energy and ambition were as strong ...
— Mother • Kathleen Norris
... services of a group of paid agents—some of them holding highly responsible positions—to sing their praises and advocate their cause. They enlisted others by more subtle means, delicate flattery and social ambition. They taught diplomats and consular officials, especially of Great Britain and America, that it was a bad thing to become a persona non grata to Tokyo. They were backed by a number of people, who were sincerely won ...
— Korea's Fight for Freedom • F.A. McKenzie
... To cold ambition or to joy's sweet store, Ye dusty corpses minister no more, We give to you neglect. Nor reck we of that suff'ring world's pale bourne Where you beyond the bridgeless barrier mourn O'erpast the ...
— Purgatory • Mary Anne Madden Sadlier
... after ascending the highest summits of the hills on the north side of the river, that captain Lewis first caught a distant view of the Rock mountains, the object of all our hopes, and the reward of all our ambition. On both sides of the river and at no great distance from it, the mountains followed its course: above these, at the distance of fifty miles from us, an irregular range of mountains spread themselves from west to northwest from his position. To the north of these a few elevated points, the most ...
— History of the Expedition under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark, Vol. I. • Meriwether Lewis and William Clark
... thou see holy love in a husband's smile. His kiss shall have the taint of Judas. From his arms thou shalt start with horror, as from those of thy wronged father's betrayer,—perchance his deathsman! Ill omen broods on the cradle of the child for whom a mother's ambition was but a daughter's perfidy. Woe to thee, wife and mother! Even my forgiveness cannot ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... that his refusal to avail himself of this splendid destiny would be a bitter and lasting grief to these people who loved him so fondly—whom he loved as fondly in return. Must he not be a churl to disappoint hopes so unselfish, to balk an ambition so innocent? And only because Madelon was not the most attractive ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... my will," he replied, with some pomposity, for who that has just gained an object of ambition can be humble?—"it is that you shut up this whisky shop, and betake yourself to a more decent way ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... and cold, and Johnny shivered at the first contact with the outside air. The stars had not yet begun to pale in the sky, and the city lay in blackness. Both Johnny and his mother shuffled their feet as they walked. There was no ambition in the leg muscles to swing the ...
— When God Laughs and Other Stories • Jack London
... Selwyn's indifference to life, to its problems and struggles and many-sidedness, that makes me at times impatient with him beyond restraint. In his profession he is successful. His ambition makes him work, but a weariness of things, of the unworthwhileness of human effort, the futility of striving, the emptiness of achievement, possesses him frequently, and in his dark days he pays the penalty of his points of view. If only he could ...
— People Like That • Kate Langley Bosher
... When Europeans were at last convinced that it was not India, they began again to seek a way to the East, and looked on the continent of America merely as an obstacle in their path. To find the road to Cathay was still their chief ambition. ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: History • Ontario Ministry of Education
... her mother, or to carry soup to someone in Mrs Hunt's district who had been overlooked. She would have given up her music altogether if her courage had not been revived from time to time by Mr Goodwin, and her ambition rekindled by hearing him play; as it was, she always came back to it with fresh heart ...
— Thistle and Rose - A Story for Girls • Amy Walton
... flaw. Mrs. Wentworth had fallen a victim to her folly. Love of pleasure, love of admiration, love of display, had become a part of Mrs. Wentworth's life, and she was beginning to reap the fruits of her ambition. ...
— Gordon Keith • Thomas Nelson Page
... the guilt of civil war, And close the scene of blood. Already Caesar Has ravaged more than half the globe, and sees Mankind grown thin by his destructive sword: Should he go farther, numbers would be wanting To form new battles, and support his crimes. Ye gods, what havoc does ambition make Among ...
— Cato - A Tragedy, in Five Acts • Joseph Addison
... it suggested the ripping music of the scythe-blade which should lay it low. Sam had taken good care of the cornfield, garden, and the cattle, and Gilbert's few words of quiet commendation were a rich reward for all his anxiety. His ambition was, to be counted "a full hand,"—this was the toga virilis, which, once entitled to wear, would make him feel that he ...
— The Story Of Kennett • Bayard Taylor
... after the old-fashioned method used by some South Sea islanders. But evidently the boy did not twirl the stick fast enough to produce sufficient heat to make the fine tinder smoke, and then take fire. Giraffe's ambition was commendable, however, and so Thad said nothing; only crept away again, after touching Allan on ...
— The Boy Scouts' First Camp Fire - or, Scouting with the Silver Fox Patrol • Herbert Carter
... Pichegru, nor to relate his interviews with Moreau. The organisation of the plot is what interests us, by reason of the part taken in it by d'Ache. No one has ever explained what might have resulted politically from the combination of Moreau's embittered ambition, the insouciance of Pichegru, and the fanatical ardour of Georges. Of this ill-assorted trio the latter alone had decided on action, although he was handicapped by the obstinacy of the princes in refusing ...
— The House of the Combrays • G. le Notre
... the youth put fuller strength into his arms and flung the knives yet higher into the air. But his ambition for the praise of the warriors was greater than his caution, for, in reaching forward to catch one of the weapons, he lost his balance and fell headlong into the deep green water beneath. And as he swam to shore the vikings ...
— Olaf the Glorious - A Story of the Viking Age • Robert Leighton
... father goes wrong here. Love and ambition prompt him to provide abundantly for his children; he enslaves himself to give them those social advantages ...
— Religious Education in the Family • Henry F. Cope
... on themselves and their own affairs. There are only two things that interest them; business and their own little world. If you talk about these things, they are interested at once; but they do not care a snap about your affairs, how you get on, or what your ambition is, or how they can help you. Our conversation will never reach a high standard while we live in such a feverish, selfish, and ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... intent or ambition of these aliens must be called reasonable enough. They wished to establish a provincial government here on the same lines as in Sicily, of which island it has been said that it was never more prosperous than ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... as manifested itself in him. I believe that he had not himself suspected the strength of his passion; and the sole resource for him, as I said often, was to quit the city—to engage in active pursuits of enterprise, of ambition, or of science. But he heard me as a somnambulist might have heard me—dreaming with his eyes open. Sometimes he had fits of reverie, starting, fearful, agitated; sometimes he broke out into maniacal movements of wrath, invoking some absent ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... accepted; and Bert soon had the satisfaction of seeing the great ambition of his life accomplished. He had employment, which promised to become a profitable business, as indeed it did in a few years. The old man and the lad proved useful to each other; and, more than that, he was united once more with his mother and sisters ...
— Tiger and Tom and Other Stories for Boys • Various
... his party. He had been offered a cabinet position by the elder Harrison and for some reason it had been withdrawn. He had been promised a place in Lincoln's cabinet, but some mysterious power had snatched it away. He was the one great man who had now no ambition for which to trim and fawn and lie, and for the very reason that he had abolished himself he was the most powerful leader who ever walked the halls ...
— The Clansman - An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan • Thomas Dixon
... my parents had educated me for a bishop, or a viceroy, or some other modest employment, that this learned craft of mine might have fallen into better hands! Ye would lose in instruction, but I should be removed from the giddy heights of ambition, and die at last with some hopes of being a saint. Fair lady, thou travellest on a bootless errand, if I know the reason that tempts thee to cross the Alps at this late season ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... come at lengthened intervals, and we rise to breast them; but it is the petty friction of our everyday life with one another, the jar of business or of work, the discord of the domestic circle, the collapse of our ambition, the crossing of our will or the taking down of our conceit, which makes inward peace impossible. ...
— Beautiful Thoughts • Henry Drummond
... their first enlistment Hal and Noll had been imbued with the ambition to rise from the ranks, and become officers. This promotion from the ranks is not as simple a matter as young people might gain from reading the stories of some misinformed authors who know nothing of actual military service. ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys as Lieutenants - or, Serving Old Glory as Line Officers • H. Irving Hancock
... that Majesty and its Court and its Army might have roofs and walls, not tents, for so long a siege, it covered the plain, a city raised in a night. The siege had been long as the war had been long. Hidalgo Spain and simple Spain were gathered here in great squares and ribbons of valor, ambition, emulation, desire of excitement and of livelihood, and likewise, I say it, in pieces not small, herded and brought here without any "I say yes" of their own, and to their misery. There held full flavor of crusade, as all along the war had ...
— 1492 • Mary Johnston
... epigram. Take note that I speak only of inward acts, [364] expressed by an "I will", such as "I will scorn", "approve", etc.) even if there were a hundred pistoles to be gained forthwith, and he ardently desired to gain these hundred pistoles, and he were fired with the ambition to convince himself by an experimental proof that he is ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... together, all feeling the crisis more seriously than they liked to express. Mrs. Loveday thought how ridiculous a thing social ambition was in such a conjuncture as this, and vowed that she would leave Anne to love where she would. Anne, too, forgot the little peculiarities of speech and manner in Bob and his father, which sometimes jarred for a moment upon her more refined sense, and was thankful for their love ...
— The Trumpet-Major • Thomas Hardy
... actually true. Sir Chichester Splay, spurred by his ambition to be a country gentleman with a foot in town, had chosen the neighbourhood on account of his name, so that it might come to be believed that ...
— The Summons • A.E.W. Mason
... fourth-rate gentleman in England? I want to be a real Englishman, not half a one. I want to throw in my lot heart and hand with the greatest nation in the world. I don't want to be young Sam Buckley of Baroona. I want to be the Buckley of Clere. Is not that a noble ambition?" ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... eyes that so admireth thine, Have seen those walls which proud ambition reared To check the world, how they entombed have lain Within themselves, and on them ploughs have eared; Yet never found that barbarous hand attained The spoil of fame deserved by virtuous men, Whose glorious actions luckily had gained Th'eternal ...
— Elizabethan Sonnet-Cycles - Delia - Diana • Samuel Daniel and Henry Constable
... [FN18] The dearest ambition of a slave is not liberty but to have a slave of his own. This was systematised by the servile rulers known in history as the Mameluke Beys and to the Egyptians as the Ghuzz. Each had his household of servile pages and squires, who looked forward to filling ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... in his wild ambition to become the best hunter of the tribe, as well as the best warrior, singled out an old bull, and gave chase to him. This was wanton as well as foolish, for bulls are dangerous and their meat is tough. What cared Eaglenose for that? ...
— The Prairie Chief • R.M. Ballantyne
... achieving the impossible. I am bound to confess that my new-born ardour was not mainly due to affection for the dead language in question, or even to esteem for my preceptress. But the idea of taking Low Heath, so to speak, by storm, had fairly roused my ambition. The glory of rising superior to my fate, of shaking off the ill-tutored Mr Evans and his works, and rejoining my old school-comrade with all the prestige of a fellow-exhibitioner, captivated my imagination and steeled me to the endurance ...
— Tom, Dick and Harry • Talbot Baines Reed
... not permit their ascendency to be disputed. The ancestors of the present pretender, Congal, surnamed "the squint-eyed," had twice received and cherished the licentious Bards when under the ban of Tara, and his popularity with that still powerful order was one prop of his ambition. It is pretty clear also that the last rally of Druidism against Christianity took place behind his banner, on the plain of Moira. It was the year 637, and preparations had long gone on on both sides for a final trial of strength. Congal had recruited numerous bands of Saxons, Britons, Picts ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... evidence was overwhelming. He did not look at her for some moments and felt ashamed of the cruelty he had had to use, but there was no avoiding this when a number of people's happiness was at stake. After all, he thought it was rather her ambition than her affection that had been engaged. Then rousing herself with an ...
— Carmen's Messenger • Harold Bindloss
... profligate lives, and for the most part, in accordance with public opinion, unmarried, were able to make no stand against the general corruption of the age, because- -at least if we are to trust such writers as Jerome and Chrysostom— they were giving themselves up to ambition and avarice, vanity and luxury, intrigue and party spirit, and had become the flatterers of fine ladies, "silly women laden with sins, ever learning, and never coming to the knowledge of the truth." Such a state of things not only drove poor creatures ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley
... small a matter makes one famous. A few months ago I was an humble, inconsequential country doctor. My greatest delight and ambition at that time was to find the indicated remedy, and see the sick recover. And I declare to you now, that while I enjoy this racing through the skies, and the roar and acclamation of the multitudes, yet all these are but secondary and insignificant ...
— Doctor Jones' Picnic • S. E. Chapman
... named the day-flowers after three brothers Commelyn, Dutch botanists, because two of them - commemorated in the two showy blue petals of the blossom - published their works; the third, lacking application and ambition, amounted to nothing, like the inconspicuous whitish third petal! Happily Kaspar Commelyn died in 1731, before the joke was perpetrated in ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... You have your great-heart courage For all such ardours as might make you seem Some fabled hero standing against fate, But not in this. In sifting vanity From the right honour, and building from ambition, You have a vision constant as the tides, But not in this. They may look Sussex over For any man who found a crooked word Ever upon your lips, and vainly look, Because, dear, truth is an old habit in you, But not in this. Here in the night enchanted, With ...
— Preludes 1921-1922 • John Drinkwater
... Napoleon, satisfied with military glory, should not henceforth devote himself to internal improvements in France. Nelson, on the contrary, speaking in the house of lords, while he professed himself a man of peace, insisted on the danger arising from "a restless and unjust ambition on the part of our neighbours," and Sheridan delivered a vigorous speech in a like spirit. On the whole, in January, 1803, the prospects of assured peace and prosperity were much gloomier than they had been in January, 1802, before the treaty of Amiens. The funds were going down, ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... pencil that makes demons spout forth fire and blood ... but with a severe portraiture of men who walk in broad daylight upon the common earth, rendering the ordinary passions of their fellows,—pride, and envy, and ambition, and revenge,—most fearful, from their alliance with stupendous intellect and unconquerable energy. This was what Marlowe must have done before he could have conducted a single sustained scene of ...
— The Critics Versus Shakspere - A Brief for the Defendant • Francis A. Smith
... is," quoth Tommy, "I am a society bird, and Nature has marked out for me a course beyond the range of the commonplace, and my wife must learn to accommodate. If she has a brilliant husband, whose success gratifies her ambition and places her in a distinguished public position, she must pay something for it. I'm sure Billy Wren's wife would give her very bill to see her husband in the circles where I am quite at home. To say the truth, my wife was all well enough content till old Mother ...
— Queer Little Folks • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... white men—we had been cordially received and entertained at that very place, and our money refused—but there is little doubt that the abandonment of the telegraph-line will be a good thing for these natives. Put two or three young men of no special intellectual resource or ambition down in a lonely spot like this, with no society at all save that of the natives and practically nothing to do, and there is a natural and almost inevitable trend to evil. To the exceptional man with the desire ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... I was actuated by ambition. I was delighted to possess superior power; I was prone to manifest that superiority, and was satisfied if this were done, without much solicitude concerning consequences. I sported frequently with the apprehensions of my associates, and threw out a bait for their wonder, and supplied them with ...
— Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist - (A Fragment) • Charles Brockden Brown
... kiss her lips was ultimate satisfaction. But it was indeed only the beginning of desires. I told her my one ambition was to marry her. ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... new conditions. No overseer was to stand over them with the whip, for their new master was the necessity of earning their daily bread. Very soon new and higher motives would come; fresh encouragements, a nobler ambition, would grow into their new condition. Then in the simplest language she explained the difference between their former relations with the then master and their new relations with the northern people, showing that labor here was voluntary, and that they could only expect to secure kind employers ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... twenty. At twenty he loves sincerely and devotedly; he respects the woman who has inspired him with the noblest sentiment of which his soul is capable. At thirty his heart, hardened by deceit and ill-requited affection, and pre-occupied by projects of worldly ambition, regards love only as an agreeable pastime, and woman's heart as a toy, which he may fling aside the moment it ceases to amuse him. At twenty he is ready to abandon everything for her whom he idolises—rank, wealth, the future!—they weigh as nothing in the balance against ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... the archbishop, turning up his fine eyes, "your vices are your children. Ambition is your eldest child, Cruelty is your second child, Luxury is your third child; and you have nourished them from your youth up. Separate yourself from these sinful ones, and prepare your soul, for the ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Caffyn turned about and came strolling back. He is a long lantern-jawed lad with a sardonic drawl of speech. He has spent two years in the ville lumiere, having come to it moth-like from somewhere afar in Texas. His ambition—no, wait!—the ambition of his father, a 'cattle king,' is that he should acquire the difficult art of painting in oils. 'Want me?' asked Caffyn, as I pushed a chair for him. 'What for? If it's to admire the 'rainbow' you've been mixing, I'm a connoisseur and I don't pass it. Your hand's steady ...
— Foe-Farrell • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... but, at the age of nineteen, it is not easy for a prince, educated in the supreme rank, to understand the true characters of his ministers and generals. He attempted to weigh, with an impartial hand, their various merits and defects; and, whilst he checked the rash confidence of ambition, he distrusted the cautious wisdom which despaired of the republic. As each moment of delay diminished something of the power and resources of the future sovereign of the East, the situation of ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... not look so low. Here are the facts of the case. Our defunct sister, whose canonisation the order are now endeavouring to obtain at the court of the Pope, and would have had it if they could have paid the proper costs of the papal brief; this Petronille, then, had an ambition to have her name included in the Calendar of Saints, which was in no way prejudicial to our order. She lived in prayer alone, would remain in ecstasy before the altar of the virgin, which is on the side of the fields, ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... his heart is humbled and warmed. And who knows,—for, with all his sincerity and aspiration, he has an eye to temporal uses,—who knows but this stumbling-block an enemy has placed in his way may prove the stepping-stone of his ambition? ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... pleasant to think of poor Alda's delight," said Geraldine, over her writing-case. "After all her troubles, to have her utmost ambition fulfilled at last; and yet-and yet it does seem turning that pretty creature over to a life ...
— The Long Vacation • Charlotte M. Yonge
... sickened upon him. He no longer took delight in arms. His heart, that used to be roused at the sight of troops and banners and battle array, and would stir and leap at the sound of a drum or a trumpet or a neighing war-horse, seemed to have lost all that pride and ambition which are a soldier's virtue; and his military ardor and all his old joys forsook him. Sometimes he thought his wife honest, and at times he thought her not so; sometimes he thought Iago just, and at times he thought him not so; then he would wish that he had never ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... Bonaparte mathematics at the college of Brienne, but he had left there to join the army. The revolution found him a sergeant in the artillery. His talent and courage raised him rapidly to the rank of general. It was he who achieved the conquest of Holland, in the middle of winter, but ambition was his downfall. He allowed himself to be seduced by agents of the Prince de Cond, and entered into correspondence with the Prince, who promised him great rewards and the title of "Constable" if he would use the influence which he had with ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot
... cease, thy frantic Tumults cease, Ambition, Sire of War! Nor o'er the mangled Corse of Peace Urge on thy scythd Car. And oh! that Reason's voice might swell 35 With whisper'd Airs and holy Spell To rouse thy gentler Sense, As bending o'er the chilly bloom The Morning wakes its soft ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... Wheelwright first visited Argentina it was little more than an unknown land, whose inhabitants had no ambition, and no desire to acquire wealth—except at the expense of broken heads. There was a standard of wealth, but it lay in the number of cattle owned; land was of little value, save for feeding cattle, and therefore counted for naught, but cattle could be boiled down for tallow; bones and hides ...
— Argentina From A British Point Of View • Various
... flattering opinion, mon ami, if I can by application realize the bright pictures my ambition paints. I shall be so much happier when I have tested myself; for now, all is untried, the present is restless, and the future perplexing. It is so difficult for me to curb my impatience, to remember that our progressive ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 5. May 1848 • Various
... part clean and commendable, for they rigidly adhered themselves to those laws which they would gladly have forced at the sword's point upon others. It is true that among so many there were some whose piety was a shell for their ambition, and others who practised in secret what they denounced in public, but no cause however good is free from such hypocritical parasites. That the greater part of the saints, as they termed themselves, were men of sober and God-fearing lives, ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Cuthbert said, "that when ambition and greed are in one scale, reverence for the holy church will not weigh much in the other. Had King Richard been killed upon his way home, or so long as nothing was heard of him, Sir Rudolph might have been content to allow matters to remain as they were, until at least Lady Margaret attained ...
— The Boy Knight • G.A. Henty
... the active ministry, as the colleague of Dr. Channing. He had youth, zeal, and executive force. Writing of him after his death, Dr. Bellows said: "He had rare administrative qualities and a statesmanlike mind. He would have been a leader anywhere. He had the ambition, the faculties, and the impulsive temperament of an actor in affairs. He had the fervor, the concentration of will, the passionate enthusiasm of conviction, the love of martyrdom, which make men great in action."[9] Throughout his life Gannett labored assiduously ...
— Unitarianism in America • George Willis Cooke
... was naturally the imperial city that contained by far the most. Rome was by no means the only city in which doles of free corn were made and free spectacular exhibitions given. But in other places the distributions were occasional and depended on the bounty of local men of wealth or ambition, whereas at Rome the dole was regular, and the spectacles frequent and splendid. Rome was the capital, and the abode of the emperor. It claimed the privileges of the Mistress City, including the enjoyment of the surplus revenues. Policy also demanded that the rabble ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... rostrum a man who held in his hand a contract between the king and the people; he began by saying that glory was a beautiful thing, and ambition and war as well; but there was something still more beautiful, ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... that Mr. BIRRELL has lately thrown off one of his obiter dicta—to the effect that Mr. Asquith and his colleagues have expressed an ambition to go down in the pages of history as the "Ministry of All ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, May 10, 1916 • Various
... possible," said Athos, smiling, "that my friend, D'Artagnan, who, after having raised me to the skies, making me an object of worship, casts me down from the top of Olympus, and hurls me to the ground? I have more exalted ambition, D'Artagnan. To be a minister—to be a slave,—never! Am I not still greater? I am nothing. I remember having heard you occasionally call me 'the great Athos;' I defy you, therefore, if I were minister, to continue to bestow that ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... every doubt and fear; I know the truth, and for that truth I live. Considered from certain aspects such knowledge, I admit, is not altogether desirable. Thus it has deprived me of my interest in earthly things. Ambition has left me altogether; for years I have had no wish to succeed in the profession which I adopted in my youth, or in any other. Indeed I doubt whether the elements of worldly success still remain in me; whether they are not entirely burnt away by that fire of wisdom in which I have bathed. How can ...
— The Mahatma and the Hare • H. Rider Haggard
... of this beautiful passage is worthy our careful study and prayerful obedience. Are we ambitious to govern: be it our honour to rule our own spirits and tongues. Are we for war? let it be levied upon our unruly passions. This is laudable ambition. This is honourable war, producing the peace and happiness of man. This is real glory to God and man, the very opposite to those horrors of desolation which gives joy among the devils of hell—the burning cities, the garments ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... false glory For which now you peril life,— For no worthless aim unholy, Do ye plunge into the strife; No unstable, fleeting vision Bright before your gaze hath shone, No day dream of wild ambition, Now your footsteps ...
— The Poetical Works of Mrs. Leprohon (Mrs. R.E. Mullins) • Rosanna Eleanor Leprohon
... King's Gate. The King and Jack Bute used him for a tool, and then cast him out. You wonder why I am of the King's party?" said he, with something sinister in his smile; "I will tell you. When I got my borough I cared not a fig for parties or principles. I had only the one definite ambition, to revenge Lord Holland. Nay," he exclaimed, stopping my protest, "I was not too young to know rottenness as well as another. The times are rotten in England. You may have virtue in America, amongst a people which is fresh from a struggle with the earth and its savages. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... the much toasted Miss Katherine Jones is too big for mere sunny paths. Showing that she has a latent ambition to climb a ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell
... true victory comes when the fight is won: that our foe is never so noble nor so dangerous as when she is fallen, that the crowning triumph is that we celebrate over our conquering selves. Sir, you are right. Kindness, ay kindness after all. And with age, to become clement. Yes, ambition first; then, the rounded vanity - victory still novel; and last, as you say, the royal mood of the mature man; to abdicate for others . . . Sir, you touched me hard about my dead friend; still harder about my living duty; and I am not ...
— The Plays of W. E. Henley and R. L. Stevenson
... Diet holden in the month of April last; resolutions which bear not only the characters of wisdom, but also those of the best intentioned solicitude, and the purest love of our country; and which prove, in the most convincing manner, that your noble Mightinesses have no greater ambition than its universal prosperity; assiduously proposing to yourselves, as the most important object of your attention, of your enterprises, and of your attachment, the rule, Salus Populi suprema Lex esto; resolutions, in fine, which ought perfectly to re-assure the good Citizens of this Province, ...
— A Collection of State-Papers, Relative to the First Acknowledgment of the Sovereignty of the United States of America • John Adams
... than the rest, Smoke, blasted as by envy's thunderbolts; So better far in quiet to obey, Than to desire chief mastery of affairs And ownership of empires. Be it so; And let the weary sweat their life-blood out All to no end, battling in hate along The narrow path of man's ambition; Since all their wisdom is from others' lips, And all they seek is known from what they've heard And less from what they've thought. Nor is this folly Greater to-day, nor greater soon to ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius
... those obtuse youths who can never take in more than one idea at a time. His present idea was football. He had come up this term with a consuming ambition to get into the fifteen, and had played hard and desperately to secure his end. Last week, when Brinkman was obliged to retire, he thought his chance was come, and great was his mortification when he found that his nomination was not accepted ...
— The Cock-House at Fellsgarth • Talbot Baines Reed
... Benedict Arnold. As boys they had gone to the same school, and when they left school they entered college and graduated at the same time. During all those years Eli had always looked upon Arnold as a superior being. When the men were enrolled as guards Eli felt that the height of his ambition was reached, for, with Arnold as captain, the guards would rival any military body ...
— The Hero of Ticonderoga - or Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys • John de Morgan
... given to the conqueror was a garland of wild olive; but this was valued as one of the dearest distinctions in life. To have his name proclaimed as victor before assembled Hellas was an object of ambition with the noblest and the wealthiest of the Greeks. Such a person was considered to have conferred everlasting glory upon his family and his country, and was rewarded by ...
— A Smaller History of Greece • William Smith
... reproduction, as over all the other functions of the body, a powerful influence. Love is said to be the ruling passion in the sanguine temperament, as ambition is in the bilious. There is also in some cases a peculiar condition of the nervous system which impels to, or diverts from, sexual indulgence. In some women, even in moderation, it acts as a poison, being followed by headache ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... contrary to the current opinion of criticism and blame, and direct attention to other causes for whatever unsatisfactory part that Negroes are playing in this line of service in the City. These causes may be looked for in the increasing number of European immigrants; in the growing ambition and effort of Negro wage-earners, sharing the feeling of all native-born Americans, to get away from personal and domestic service and to enter fields of work with better wages, shorter hours, and more independence.[64] To this may be added the increasing ...
— The Negro at Work in New York City - A Study in Economic Progress • George Edmund Haynes
... present fortune betrayed itself again in a phrase to Warren, "I have nothing so much at heart as the faithful discharge of my duty, and in such manner as will give satisfaction both to the Lords of the Admiralty and yourself. This shall ever be my utmost ambition, and no lucre of profit, or other views, shall induce me to act otherwise." Not prize-money; but honor, through service. And this in fact not only ruled his thought but in the moment of decision inspired his act. ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... that some one had gone before us. Archie was great in those days at tracking, his ambition running in Indian paths. He would walk always with his head bent and his eyes on the ground, whereby he several times found lost coins and once a trinket dropped by the provost's wife. At the edge of the burn, where the path turns downward, there is a patch of shingle ...
— Prester John • John Buchan
... nature, and excite a disgust of which it is divested in civilized life. In the latter case we see certain privileges even hereditarily enjoyed; but the weak and strong, the rich and poor, the young and old have paths of honourable ambition laid open to them by entering on which they can gain like immunities. While in the savage condition we find the female sex, the young, and the weak, condemned to a hopeless state of degradation and to a lasting deprivation of particular ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 2 (of 2) • George Grey
... see why a widow should ever marry again. She has gained the benefits of matrimony—freedom and consideration—and she has got rid of the drawbacks. Why should she put her head into the noose again? Her usual motive is ambition: if a man can offer her a great position, make her a princess or an ambassadress she may think ...
— The American • Henry James
... is the ambition of every one to live fashionable, it is their chief wish to be laid in the grave in the same style. Undertakers at fashionable funerals are generally the sexton of some fashionable church, that, perhaps, of the church the deceased was ...
— The Secrets Of The Great City • Edward Winslow Martin
... is the best policy," but because it is a duty to God and to man. The heart that can be gratified by dishonest gains; the ambition that can be satisfied by dishonest means; the mind that can be devoted to dishonest purposes, must be of ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous
... seek the satisfaction of the needs of the moment, without much forethought, and without considering that by sufficient effort the whole conditions of their lives could be changed. A certain percentage, guided by personal ambition, make the effort of thought and will which is necessary to place themselves among the more fortunate members of the community; but very few among these are seriously concerned to secure for all the advantages which they seek for themselves. It is only a few rare and exceptional men who have ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell
... distinct, personal talent entitled to its place in the republic of painting. At that point we leave him. But we may be sure that, with his remarkable gift and even more remarkable power of turning it to account, his energy, his patience, and his manifest ambition, he will soon have gone ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... these impressions on my mind. My knowledge of the interior is, however, too limited to justify me in any conclusion with regard to the central parts of Australia. An ample field is open to enterprise and to ambition, and it is to be hoped that some more decisive measures will be carried into effect, both for the sake of the colony and of geography, to fill up the blank upon the face of the chart of Australia, and remove from us the ...
— Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia, Complete • Charles Sturt
... fellow, an orphan, who goes to the wars as substitute for his friend Jean. After rising from rank to rank by bravery, he returns to his home just as his sweetheart, Perrine, enters the church to wed Jean. The girl had been his one ambition, and now in his despair he reenlists and begs to be placed in the thickest of danger. When he falls, they find on his breast a withered spray from the pear-tree under which Perrine had first plighted troth. On these simple lines the music builds ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... sinewy, with a faint hint of rib and a wonderful bust; her brain was good, intuitive in its non-educated state, and subtle from inheritance; her ambition was superb, it knew no limits, it ...
— Desert Love • Joan Conquest
... where and how I would be admired, if ever such a luxury could come to me, I would be Joe Wurzel under present circumstances. A young hero, handsome, tall, in the uniform of the Hussars, with a loved one near and all the village girls fixing their eyes on me! That for once only, and my utmost ambition would be gratified. Life could have no greater pride for me. I don't know whether the sermon made much impression that day, but of the two, I verily believe Joe made the most; and as they streamed out of the little church all the young ...
— The Humourous Story of Farmer Bumpkin's Lawsuit • Richard Harris
... the President alone and each might be removed alone, without explanation given by the President to the others. I imagine that the late practice of the President's cabinet has in some degree departed from this theory; but if so, the departure has sprung from individual ambition rather than from any pre-concerted plan. Some one place in the cabinet has seemed to give to some one man an opportunity of making himself pre-eminent, and of this opportunity advantage has been taken. I am not now intending to allude to any individual, but am endeavoring ...
— Volume 2 • Anthony Trollope
... manoeuvre performed, and learning the arts of knotting and splicing, reefing and steering, as well as studying navigation. The captain told me that he was well pleased with my progress, and this encouraged me to persevere. My great ambition was to learn a profession, and thus to be independent. It is what all boys should aim at. I had originally no particular taste for the sea; but having chosen it, I was determined to be a thorough sailor. How many among my schoolfellows could not make up their minds what ...
— In the Eastern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... prick the sides of my intent, but only Vaulting ambition; which o'erleaps itself, And falls on ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... stream which probably flowed past her father's cottage, as it still flows, bathing the base of cottages as humble and as rudely built as his could have been. There might, perchance, have been one, amongst the youths who admired her beauty, whom she preferred to the rest; her ambition might have been to become his bride, her dreams might have imaged his asking her of her father, whose gracious consent made them both happy: in her ears might have rung the pealing bells of St. Gervais—the vision of maidens, ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... departed from the wife of his youth, nor could Sarah ever have intended to relinquish her hold upon his affection. It is the last claim a woman foregoes. And on the other hand, Hagar could have felt no love for her master, so much her superior in age and station. Unholy pride and rank ambition were all the feelings which such an alliance could awaken in the heart of Hagar. Yet Hagar was the least blameworthy, and, perhaps, not eventually the greatest sufferer. By the customs of society, she had no voice in the disposal of herself. Her heart was ...
— Notable Women of Olden Time • Anonymous
... time have nobly worn this jewel of courage in the eyes of the world. John Addington Symonds was for many years an invalid whose life hung on a thread. He had youth, gifts of a high order, culture, ambition, but a desolating shadow blackened the landscape of his life; he might have yielded to the lassitude which came with his disease; he might have become embittered and poured his sorrows into the ear ...
— Essays On Work And Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... fact that he trusted her; that he, a strong man, put his faith in her, a woman. He flattered her as she had never been flattered, not too subtly, yet not so broadly as to arouse her suspicion of his intent. He spoke quietly at first, then his voice seeming charged with his leaping ambition set responsive chords within her thrilling. He pictured to her the state he was going to found, organize, rule, an uncertain number of fair miles stretching along a tropical coast; he made her see again a palatial dwelling with servants in livery, ...
— The Bells of San Juan • Jackson Gregory
... Those fellows are done for, I tell you. I know the symptoms. They've lost their morale, lost the ambition for success. I've seen soldiers fall in precisely that way, too far gone even to shelter ...
— A Captain in the Ranks - A Romance of Affairs • George Cary Eggleston
... by NICHOLAS LONGWORTH, near Cincinnati, whom we may justly call one of the founders of American grape culture. He adopted the system of leasing parcels of unimproved land to poor Germans, to plant with vines; for a share, I believe, of one-half of the proceeds. It was his ambition to make the Ohio the Rhine of America, and he has certainly done a good deal to effect it. In 1858, the whole number of acres planted in grapes around Cincinnati, was estimated, by a committee appointed for that purpose, at twelve hundred acres, of which ...
— The Cultivation of The Native Grape, and Manufacture of American Wines • George Husmann
... was that Caesar had always shown signs of courage and ambition, and had always been confident of his future greatness. Now that his position in the country was assured men began to remember these stories of his youth. In the days when Sulla was master of Rome, Caesar had been one of the very few who had ventured to resist the great man's will. Marius, the ...
— Roman life in the days of Cicero • Alfred J[ohn] Church
... of life are all that are worth striving for. They come to us fresh from Nature and from Nature's God. The complex are but concoctions of man after recipes in the devil's alchemy. So much gold, so much ambition, so much lust. Mix well. ...
— Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall • Charles Major
... are to be reprehended, and not uncommon is it that we hear of health ruined and even life jeopardized by some foolish or thoughtless effort. Young men ought to guard against strife in labor, which usually accompanies an ambition to excel. We know of an instance where a company of boys, by lifting against each other, one was ruptured. And again, an "itinerant" came along with a machine known as a lung-tester; one fair-haired, slender youth, having fears he would fall below the ...
— Minnesota; Its Character and Climate • Ledyard Bill
... different breeds. These animals will then be found to deserve the encomiums bestowed upon them by Buffon, "as possessing such an ardour of sentiment, with fidelity and constancy in their affection, that neither ambition, interest, nor desire of revenge, can corrupt them, and that they have no fear but that of displeasing. They are, in fact, all zeal, ardour, and obedience. More inclined to remember benefits than injuries; more docile and tractable than ...
— Anecdotes of Dogs • Edward Jesse
... mind how hard the work is," answered Alec. "I hate to give up the one thing that has been my ambition all my life, but I have come to the point where I'd do anything honest to get a place somewhere out of this town. I'd even scrub floors. You don't know what I've been through this summer, Uncle Dick. Of course, you ...
— Flip's "Islands of Providence" • Annie Fellows Johnston
... boarding-school of some pretension, with ambition which had been awakened years before under the apple-trees, had given Miss Phrony the full number of accomplishments that are to be gained by such means. The years had also changed the round, school-girl plumpness into a slim yet strong figure; and as she entered the parlor,—quite casually, be ...
— Gordon Keith • Thomas Nelson Page
... Boys in a Graded School had a Burning Ambition to be a Congressman. He loved Politics and Oratory. When there was a Rally in Town he would carry a Torch and listen to the Spellbinder ...
— More Fables • George Ade
... educated in the Dominican Cloister at Siena, under the care of his uncle Cristoforo Tolomei. There, and afterwards in the fraternity of S. Ansano, he felt that impulse towards a life of piety, which after a short but brilliant episode of secular ambition, was destined to return with overwhelming force upon his nature. He was a youth of promise, and at the age of sixteen he obtained the doctorate in philosophy and both laws, civil and canonical. The Tolomei ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... her!" cried Rudolph. "Her mother is an unworthy creature, a being bronzed by egotism and ambition. Sometimes I ask myself if it were not better my child should be dead, than to have remained in the hands of ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... village. There were more. I heard the calls and cries of others in the wood and various places, but refused, except in the case of the too elusive crake, to set down any in my list that I did not see. It was not my ambition to make a long list. My greatest desire was to see well those that interested me most. But those who go forth, as I did, to look for birds that are a sight for sore eyes, must meet with many a disappointment. In all those fruit and shade trees that covered the village ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... musicke, like the chime of spheares, Did rauish pleasure, till this paire did rise: More wonder then that sound was to men eares Was her rare beauty to the gazers eyes. Ioy was so violent, the rockes it teares, The noise and triumphs beates vpon the aire, And like ambition pierceth through the skies, That Ioue loo'kt downe on ...
— Seven Minor Epics of the English Renaissance (1596-1624) • Dunstan Gale
... this disaster, lies in the future, for as yet Winslow is only seven-and-twenty, and yet the lines of ambition, of weariness, of hauteur are foreshadowed upon his face; already Time with his light indelible pencil has faintly traced the furrows he by and by will plow that all who ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... Louis Phillippe, who then reigned in France—for Bonaparte had died in St. Helena—banished from his throne and his adopted country, and brought to see the folly of his mad ambition; and this Bazaar was held in the Place de la Concorde, a suitable locality for such an object,—for Concorde, you know, means peace and harmony, instead ...
— The Young Emigrants; Madelaine Tube; The Boy and the Book; and - Crystal Palace • Susan Anne Livingston Ridley Sedgwick
... temporary, has become apparent in its quality. This applies, at least, to certain sections of the party. A sordid practicalism has made itself felt, due to a feverish desire to play an important role in the detail of current politics. Personal ambition and the mechanical working of the party system have also had their evil influence in the movement in recent years. Nevertheless, we have reason to believe that the core of the party is as sound and as true to principle as ever it was, and that on the restoration of international peace this ...
— German Culture Past and Present • Ernest Belfort Bax
... such a tired feeling that he didn't have the ambition of an oyster. He didn't have enough energy to realize he was all in. He took it for granted that the whole race was as tired ...
— The Iron Puddler • James J. Davis
... installments. Such a vessel is needed for the safety of that State against the native African races, and in Liberian hands it would be more effective in arresting the African slave trade than a squadron in our own hands. The possession of the least organized naval force would stimulate a generous ambition in the Republic, and the confidence which we should manifest by furnishing it would win forbearance and favor toward the ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... the King of Prussia, Lady Hervey, in a letter of the 17th, says, "I think it very well and very artfully drawn for his purpose, and very impertinently embarrassing to our King. He is certainly a very artful prince, and I cannot but think his projects and his ambition still more extensive, than ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... roses and Canterbury bells, and lilies and pinks, and sweet-peas and daisies, and put them over the posts. And I think if Bill Simpkins had known how sorry we were, he would have been glad. Oswald only hopes if he falls on the wild battlefield, which is his highest ambition, that somebody will be as sorry about him as he was ...
— The Wouldbegoods • E. Nesbit
... extravagances, such as Cowley would have admired, and which he might have envied. The suddenness of the impression, so to speak, made by great poets, their direct communication with the heart, belongs to another time. It is our ambition to come to the same end by feats of ingenuity; and instead of touching the feelings, and setting the imagination of the reader instantaneously aglow, to exercise his skill in unravelling and interpretation. We expect the pleasure of success ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 443 - Volume 17, New Series, June 26, 1852 • Various
... which he at this time endured. "I felt impressed," said he, "with a feeling that I should never rise in my profession. My mind was staggered with a view of the difficulties I had to surmount and the little interest I possessed. I could discover no means of reaching the object of my ambition. After a long and gloomy reverie, in which I almost wished myself overboard, a sudden glow of patriotism was kindled within me, and presented my king and country as my patron. 'Well then,' I exclaimed, 'I will be ...
— The Life of Horatio Lord Nelson • Robert Southey
... good writer, but had a bad heart. Even to the last he was devoured by ambition, which he pretended to despise. Would you believe that, after finding his opposition to the ministry fruitless, and, what galled him still more, contemned, he summoned up resolution to wait on Sir Robert Walpole? Sir Robert seeing Swift look pale and ill, inquired the state ...
— A Letter From a Clergyman to his Friend, - with an Account of the Travels of Captain Lemuel Gulliver • Anonymous
... a year!" thought Salmon, deeming that man enviable who had constant employment, an assured position, and eight hundred a year. His ambition was to get a living simply,—to place his foot upon some certainty, however humble, with freedom from this present gnawing anxiety, and with a prospect of rising, he cared not how slowly, to the place which ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... without a sense of beauty. And now I shoot a second rapid—I want you to practise verse, and to practise it assiduously.... I am quite serious. Let me remind you that, if there ever was an ancient state of which we of Great Britain have great right and should have greater ambition to claim ourselves the spiritual heirs, that state was Imperial Rome. And of the Romans (whom you will allow to have been a practical people) nothing is more certain than the value they set upon acquiring verse. To them it was not only (as Dr Johnson said of Greek) 'like ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... made of gun-boxes covered with condemned blankets, another settee, two pails, a tin cup, tin basin (we prize any tin or wooden ware as savages prize iron), and a valise, regulation size. Seriously considered, nothing more appears needful, unless ambition might crave another chair for company, and, perhaps, something for a wash-stand ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... which in after-life render him humbly celebrated in subordinate positions. At school he will have had the good fortune to be attached as fag to a big boy who occupied an important place as an athlete, and whose condescending smiles were naturally an object of greater ambition to the small fry than the approval of the school authorities. For him he performed with much assiduity the various duties of a fag, happy to shine amongst his companions as the recipient of the great boy's ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, Sept. 27, 1890 • Various
... than my head. This friend might well have caused my portrait, which the famous Don Juan de Jauregui would have given him, to be engraved and put in the first page of this book, according to custom. By that means he would have gratified my ambition and the wishes of several persons, who would like to know what sort of face and figure has he who makes bold to come before the world with so many works of his own invention. My friend might have written under the portrait—"This person whom you see here, with an oval visage, ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... was the right person to ask for advice about getting some employment. He was in a great way of business; he had not the narrow notions of uncle Glegg; and he had risen in the world on a scale of advancement which accorded with Tom's ambition. ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... that "Imperial Majesty, for some time past, spends half of her time in praying to the Virgin, and the other half in weeping." "I wish her," adds the ungallant D'Argens, "as punishment for the mischiefs her ambition has cost mankind these seven years past, the fate of Phaethon's Sisters, and that she melt altogether into water!" [Ib. xix. 320 ("24th May, 1762").]—Take one other little utterance; and then to Colonel Hordt and the Petersburg ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... attained by those whose systems are untainted by secret influences, such as love, envy, ambition, food, college education and ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... Being. Boethius, life; the first scholastic; an independent philosopher; his philosophic ambition; his achievement; a Christian; perhaps a martyr; son-in-law of Symmachus; his wife; his sons; early training; youthful poetry; premature old age; his learning; his library; his lofty position; his principles; the champion of the oppressed; of the Senate; his ...
— The Theological Tractates and The Consolation of Philosophy • Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius
... these is jealousy, or the feeling of grief and anger produced in an individual when the object of his sexual appetite is disputed by another individual of the same sex. Jealousy may also arise from other instincts, such as those of nutrition, ambition, etc.; but it forms one of the most typical complements of the sexual appetite, and leads, as we know, to furious combats, especially between males, sometimes ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... (he was eighty-one when he died) was almost exactly divided, by the nature of his occupations, into two equal periods. During the first, up to his forty-first year, he was wholly the artist, enthusiastic, filled with a laudable ambition to excel, not only for personal reasons, but, as appears from his correspondence, largely from patriotic motives, from a wish to rescue his country from the stigma of pure commercialism which it had incurred in the eyes of the rest of the world. It is true that his active brain and ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Samuel F. B. Morse
... matter settled, the Penney girls arose in their might upon the wings of ambition. There ...
— People of the Whirlpool • Mabel Osgood Wright
... look of gratitude. She, at least, understood his profession. She entered into his feelings far better than Jacqueline, who had been his first confidante—Jacqueline, to whom he had confided his purposes, his ambition, and his day-dreams. He thought Jacqueline was selfish. She seemed to care only for herself. And yet, selfish or not selfish, she pleased him better than all the other girls he knew— a thousand times more than ...
— Jacqueline, v1 • Th. Bentzon (Mme. Blanc)
... white, dusty road, the fires of his ambition kept on kindling with every step, and his pace, even in the cool of the early morning, sent his hat to his hand, and plastered his long lank hair to his temples and the back of his sturdy sunburnt neck. The sun was hardly star-pointing the horizon when he saw the luminous ...
— The Heart Of The Hills • John Fox, Jr.
... when the fit was upon him. Slowly, by a gradual study of him, she learned what few had ever guessed, namely, that beneath the experienced man of the world, under his modest manner and his gentle ways, there lay a powerful mainspring of ambition, a mine of strength, which would one day exert itself and make itself felt upon his surroundings. He had developed slowly, feeding upon many experiences of the world in many countries, his quick Italian intelligence ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford
... incapable of large designs or sustained effort, lose every aspiration and forget every ideal. Our gilded youth want such examples as this of Motley, not a solitary, but a conspicuous one, to teach them how much better is the restlessness of a noble ambition than the narcotized stupor of club-life or the vapid amusement of a dressed-up intercourse which too often requires a questionable flavor of forbidden license to render it endurable to persons ...
— Memoir of John Lothrop Motley, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... which to my mind was the result of his having passed so much of his life amongst the wild and lawless tribesmen, with whom his authority was supreme. Intercourse with this man amongst men made me more eager than ever to remain on the frontier, and I was seized with ambition to follow in his footsteps. Had I never seen Nicholson again, I might have thought that the feelings with which he inspired me were to some extent the result of my imagination, excited by the astonishing stories I had heard of his ...
— Forty-one years in India - From Subaltern To Commander-In-Chief • Frederick Sleigh Roberts
... leaving Rene to finish his porringer of buckwheat in boiled milk. Du Bousquier, still in bed, was revolving in his mind his plans of fortune; for ambition was all that was left to him, as to other men who have sucked dry the orange of pleasure. Ambition and play are inexhaustible; in a well-organized man the passions which proceed from the brain will always survive the ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac
... anything), the apparently opulent M. Prosper Sauvage—wasn't it?—had not long before, unless I mistake, inherited the place as a monument of "family," quite modestly local yet propitious family, ambition; with an ample extension in the rear, and across the clearest prettiest court, for his own dwelling, which thus became elegant, entre cour et jardin, and showed all the happy symmetries and proper conventions. Here flourished, or rather, I surmise at this time of ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... greatly from weakness, seemed to be tired all the time, and had no ambition to do anything or go any place. My nerves were in bad shape, I could not sleep at night and then came a breakdown. I read of Lydia E. Pinkham's Vegetable Compound in the newspapers and several of my friends advised me to use it. It surely put new life into me and now I am quite able to do all my ...
— Food and Health • Anonymous
... thought turn when it would heal itself? To the disconsolate there has always been comfort in recalling the early home where childhood was nourished, the orchard and the meadow where first love came to the meeting, the eager city where ambition, full-panoplied, sprang from the brain. The mind is hung with pictures of what once was. But there must always be a local habitation for these rekindled heats. Somewhere, in scene and setting, the boy played, the youth loved, the man struggled. That richness of feeling is interwoven with a place. ...
— Young Hilda at the Wars • Arthur Gleason
... Ambition Which, upon a rival's fall, Winds above its old condition, With a reptile's slimy crawl, Shall the pleading voice of sorrow, shall the slave in ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... it to find profit; to face defeat after defeat and therein acquire faith in his own permanence; to live for years within a frail, defective body, with a mind unable to respond to the promptings of ambition and inspiration, and thereby take on the greatness of gentleness-the conviction comes clear, a conviction which will not comfortably stay put aside, that life is intended to develop ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll
... or rather when the Prince de Conti desired it for him, the President de Mesmes, a man of great capacity, but by fear and ambition most slavishly attached to the Court, made an eloquent and pathetic harangue, preferable to anything I ever met with of the kind in all the monuments of antiquity, and, turning about to the Prince de Conti, "Is it possible, monsieur," said he, "that a Prince of the blood of France ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... vices which his age regarded more as the characteristics than the failings of a gentleman. The most scurrilous of the many scurrilous chroniclers of the Covenanters' wrongs has owned in a characteristic passage that his life was uniformly clean.[3] Gifted by nature with quick parts, of dauntless ambition and untiring energy both of mind and body, he was not the man to have let slip in idleness any chance of fortifying himself for the great struggle of life, or to have neglected studies which might be useful to him in ...
— Claverhouse • Mowbray Morris
... turn and however we regard it, at the close of more than a century of independent existence we find ourselves, historically speaking, involved in a mesh of contradictions with our past. Under a sense of obligation, impelled by circumstances, perhaps to a degree influenced by ambition and commercial greed, we have one by one abandoned our distinctive national tenets, and accepted in their place, though in some modified forms, the old-time European tenets and policies, which we supposed the world, ...
— "Imperialism" and "The Tracks of Our Forefathers" • Charles Francis Adams
... move smoothly. Umako, with all his zeal and enthusiasm for Buddhism, was suspected of personal ambition, and was looked upon with distrust. A plot to assassinate the emperor was planned by Umako, which terminated his life, after a reign of only four years, in the seventy-third year of ...
— Japan • David Murray
... certainly not very learned in the archaeologies of his own country; where all men had gone astray, he went astray. And in geography, as regarded the Italian movements of Hannibal, he erred with his eyes open. But these were no objects of Livy's ambition: what he aspired to do was, to tell the story, 'the tale divine,' of Roman energy and perseverance; and he so told it that no man, as regards the mere artifices of narration, would ever have presumed to tell it after him. I cite this particular case as illustrating the ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... dolce far niente. But, just as the first warm day in June fills you with a physical vitality which you feel convinced that you must live for ever, so autumn makes you realise that life is fleeting and the mind has not yet reached its full development, nor intellectual ambition its complete fruition. Perhaps it is the touch of winter in the air which braces your mind and soul and gives you the impression that, given the long autumn evenings over the fire undisturbed, your brain ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... emolument - in short, popular religion may be summed up as respect for ecclesiastics. (26) The spread of this misconception inflamed every worthless fellow with an intense desire to enter holy orders, and thus the love of diffusing God's religion degenerated into sordid avarice and ambition. (27) Every church became a theatre, where orators, instead of church teachers, harangued, caring not to instruct the people, but striving to attract admiration, to bring opponents to public scorn, and to preach only novelties ...
— A Theologico-Political Treatise [Part I] • Benedict de Spinoza
... for a quarter of a dollar or so, and since then ever so many had been to buy them. Could he tell me where I might find one? Yes, he sold one to the barber last week, down near the depot. Didn't believe but what he would sell it. Was it a female bird? For my ambition had grown by what it fed on, and, instead of contenting myself simply with a companion for Cheri, I was now planning for a whole brood of canaries, with all the interests of housekeeping, baby-tending, and the manifold small cares incident upon domestic life. In ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... which make for ambition, for right living, for honor and position, but how pitifully small and inconsequential besides the mighty tomes which, circling the globe, comprise the lexicon of love. Love—the symbol and sequel of birth, the solace of death—the essence of divinity! Frozen indeed is the heart which ...
— Reno - A Book of Short Stories and Information • Lilyan Stratton
... think that he would live long. Disappointed men—those who have failed in their ambition—do not live to make old bones. There were men like him in every profession—the arts are crowded with them. He had met barristers and soldiers and clergy-men, just like himself. One hears of their deaths—failure of the heart's action, paralysis of the brain, a hundred other ...
— Vain Fortune • George Moore
... his will, Publius Cornelius Scipio lived no more; his ambition might reach without hindrance the utmost limits of his desires, and yet he could not rejoice; he could not escape from a deep horror of himself, and he struck his broad forehead with his clenched fists. He was face to face with ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... was founded for the relief of sick and wounded soldiers, and he told his eager listener what she did not know, that back of the Society was the Geneva Treaty, which had been providing for such relief work, signed by all the civilized nations except her own. From that moment a new ambition was born in Clara Barton's heart—to find out why America had not signed the treaty, and to know more about the Red ...
— Ten American Girls From History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... chapter show that a book may decide the future character and destiny of a man, by inspiring thought, kindling ambition and a lofty aim, stimulating the mental powers, inspiring practical and, perhaps, elegant composition, and consecrating the whole being to a definite purpose. All this was true ...
— From Boyhood to Manhood • William M. Thayer
... reputation would induce to visit his lodge. They assured him that he would soon be acknowledged as a chief, and that in this case a second wife was indispensable. Their pleadings and flattery infused new ideas into his mind, and ambition soon succeeded in dispelling love, and the remembrance of years of conjugal endearment. Fired with the thought of obtaining high honours, he resolved to increase his importance by a union with the daughter of an influential man of his tribe. ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 2 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... in a good cause or a foolish one, let those judge who call themselves wise; there was no taint of selfishness in him, no thought of ambition for his own name, and there was no spot upon his life in an age of which the evils cannot be written down, and are better not guessed. He died for something in which he believed enough to die for it, and belief cannot be ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... to destruction because freedom is man's inalienable birthright, man's undying passion. Germany! fated to execration by future generations for that she ahs crucified the Son of God afresh and put Him to an open shame. Germany! for the balking of whose insolent and futile ambition, and for the crushing of whose archaic military madness we Canadians are tramping on this Dominion Day these English fields and these sweet English lanes 5,000 miles from our Western Canada which dear land we can ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy
... I used the reason that God has given me, and resolved to marry a gentleman after my own heart. And this I did not to gratify the lust of the eye, for you know that he is not handsome; nor the lust of the flesh, for there has been no carnal consummation of our marriage; nor the ambition and pride of life, for he is poor and of small rank; but I took account purely and simply of the worth that is in him, for which every one is constrained to praise him, and also of the great love ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. III. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... posted in the current literature of the day. Another man learned in the law was the ponderous Senator Davis, of Illinois, who had left the Supreme Court for the Senate, thinking it was the better avenue to the White House, and whose political views were bounded by his personal ambition. ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... Richard turned his attention to, when he found himself securely seated on his throne, was the preparation for a crusade. It had been the height of his ambition for a long time to lead a crusade. It was undoubtedly through the influence of his mother, and of her early conversations with him, that he imbibed his extraordinary eagerness to seek adventures in the Holy Land. ...
— Richard I - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... have alluded, did not exist, and if we could be perfectly satisfied with the kinetic theory of gases founded on the collisions of elastic solid molecules, there would still be beyond it a grander theory which need not be considered a chimerical object of scientific ambition—to explain the elasticity of solids. But we may be stopped when we commence to look in the direction of such a theory with the cynical question, What do you mean by explaining a property of matter? As to being stopped by ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 460, October 25, 1884 • Various
... a steady, sober man, who disliked excitement, and the quiet plodding along in Mossvale just suited him. He was only a journeyman, and it is doubtful if his ambition had ever risen beyond his present station. By frugality he and his wife had saved enough to buy a half acre of land in this pretty New Jersey village, on which they had erected a neat cottage, and here apparently John Dare was content to spend ...
— Richard Dare's Venture • Edward Stratemeyer
... somewhere between a thousand and fifteen hundred, these play no part in political history, except as this or that one of them may have been thrust prominently forward for a moment as a pawn in the game of ambition played by the greater vassals. Nominally the Emperor was direct suzerain lord of all vassals, great or small; but in practice the greater vassal princes seem to have been what in the Norman feudal system were called ...
— Ancient China Simplified • Edward Harper Parker
... This was a surprise to Janet if not to the lamb; he had shaken himself off his feet; everything had to be done over again. He seemed a little stultified by this turn of affairs; but though he was down the fall had not knocked any of the ambition out of him; he immediately went at it again. This time he conquered and stood right up to the bar of life, ...
— The Wrong Woman • Charles D. Stewart
... usual coolness, the young rancher thought he saw the explanation of other matters which had puzzled him, but he bestowed little thought upon them, for his whole ambition for the time was to reach ...
— The Young Ranchers - or Fighting the Sioux • Edward S. Ellis
... arch, its ruined wall, Its chambers desolate, its portals foul; Yes, this was once Ambition's airy hall— The dome of thought, the palace of ...
— Strange Pages from Family Papers • T. F. Thiselton Dyer
... explode) will be rendered an uneasy struggle, and sometimes almost a curse, by the envy of those who deny approval while blind to success, and the affected disdain of those who exaggerate demerit. Yet these obstacles warm the spirit of honest ambition, and enhance ...
— Lippincott's Magazine. Vol. XII, No. 33. December, 1873. • Various
... took Myra's hand. He looked up into the sky. "You may be wrong, my dear. Possibly it's the other way. A man's ambition—" he smiled. "Lee called it an obsession once. A man's ...
— The Big Tomorrow • Paul Lohrman
... until she died, leaving two children. Don Sebastian, a man of strong passions, was almost vehement in his paternal feelings—those two beings were the image of the poor dead woman, the remembrance of the only idyll which had softened a life wholly given over to ambition, and the calumnies circulated by his enemies, founded on the presence of his daughter in the archiepiscopal palace ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... her arm, started to make her way into the gardens. Despite Louise's cynicism she had no intention of abandoning her studies. She had decided to fit herself for a teacher before Aunt Jane's invitation had come to her, and this ambition would render it necessary for her to ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces • Edith Van Dyne
... surprise, which told him almost as plainly, as he soon forced her to tell him in words, that she had never seen any gardens at all equal to them before; and he then modestly owned that, "without any ambition of that sort himself—without any solicitude about it—he did believe them to be unrivalled in the kingdom. If he had a hobby-horse, it was that. He loved a garden. Though careless enough in most matters of eating, he ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... accompanied to Mooltan by two officers—Mr Vans Agnew, of the Civil Service, and Lieutenant Anderson, of the 1st Bombay European Fusiliers—and a considerable body of troops. Moolraj, however, had no intention of losing his government, and either prompted by his own ambition, or instigated by evil counsellors, he resolved to rebel. By bribes he won over the native troops who had accompanied the commissioners, and whom, there can be little doubt, he instigated his followers to murder. Both Mr Agnew and Lieutenant Anderson ...
— Our Soldiers - Gallant Deeds of the British Army during Victoria's Reign • W.H.G. Kingston
... of despatch, and easy of access. Oh! had he been content to serve the crown, With virtues only proper to the gown; Or had the rankness of the soil been freed From cockle, that oppress'd the noble seed; David for him his tuneful harp had strung, And Heaven had wanted one immortal song. But wild ambition loves to slide, not stand, And fortune's ice prefers to virtue's land. Achitophel, grown weary to possess 200 A lawful fame, and lazy happiness, Disdain'd the golden fruit to gather free, And lent ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... complimenting her on her judgment in selecting Marlborough for the command, whose courage and conduct had "settled the tottering empire, relieved Savoy, chastised the Elector of Bavaria, and curbed the ambition of the French king." They prayed that her majesty might long live a terror to her enemies, a defence to her injured neighbours and a delight to her subjects. The next day (31 Aug.) the mayor issued his precept to the several livery companies to prepare their rails, stands, banners and other usual ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume II • Reginald R. Sharpe
... a little of Peter's disposition in Vic, too. He lay for several minutes staring hard at a patch of sunlight on the farther wall. I suppose when one is fifteen the ambition to be a movie star dies just as hard as does later the ambition to be president of the ...
— Starr, of the Desert • B. M Bower
... But his ambition increased more and more. And as if Heaven itself wished to consecrate it all, it caused the fruit to thrive in such abundance that year (the seventh since his mother's death), sent rain and sunshine so lavishly, each at its proper time, that the people began to feel uncomfortable at all ...
— Dame Care • Hermann Sudermann
... unmanned me!" said the professor, wiping away a tear. "I felt that all ambition was quite gone, and I was mad and sick. Indeed, only a week since I rose from a sick-bed. But Lorenzo is himself again!" he exclaimed, striking his breast energetically. "I will not succumb to Fate. I will again court the favor of the public, and this time I will take care of the ducats ...
— The Young Musician - or, Fighting His Way • Horatio Alger
... some being, perhaps then incarnate as a mosquito alighting on a muddy leaf in some swamp, pauses for a while to muse. Looking up through infinite stellar systems, with hungry love and boundless ambition, to the throne and sceptre of absolute immensity, he vows within himself, "I will become a Buddha." The total influences of his past, the forces of destiny, conspiring with his purpose, omnipotence is in that resolution. Nothing shall ever turn him aside from it. He might ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... the fact that Conny seemed to be specially bent on defeating Ramon's ambition to be alone with the girl. If no one else joined them at the end of a dance, Conny was almost sure to do so, and to occupy the intermission with one of his ever-ready monologues, while Ramon sat silent and angry, wondering what Julia saw to admire in this windy fool, and occasionally ...
— The Blood of the Conquerors • Harvey Fergusson
... favourite one for romance-writers. We find him in early life fighting in the Italian war under the Emperor Maximilian, whose private secretary he was. The honour of knighthood conferred upon him did not satisfy his ambition, and he betook himself to the fields of learning. At the request of Margaret of Austria, he wrote a treatise on the Excellence of Wisdom, which he had not the courage to publish, fearing to arouse the hostility of the theologians of the day, ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... spring. It is little to be doubted that several of his forefathers in that long series have degenerated into honor and virtue. Let the Duke of Bedford (I am sure he will) reject with scorn and horror the counsels of the lecturers, those wicked panders to avarice and ambition, who would tempt him, in the troubles of his country, to seek another enormous fortune from the forfeitures of another nobility and the plunder of another Church. Let him (and I trust that yet he will) employ all the energy of his youth and all the resources of his wealth to crush ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... name of Liberty, each vain spirit seeks its revenge and finds its nourishment. What is sweeter and more natural than to justify passion by theory, to be factious in the belief that this is patriotism, and to cloak the interests of ambition with the interests ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... between 1765 and 1774. They did not deny its legality; but they doubted as a rule either its wisdom or its justice. Thomas Hutchinson, the governor of Massachusetts, one of the most famous and most hated of the Loyalists, went to England, if we are to believe his private letters, with the secret ambition of obtaining the repeal of the act which closed Boston harbour. Joseph Galloway, another of the Loyalist leaders, and the author of the last serious attempt at conciliation, actually sat in the first Continental Congress, which was called with the ...
— The United Empire Loyalists - A Chronicle of the Great Migration - Volume 13 (of 32) in the series Chronicles of Canada • W. Stewart Wallace
... superstition or pity the ignorance which made such large mistakes on the nature of religion—and, loud in their denunciations of priestcraft and of lying wonders, they point their moral with pictures of the ambition of mediaeval prelacy or the scandals of the annals of the papacy. For the inner life of all those millions of immortal souls who were struggling, with such good or bad success as was given them, to carry Christ's cross along their journey through life, they set it ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... where he conducted negotiations with a certain "revolucionista" of no particular notoriety as yet, of avaricious character, unscrupulous nature, and with a small following of fellow bandits and a large animosity for Americans. His ambition was to emulate the brilliant Villa. But pickings had been poor of late, no more than that of stealing a few horses from across the border. To Burkhardt, who had heard of him and sought him out, he listened with interest and bargained with zest. Five thousand in gold for fifty men was like pearls ...
— In the Shadow of the Hills • George C. Shedd
... the narrowing valley, darkness came on, and with a boy to lead my sure-footed pony, I was at liberty uninterruptedly to reflect on the events of a day, on which I had attained the object of so many years' ambition. Now that all obstacles were surmounted, and I was returning laden with materials for extending the knowledge of a science which had formed the pursuit of my life, will it be wondered at that I felt proud, not less for my own sake, than for that of the many friends, both in India and at home, ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... opportunity came when The Overland Monthly was established in 1868 by Anton Roman. This magazine was the outgrowth of the racy, exuberant literary spirit which had already found free expression in the journals named. An eager ambition to lift all the new life of the Pacific into a recognized place in the world of letters made the young men we have named put their wits together in a monthly magazine which should rival the Atlantic in Boston and Blackwood in Edinburgh. The name was easily had, and for a sign ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte
... some acquaintance with almost every branch of science and letters is a necessary preparative. He contrasted their liberal aspirations, and the encouragement which these received in their domestic circles, with the narrower views which predominated in his own home; and resolved to gratify his ambition by adopting a most precarious walk in life, instead of adhering to that in which he might have counted with perfect security on the early attainment of pecuniary independence. This resolution appears to ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... the King wanted to see him. He replied that he could not exercise his art in every place, as a certain climate and temperature were absolutely necessary to his success. The truth is, that this man appears to have no ambition. He only keeps two horses and two men-servants. Besides, he loves his liberty, has no politeness, and speaks very bad French; but his judgment seems to be solid. He was formerly no more than a blacksmith, but excelled in that trade without ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... you would not be able to do this if—h'm!—the thief had stolen through need, but rather as an instance of a collector's mania, of scientific interest, of the ambition to ...
— Plays: Comrades; Facing Death; Pariah; Easter • August Strindberg
... opera house in the village To Broadway is a great step. But I tried to take it, my ambition fired When sixteen years of age, Seeing "East Lynne," played here in the village By Ralph Barrett, the coming Romantic actor, who enthralled my soul. True, I trailed back home, a broken failure, When Ralph disappeared ...
— Spoon River Anthology • Edgar Lee Masters
... had arrayed against him, how little he could count upon the allegiance of the people of Paris if once the enemy were able to put a foot within the walls of the capital city. He was very ambitious, he was very confident, he was very brave, and yet he felt that ambition, confidence and courage were not enough at that crisis to give his throne support. The superstitious side of his nature turned restlessly to the unknown and his spirit dived into crystals or soared among the spinning planets, struggling for occult enlightenment. ...
— If I Were King • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... to a mirror and looked thoughtfully at her unassertive reflection. Her hair was a dusty brown, her eyes an unsoftening grey, and her cheeks, which were careworn with exacting, humble ambition, acted at once as frame and background for a thin ...
— The Education of Eric Lane • Stephen McKenna
... true and what is false; between what is cheap and what is worth while. Moreover, the study of the novel is the study of life and character. It is of great human interest, and it may be made an important factor in developing the pupil's ambition, judgment, ideals, and character. Good stories grow in meaning with the growth of mental power. The Iliad and The Odyssey are full of delightful stories for boys and girls, but these same stories, securely fixed in the youthful mind, gain a deeper meaning from experience as the ...
— Teachers' Outlines for Studies in English - Based on the Requirements for Admission to College • Gilbert Sykes Blakely
... not be amiss to make some remarks upon the locality which he has designed as the seat of his empire and dominion, and where he has already established his followers, as the destined instruments of his ambition. ...
— Monsieur Violet • Frederick Marryat
... who enriched themselves with the spoils of war and the tribute of subject States, not only satisfied personal ambition and afforded protection for industrious traders and workers, but also incidentally promoted culture and endowed research. When a conqueror returned to his capital laden with treasure, he made generous gifts to the temples. He believed that his successes ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... these new names would begin to be known. Each man would count the number of scalps he had taken, and a certain number entitled him to a new name, in token of his bravery. It is not wonderful that they were revengeful, when they were stimulated by this sort of ambition. Besides this, they believed that he who took the scalp of a brave man received at once all his courage and other good qualities; and this made them more eager in their thirst for scalps. In this way, names of warriors were sometimes ...
— The Adventures of Daniel Boone: the Kentucky rifleman • Uncle Philip
... much more generally than he does now, of the excellent educational facilities which surround him. The very consciousness, which would then be at work within him, of his eligibility for filling any office of honour in the country, which enfranchisement would confer, would minister to a worthy ambition, and would spur him on to develop his powers of mind, and, viewing education as the one grand mean for subserving this end, he would so use it and honour it, as that he should not discredit his office, if, haply, he should be ...
— A Treatise on the Six-Nation Indians • James Bovell Mackenzie
... the accessible and illuminated caverns, restoring here and there the layers of capital sins, studying their veins, their growths, and noting, like Balzac for example, the layers of strata in the soul possessed by the monomania of a passion, by ambition, by avarice, by paternal stupidity, or by ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... superiority and renown of their city than did Deacon Sword. So it came to pass, as he was sitting at supper with my grandfather, that he enlarged and expatiated on the inordinate pretensions of the Archbishop of St Andrews, and took occasion to diverge from the prelate's political ambition to speak of the enormities of his ecclesiastical government, and particularly of that heinous and never-to-be-forgotten act, the burning of an aged man of fourscore and two years, whose very heresies, as the deacon mercifully ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt
... coming oars; The mists are lifting and the boat is near. 'Tis well. To die as I am dying now— A soldier's death amid the gladsome shouts Of victory for which my puny hands Did their full share, albeit it was small, Was all my late ambition. Bring the Flag, And hold it over my head. Let me die thus Under the stars I've followed. ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... series of events, it had been brought into antagonism with two opposing interests—those of her father and of a certain Fernan Perez, the tool and favourite of the powerful Duke of Villena. The ambition and selfish passion of these two men are enlisted against her. Perez is determined to marry her; her father is determined to sweep Macias out of the path of his own political advancement. The intrigue devised between the two is perfectly successful. Macias ...
— Miss Bretherton • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... caught than most of his confreres of any creed. He had that manner of innate authority which never fails to impose itself on the indecisions and self-distrusts of the mass of men, and which in a wider circle of ambition would certainly have won him a larger place. Like the Hegoumenos of every other Greek convent, he was elected by the monks, and, though completely in the hands of his brethren, and at any time liable to be removed by another election, the subordination to him was perfect ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... the monarch under Louis XIV., of mixed reverses and success under Louis XV., only ceased with the revolution. The parliament, from its very nature, was only called upon to serve as an instrument. The exercise of its prerogative, and its ambition as a body, leading it to oppose itself to the strong and support the weak, it served by turns the crown against the aristocracy and the nation against the crown. It was this that made it so popular under Louis XV. ...
— History of the French Revolution from 1789 to 1814 • F. A. M. Mignet
... heroes we have no ambition to be numbered; we leave to the confessors of faction the merit of their sufferings, and are desirous to shelter ourselves under the protection of truth. That all our facts will be authentick, or all our remarks just, we dare not venture to promise: ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... good to listen to Connie,—her brave patience was so inspiring. As long as I was in town she came every day when her work was finished to talk to me about Lennie. For herself she had no ambition. Her clothes were clean, but they were odds and ends that had served their day for other possessors; her shoes were not mates, and one was larger than the other. She said: "I thought it was a streak of luck when I found the cook always wore out her right shoe first and the dining-room ...
— Letters on an Elk Hunt • Elinore Pruitt Stewart
... these rites, a contest for 259 the highest place arose among Attila's successors,—for the minds of young men are wont to be inflamed by ambition for power,—and in their rash eagerness to rule they all alike destroyed his empire. Thus kingdoms are often weighed down by a superfluity rather than by a lack of successors. For the sons of Attila, who through the license of his ...
— The Origin and Deeds of the Goths • Jordanes
... Rutledge can be. We will go right back and tell her the whole thing and she will, I am positive, think the matter one inspired by the noble effort you made" (to Shirley) "to keep your brother in college. Bobbie, you did want to come to college, that is always a laudable ambition, and think of the ...
— Jane Allen: Junior • Edith Bancroft
... still retained its original name, Gibbon became a member of the club, and Reynolds wished to be. "Would you imagine," wrote Topham Beauclerk, "that Sir J. Reynolds is extremely anxious to be a member of Almack's? You see what noble ambition will make men attempt." Gibbon found the place to his liking. "Town grows empty," he wrote in June, 1776, "and this house, where I have passed very agreeable hours, is the only place which still invites the flower of English youth. The style ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley
... position of Luis Herrera in the family of Count Villabuena, and on his future fortunes. Mingled with the natural grief felt by the count at the untimely death of his children, were the pangs of disappointed pride and ambition. He had reckoned upon the gallant and promising young men, thus prematurely snatched away, for the continuance and aggrandizement of his ancient name. Upon his daughter he had hitherto scarcely bestowed a thought. She would marry—honourably of course, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... captain! The captain rises; they pass in alone; the door is shut; and now this strange, unknown man, drawing a horn of oil from his shaggy cloak, pours it on Jehu's head. As if it had fallen on fire, it kindled up his smouldering ambition—so soon at least as this speech interpreted the act, "Thus saith the Lord God of Israel, I have anointed thee king over the people of this land. Thou shall smite the house of Ahab thy master; dogs shall eat Jezebel in the portion of Jezreel, and there shall be none to bury ...
— The Angels' Song • Thomas Guthrie
... intention of holding out to the end. Unfortunately, their king, Tennes, was not a man of firm resolution. Hitherto he had lived a life of self-indulgence, surrounded by the women of his harem, whom he had purchased at great cost in Ionia and Greece, and had made it the chief object of his ambition to surpass in magnificence the most ostentatious princes of Cyprus, especially Nicocles of Salamis, son of Evagoras. The approach of Ochus confused his scanty wits; he endeavoured to wipe out his treachery towards his suzerain by the betrayal of his own subjects. He secretly despatched his ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 9 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... suffers at times from a desire to live up to a sort of honorary reputation for sprightly humour, conferred upon her by undiscriminating admirers in the days before she became engaged to me. As a matter of fact, her solicitude on my behalf was largely due to an ambition to see a little paragraph in the newspapers, announcing that "Mr Adrian Inglethwaite, M.P., Director of the Sub-Tropical and Arctic Department at the Foreign Office, has appointed Mr Blankley Dash to ...
— The Right Stuff - Some Episodes in the Career of a North Briton • Ian Hay
... no spur To prick the sides of my intent, but only Vaulting ambition; which o'erleaps itself, And ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... then was the reason why she had never attracted Jack. Both their natures were strong and firm. Both had full control over themselves, although both of a passionate nature; both had the capability of making great sacrifices, even of life if necessary; both had ambition and a steady power of work. No wonder Jack had thought of her as a comrade rather than as a possible wife; while Harry, gentler and easily led, patient rather than firm, leaned ...
— Facing Death - The Hero of the Vaughan Pit. A Tale of the Coal Mines • G. A. Henty
... was Ned Foster, who never stood to lose on any proposition and never was known to play any game on the square. Being lame, Foster did not have any ambition to meet the big bear, but contented himself with shooting birds for the pot and helping the camp cook. One morning, after all the mighty hunters had gone out on their quest, Foster picked up his shot-gun, jocularly remarked that ...
— Bears I Have Met—and Others • Allen Kelly
... exposes their deficiency in the chief character of their sex: accurate observation. The fact is that, even if they possessed the freedom that men are supposed to possess, they would still find it difficult to achieve their ambition, for the average man, whatever his stupidity, is at least keen enough in judgment to prefer a single wink from a genuinely attractive woman to the last delirious favours of the typical suffragette. Thus the theory of the whoopers and snorters of the cause, in ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... used the reason that God has given me, and resolved to marry a gentleman after my own heart. And this I did not to gratify the lust of the eye, for you know that he is not handsome; nor the lust of the flesh, for there has been no carnal consummation of our marriage; nor the ambition and pride of life, for he is poor and of small rank; but I took account purely and simply of the worth that is in him, for which every one is constrained to praise him, and also of the great love that he bears me, and that gives me hope of having a life of quietness and kindness ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. III. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... same idea still more upon my mind. Semur, I need not say, is not the centre of the world, and might, therefore, be supposed likely to escape the full current of worldliness. We amuse ourselves little, and we have not any opportunity of rising to the heights of ambition; for our town is not even the chef-lieu of the department,—though this is a subject upon which I cannot trust myself to speak. Figure to yourself that La Rochette—a place of yesterday, without either the beauty or the antiquity of Semur—has ...
— A Beleaguered City • Mrs. Oliphant
... man's nature to soar intellectually, and it seems to have been his ambition from earliest ...
— Up in the Clouds - Balloon Voyages • R.M. Ballantyne
... detest them for their cunning, in deceiving others, when they are, in reality, the objects only of ridicule, for deceiving themselves. Strip off the thin disguise of wisdom from self-conceit, of plenty from avarice, and of glory from ambition. Come, thou that hast inspired thy Aristophanes, thy Lucian, thy Cervantes, thy Rabelais, thy Moliere, thy Shakespear, thy Swift, thy Marivaux, fill my pages with humour; till mankind learn the good-nature to laugh only at the follies of others, ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... manner. Again we noted that many a society woman would give much for her well modulated voice and powers of verbal expression. Without any suggestion of melodrama she would rise to strong passages in giving vent to her feelings of indignation and ambition. At this time we were still wondering where she could have obtained her education; it was not until later that we comprehended that her ...
— Pathology of Lying, Etc. • William and Mary Healy
... the narrator's literary culture, and not to any intention, on his part, of treating God and the angels with levity. The whole aim of the story is a moral and religious one. The narrator is trying to show that sympathy and mercy are better than selfish ambition, and that war is not only immoral but irrational. The conversation between God, the angels, and the Devil is a mere prologue, intended to bring Napoleon and Ivan-angel on the stage and lay the foundation of the plot. The story-teller's keen sense of fun and humor is shown in many little ...
— Folk-Tales of Napoleon - The Napoleon of the People; Napoleonder • Honore de Balzac and Alexander Amphiteatrof
... profit of the enterprise without exposing themselves to danger, and are led on by some irresponsible foreigner, who abuses the hospitality of our own Government by seducing the young and ignorant to join in his scheme of personal ambition or revenge under the false and delusive pretense of extending the area of freedom. These reprehensible aggressions but retard the true progress of our nation and tarnish its fair fame. They should therefore receive the indignant frowns of every good citizen ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... occasionally come to us of fabulous adventures by him accomplished in the far regions of the Rue de la Paix and the Boulevard Poissonniere. Such recitals were, for us less favored mortals, like tales of Bacchus conquering in the East; they excited our ambition, but not our jealousy; for the superiority of Harmodius was acknowledged by us all, and we never thought of a rivalry with him. No man ever cantered a hack through the Champs Elysees with such elegant assurance; no man ever made such a massacre ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... that she spoke as if she had no realisation of the lives of lesser persons who might possibly wed because they were "mated" as well—not for political reasons or ambition of family. Her keen senses divined ...
— Three Weeks • Elinor Glyn
... well-expressed ideas, a few striking figures, much distortion of face and contortion of body, tears, groans and sobs, with occasional pauses for recollection, and continual complaints of having lost his notes." So ended the ambition of John Randolph of Roanoke ...
— John Marshall and the Constitution - A Chronicle of the Supreme Court, Volume 16 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Edward S. Corwin
... For a year he had continued at this task; then his health broke down, and feeling that he had done his part, from no personal motives of ambition, but rather at some cost to himself, for what he held to be national ends, he determined not to resume the work after the rest which was to restore him to health, and made his ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... administered everything. This immense domain, which was a kind of State within the State, was ruled over by a single high priest, chosen by the sovereign from among the prophets. He was the irresponsible head of it, and his spiritual ambition had increased step by step with the extension of his material resources. As the human Pharaoh showed himself entitled to homage from the lords of the earth, the priests came at length to the conclusion that Amon had a right to the allegiance of the lords of heaven, and that he was the Supreme ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 5 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... hindmost; so youth having a close view of pleasures is perhaps more gratified; but old age is as much delighted as is necessary in viewing them at a distance. However, of what high value are the following circumstances, that the soul, after it has served out, as it were, its time under lust, ambition, contention, enmities, and all the passions, shall retire within itself, and, as the phrase is, live with itself? But if it has, as it were, food for study and learning, nothing is more delightful than ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume II (of X) - Rome • Various
... I arrived at Jockmock, where the curate and schoolmaster tormented me with their consummate and most incorrigible ignorance. I could not but wonder that so much pride and ambition, such scandalous want of information, with such incorrigible stupidity, could exist in persons of their profession, who are commonly expected to be men of knowledge. No man will deny the propriety of such people as these being placed as far ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... His ambition was thus gratified—for the moment at least. The unknown youth, living once on bread and tea, and too poor to possess a bed, was now a foreign minister; had an Italian count for his chef de cuisine; and drew a salary which enabled ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke
... Holland, and the dread of Spain—had probably listened with more than usual favor to that mixture of romantic gallantry with which she always loved to be addrest, and the earl had, in vanity, in ambition, or in both, thrown in more and more of that delicious ingredient, until his importunity became the ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... himself would have cried 'Stay!' though the price of satisfied desire were his soul. And there had been many such moments in Cordova's life. They satisfied something much deeper than greedy vanity and stronger than hungry ambition. Call it what you will, according to the worth you set on such art, it is a longing which only artists feel, and to which only something in themselves can answer. To listen to perfect music is a feast for ...
— The Primadonna • F. Marion Crawford
... marry women, expecting them to be angels, and very often the angel's highest ambition is to be considered a doll. Then your hope ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... than poems, or pastorals, or novels, it was his dramatic ambition that engrossed his thoughts. The same indomitable spirit that kept him from despair in the bagnios of Algiers, and prompted him to attempt the escape of himself and his comrades again and again, made him persevere in spite of failure and discouragement ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... perceived myself regarded with malevolence or distrust, but wondered what had been discovered in me either terrible or hateful. I had invaded no man's property; I had rivalled no man's claims: nor had ever engaged in any of those attempts which provoke the jealousy of ambition or the rage of faction. I had lived but to laugh, and make others laugh; and believed that I was loved by all who caressed, and favoured by all who applauded me. I never imagined, that he who, in ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... of morality, if there are few rare books in the stalls. The decay of affection, the breaking of friendship, the decline of ambition, are all illustrated in these fourpenny collections. The presentation volumes are here which the author gave in the pride of his heart to the poet who was his "Master," to the critic whom he feared, to the friend with whom he was on terms ...
— The Library • Andrew Lang
... Who doth ambition shun And loves to live i' the sun; Seeking the food he eats, And pleased with what he gets, Come hither, come hither, come hither; Here shall he see No enemy But ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... insight, fine composition, and an unusual mastery of technical details. The obedient fellow had bowed to what he deemed my better judgment, and turned away, with something of a sigh, from his dear love and ambition. Now, however, this love came suddenly back, and with tenfold intensity, as is always the case, and, though I dreaded its unhealthiness, I could no longer thwart him. Indeed, the Art-sense took such complete possession of him that I feared to interpose ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... domestic life, it had something of the calm, the silence, of a monastery. None entered save those whom husband and wife held in affection or in respect; idle gaiety was unknown beneath their roof, and worldly ambition had no part in their counsels. Because of the reverence these things inspired in him, and because of his longing to speak with a pure-hearted woman who held him in kindness, Basil again presented himself at his kinsman's door. He was led directly to an inner room, where ...
— Veranilda • George Gissing
... my friend," said Erling; "now that I have seen King Harald a second time, I think him a better man than at first I did. Ambition will no doubt lead him to do many things that are contrary to his nature; but I do not think he will violate the laws of hospitality after what has passed. However, I may be wrong; so I would ask thee, Guttorm, to go aboard of ...
— Erling the Bold • R.M. Ballantyne
... the mind of Europe: it is the belief or want of belief, the religious or irreligious views, the grasping ambition, the headlong desire of an impossible or unholy happiness, the reckless sway of unbridled passions, which try to spread themselves among all nations, and bring them all up, or rather down, to the level of ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... that as she stood on the veranda an hour later, looking down upon the flowery kingdom to which all her interest and ambition had been pledged. Yes, it was lovely, lovely in the long afternoon light, and it would have been lovelier still with the gleaming marble she had dreamed of. She really tried to keep her mind upon it, ...
— A Bookful of Girls • Anna Fuller
... come out of that investigation without some of its slime sticking to him, and this annoyed and irritated and enraged him more than we guessed, for we hadn't as yet learned the man's ambition. Also, the women kept following him up. They meant to make him comply with the strict letter of the law, if that were ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... being educated either for life or for fashion. Which is it? What is your ambition? Is it to continue, with fewer restrictions, the amusements which have engrossed you here? Is it to be favourite or brilliant members of a society which keeps want and misery at a distance? Would this content you? Is ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... It was a little gray, dusky thing, three foot by two, and their flaming miles of canvas murdered it. I am not a scene-painter," he went on a little savagely. "I don't paint with a broom, and I have no ambition to do the sun, or an eruption of Vesuvius. So I doubt if I shall exhibit there again until the vogue alters. Oh, they are clever enough, those fellows! even the trickiest of them can draw, which is the last thing ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... O'Moy was of a singular humility where women were concerned, and this humility of his would often breathe a doubt lest in choosing between himself and Tremayne Una might have been guided by her head rather than her heart, by ambition rather than affection, and that in taking himself she had taken the man who could give her by far the more assured and ...
— The Snare • Rafael Sabatini
... in thus striving to keep aloof the ravenous wolf Ambition from my guileless flock, that I was giving cause for many to think me an enemy to the king and government, and a perverter of Christianity, to suit levelling doctrines. But so it was. Many of the heritors ...
— The Annals of the Parish • John Galt
... heart as a talisman. Lafayette, who had been arrested in France by order of the Government, which was opposed to his expedition, soon came and joined us after escaping from prison. I had had time to make my preparations, and I sailed full of melancholy, ambition, ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... hated Gentile. The Greek had beheld the foolishness of the Gospel transformed into infinite wisdom, and the contempt which he had once felt for the followers of Jesus had given place to tender affection. Selfishness and ambition, haughtiness and envy, all the baser passions of human life, seemed to have fled before the almighty power of Christian love. The religion of Christ dwelt in their hearts in all its fullness, and its blessed influences were ...
— The Martyr of the Catacombs - A Tale of Ancient Rome • Anonymous
... that decided him; that but for that sharp fit of pain and the prospect of others like it, he would not have yielded to the temptation, no, not to be the Grand Duke's favourite, not to be Minister of Savoy! He ignored, in his looking backward, the visions of glory and ambition in which he had revelled. He saw himself on the rack, with life and immunity from pain drawing him one way, the prospect of a miserable death the other; and he pleaded that no man would have decided otherwise. After ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... always just the same, a little confidential and SOTTO VOCE, artlessly rude and egoistic in an undignified way. She had considerable social experience, good social connections, and considerable social ambition, while he had none of these things. She saw in a flash her opportunity to redeem his defects, use his powers, and do large, novel, rather startling things. She ran him. Her marriage, which shocked her friends and relations beyond measure—for a time they would only speak ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... broad, humorous smile, had not changed as the years passed him on from success to success. Mrs. Hitchcock still slurred the present participle and indulged in other idiomatic freedoms that endeared her to Sommers. These two, plainly, were not of the generation that is tainted by ambition. Their story was too well known, from the boarding-house struggle to this sprawling stone house, to be worth the varnishing. Indeed, they would not tolerate any such detractions from their well-earned reputation. The Brome Porters might draw distinctions and ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... life—it occurred to her at nineteen that it might have in store for her certain surprises—but she was perfectly sure of herself. She knew that she ought to have been a boy, and that if she had been a boy she would have tried to be like General Gordon. Balked of this ambition by the fact of her sex, she turned her ...
— The Dark Tower • Phyllis Bottome
... aroused a boyish ambition to see himself in print. He scribbled some ballads, one about a shipwreck, another about the capture of a pirate; but he "escaped being a poet," as fortunately as he had escaped being a clergyman. James Franklin seems to have trained his junior with such fraternal ...
— Benjamin Franklin • John Torrey Morse, Jr.
... the soundest view is that expressed by FitzGerald's editor,[C] that the real Omar Khayyam was a Philosopher, of scientific insight and ability far beyond that of the Age and Country he lived in; of such moderate and worldly Ambition as becomes a Philosopher, and such moderate wants as rarely satisfy a Debauchee; that while the Wine Omar celebrates is simply the Juice of the Grape, he bragged more than he drank of it, in very defiance perhaps of that Spiritual ...
— Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and Salaman and Absal • Omar Khayyam and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... What can I say which will bring home to you that wonderful, terrible, fascinating woman? Mastered as she was by overweening ambition, utterly unscrupulous in her methods of achieving her purpose, none the less her adorable humanity betrayed itself in a passion for diary-keeping and a devotion to the simpler forms of lyrical verse. That she is the villain of the piece ...
— Once on a Time • A. A. Milne
... individuals to stand apart and prove to themselves and to others that they are exceptional people is a primitive ambition in conflict with the actual facts of a present day society where interdependence is a law of living. This conflict is kept alive by the industrial motive of exploitation of people and of wealth. Exploitation ...
— Creative Impulse in Industry - A Proposition for Educators • Helen Marot
... rejoiced in; he liked to organise, to contend, to administer; he could make people work his will, believe in him, march before him and justify him. This was the art, as they said, of managing men—which rested, in him, further, on a bold though brooding ambition. It struck those who knew him well that he might do greater things than carry on a cotton-factory; there was nothing cottony about Caspar Goodwood, and his friends took for granted that he would somehow and somewhere write himself in bigger letters. But it was as if something large ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James
... bewildered by this brilliant prospect, and took a long breath, as if some hand had lifted a heavy burden a little way from her weary back, for stronger than ambition for herself was love for her family, and the thought of help for them was sweeter than any dream ...
— A Garland for Girls • Louisa May Alcott
... moon and stared long and silently at the brilliant planet. In his mind there was conflict, war between right and ambition. He seemed to have forgot those about him, waiting anxiously ...
— The Adventures of Kathlyn • Harold MacGrath
... nature-worshiper like Senancour himself. About this time a vague desire for fame seems to have seized him,—a desire destined to grow into an almost morbid passion; and it was a kindly Providence that soon after (1814) led his family to quit the stagnant provinces for that nursery of ambition, Paris. Here he studied under new masters, heard lectures at the Sorbonne, read in the libraries, and finally, at the desire of his practical father, took a three ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... of all these evils was the love of power originating in avarice and ambition, and the party-spirit which is engendered by them when men are fairly embarked in a contest. For the leaders on either side used specious names, the one party professing to uphold the constitutional equality of the many, ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... dwelt a swain, Unvexed by petty cares of gain; His head was silvered, and by age He had contented grown and sage; In summer's heat and winter's cold He fed his flock and penned his fold, Devoid of envy or ambition, So had ...
— Fables of John Gay - (Somewhat Altered) • John Gay
... she believed herself to be whispering. She invited me to read some selections from my new work in her saloon, and I was weak enough to accept the invitation. I had just completed my 'Brutus,' and burned with ambition to receive the applause of the Parisiennes. I commenced to read aloud my tragedy of 'Brutus' in the saloon of the duchess, surrounded by a circle of distinguished nobles, eminent in knowledge and art. I was listened to in breathless attention. In the deep silence ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... Pontiff, who continued for many ages to be the temporal ruler of consciences, of public institutions, and of civilization. Strange daring in a race which from its early beginnings down to our own days has been always true to its own character, and in one form or other has displayed vigour, energy, ambition, transforming power, and ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... All who have wrote of India for the most part, are fabulous, but in the highest degree Daimachus; then Megasthenes, Onesicritus, and Nearchus, and such like. And as if it had been their greatest Ambition to excel herein, Strabo[C] brings in Theopompus, as bragging, [Greek: Hoti kai mythous en tais Historiais erei kreitton, ae hos Haerodotos, kai Ktaesias, kai Hellanikos, kai hoi ta Hindika syngrapsantes;] That ...
— A Philological Essay Concerning the Pygmies of the Ancients • Edward Tyson
... curtain: the king sits sleeping, his sword by his side. Enter Austria, before whom cometh Ambition, and bringing him before the chair, King John in sleep maketh signs to avoid, and holdeth his own crown fast ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... statute 34 Edw. III. c. 1. that one lord, and three, or four, of the most worthy men in the county, with some learned in the law, shall be made justices in every county. But afterwards the number of justices, through the ambition of private persons, became so large, that it was thought necessary by statute 12 Ric. II. c. 10. and 14 Ric II. c. 11. to restrain them at first to six, and afterwards to eight only. But this rule is now disregarded, and the cause seems to be (as Lambard ...
— Commentaries on the Laws of England - Book the First • William Blackstone
... occupations of civilized life. The introduction of the freighting business among them has been remarkably fruitful of good results, in giving many of them congenial and remunerative employment and in stimulating their ambition to earn their own support. Their honesty, fidelity, and efficiency as carriers are highly praised. The organization of a police force of Indians has been equally successful in maintaining law and order upon the reservations ...
— Messages and Papers of Rutherford B. Hayes - A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents • James D. Richardson
... arrested by Servile Hands for that Freedom of Thought and Expression for which I have already Sacrifized so much—aye all that Man hath but Love and Honour. But the End is Near. When for the Maintenance of Power, the Liberties of the Peoples are subdued by Martial Supremacy and the Dictates of Ambition the State is Lost. I lie in Vile Bondage here in Morristown under charge of Disrespeck—me that a twelvemonth past left a home and Respectable Connexions to serve my Country. Believe me still your own Love, albeit in the Power of Tyrants ...
— Thankful Blossom • Bret Harte
... century, and the bishops and clergy lived in much pomp and luxury. "Though several [bishops] yet continued to exhibit to the world illustrious examples of primitive piety and Christian virtue, yet many were sunk in luxury and voluptuousness, puffed up with vanity, arrogance, and ambition, possessed with a spirit of contention and discord, and addicted to many other vices that cast an undeserved reproach upon the holy religion of which they were the unworthy professors and ministers. This is testified in such an ample ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... criticism, Arnold did not feel that he was descending to a lower level. Rather he felt that he was helping to lift criticism to a position of equality with more properly creative work. The most noticeable thing about his definition of criticism is its lofty ambition. It is "the disinterested endeavor to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world," and its more ultimate purpose is "to keep man from a self-satisfaction which is retarding and vulgarizing, to lead him towards perfection." It is not to be confined to art and ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... worn those furrows? what vigils had hollowed those eyeballs? Was this the face of a happy man, with whom everything had succeeded, who, having been born to wealth and of an excellent family, had married the woman he loved; who had known neither the wearing cares of ambition, the toil of money-getting, nor the stings of wounded self-love? It is true, he suffered from liver complaint; but why was it that, although I had hitherto been satisfied with this answer, it now appeared to me childish and even foolish? ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne
... nobles efforts. Considerant tout ce qu'a d'honorable pour l'ile de Guernesey d'avoir mis au jour un de ces grands hommes qui ont illustre leur nation en la defendant, et dont la Providence s'est servie pour reprimer l'insatiable ambition de l'ennemi, les Etats ont unanimement resolu d'offrir dans cette occasion aux habitans de la dite ile leurs sinceres et cordiales felicitations; et, afin de leur faire connaitre la part que prend cette assemblee a cet evenement ...
— Memoirs and Correspondence of Admiral Lord de Saumarez. Vol II • Sir John Ross
... subservient to the latter. After having passed the Nile, and subdued the nations which lay on the confines of Egypt, he compelled them to open a road of communication between their country and Egypt. The frankincense country was the next object of his ambition: this he subdued; and having sent a fleet and army across the Red Sea into Arabia, he compelled the inhabitants of the district to maintain the roads free from robbers, and the sea from pirates—a proof that these people had made some advances in seafaring matters, and ...
— Robert Kerr's General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 18 • William Stevenson
... week witnessed the sallying forth of Harvey What's-His-Name, moved to energy by a long dormant and mournfully acquired ambition. The delay ...
— What's-His-Name • George Barr McCutcheon
... a telescope, because, even if learning were general, there are people who prefer to examine things through a microscope to studying the starry heavens. Some like statues, some like pictures. A particular individual has no other ambition than to possess a good piano, while another is pleased with an accordion. The tastes vary, but the artistic needs exist in all. In our present, poor capitalistic society, the man who has artistic needs cannot satisfy them unless he is heir to a large fortune, or by dint of hard work ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... I wish to show that elegance is inferior to virtue, that the first object of laudable ambition is to obtain a character as a human being, regardless of the distinction of sex, and that secondary views should be brought to ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... over Mike Flynn. Until he met Rodney he seemed quite destitute of ambition. The ragged and dirty suit which he wore as bootblack were the best he had. His face and hands generally bore the marks of his business, and as long as he made enough to buy three meals a day, two taken at the Lodging House, with something ...
— Cast Upon the Breakers • Horatio Alger
... Church, and slaves to cling to slavery. There were many black men in the South who voluntarily went back and offered to remain in bondage. And that is one of the strongest arguments against the institution of slavery—that it can so far degrade its victims that they lose even the ambition to ...
— Men, Women, and Gods - And Other Lectures • Helen H. Gardener
... reputation, but only that they might represent facts just as they were, whatever might be the consequences. Hence they readily confess, not only the meanness of their original employments, and the scandals of their former life, but their prejudices, follies, faults, unbelief, cowardice, ambition, rash zeal, foolish contentions, etc. How faithful is the pen of inspiration—here truth with impartial hand dips her pencil, now in brighter, now in darker colors, and thus draws her characters to ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... should be presented to scholars, to give their studies proper direction, while the true article can always be adulterated into a composite jargon by those whose ambition is only to be sign talkers instead of making an honest contribution to ethnologic and philologic science. The few direct contributions of interpreters to the present work are, it is believed, valuable, because they were made ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... are, I fear, reactionary—realising, no doubt, their incompetence to deal with business subjects. The boys are enthusiastic. I am constantly approached in the corridors by lads who say it has always been their ambition to become a Tipton or a Whiteridge, or a Gilling and Warow, as the case may be. One little fellow quaintly confessed that he had always longed to be a "Mother Spiegel." Great Britain's future in trade is assured if ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 4, 1914 • Various
... on, Dave and Dolly, who began life with an idea that Sapps Court was the Universe, became curious about what was going on outside. They grew less contented with the dustbin, and ambition dictated to Dave an enthronement on an iron post at the entrance, under the archway. The delight of sitting on this post was so great that Dave willingly faced the fact that he could not get down, and whenever he could persuade anyone to put him up ran a risk ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... strange cat on the back porch. This indiscretion, so uncharacteristic, was due to the agitation of a surprised moment, for Duke's experience had inclined him to a peaceful pessimism, and he had no ambition for hazardous undertakings of any sort. He was given to musing but not to avoidable action, and he seemed habitually to hope for something which he was pretty sure would not happen. Even in his sleep, this gave him an ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various
... readers in high life, low and coarse incidents to the vulgar, marvels to the romantic, wit to the young and lively, lessons of morality and policy to the grave, and maxims of deep and bitter misanthropy to neglected age and disappointed ambition."[153] ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... was compelled to break faith where I most wished to keep it. I heard afterwards from my daughter (who played some of my parts instead of me) that many of the Coventry people thought I had never meant to come at all. If this should meet their eyes, I hope they will believe that this was not so. My ambition to play at Coventry again shall be ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... anxiety to show off at their best before you. You will be astonished to observe the scrupulous neatness of the men, the gaudy and ostentatious habiliments of 'de ladies.' The negroes have an intense ambition to imitate the upper classes of white society. They will study the apparel of a well-dressed gentleman, and squander their money on 'swallow-tail' coats, high dickeys, white neckties, and the most elaborate arts ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... major made his bow, and took his leave. I proceeded on to the sign of the Crown and the Bible, where I found a large collection of people, coming in quest of tickets. As the elite of the town would not of themselves form an audience sufficiently large to meet the towering ambition of the players, more than half the tickets were sold, the money being appropriated to the sick families of soldiers—those who were not entitled to receive aid from government. It was deemed a high compliment to receive tickets gratis, though all who did, ...
— Satanstoe • James Fenimore Cooper
... will never see that young man again, and that thanks to your cursed advice I shall never see my daughter again, at least not really? What devil was it that sent you to play upon my weaknesses and ambition? If you had left things alone and they had come to me in a natural way there would have been a row, of course, but I dare say it would have ended all right. But you told me how to work on him and I overdid the part. ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... height, I dare not say; rather I fear that he would lower it to him. He is passionate, yet cold; but he is strong, and to men he is loyal and a lasting friend. He is a soldier through and through; no mistress, were she never so madly loved, could come before his sword. For to him, arms mean ambition and the fame he has set himself to gain; love is a dalliance by the way, pleasant for the hour, soon forgotten. Sorry sport for a wife, you see! There you have him, as I, his father, know him. And how can I, his father, say these things of him, who should stand with ...
— Nicanor - Teller of Tales - A Story of Roman Britain • C. Bryson Taylor
... thirteen days out of each fortnight his father was a steady, hard-working shift-boss of the mine. Every other Sunday he became an irresponsible animal, a beast, a brute, crazed with alcohol. His mother cooked for the miners. Her one ambition was that her son should enter a profession. He was apprenticed to a traveling quack dentist and after a fashion, learned ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... in the town. Moreover, just before the appointment of the new governor, she had been on the very point of founding a local committee of ladies to assist the poorest mothers in the town and in the province. She was severely censured among us for ambition; but Varvara Petrovna's well-known strenuousness and, at the same time, her persistence nearly triumphed over all obstacles. The society was almost formed, and the original idea embraced a wider and wider scope in the enthusiastic mind of the ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... this, his very first hunt alone, he was filled with a newborn ambition. But before he had wandered for ten minutes he began to feel the heat, and wished he had not been so silly as to imagine he were cut out for a ...
— Chums in Dixie - or The Strange Cruise of a Motorboat • St. George Rathborne
... upon ambition, a drag upon development, and a handicap upon success in life, the cigarette has few equals and no superiors. The stained fingers and sallow complexion of the youthful cigarette smoker will generally result in his being rejected when applying for a position. The ...
— A Handbook of Health • Woods Hutchinson
... his Memoirs, p. 342-3:—"Even out of England there are many places which I should prefer to this (Bombay). You will smile at the mention of Botany Bay; but I am most serious, and I assure you that next to a parliamentary situation, to which either nature or early ambition has constantly directed my views, I should prefer, without much regarding pecuniary advantages, that of being the lawgiver of Botany Bay.... England, in rearing such a community, is preparing not only conquerors of India, but enemies to herself and ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West
... house-breaker would have simplified matters by removing his chaussures, it had seemed to Clifford that the shortest cut to comfortable relations with people—relations which should make him cease to think that when they spoke to him they meant something improving—was to renounce all ambition toward a nefarious development. And, in fact, Clifford's ambition took the most commendable form. He thought of himself in the future as the well-known and much-liked Mr. Wentworth, of Boston, who should, in the natural course of prosperity, have ...
— The Europeans • Henry James
... shine as a great athlete, sport leader, a water witch, or in any of the other specialties in which Matt reveled, but he did pretend to know a little something about beetles, bugs, butterflies and bees. He had long cherished an ambition to find a "bee tree." At last night's camp fire he had announced his positive belief, based on observations of the day, that such a tree was somewhere in the vicinity of the blazed oak. He had watched the bees until dark without definitely ...
— The Boy Scout Treasure Hunters - The Lost Treasure of Buffalo Hollow • Charles Henry Lerrigo
... beauty. And now I shoot a second rapid—I want you to practise verse, and to practise it assiduously.... I am quite serious. Let me remind you that, if there ever was an ancient state of which we of Great Britain have great right and should have greater ambition to claim ourselves the spiritual heirs, that state was Imperial Rome. And of the Romans (whom you will allow to have been a practical people) nothing is more certain than the value they set upon acquiring verse. To them it was not only (as Dr Johnson said of Greek) 'like old lace—you can ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... of the senate underwent scarcely any change in form. The senate carefully avoided giving a handle to opposition or to ambition by unpopular changes, or manifest violations, of the constitution; it permitted, though it did nor promote, the enlargement in a democratic direction of the power of the burgesses. But while the burgesses acquired the semblance, the senate acquired the substance ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... to no office, Mr. Blair. I'm fifty-four years of age. I am on the hilltop of life. The way leads down a gentle slope, I trust, to a valley of peace, love and happiness. Ambition does not lure me; I have lived. I have played my part as well as I know how. I am content. I love my Country, North and South, East and West. I am a ...
— The Man in Gray • Thomas Dixon
... such remains of greatness, you read what you can of the place.... And you find nothing but a dust of legend. You find a story that once here a king, filled with ambition and worshipping strange gods, thrust out these great roads to the ends of the earth; desired his capital to be a hub and navel for the world. He put them under the protection of the seven planets and of the deities of those stars. Three he paved with ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... exceeding great reward; a quality which always kindles enthusiasm, and justly,—but which is a thing of temperament, not necessarily joined with any other great qualities, and worthless when it stands alone—But she had other resources,—weapons, at least, if not qualities; she had birth, wealth, ambition, decision, pride, perseverance, ingenuity; beauty not slight, though not equalling the superb Longuevilles and Chevreuses of the age; great personal magnetism, more than average cultivation for that ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various
... likes to do some uninteresting thing over and over, week after week and year after year, unless he understands what he is doing. Even the money you earn doesn't help to make your work less monotonous. How can employers expect their men to have any ambition, or any desire to turn out flawless products unless they realize that each detail of a process makes the perfect whole? I mean to know every step of the road I am traveling so when ...
— The Story of Silk • Sara Ware Bassett
... created the demand for their crops, without which no dollar had been theirs to spend. Their outcries rung in the ears of the Commissioner: he blamed the improvidence of the Governor, who had rejected their applications, and threw some ridicule on his architectural ambition. The Commissioner only saw a gaol, but Macquarie believed, that when he erected an edifice he was forming a model; and that in aiming at symmetry and refinement, he was fixing ...
— The History of Tasmania , Volume II (of 2) • John West
... all as much empty talk as any random arguments?" Pao-ch'ai exclaimed. "Why every sentence in it is founded on fact. You've only had the management of affairs in your hands for a couple of days, and already greed and ambition have so beclouded your mind that you've come to look upon Chu-tzu as full of fraud and falsehood. But when you by and bye go out into the world and see all those mighty concerns reeking with greed and corruption, you'll even go so far as to treat Confucius ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... prayer of Brother Billy Fleming in this connection. In every experience meeting one part of his testimony was always in standing type—the ambition to be at home in glory, and particularly to rest in Abraham's bosom. But when a long fever brought him almost within kissing distance of Abraham's beard he made a mighty prayer that God would spare his weak and unprofitable life. Not only that, but William was called in to add his own petitions, ...
— A Circuit Rider's Wife • Corra Harris
... spirit and her ability to rule. And yet, as you, who can so easily read the innermost secrets of the heart, must know I have not been able to discern the happiness for myself in this union that my soul would crave, or that you led me to expect in wedded love. If my ambition irresistibly impelled me to fill the external destinies of mankind, to become a monarch of unsurpassed power and magnificence, then would Nu-nah be the royal consort absolutely adapted for such pride and pomp. But, you know, O Father, all these things are as empty bubbles ...
— Within the Temple of Isis • Belle M. Wagner
... to don the senatorial toga; why not? Also, even more vehemently, Mr. Inglesby desires to lead to the altar Miss Mary Virginia Eustis: yourself, dear lady, your charming self: again, why not? Who can blame him for so natural and laudable an ambition? ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... only cloud upon her life, which unfortunately came at about the dawn of this period, that is perhaps better marked by the great expansion of mind which she experienced at the World's Fair in Chicago in 1893, when she was thirteen. About this time, too, her great ambition of going to college and enjoying all the advantages that other girls did, which, considering her handicap, was one of the greatest human resolutions, was strengthened and deepened. The fresh, spontaneous, and exquisite reactions of this pellucid mind, which felt that ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
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