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More "Ambition" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the conviction that the young girl had spoken the truth, and had brusquely brushed the veil from his foolish eyes. He WAS in love with Mrs. Peyton! That was what his doubts and hesitation regarding Susy meant. That alone was the source, secret, and limit of his vague ambition. ...
— Susy, A Story of the Plains • Bret Harte
... me. As I travelled along in the train I could not conceal from myself an increasing feeling of comfort; it was obvious that the absolutely useless worries of the past weeks could not have been endured any longer, and that my life's ambition demanded a complete severance from them. On the evening of the same day I arrived in Geneva; here I wished to rest a little and pull myself together, so as to arrange my plan of life calmly. As I had an idea of making another attempt to settle in Italy, I proposed, after my former experience, ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... East the 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 ...
— Studies in Occultism; A Series of Reprints from the Writings of H. P. Blavatsky • H. P. Blavatsky
... he had got up a magnificent regiment, he had spent thousands of pounds on it. Ferdy was of the opinion that this was wasted money—he himself intended to have a real regiment, to be a colonel in the Guards. Geordie looked as if he thought that a superficial ambition and could see beyond it; his own most definite view was that he would have back the hounds. He didn't see why papa didn't have them—unless it was because he wouldn't take ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... impossible standard of living. One idea mastered him—to give Africa to the world. His life was a success, as all lives must be which have a single aim. Life was clear, elemental almost to him, and to the man whose ambition is a unit; who sees but one goal, shining clearly ahead, success is inevitable, though it may be masked under the guise of poverty and hardship. Livingstone had a higher and nobler ambition than the mere pecuniary sum he might receive, or the plaudits ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... party, each drinking to the health of the young married pair, and then bottle and glass were thrown away and broken. The whole party then proceeded on their way to the young folks' house. To be the successful runner in this race was an object of considerable ambition, and the whole town and neighbourhood took great interest in it. At riding weddings it was the great ambition of farmers' sons to succeed in winning the braize, and they would even borrow racing ...
— Folk Lore - Superstitious Beliefs in the West of Scotland within This Century • James Napier
... though in a manner which rather resembled stepping up behind a carriage than getting into one. The Antiquary was indeed uncommonly delighted; for, like many other men who spend their lives in obscure literary research, he had a secret ambition to appear in print, which was checked by cold fits of diffidence, fear of criticism, and habits of indolence and procrastination. "But," thought he, "I may, like a second Teucer, discharge my shafts from behind the shield of my ally; and, ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... destroy hope in the future of the Irish peasant cultivator, although this trimness is by no means so general as it might be. Mr. Mahony has also, by way of showing his people how things should be done, a model farm and dairy, of such moderate size as not to be beyond the ambition of a successful tenant. The proprietor has also, like Mr. Bland and Mr. Butler, of Waterville, a successful salmon fishery, great part of the produce whereof goes, at some little advance on sixpence per pound, to the agents of a London firm, who also get an enormous ...
— Disturbed Ireland - Being the Letters Written During the Winter of 1880-81. • Bernard H. Becker
... the temperament of those who felt them. "We have seen," said Charles Greville, "such a stirring-up of all the elements of society as nobody ever dreamt of; we have seen a general saturnalia—ignorance, vanity, insolence, poverty, ambition, escaping from every kind of restraint, ranging over the world, and turning it topsy-turvy as it pleased. All Europe exhibits the result—a mass of ruin, terror, and despair." Matthew Arnold, young and ardent, and in some ways democratic, wrote in a different vein: "The hour ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... is, at once you feel it to lie outside the range of Shakespeare's philosophy. Shakespeare's men are fine, brave, companionable fellows, full of passionate love, jealousy, ambition; of humour, gravity, strength of mind; of laughter and rage, of the joy and stress of living. But self-sacrifice scarcely enters into their notion of the scheme of things, and they are by no means men to go to death for an idea. We remember ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... him do more and express less, but he never was intended as an example, further than to show, that early perversion of mind and morals leads to satiety of past pleasures and disappointment in new ones, and that even the beauties of nature and the stimulus of travel (except ambition, the most powerful of all excitements) are lost on a soul so constituted, or rather misdirected. Had I proceeded with the Poem, this character would have deepened as he drew to the close; for the outline which I once meant to fill up for him was, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... learn. She had the notion that he might become something better, something higher than she had been. But for him school had no charms; his school was the cool stalls in the big livery stable near at hand; the arena of his pursuits its sawdust floor; the height of his ambition, to be a horseman. Either here or in the racing stables at the Fair-grounds he spent his truant hours. It was a school that taught much, and Patsy was as apt a pupil as he was a constant attendant. He learned strange things about horses, and fine, sonorous oaths that sounded ...
— The Strength of Gideon and Other Stories • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... of his wages and remitting them monthly to Goa, or Nowsaree, is one of the ancient myths of Anglo-India. I do not mean to say that if you encourage your Boy to do this he will refuse; on the contrary, he likes it. But the ordinary Boy, I believe, is not a prey to ambition and, if he can find service to his mind, easily reconciles himself to living on his wages, or, as he terms it, in the practical spirit of oriental imagery, "eating" them. The conditions he values seem to be,— permanence, respectful treatment, immunity from kicks and cuffs and from ...
— Behind the Bungalow • EHA
... came to church on a rainy day in the new carriage, and gave his hand to Ursula to help her out, all the inhabitants flocked to the square,—as much to see the caleche and question the coachman, as to criticize the goddaughter, to whose excessive pride and ambition Massin, Cremiere, the post master, and their wives attributed this extravagant folly of ...
— Ursula • Honore de Balzac
... handled work. The poem tells the story of a young French 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 up a drama. From ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... years Grizzly Dick was the terror of that county and all the adjoining ones. To take him, alive or dead, was the ambition of half the sheriffs in California. After my first few escapades I had plenty of helpers. Men as desperate and as dare-devil as I gathered around me and we carried things with a high hand. I cared nothing for the profits of being an outlaw. What I wanted was revenge on society, and the excitement ...
— Emerson's Wife and Other Western Stories • Florence Finch Kelly
... also considerable, and he spoke Italian, German, French, and Spanish with fluency. His beauty was remarkable; his personal fascinations acknowledged by either sex; but as a commander of men, excepting upon the battle-field, he possessed little genius. His ambition was the ambition of a knight-errant, an adventurer, a Norman pirate; it was a personal and tawdry ambition. Vague and contradictory dreams of crowns, of royal marriages, of extemporized dynasties, floated ever before him; but he was himself always the hero of his own romance. He sought ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... supposed that a small-footed woman must be one of rank, but this is an error. It is a matter of family ambition, even among the poor, to have in the family at least one such deformity. Gentlemen marry only small-footed women, and their child might make a good match. If large-footed, this would be impossible; but such hopes are sometimes doomed ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie
... peaceable an' proper, but you know de trouble is Freckled Frances is jealous-hearted, an' she ain't got no principle. I tell you, Miss Bettie, when niggers gits white enough to freckle, you look out for 'em! Dey jes advanced fur enough along to show white ambition an' nigger principle! An' dat's a ...
— Moriah's Mourning and Other Half-Hour Sketches • Ruth McEnery Stuart
... their servitude is not to God's law but to man's ambition is creeping over the people here. That is a very hopeful sign. When a man first feels he is a slave he begins to grow grey inside, to get moody and irritable. The sore spot becomes more sensitive the more he broods. At last to touch it becomes dangerous. For, from such pent-up ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... of undoubted talents, but of unappeasable ambition, had at an early period of his life, while Secretary of War, and still a young man, aspired to the office of President. By his ability and patriotic course during the war of 1812, and subsequently by a brilliant career as ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... age, with my relations, I hoped for a moment, if not to repair my fortune, at least to assure myself an honorable independent position in its place. Several of my friends, perhaps, less capable than myself had made rapid strides in diplomacy. I had a velleity of ambition. I had only to request, and I was attached to the legation of Gerolstein. Unfortunately, some days after this nomination, a gambling debt contracted with a man I hated placed me in the most cruel embarrassment. I had exhausted every resource. ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... windows, and where she would have to work from fourteen to sixteen hours a day for a living, and sleep in a kennel. The prettiness, the pertness, and the naive contentedness of the child thus realizing an ambition touched her deeply. ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... Partners, in Dutchess County, New York, and nineteen years later came to the city of New York to fill a clerkship in a public office. His family was related to that of Washington Irving by marriage; he was himself united to Irving by literary sympathy and ambition, and the two young men now formed a friendship which endured through life. They published the Salmagundi papers together, and they always corresponded; but with Irving literature became all in all, and with Paulding a favorite relaxation from political life and a merely collateral ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... to be the easiest task possible. Francis Wade was an invalid virtuoso, who detested business, and whose ambition was to be known as man of taste. The possessor of a small independent income, he had resided at North End ever since his father's death, and had made the place a miniature Strawberry Hill. When, at his sister's urgent wish, he assumed the sole responsibility of the estate, he put ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... of navigation that irritated a new young officer on the bridge, who felt that the Bismarckian policy, though perhaps sure, was not speedy enough for his vaulting ambition. ...
— The Sequel - What the Great War will mean to Australia • George A. Taylor
... 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, Vol. 1, December 18, 1841 • Various
... passed without special incident. The boy, filled with that quenchless ambition to know, which characterizes the finest minds, entered eagerly upon his studies and faithfully observed his promises. If his tender soul warped and his fresh, receptive mind shriveled under the religious tutelage he received, no one but himself knew it, not ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... to an understanding the sooner, because in their vices, like their good qualities, they closely resembled each other. Danton, like Dumouriez, only wanted the impulse of the Revolution. Principles were trifles with him; what suited his energy and his ambition was that tumultuous turmoil which cast down and elevated men, from the throne to nothing, from nothing to fortune and power. The intoxication of movement was to Danton, as to Dumouriez, the continual need of their disposition: the Revolution was to them ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... Zagatai were long considered as the khans or sovereigns of this fair empire, which fell into civil war and anarchy, through the divisions and subdivisions of the hordes, the uncertain laws of succession, and the ambition of the ministers of state, who reduced their degenerate masters to mere state puppets, and elevated or deposed successive khans at their pleasure; and the divided and distracted country was subjected or oppressed by the invasions of the khans of Kashgar, who ruled over the Calmucks or Getes ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 1 • Robert Kerr
... walk in, as the old collect says. How often, in real life, do we see any one making a clean sweep of all his conditions and surroundings, to follow the path of the soul? How often do we see a man abjure wealth, or resist ambition, or disregard temperament, unexpectedly? Not once, I think, to speak for myself, in ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Lady Artemis Morals has some gift for publicity. But Alfred won't marry a title—say's he rather thinks of making a title for himself. The boy's got ambition. The cash is forthcoming. And you ...
— Marge Askinforit • Barry Pain
... Certainly, were this officer attired like an ordinary civilian, no one would have taken him for one of England's bravest and most efficient sea-captains; he would have passed rather as some thoughtful, well-educated, and refined gentleman, of retired habits, diffident of himself, and a stranger to ambition. He wore an undress rear-admiral's uniform, as a matter of course; but he wore it carelessly, as if from a sense of duty only; or conscious that no arrangement could give him a military air. Still all about his person was faultlessly neat, and ...
— The Two Admirals • J. Fenimore Cooper
... was contented with this article, felt, as he sat in his chambers in the Albany, that something else was wanting to his happiness. This sort of life was all very well. Ambition was a grand thing, and it became him, as a Palliser and a future peer, to make politics his profession. But might he not spare an hour or two for Amaryllis in the shade? Was it not hard, this life of his? Since he had been told that Lady ...
— The Small House at Allington • Anthony Trollope
... near; for the softening of an obdurate landlord's heart; for strength in temptation, light in darkness, salvation from vice; for a friend in friendlessness; for that miracle of miracles, an opportunity to struggling ambition; for the ending of a dark night, the breaking of day; and, oh! for God's own miracle to the bedside-watchers—the change for the better, when death is there and the apothecary's skill too far, far away. The poor, the miserable, the unhappy, they can show their miracles ...
— Balcony Stories • Grace E. King
... ambition indeed, and one that, so far as my experience goes, very few knights entertain. I see yearly scores of young knights depart, no small proportion of whom never place foot on Rhodes again, although doubtless many of them will hasten back again as soon as the danger of an ...
— A Knight of the White Cross • G.A. Henty
... year 1414, Henry V., influenced by the persuasions of Chichely, Archbishop of Canterbury, by the dying injunction of his royal father, not to allow the kingdom to remain long at peace, or more probably by those feelings of ambition, which were no less natural to his age and character, than consonant with the manners of the time in which he lived, resolved to assert that claim to the crown of France which his great grandfather, King Edward the Third, had ...
— King Henry the Fifth - Arranged for Representation at the Princess's Theatre • William Shakespeare
... race. What passions had 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? Why did all these marks ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne
... of living in England is altogether too high. Middle-class people are too apt to live up to their incomes, if not beyond them: affecting a degree of "style" which is most unhealthy in its effects upon society at large. There is an ambition to bring up boys as gentlemen, or rather "genteel" men; though the result frequently is, only to make them gents. They acquire a taste for dress, style, luxuries, and amusements, which can never form any solid foundation for manly or gentlemanly character; and ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... dissipated our fatigue. We had at last conquered this formidable crest. We overlooked all the others, and the thoughts which Mont Blanc alone can inspire affected us with a deep emotion. It was ambition satisfied; and to me, ...
— A Winter Amid the Ice - and Other Thrilling Stories • Jules Verne
... would be obeyed in his own kingdom, and the Venetian should out. Upon the whole, all circumstances which I have seen, considered, it is to me apparent enough, that these Ambassadors of Venice, in this contest, did nourish double ambition, either to carry the house against an English Ambassador, or that an English Ambassador should carry it against them; but my business throughout hath been never to come in any ...
— Memoirs of Lady Fanshawe • Lady Fanshawe
... the trenches. The son had been wounded, and the father had obeyed a hurried call, found his son dead, and himself died of the shock on the return voyage. Wesley, mourning the man who had been his stanch friend, was guiltily conscious of his thwarted ambition. "There goes my city church," he thought, and flung the thought back at himself in anger at his own self-seeking. He was forced into accepting the first opportunity which offered. His mother had an annuity, which he himself had insisted upon for her greater comfort. ...
— An Alabaster Box • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Florence Morse Kingsley
... essential of the young man, or young woman, who would lay the foundation of a career. The choice of the school to which one will go and the calling he will adopt must be influenced in a very large measure by his environments, trend of ambition, natural capacity, possible opportunities in the proposed calling, and the means at ...
— Tuskegee & Its People: Their Ideals and Achievements • Various
... 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 ...
— The Heart Of The Hills • John Fox, Jr.
... the age of fifty, terminate his active and extraordinary life. To ambition, he owed both his greatness and his ruin; with all his failings, he possessed great and admirable qualities, and had he kept himself within due bounds, he would have lived and died without an equal. The virtues of the ruler and of the hero, prudence, justice, firmness, and ...
— The History of the Thirty Years' War • Friedrich Schiller, Translated by Rev. A. J. W. Morrison, M.A.
... to absorb all my attention; while Holmes, who loathed every form of society with his whole Bohemian soul, remained in our lodgings in Baker Street, buried among his old books, and alternating from week to week between cocaine and ambition, the drowsiness of the drug and the fierce energy of his own keen nature. He was still, as ever, deeply attracted by the study of crime, and occupied his immense faculties and extraordinary powers of observation ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... and in a few days would be the owner of a delightful little house in the Rue Saint-Lazare; he was going to be married to a charming woman, he would have about twenty thousand francs a year, and could give the reins to his ambition; the young lady loved him, and he would be connected with several respectable families. In short, he was in full sail on the ...
— Parisians in the Country - The Illustrious Gaudissart, and The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... satisfaction basis of; standards, effect of custom on; value of science; values; vs. moral values; vs. practical values. See also Art. Affection. See Love. Age, influence of on learning. Altruism. Ambition. Animal, instincts compared with human; man as an; man a social. Appreciation. See AEsthetic. Aristocracy. Aristotle. Arnold, Matthew. Art, and emotion; and morals; and nature; appreciation of; as an industry; as propaganda; as realization of ideals; as recreation; ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... I have here described. When all the privileges of birth and fortune are abolished, when all professions are accessible to all, and a man's own energies may place him at the top of any one of them, an easy and unbounded career seems open to his ambition, and he will readily persuade himself that he is born to no vulgar destinies. But this is an erroneous notion, which is corrected by daily experience. The same equality which allows every citizen to conceive these lofty hopes, renders all the citizens less able to realize ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 2 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... youth, a 25 years' period of continuous crescent expansiveness, he had learned to view them, and his slow death was the result, not of mere weariness in working, but of the adverse circumstances that thwarted and finally wrecked the one unworthy ambition that had fatally taken possession of his heart. Of Scott Ruskin says, "What good Scott had in him to do, I find no words full enough to express... Scott is beyond comparison the greatest intellectual ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... of gold, nor the cupidity of conquest, those characteristics which have subordinated other portions of the New World to the restless ambition of man, were the causes that have revolutionized both the physical character and the social conditions of the now wealthy and prosperous state of Utah. As Bancroft very forcibly states: Utah was settled upon an entirely new idea ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... quiet, methodical way life went on with the occupants of the saloon for some time; but at length ambition entered into and seized upon the imagination of Miss Stanhope, and she determined to learn to steer. Hour after hour had she watched the helmsmen standing in more or less graceful attitudes at the wheel, with their sinewy ...
— The Missing Merchantman • Harry Collingwood
... moral strength regained, prove that the work of the Spirit is not to be measured by puny human standards of judgment, prove that simple things—the things from which we expect the least, in which we put the least ambition or worldly desire may be those which will yield the "hundred ...
— The Right Knock - A Story • Helen Van-Anderson
... mind; and thy purpose comes more, methinks, from hasty pride than from prudence. But it may be there is a wide difference between my humble ways and the high thoughts thou hast; for whilst yet in thy childhood thou wast full always of ambition and desire of command, and now thou art experienced in battles, and hast formed thyself upon the manner of foreign chiefs. I know therefore well, that as thou hast taken this into thy head, it is useless to dissuade thee from ...
— Heimskringla - The Chronicle of the Kings of Norway • Snorri Sturluson
... three such poems if God should spare me, written in the course of the next six years would be a famous gradus ad Parnassum altissimum. I mean they would nerve me up to the writing of a few fine plays—my greatest ambition—when I do ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry
... but 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 ...
— The Baron's Yule Feast: A Christmas Rhyme • Thomas Cooper
... boy," said the King, "and too fond of my comfort; besides, I have no longer any ambition. When an actor once realises that he will never be a Charles Kean or a Macready, then come peace and the enjoyment of life. Now, with you it is different: you are, if I may say so in deep affection, young and foolish. Your project is ...
— Revenge! • by Robert Barr
... said, accompany him on his expedition. If the Governor ordered them to disband, they would defy him. "They drank damnation to their souls", if they should prove untrue to him. Touched by these proofs of confidence, and fired perhaps with ambition, the young man yielded, and ...
— Virginia under the Stuarts 1607-1688 • Thomas J. Wertenbaker
... Achmath would go to the Emperor, and say: "Such a government is vacant, or will be vacant on such a day. So-and-So is a proper man for the post." And the Emperor would reply: "Do as you think best;" and the father of the girl was immediately appointed to the government. Thus either through the ambition of the parents, or through fear of the Minister, all the beautiful women were at his beck, either as wives or mistresses. Also he had some five-and-twenty sons who held offices of importance, and some of these, under the protection ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... us take Devoutness. When unbalanced, one of its vices is called Fanaticism. Fanaticism (when not a mere expression of ecclesiastical ambition) is only loyalty carried to a convulsive extreme. When an intensely loyal and narrow mind is once grasped by the feeling that a certain superhuman person is worthy of its exclusive devotion, one of the first things that happens is that it idealizes the devotion itself. To adequately realize ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... regains his heritage and, through marriage, the crown of Norfolk in England in addition. The story was of a nature to make a strong appeal to the Scandinavians, especially the Danes, in England. It achieved, in fiction, the ambition which the Danes realized under Swen and Canute, when these sovereigns governed both Denmark and England. It was a Danish story; it was developed after 950, which was about the time the third stage in the development of the Hroar-Helgi story had been reached; and it was a creation of ...
— The Relation of the Hrolfs Saga Kraka and the Bjarkarimur to Beowulf • Oscar Ludvig Olson
... monument by Giovanni Pisano is the tomb of Benedict XI. in the church of S. Domenico at Perugia. The Pope, whose life was so obnoxious to the ambition of Philip le Bel that his timely death aroused suspicion of poison, lies asleep upon his marble bier with hands crossed in an attitude of peaceful expectation.[64] At his head and feet stand angels drawing back ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... about the grandeur or the glitter of life. But in directing the employment of labour, they would find room for the exercise of all the powers of their minds, of their best affections, and of whatever was worthy in their ambition. Their occupation, so far from being a limited sphere of action, is one which may give scope to minds of the most various capacity. While one man may undertake those obvious labours of benevolent superintendence which are of immediate and pressing necessity, another may devote himself ...
— The Claims of Labour - an essay on the duties of the employers to the employed • Arthur Helps
... East, where fortunes were made by looking wise for a few moments every morning and devoting the rest of the day to samisens and flutes. He found the glorious country of Japan. The beguiling tea-houses, and softly swinging sampans were all too distracting. They sang ambition to ...
— The Lady and Sada San - A Sequel to The Lady of the Decoration • Frances Little
... double-dealing could not be laid against them, for the ground of their grievances had been the same from the outset, and their conduct consistent with single motives; and if independence had been mentioned at all as yet, it was only as an ulterior resort, and not as an aim or ambition. The king and the Ministry, on the other hand, were wedded to strict notions of authority in the central government, and measured a citizen's fidelity by the readiness with which he submitted to its policy and legislation. Protests and discussion about "charters" and "liberties" were distasteful ...
— The Campaign of 1776 around New York and Brooklyn • Henry P. Johnston
... no qualification was ever required of a teacher beyond "readin', writin', and cipherin'" to the rule of three. If a straggler supposed to understand Latin happened to sojourn in the neighborhood, he was looked upon as a wizard. There was absolutely nothing to excite ambition for education. Of course, when I came of age, I did not know much. Still, somehow, I could read, write, and cipher to the rule of three, but that was all. I have not been to school since. The little advance I now have upon this store ...
— Lincoln's Inaugurals, Addresses and Letters (Selections) • Abraham Lincoln
... of 'King 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 kings ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... a public speaker, and these were considerable. He had eloquence, wit, humour, and sufficient assurance to place them all in the fullest light. His speeches in parliament were much admired, and the passion of ambition was now kindled in his mind: he determined to be a leading man in the senate; and whilst he pursued this object with enthusiasm, his private affairs were entirely neglected. Ambition and economy never can agree. Sir Hyacinth, however, found it necessary ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... long poles, which fluttered about in the breeze. According to the account of our interpreter, which had to pass from Thibetian into Hindostanee before it could clothe itself in English, the cause of this dilapidation was the state of wealth and ambition at which the Lamas had arrived, and the consequent interposition of Gulab Singh to take down their pride and ease them of a little of their wealth, both of which he accomplished in the style to which he was so partial, by slaughtering ...
— Diary of a Pedestrian in Cashmere and Thibet • by William Henry Knight
... silence, wishing that she too could hope. But whichever way the prognosis pointed, she felt only a dull despair. She believed no more than Dr. Garford in the chance of recovery—that conviction seemed to her a mirage of Wyant's imagination, of his boyish ambition to achieve the impossible—and every hopeful symptom pointed, in her mind, only to a ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... the reader in suspense, the little man was Benjamin Quelch, clerk in the office of Messrs. Cobble & Clink, coal merchants, and he was about to carry out a desperate resolution. Most men have some secret ambition; Benjamin's was twofold. For years he had yearned to wear a soft felt hat and to make a trip to Paris, and for years Fate, in the person of Mrs. Quelch, had stood in the way and prevented the indulgence of his longing. Quelch being, as we have hinted, exceptionally small ...
— Stories by English Authors: England • Various
... and said that God did 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, and pretend so distinctly to hear the angels flying in ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... child! Sorry, old girl, but I'm in training. Will you order broiled steak and pale ale for me? I'm going to box Tricky Sal, the coloured girl-boxer from the Other Side. Wonder how she'll like my upper-cut and left-hand jab! Isn't it glorious, people? I've got my ambition! I'm a White Hope! See if we don't fill the Colidrome ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, June 10, 1914 • Various
... all have forsaken him, his hope blasted, his ambition gone, and he feels that no one has confidence in him, no one cares for him. In this condition he wends his way to an institution of reform, a penniless, homeless, degraded, lost and hopeless drunkard. Here is our subject, how ...
— Grappling with the Monster • T. S. Arthur
... perpetual dissonance. The common condition of human society must indeed be accepted; tumult, hatred, fraud, crime, the ferocity of self-interest, the tenacity of prejudice, are perennial; but the philosopher sighs over it; his heart is not in it; his ambition is to see human history from a height; his ear is set to catch the ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... contentment, and knowledge (of Brahma), should, O king, be striven after by Brahmanas to the best of their ability for the attainment of success. I shall now tell thee the duties of Kshatriyas. They are not unknown to thee. Sacrifice, learning, exertion, ambition,[69] wielding 'the rod of punishment,' fierceness, protection of subjects, knowledge of the Vedas, practise of all kinds of penances, goodness of conduct, acquisition of wealth, and gifts to deserving persons,—these, O king, well performed and acquired by persons of the ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... endeavored, by careful culture, to produce larger, tenderer, and sweeter varieties. Of an adaptable character, under careful treatment the plant has evolved in a docile fashion, and has ended by giving us what the ambition of the gardener desired. To-day we have gone far beyond the yield of the Varrons and Columelles, and further still beyond the original pea; from the wild seeds confided to the soil by the first man who thought to scratch up the surface of the earth, perhaps with the half-jaw ...
— A Book of Exposition • Homer Heath Nugent
... did not satisfy the ambition of the farmer, and from the time he came into the possession of Mount Vernon he was a persistent purchaser of lands adjoining the property. In 1760 he bargained with one Clifton for "a tract called ...
— The True George Washington [10th Ed.] • Paul Leicester Ford
... gang by the links o' the wild rowin' burnie, Whaur aft in my mornin' o' life I did stray, Whaur luve was invited and cares were beguiled By Mary an' me, on the braes o' Bedlay. Sae luvin', sae movin', I 'll tell her my story, Unmixt wi' the deeds o' ambition for glory, Whaur wide spreadin' hawthorns, sae ancient and hoary, Enrich the sweet breeze on the ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... some men," replied the other, "in whom certain humours and desires are so strong, that the gratification thereof is worth the whole of the rest of a life's happiness, and gratified ambition may be sufficient in this case to compensate for the sacrifice of peace. I mean not to speak one word against the master that you serve. He has, as you say, fought the battles of liberty for many years: he is a brave and ...
— The King's Highway • G. P. R. James
... could pass the spoon to, and from, the bowl, and her mouth; and she was evidently taking no inconsiderable trouble to qualify herself for that happy state, which Pope tell us is the object of every woman's ambition, that of being Queen for life, the royal road to which, in this country, lies through a course of gormandizing. The same custom extends to the wives of the great men, who undergo a similar operation before marriage. On the morning of their wedding-day they ...
— A Voyage Round the World, Vol. I (of ?) • James Holman
... felt a vague melancholy when he thought of his honeymoon. He smiled with resignation especially when he called the phantom of hunger to his aid. He had never had ambition or pretensions. His tastes were simple, his thoughts limited; but his heart, untouched till then, had dreamed of a very different divinity. In his youth when, tired by his day's labor, after a frugal meal, he lay down on a poor bed, he dreamed of a smiling, affectionate ...
— Friars and Filipinos - An Abridged Translation of Dr. Jose Rizal's Tagalog Novel, - 'Noli Me Tangere.' • Jose Rizal
... order that ennui shall not drive you, like myself, prematurely from the world so soon as the season for pleasure shall have ended, you should leave the emotions of ambition and of public life for the gratification of your riper age. Do not enter into any engagements with the reigning government, and reserve for yourself to hear its eulogium made by those who will have subverted it. That is the French fashion. Each generation ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... Page 28: "It is most horrible with the keen sword to gore the finely fibred human frame," and what follows, pleased me mightily. In the second book, the first forty lines in particular are majestic and high-sounding. Indeed, the whole vision of the Palace of Ambition and what follows are supremely excellent. Your simile of the Laplander, "By Niemi's lake, or Balda Zhiok, or the mossy stone of Solfar-Kapper," [1] will bear comparison with any in Milton for fulness of circumstance and lofty-pacedness ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... to think that when Washington went back to his quiet home on the Potomac he was not as generally beloved as when he took his high office. He had had to disappoint a great many men who looked to him to help their private ambition at the expense of the country. He had had to enforce laws which some people looked upon as unjust. He had differed from various public men as to the war between France and England, and the payment of the debt, and other things, and it is so easy for all of ...
— Harper's Young People, June 15, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... effort to restrain his expenditure. She had even been accused by those judicious persons who are always ready with an estimate of their neighbours' motives, of having encouraged poor Denis's improvidence for the gratification of her own ambition. She had in fact, in the early days of their marriage, tried to launch him in politics, and had perhaps drawn somewhat heavily on his funds in the first heat of the contest; but the experiment ending in failure, as Denis Peyton's experiments ...
— Sanctuary • Edith Wharton
... chief ambition is to become an artist, but who has no friends with whom to realize his hopes, has a way opened to him to try his powers, and, of course, ...
— The Turtles of Tasman • Jack London
... lends a helping hand with the dishes, dusting, or other regular work of the day, she can go to her tubs just that much earlier. Getting up in the wee sma' hours and working by early candle light is misdirected ambition. The maid needs her rest to fit her for her day's labors, and washing well done requires the light of day. Set the breakfast hour ahead half an hour and so gain a little extra time. Foresight and extra planning on Saturday will provide certain left-overs from Sunday's meals which can be quickly ...
— The Complete Home • Various
... My ambition when leaving school was first to endeavor to become independent financially, so that I might enjoy my old age; then, if it were possible, to gain that independence early in life by economy, by earning for myself what I earn for my employer; to try to make it possible for the Negro farmer ...
— Tuskegee & Its People: Their Ideals and Achievements • Various
... while ago he had been happy there. Only an hour or two since he was meditating, between the moves of the game, on the very words he meant to use in telling Irene that he loved her. Only an hour or two since every thought was full of hope and ambition, since the path of honour stood wide open with a vague bright figure beckoning in its ...
— VC — A Chronicle of Castle Barfield and of the Crimea • David Christie Murray
... apt to fancy that the world will always go on very much as it goes on now; that it will be guided, not by the will of God, but by the will of man; by man's craft; by man's ambition; by man's self-interest; by man's cravings after the luxuries, and even after the mere necessities of this life. In a word, we are apt to fancy that man, not God, is the master of this earth on which we live, and that men have no king over them ...
— All Saints' Day and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... off with a perfect bomb, Joey. It was funny! Of course the new man's a city product, and he drew him to the life: rushed and tortured by ambition, tired out at the end of the day, too tired to be possibly amusing, his nerves excited till anything quieter than lower Broadway hurts his ears, all passion and brilliance spent on business, dinners here and there, with ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... protect the government from its enemies, lest, if the bucklers were entire and the swords perfect, they might be tempted, in the heyday of victory, to smite their employers. But this want of confidence never manifested itself toward General Lee, whose conduct satisfied the most suspicious that his ambition was not of glory but of the performance of duty. The army always felt this: the fact that he sacrificed no masses of human beings in desperate charges that he might gather laurels from the spot enriched by their gore. A year or more before he was appointed commander-in-chief of ...
— A Life of Gen. Robert E. Lee • John Esten Cooke
... statesmen of England to represent her, we know not.... But we may be permitted to hope that when the union takes place, and we become the great country which British North America is certain to be, it will be an object worthy the ambition of the statesmen of England to be charged with presiding ...
— British Supremacy & Canadian Self-Government - 1839-1854 • J. L. Morison
... a far more wonderful way of the friendship of Jesus. We have only to recall the story of his three years with his disciples. They gave him at the best a very feeble return for his great love for them. They were inconstant, weak, foolish, untrustful. They showed personal ambition, striving for first places, even at the Last Supper. They displayed jealousy, envy, narrowness, ingratitude, unbelief, cowardice. As these unlovely things appeared in the men Jesus had chosen, his friendship did not slacken or unloose its hold. He had taken them as his friends, and he trusted them ...
— Personal Friendships of Jesus • J. R. Miller
... new performers as would suffice to revive the corpse, (if it were a corpse that had ever had a spark of sense or spirit in it,) and make it kick the coroner out of the room.[8] But to one of so high an ambition as Tittlebat Titmouse, how delightful would it not have been, to anticipate becoming (what had been quite impracticable during life) the object of public attention after his death—by means of a flaming dissertation by the coroner on his own zeal and spirit—the nature ...
— Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren
... Shakespeare sont tellement des objets de meditation plutot que d'interet ou de curiosite relativement a leurs actes, que, tandis que nous lisons l'un de ses grands caracteres criminels,—Macbeth, Richard, Iago meme,—nous ne songeons pas tant aux crimes qu'ils commettent, qu'a l'ambition, a l'esprit d'aspiration, a l'activite intellectuelle qui les poussent a franchir ces barrieres morales. Les actions nous affectent si peu, que, tandis que les impulsions, l'esprit interieur en toute sa perverse grandeur, paraissent ...
— Pelleas and Melisande • Maurice Maeterlinck
... have such a sense of your generous favour, that, to my last hour, I shall have pleasure in contemplating upon it, and be proud of the place I hold in the esteem of such venerable persons, to whom I once had the ambition ...
— Clarissa, Volume 7 • Samuel Richardson
... with anything like sang-froid contemplate his reflection. Yet throughout he bore up stoutly and patiently—and ended by being transferred to the Customs Department. It may be said that the department had long constituted the secret goal of his ambition, for he had noted the foreign elegancies with which its officials always contrived to provide themselves, and had also observed that invariably they were able to send presents of china and cambric to their sisters ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... was naturally the ambition of every officer engaged in pressing "to do the business without any disagreeable accident ensuing," he preferred, did fate ordain it otherwise, that the accident should happen at sea rather than on land, since it was on land that the most disagreeable consequences accrued to the unfortunate victim. ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... made what observations our means afforded, we proceeded to descend. We had accomplished an object of laudable ambition, and beyond the strict order of our instructions. We had climbed the loftiest peak of the Rocky mountains, and looked down upon the snow a thousand feet below; and, standing where never human foot ...
— The Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains, Oregon and California • Brevet Col. J.C. Fremont
... man. Socrates should enter into Adam and produce Marcus Aurelius; in other words, the man of wisdom should be made to emerge from the man of felicity. Eden should be changed into a Lyceum. Science should be a cordial. To enjoy,—what a sad aim, and what a paltry ambition! The brute enjoys. To offer thought to the thirst of men, to give them all as an elixir the notion of God, to make conscience and science fraternize in them, to render them just by this mysterious confrontation; such is the function of real philosophy. Morality ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... detective father had been accustomed to argue his cases and their perplexities with his only child and for hours at a time he would instruct her in all the details of his profession. It was O'Gorman's ambition that his daughter might become a ...
— Mary Louise in the Country • L. Frank Baum (AKA Edith Van Dyne)
... I have to some of the Great Men of your Nation, particularly to your Lordship, gives me an Ambition of making my Acknowledgements by all the Opportunities I can; and such humble Fruits as my Industry produces I lay at your Lordship's Feet. This is a true Story, of a Man Gallant enough to merit your Protection, ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... was grown to some extent in California 40 years and abandoned; it was not so sure in bearing as the French, and it was not the type of prune which we had ambition to excel with. The prune which we grow as the French is the true prune or plum of Agen. We should plant it and let the Oregon people ...
— One Thousand Questions in California Agriculture Answered • E.J. Wickson
... rich countship of Valdemarino." Thus highly did Bodoeri extol Falieri's virtues; and he had a ready answer for all objections, so that at length all voices were unanimous in electing Falieri. Several, however, still continued to allude to his hot, passionate temper, his ambition, and his self-will; but they were met with the reply: "And it is exactly because all these have gone from the old man, that we choose the grey-beard Falieri and not the youth Falieri." And these censuring voices were completely silenced when the ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... this honor, all 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 ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... overawing sense of an unseen omnipresent Power, will burst forth with devastating fury, snapping asunder the feebler fetters of human law, and overleaping the barriers of selfish prudence itself; vanity and pride, ambition and covetousness, sensual indulgence and ferocious cruelty, will rise into the ascendancy, and establish their dark throne on ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... drop of blood in my body," Mr. Sabin answered. "Save for my love for her I am a dead man upon the earth. I have no longer politics or ambition. So the past can easily be expunged. Those who must be her ...
— The Yellow Crayon • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the picture. But he said, and his tone was not pleasant: "Lord Beauvayse attained the height of his ambition a few ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... from an intercourse, which not the coolness of a single hour has ever interrupted. It would be strange indeed if there were not one single flaw in so bright an emanation from the very soul of the divinity, wearing as it does the form of humanity. I allude to her ambition. It is boundless, almost insane. Caesar himself was not more ambitious. But in her even this is partly a virtue, even in its wildest extravagance; for it is never for herself alone that she reaches so far and so high, but as much or more for her people. She never separates herself ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware
... statesman, indeed, though possessed of considerable abilities, and great power, had failings, which rendered him unpopular among the Highland chiefs. The devotion which he professed was of a morose and fanatical character; his ambition appeared to be insatiable, and inferior chiefs complained of his want of bounty and liberality. Add to this, that although a Highlander, and of a family distinguished for valour before and since, Gillespie ...
— A Legend of Montrose • Sir Walter Scott
... knew what it was to be hipped, I will call it, till he came to be what Pompey was; that is to say, till he arrived at the height of his ambition: nor did thy Lovelace know what it was to be gloomy, till he had completed his wishes upon the most ...
— Clarissa, Volume 6 (of 9) - The History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... it is, in all literalness; an evangel; a message of glad tidings. It is not merely a truth, it is "the Truth" (p. 1). Let there be no mistake about it: Mr. Wells's ambition is to rank with St. Paul and Mahomet, as the apostle of a new world-religion. He does not in so many words lay claim to inspiration, but it is almost inevitably deducible from his premises. He is uttering the first clear and definite tidings ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... Man's faults of dogmatism, of selfish domination, of sacrifice of personal life to further desired political or economic ends, have roots in the patriarchal family. Man's careless misuse of his own moral ideals for purposes of ambition was certainly fostered by this sense of ownership of women and children with legal power to use ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... the king in the most humble expressions, that he might the better shew his gratitude. "As for my condition," said he, "I must own I am not an astrologer, as your majesty has guessed; I only put on the habit of one, that I might succeed the more easily in my ambition to be allied to the most potent monarch in the world. I was born a prince, and the son of a king and of a queen; my name is Kummir al Zummaun; my father is Shaw Zummaun, who now reigns over the islands that are well known by the ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... year to have been seized with a temporary fit of ambition, for he had thoughts both of studying law and of engaging in politics. His 'Prayer before the Study of ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... doe, or a lady's slipper, beyond the greenwood season. So I say, for the glory of your manhood up and away! Abroad, abroad! My father is right. That is the only ground for such a race and guerdon as you aspire to. I admire your taste, and not less your ambition, my brave boy. Do not thwart him, Sir Fulke," added he, to the baronet, who began to frown: "let him enter the lists with the boldest of us; faint heart never won fair lady! So, forward, Robert! and give me another sweet ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... inflamed with filial love, And anxious hope, to hear my parent's doom, A suppliant to your royal court I come: Our sovereign seat a lewd usurping race With lawless riot and misrule disgrace; To pamper'd insolence devoted fall Prime of the flock, and choicest of the stall: For wild ambition wings their bold desire, And all to mount the imperial bed aspire. But prostrate I implore, O king! relate The mournful series of my father's fate: Each known disaster of the man disclose, Born by his mother to a world of woes! Recite them; nor ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer, translated by Alexander Pope
... life to yield; abstractly, not. Ambition is the looting of hell in chase of biting flames swirling above a desert of ashes. As for posthumous fame, it must be about as satisfactory as a draught of ice-water poured down the throat of a man who has died on Sahara. And yet, even if in the end it all means nothing, if 'from ...
— The Doomswoman - An Historical Romance of Old California • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... danger in remaining away too long from the established sources of spiritual inspiration and uplift, especially when one is reading Ingersol and Tom Paine. I have no fault to find with your ambition to get ahead in the world, but with it 'remember thy creator in the days of thy youth.' ...
— Dorian • Nephi Anderson
... that the exports and imports were constantly increasing. The Governors of Bombay and the rest of the Presidencies would be animated by the same spirit, and so you would have all over India, as I have said, a rivalry for good; you would have placed a check on that malignant spirit of ambition which has worked so much evil—you would have no Governor so great that you could not control him, none who might make war when he pleased; war and annexation would be greatly checked, if not entirely prevented; and I do in my conscience believe you would have ...
— Speeches on Questions of Public Policy, Volume 1 • John Bright
... trouble even without the change of the government. They do not mind disturbing the peace of the country at the present time when the republic exists. It is almost certain that at the first unfurling of the imperial flags they will at once grasp such an opportune moment and try to satisfy their ambition. Should they rise in revolt at the time when the Emperor is changed the Government, supported by the loyal statesmen and officials, whose interests are bound up with the welfare of the imperial family and whose influence has spread far ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... multitude of human actions and by the crowd of delightful people who fill his four-hundred odd pages.... It deserves a high place among the novels that deal with American life. No recent American novel save one has sought to cover so broad a canvas, or has created so strong an impression of ambition and of ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... courtiers suggested that he should collect in his harem all the beautiful virgins of the land, and choose him a wife. Among these was Hadassah, the adopted daughter of Mordecai. He urged her to enter her name among the rivals for kingly favor. It was not ambition merely that moved Mordecai. He had been meditating upon the unfolding providence of God toward his scattered nation, and felt that there was deeper meaning in passing events than the pleasures and anger of his sovereign. ...
— Half Hours in Bible Lands, Volume 2 - Patriarchs, Kings, and Kingdoms • Rev. P. C. Headley
... it was, sank still lower. What miserable luck he had! His one great ambition, next to getting his diploma, had been to make the varsity ...
— The Young Pitcher • Zane Grey
... mental and physical agony inflicted by the disease, and the thought occurred to him that he was on the point of finding a sure and certain remedy, his benevolent heart overflowed with unselfish gladness. No feeling of personal ambition, no hope or desire of fame, sullied the purity of his noble philanthropy. 'While the vaccine discovery was progressive,' he writes, 'the joy at the prospect before me of being the instrument destined to take away from the world one of its greatest calamities, blended with the fond hope of enjoying ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... England that few and fewer pigeons visit us every year. Our forests furnish no mast for them. So, it would seem, few and fewer thoughts visit each growing man from year to year, for the grove in our minds is laid waste,—sold to feed unnecessary fires of ambition, or sent to mill, and there is scarcely a twig left for them to perch on. They no longer build nor breed with us. In some more genial season, perchance, a faint shadow flits across the landscape of the mind, cast by the wings of some thought in ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... Bundelkund in the year 1849. He married a noble Indian lady, who was imbued with an ambition not less ardent than that by which he was inspired. Two children were born to them, whom they tenderly loved. But domestic happiness did not prevent him from seeking to carry out the object at which he aimed. He waited ...
— The Mysterious Island • Jules Verne
... will do well," said Count Ostermann. "I may venture to say so, as I have no longer the least ambition—death will soon relieve me from all participation in affairs of state. I am a feeble old man, and desire nothing more than to be allowed occasionally to impart good counsels to my benefactors. And this ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... a while ago he had been happy there. Only an hour or two since he was meditating, between the moves of the game, on the very words he meant to use in telling Irene that he loved her. Only an hour or two since every thought was full of hope and ambition, since the path of honour stood wide open with a vague bright figure beckoning ...
— VC — A Chronicle of Castle Barfield and of the Crimea • David Christie Murray
... feeble health has its compensations, especially for those who unite restless vanity and ambition to a feminine desire for sympathy. It has been much the habit of Mr. Stephens to date controversial epistles from "a sick chamber," as do ladies in a delicate situation. A diplomatist of the last century, the Chevalier D'Eon, by usurping the privileges ...
— Destruction and Reconstruction: - Personal Experiences of the Late War • Richard Taylor
... because "honesty 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 the ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous
... him?" she thought. "I love the other man, but if I cannot win him, I shall gratify my ambition by marrying Haughton Hall, and in petting my idol gratify myself; and so to pet my old ...
— A Heart-Song of To-day • Annie Gregg Savigny
... (or I much am wrong) It is not beauty lures thy vows, Rather ambition's gilded crown Makes thee forget thy ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various
... received proposals of marriage from Mr. Joseph Fry of London. His family, also Quakers, were wealthy and of good position; but for some time Elizabeth seemed to hesitate about entering on married life. Far from looking on marriage as the goal of her ambition, as is the fashion with many young women, she was divided in her mind as to the relative advantages of single and married life, as they might affect philanthropic and religious work. After consultation with her friends, however, the offer was accepted, and on August ...
— Elizabeth Fry • Mrs. E. R. Pitman
... "Chawming weather, moddom!" (which is usually a black lie) and pass them on to the staff, who do the actual work. I shouldn't mind going on like this for the next few years, but Mr. Faucitt is determined to sell. I don't know if you are like that, but every other Englishman I've ever met seems to have an ambition to own a house and lot in Loamshire or Hants or Salop or somewhere. Their one object in life is to make some money and "buy back the old place"—which was sold, of course, at the end of act one to pay ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... others trust it is only a gas explosion. I shock my group by hoping it is a bomb, so that I may say I have heard it go off. But I know nothing till I read "Paris Day by Day" next evening in "The Daily Telegraph," and find that my ambition has been gratified, and that the chief victim of the explosion is a Decadent Poet. Has any one been taking seriously Nordau's cry for the ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... nun apprised the Chang family that the major had actually suppressed his indignation, hushed his complaints, and taken back the presents of the previous engagement. But who would have ever anticipated that a father and mother, whose hearts were set upon position and their ambition upon wealth, could have brought up a daughter so conscious of propriety and so full of feeling as to seize the first opportunity, after she had heard that she had been withdrawn from her former intended, and been promised to the Li family, to stealthily devise a way to commit suicide, by means of ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... 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; ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... an opportunity to prove to him that I was not an unworthy son, and that I had courage and bravery. It was not long before we met the enemy and a battle immediately ensued. Standing by my father's side, I saw him kill his antagonist and tear the scalp from off his head. Fired with valor and ambition, I rushed furiously upon another and smote him to the earth with my tomahawk. I then ran my lance through his body, took off his scalp and returned in triumph to my father. He said nothing but looked well pleased. This was the first ...
— Autobiography of Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia-kiak, or Black Hawk • Black Hawk
... animated by the death of Ysiaslaf, soon found enthusiastic adventurers rallying around his banners. He marched vigorously to Kief, drove Rostislaf from the capital and seized the scepter. But there was no lull in the tempest of human ambition. Georges had attained the throne by the energies of his sword, and, acting upon the principle that "to the victors belong the spoils," he had driven from their castles all the lords who had been supporters ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... and virtue were as natural as her prejudices; she believed that marriage was the close of female ambition, and marrying her children was the only innovation to be permitted. Certain accomplishments she thought due to woman, but none of them must become masculine in prosecution; a professional woman she ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... "Let craft, ambition, spite, Be quenched in Reason's night, Till weakness turn to might, Till what is dark be light, Till what is ...
— Sylvie and Bruno • Lewis Carroll
... possessed the sneaking, cringing, treacherous character traditionally ascribed to people of mixed blood—the character which the blessed institutions of a free slave-holding republic had been well adapted to foster among them; had they been selfish enough to sacrifice to their ambition the mother who gave them birth, society would have been placated or humbugged, and the voyage of their life might have ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt
... sparkle of electricity like pendant diamonds—made the Quarter seem fuller of life than ever. These fall days make the little ouvrieres trip along from their work with rosy cheeks, and put happiness and ambition ...
— The Real Latin Quarter • F. Berkeley Smith
... 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 trained ...
— The Man in Gray • Thomas Dixon
... alluring figures, that seem to glean gratefully after the steps of labor, is the negro's manifesto of the French slave-trade. The surprising totals betray the sudden development of that iniquity under the stimulus of national ambition. The slave expresses his misery in the ciphers of luxury. The single article of sugar, which lent a new nourishment to the daily food of every country, sweetened the child's pap, the invalid's posset, and the drinks of rich and poor, yielded its property ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... which province he belonged, had just been annexed to France. A party of guides from Chamouni had the day before succeeded, with difficulty, in planting the imperial flag on the summit of Mont Blanc. Was it this which had awakened the ambition of the young Savoyard to share the spoils of the empire of which he had so suddenly become a member? Perhaps (I never thought of it before, but perhaps) he was already seeking means for his journey to the capital. Perhaps the price of his hard-won service was to be the nucleus ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... of this tragicall warre, the Moscouite, to cloke his tyranny and ambition vnder some faire pretense amongst other of his demaunds, made mention also of a tribute which should be due vnto him out of the bishop of Dorpat his iurisdiction, whereof notwithstanding hee could neither bring any iust account, ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, • Richard Hakluyt
... him but too well. Ambition was awakened in this young maiden of eighteen years; it was an imperial crown that called her—why should she not listen to this call coming from the lips of one in whom she had unlimited confidence, and toward whom ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... at a distance, was the improvement of the finances, and the restoration of order in several branches of the administration. Napoleon was obliged to begin by the good to arrive at the bad; he was obliged to increase the French army, before he could employ it for the purposes of his personal ambition. ...
— Ten Years' Exile • Anne Louise Germaine Necker, Baronne (Baroness) de Stael-Holstein
... Ladies slowly increased in numbers, keeping their school and struggling against poverty, all the time endeavoring to become established as members of the Visitation Order. At last their hope and ambition came to pass, and, in 1816, they were regularly established as the Georgetown ...
— A Portrait of Old George Town • Grace Dunlop Ecker
... and giving in marriage, it was just as though he had died and gone to heaven. Heaven is the absence of worry and of ambition. Heaven is where you want nothing you haven't got. Heaven is finality. And this was finality. On the September morning, after the honeymoon and the settling down, he arose leisurely, long after his wife, and, putting on the puce dressing-gown (which Alice much ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... flies off the saddle at a tangent, and finds that his "vaulting ambition" had o'erleap'd itself, and fallen on the other side - ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... Johnson's personality, ambition, and administrative strategy. If many of his associates questioned his personal commitment to the principle of integration, or indeed even his private feeling about President Truman's order, all recognized his political ambition and penchant for vigorous and direct ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... and he deprived of his great patron, [he] had nothing to depend upon but the fortune of his wife: which, though ample enough to have supported the expense a person of his quality ought to have made, was not large enough to satisfy his vanity and ambition, nor so great as he upon common reports had possessed himself by her. By being not enough pleased with her fortune he grew displeased with his wife, who, being a woman of a haughty and imperious nature and of a wit superior ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... him the whole-souled enthusiasm with which he set about his tasks. How completely he dedicated himself to the artistic duty was illustrated when, in the season of 1887-88, he realized what had been the ambition of years, and gave a first performance of Siegfried in "Gtterdmmerung." He had studied the part a dozen years before in the hope of appearing in it at the first Bayreuth festival; but Wagner did not want the illusion spoiled by presenting the actor of Siegmund on one ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... the Executive Council board, or not. Personally, Charles Sumner would gain nothing by a transfer from the Senate Chamber to the State Department. He does not need a place in the American cabinet any more than John Bright does in the British. The highest ambition might well be satisfied with his present position, from which, looking back upon an honorable record, he might be justified in using Milton's language of lofty confidence in the reply to Salmasius: "I am not one who has disgraced beauty of sentiment by deformity of conduct, ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... sole monarch of the world. But I plainly protested that I would never be the means of bringing a free and brave people into slavery; and though the wisest of the Ministers were of my opinion, my open refusal was so opposed to his Majesty's ambition that he could never forgive me. And from this time a plot began between himself and those of his Ministers who were my enemies, that nearly ended in my ...
— The Blue Fairy Book • Various
... here in Saumur so many men in arms," said he. "I fear that you think the peasants of our country have turned themselves into soldiers, that we might become generals, and play at being great men. Indeed, such is not the case; if personal ambition has brought you here, you had better leave us. We have come here to fight, and very probably to die for our King and our religion; and, being called upon to act as leaders, we must bear a heavier share of the burden, and undergo ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope
... Sith I have cause, and will, and strength, and means To do it. Examples gross as earth excite me: Witness this army of such mass and charge, Led by a delicate and tender prince, Whose spirit with divine ambition puff'd, Makes mouths at the invisible event, Exposing what is mortal and unsure To all that fortune, death, and danger dare, Even for an egg-shell. 'Tis not to be great, Never to stir without great argument; But greatly ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... here, Reade," declared the physician. "Almost any ambition that money will gratify will soon be yours. From the very appearance of this newly-opened vein I don't believe it is one that will give out ...
— The Young Engineers in Nevada • H. Irving Hancock
... to ambition like success. Every day the widow thought, and toiled, and kept her eyes open for chances for her boys. "For, after all," said she, "twenty-one dollars a month is all too small to kape six b'ys and mesilf when the winter's a-comin', and 'twon't be twenty-one ...
— The Widow O'Callaghan's Boys • Gulielma Zollinger
... with an ineffable sadness, "I am naught but a wanderer upon the face of the earth. I have no ties, no kindred,—no real friends, save you and Dale, and some of these honest fellows whom I lead to slaughter. My ambition is seamed with a flaw. And all my life I must be striving, striving, until I am laid in the grave. I know that now, and it is you yourself who have taught me. For I have violently broken forth from those bounds which God in His ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... the highest ambition of our people. They make the greatest mistakes who tell you that money is the master need of our race. They equally err who would fain fasten your attention upon the acknowledged political difficulties which confront us in the lawless sections of the land. ...
— Sparkling Gems of Race Knowledge Worth Reading • Various
... judgments; he hath judged the great whore, and avenged the blood of his servants,—with a numberless throng on his left hand of these miscreants sentenced unto that place of torment and woe, where they shall have an eternity to bewail their infidelity, impiety, avarice, ambition, cruelty, and stupidity in.—And, in fine, if the following hints shall serve for no other purpose, they will stand for an incontestable evidence of the very first principle of religion, that there is a God to reward the righteous and punish the wicked:—So that men shall say, Verily, there is a ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... transferred his affections to his grandson, whom he looked upon as his successor. Reginald did his best to make amends to her for the change in their grandfather's manner; but she seemed rather pleased than otherwise, having had no ambition to occupy the exalted position to which she had been destined. Perhaps she reflected that it might remove all objections the rajah would have entertained with regard to bestowing her hand on ...
— The Young Rajah • W.H.G. Kingston
... but one long death?" he went on, with sudden violence. "Our pleasures, our hopes, our youth are all dying; ambition dies, and even desire at last; our passions and tastes will die, or will live only to mourn their dead opportunity. The happiness of love dies with the loss of the loved, and, worst of all, love itself grows old in our hearts and dies. Why should we shrink only from the one death which can free ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... The ambition of Theodore was still boundless. He gathered an increased following, conquered tribe after tribe in Abyssinia proper, and prosecuted a most successful crusade in the country of the Gallas, subduing descendants of those who had wrought havoc in his native land from time to time, and ...
— Our Sailors - Gallant Deeds of the British Navy during Victoria's Reign • W.H.G. Kingston
... She who would give life to others, what was her life to be henceforth? The mellowing sorrow, which her vivacity could not hide, smote him again, as it had that evening in Mexico when he came to her for counsel. He remembered. Out of a useless ambition for her country she had squandered her name, blighted her future. He remembered how, looking on her saddened face, he had been exalted to a pure devotion, and had burned with knightly fervor to do her some ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... spirit. Midsummer eve of 1850 could clearly make no spiritual change in the king or his people—such they would be on the morning after St. John's day, as on the morning before it—i. e., filled with all elements (though possibly undeveloped) of strife, feud, pernicious ambition, ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... a valley in South England remote from ambition and from fear, where the passage of strangers is rare and unperceived, and where the scent of the grass in summer is breathed only by those who are native to that unvisited land. The roads to the Channel ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... the early Greeks the fall of Troy or the labors of Hercules, his work (taking the place which those of Homer have unfortunately occupied) as a splendid model for all succeeding ages, would have given a very different turn to the pursuits of heroes and the policy of nations. Ambition might then have become a useful passion, ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... Villiers great master.] And here it is manifestly to bee vnderstood of all men, that after the death of the noble and right prudent lord, Fabrice of Cacetto, great master of Rhodes, the sayd Sir Andrew enflamed with ambition and couetousnesse to bee great master, and seeing himselfe deceiued of his hope, by the election made the two and twentieth day of Ianuary, of the right reuerend and illustrate lord, Philip de Villiers Lisleadam, before him: from that time hee tooke so great enuie and ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, - and Discoveries of The English Nation, v5 - Central and Southern Europe • Richard Hakluyt
... had shown a guilty ambition in a more covert way. Understanding that Darius had issued a gold coinage of remarkable purity, he, on his own authority and without consulting the king, issued a silver coinage of a similar character. There is reason to believe that he ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 5. (of 7): Persia • George Rawlinson
... teacher, was expected the next day but one. Henry had pottered about the place, and attended to some ploughing on the famous White grass-land, which was supposed to produce more hay than any piece of land of its size in the county. Henry had been fired with ambition to produce more than ever before, but that day his spirit had seemed to fail him. He sat about gloomily all the afternoon; then he went down for the evening mail, and brought home no letters, but the local paper. Sylvia was preparing supper in the large, clean kitchen. She ...
— The Shoulders of Atlas - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... 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 ...
— Studies in Occultism; A Series of Reprints from the Writings of H. P. Blavatsky • H. P. Blavatsky
... war, dayly experience teacheth vs, that some vpon no iust & lawful grounds (being egged on by ambition, enuie, and couetise) are induced to follow the armie, and on the contrary side, that others arme themselues vpon iust and necessary causes: namely such as go to battell for the defence and propagation of the Gospel, or such as being any way prouoked thereunto, doe withstand ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries - of the English Nation, v. 1, Northern Europe • Richard Hakluyt
... 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 blue waters of the Gulf, the white ...
— The Bells of San Juan • Jackson Gregory
... Greece and Rome, He is almost entirely obscured, "an unknown God ignorantly worshipped"—the End, as usual, being forgotten and buried in the means. All this process of degradation will be hastened by the corruption of priests whose avarice or ambition, as Mr. Lang says, will tempt them to exploit the lucrative elements in religion at the expense of the ethical; to whittle-away the decrees of God and conscience to suit the wealthy and easy-going; to substitute purchasable sacrifice, for obedience; and the fat of rams, for charity. We ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... leading men of to-day, were at one time country school teachers. They exercised a great influence upon the pupils. They were the angels who put the coals of fire upon the lips of the young men, giving them the ambition that made for future greatness. The country schools now are not so good as they were twenty years ago. The chief reason is that their ...
— Rural Life and the Rural School • Joseph Kennedy
... ANNE BOLEYN, QUEEN OF HENRY VIII. In the records of biography there is no character that more forcibly exemplifies the vanity of human ambition, or more thoroughly enlists the attention of the reader than this—the Seventh American, and from the Third London Edition. By MISS BENGER. With portrait ...
— Cattle and Their Diseases • Robert Jennings
... and ambition of a gentlewoman called Tanaquil, the Queene and wife of Tarqvinivs Priscvs the fift Roman king, with his persuasions and pollicy to hir husbande for his aduauncement to the kingdom, her lyke encouragement of Servivs Tvllivs, ...
— The Palace of Pleasure, Volume 1 • William Painter
... through which our road lay, I fancied I saw the great elms of Newtown, the wide, straight street, the familiar house, an open door, and—ah! It wasn't the first time I had been taken in at that door, the survivor of wrecked ambition and misguided hope, only to hear my shortcomings made tenderly light of, my most desperate ...
— Cape Cod Folks • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... could bring happiness, then surely Eveline Merivale should have been the most envied woman in the world. A renowned beauty, a leader of fashion, with every wish and ambition gratified—save the one which, at present, the chief object of her life—to enslave and retain, as ...
— Adrien Leroy • Charles Garvice
... and sounds, all should aid a skilled writer of articles to turn his energies, with some hope of achievement, toward producing fiction. The hand that can fashion a really vivid article holds out promise of being able to compose a convincing short story, if grit and ambition help push ...
— If You Don't Write Fiction • Charles Phelps Cushing
... fling away ambition. By that sin fell the angels: how can man, then, The image of his Maker, hope ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 8 - Talmage to Knox Little • Grenville Kleiser
... state, he had turned his energies into the pursuit of pleasure, and had been leading a gay and dissolute life. His accession to power was, however, speedily to prove that he was possessed of great abilities, a masterful will and a keen and eager ambition. He had strongly disapproved of the trend of the peace negotiations at Muenster, and would have preferred with the help of the French to have attempted to drive the Spaniards out of the southern Netherlands. The preliminaries were, however, already settled in the spring ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson
... 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 ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... as the incident of their locking out, may have had something to say to it. Anyway, a new reflective temper set in. The young immature creature became self-conscious, began to feel the ferments of growth. The ambition and the restlessness his father had foreseen, with ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... think so?" replied Walker; "well, if we had only the means I would certainly have her trained, for, since she has seen Mademoiselle B—— act, her great ambition seems to be to occupy a similar position." After further conversation it was agreed to place Margery under the care of Mrs. L——, with a view of becoming a professional actress; for, although Walker ...
— The Mysteries of Montreal - Being Recollections of a Female Physician • Charlotte Fuhrer
... and look after the repairs and the police and taxes while I run the business. I never had a dollar of my own invested in my life. I wouldn't know how it felt to have the dealer rake in a coin of mine. But I can handle other people's stuff and manage other people's enterprises. I've had an ambition to get hold of something big—something higher than hotels and lumber-yards and local politics. I want to be manager of something way up—like a railroad or a diamond trust or an automobile factory. Now here comes this little man from the tropics with just what I ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... "charming Betty Careless" upon the bannisters, which he is supposed to scratch upon every wall and every wainscot,) and wrapt up so close in melancholy pensiveness, as not even to observe the dog that is flying at him. Behind him, and in the inner room, are two persons maddened with ambition. These men, though under the influence of the same passion, are actuated by different notions; one is for the papal dignity, the other for regal; one imagines himself the Pope, and saying mass; the other fancies himself a King, is encircled with the emblem of royalty, ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler
... threatened or are threatening it, the losses which it has sustained, the capacities which may be yet latent in it, waiting to be evoked, the points in which it transcends other tongues, in which it comes short of them, all this may well be the object of worthy ambition to every one of us. So may we hope to be ourselves guardians of its purity, and not corrupters of it; to introduce, it may be, others into an intelligent knowledge of that, with which we shall have ourselves more than a merely superficial ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... world. This day the father took rather more than half the charge of the provision supply, and with considerable regularity. During four hours that the nest was closely watched, its tenants were fed at about five-minute intervals for half an hour; and then mamma promptly smothered their ambition, as above mentioned, for perhaps a quarter of an hour, when, if they did not take naps like "good little birdies," they at least were ...
— Little Brothers of the Air • Olive Thorne Miller
... virtuous Wife, where thou again dost meet Both Pleasures more refin'd and sweet: The fairest Garden in her Looks, And in her Mind the wisest Books. Oh! who would change these soft, yet solid Joys, For empty Shows and senseless Noise; And all which rank Ambition breeds, Which seem such beauteous Flowers, ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... choose 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 ...
— The Humourous Story of Farmer Bumpkin's Lawsuit • Richard Harris
... His great ambition was to acquire a "mustang pony," for all the adventurous spirits of the dime novels he had known carried revolvers and rode mustangs. He did not read much, but when he did it was always some tale of fighting. He was too restless and active to continue at a ...
— The Eagle's Heart • Hamlin Garland
... offends continually. But, nevertheless, a great Part of one's Life is lost in Excess, Lust, Ambition, and other Vices; but a much greater Part is lost in doing of nothing. Moreover they are said to do nothing, not who live in Idleness, but they who are busied about frivolous Things which conduce nothing at all to our Happiness: And ...
— Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I. • Erasmus
... been the one ambition of her mind during these three or four years to speak English like an Englishwoman, and she has very nearly succeeded, only there is still a rhythm left ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... ready—all faithful," groaned the king, "and, Ornethelo, they may all have to perish to-day, and all for our ambition. Poor mortals!" ...
— The Land of the Changing Sun • William N. Harben
... Huff, after a deal of blustering, wenching, and bullying, died, and was succeeded by a good-natured boy {161a}, who, giving way to the general bent of his tenants, allowed Martin's notions to spread everywhere, and take deep root in Ambition. How, after his death, the farm fell into the hands of a lady {161b}, who was violently in love with Lord Peter. How she purged the whole country with fire and sword, resolved not to leave the name or remembrance of Martin. How Peter triumphed, ...
— A Tale of a Tub • Jonathan Swift
... poet Becquer[1] in the golden days of his youth, when his veins were swelling with health, when his heart was fired with ambition, and in his ears was ringing the ...
— Legends, Tales and Poems • Gustavo Adolfo Becquer
... am aware of. He shows so little ambition to excel in any particular branch that I should say his choice of a profession may be best determined by his parents. I am, of course, ignorant whether his relatives possess influence likely to be of use to him. That is often the chief point to be considered, particularly ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... Wilmot's ambition was to become a public man and to assist in the reformation of the constitution of his native province. He enjoyed many advantages for the role he had undertaken. He was tall, his height being upwards of six feet, well proportioned, handsome and striking in his features, and he possessed ...
— Wilmot and Tilley • James Hannay
... Johnston, a widow, whom, when she was the maiden Sarah Bush, he had loved and courted, and by whom he had been refused. He now asked again, and with better success. The marriage was a little inroad of good luck into his career; for the new wife was thrifty and industrious, with the ambition and the capacity to improve the squalid condition of her husband's household. She had, too, worldly possessions of bedding and furniture, enough to fill a four-horse wagon. She made her husband put a floor, a door, and windows to his cabin. From the day of her advent ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... thousand Frenchmen and a thousand millions of francs, besides the indemnities, which amounted to fifteen hundred millions more. No language of denunciation could be stronger than that which went forth from the mouth of the whole nation in view of Napoleon's selfishness and ambition. But one voice was listened to, and that was the cry for vengeance; prudence, moderation, and justice were alike disregarded. All attempts to stem the tide of ultra-royalist violence were in vain. The king ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IX • John Lord
... to have any other ambition," he answered, wearily. "When I read in the paper this morning that you and your father were here, things seemed suddenly different. I came at once. I didn't know what I wanted until I saw you, but I know now, ...
— The Tempting of Tavernake • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... civilized man is often compelled by necessity to adopt the methods of primitive beings. The rubbing of sticks is an emergency measure of the master of woodcraft at the present time, and the production of fire in this manner is the proud accomplishment or ambition of every ...
— Artificial Light - Its Influence upon Civilization • M. Luckiesh
... fellow-men. Our scales are not wisely balanced in this world—we cannot weigh motives against acts, thought against deeds, with atom-like precision, nor measure the tempted with the temptation grain by grain, hair by hair. Ambition was the fault of the seraphim in the commencement—be well assured that some of the old angelic leaven lingers still about all ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... it was her quietly fixed intention to assimilate, bespoke her possession of a brain the powers of which being concentrated on large affairs might have accomplished almost startling results. There was, however, nothing startling in her intentions, and ambition did not touch her. Yet, as she went with Hutchinson from one country to another, more than one man of affairs had it borne in upon him that her young slimness and her silence represented an unanticipated knowledge of points under discussion which might wisely be considered as a factor in ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... possible in Britain only in London, for the celebrities and their works are centred here. An unusually large proportion of the population is of the wealthy classes, for the height of the average Briton's ambition is, in addition to the essential estate in the country, to be in possession of a mansion in London. After these are acquired, and his wife and daughters have been presented at court, any after- successes may be regarded as details which ornament ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie
... outcome of the experiences of the American people in dealing with the West. Western democracy through the whole of its earlier period tended to the production of a society of which the most distinctive fact was the freedom of the individual to rise under conditions of social mobility, and whose ambition was the liberty and well-being of the masses. This conception has vitalized all American democracy, and has brought it into sharp contrasts with the democracies of history, and with those modern efforts of Europe to create an artificial democratic order ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... think that best of all Ecgbert would wish to come home in peace at once, and set all ambition aside. Presently, if we are careful, I may be able to speak to Offa of him again. Nay, but have no fear; I understand how matters are with Bertric, and will risk naught. I think we may find that Offa, who is friendly with King ...
— A King's Comrade - A Story of Old Hereford • Charles Whistler
... year after, so much ridicule and rancour. He said—"Was it likely that he would resign the office of commander-in-chief," a situation so consonant to his feelings and his habits, "for the mere empty ambition of being placed at the head of the government. I know," continued the Duke, "I am disqualified for any such office; and I, therefore, say, that, feeling as I do with respect to the situation which I recently filled at the head of the army; ...
— Maxims And Opinions Of Field-Marshal His Grace The Duke Of Wellington, Selected From His Writings And Speeches During A Public Life Of More Than Half A Century • Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington
... had so comfortingly said. How could it be otherwise when he had done nothing discreditable, but, on the contrary, had been developing himself in a way that reflected the highest credit upon his family, as it marched up toward the lofty goal of "cultured" ambition, toward high ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... 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, made it a point to leave a donation ...
— Satanstoe • James Fenimore Cooper
... "The ambition of my life is to sit on the supreme bench of some State," spoken by a fair-haired young man as he passed with a taller, older one. "Montana will be a State, some day," the would-be ...
— A Man of Two Countries • Alice Harriman
... may be so; but I believe there is more than that in it. I fear she is all outside. It is true her poetry is even passionate sometimes; but I suspect all her inspiration comes of the poetry she reads, not of the nature or human nature around her; it comes of ambition, not of love. I don't know much about verse, but to me there is an air of artificiality about all hers. I can not understand how you could praise her long poem so much—if you were in love with her. She has grown to ...
— Home Again • George MacDonald
... enjoyment of his home he had forgotten all about the Stamp Act, and scarcely remembered that there was a king across the ocean who had resolved to make tributaries of the New Englanders. Possibly, too, he had forgotten his own ambition, and would not have exchanged his situation at that moment to be governor ...
— Journeys Through Bookland - Volume Four • Charles H. Sylvester
... about, conjuring up scenes of days gone by—real scenes, actions on the stage of life; all gone! It quiets ambition! ...
— General Gordon - A Christian Hero • Seton Churchill
... successor of Roosevelt. This might be one reason for his antagonism toward the politicians of the old regime, such as Penrose, who have barred his way in that direction, and his fitful devotion to progressivism championed by others. The failure to realize this ambition might account in some measure for his later reticence and his suspicion of politicians in general. He has shown a pronounced distrust of them. The only exception has been the audacious Ambassador to the Court of Saint James who in his REVIEW and in his WEEKLY flattered the Senator from Idaho ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous
... false. It is a religion of Atheism. Instead of a Heavenly Father forgiving sin, and filial service from a pure heart, as the effect of love—it presents nothing to love, for its Deity is dead; nothing as the ultimate object of action but self; and nothing for man's highest and holiest ambition but annihilation." ...
— Lives of the Three Mrs. Judsons • Arabella W. Stuart
... payments to the papal chancery, and which was endeavouring to restore the papacy to evangelical poverty. The King of France and the Emperor, on the other hand, looked favourably on the Council when it essayed to bridle the ambition and greed of the Bishop ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... endeavoured to persuade the world that it was owing to my having a private amour with a Lady of distinction in the Austrian court, but that minister was too deeply immersed in state-intrigues, to know much about those of a more tender nature. The tumultuous hurry of business and ambition, left no room in his mind for the delicious delicacy of sentiment and passion, so very essential to ...
— Boswell's Correspondence with the Honourable Andrew Erskine, and His Journal of a Tour to Corsica • James Boswell
... had been universally taken many a beautiful old cottage would have been spared to us, and our eyes would not be offended by the wondrous creations of the estate agents and local builders, who have no other ambition but to build cheaply. The contrast between the new and the old is indeed deplorable. The old cottage is a thing of beauty. Its odd, irregular form and various harmonious colouring, the effects of weather, time, and accident, environed with ...
— Vanishing England • P. H. Ditchfield
... soon discovered its unreality. From the renewal of hostilities, in May, 1803, until the final triumph of the allies, in 1815, the war resolved itself into a struggle between Napoleon and England. This young Corsican lieutenant had raised himself by sheer force of genius and unscrupulous ambition to absolute power. His scheme for the subjugation of Europe beat down every obstacle except the steady and unbending opposition of England. Pitt, who had withdrawn from the government because of the stupid ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy
... betrayed deep melancholy, his head forward with a stoop, but not bent like that of a conscience-stricken man. That head, large and powerful, which might contain the treasures necessary for a man of the highest ambition, looked as if it were loaded with thought; it was weighted with grief of mind, but there was no touch of remorse in his expression. As to his face, it may be summed up in a word. A common superstition has it that every human countenance ...
— Z. Marcas • Honore de Balzac
... the minister might be seen joyful tears and a noble ambition; he bowed low and kissed the extended ...
— Frederick the Great and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... spent on the river where he learned to handle a canoe and skiff; and before he was fourteen could swim and dive like a didapper. At that time his greatest ambition was to run the falls in a canoe; his next to be a ...
— Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight • Mathew Joseph Holt
... shortly. "Never mind what I am. Think! Think hard! By to-morrow you must decide! Are you content with your life? Does it satisfy you? You have everything else; have you ambition?" ...
— The Great Secret • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... fairly flooded his arteries with joy and tenderness. She had remembered him at a glance after the three long years! She had called him by name! Work, ambition, fame and disaster had not driven out the ...
— The Harbor Master • Theodore Goodridge Roberts
... he took office, in fact, Cornell had counted upon a renomination. He cleverly strengthened the State machine, surrounded himself with able lieutenants, and never failed to make appointments promotive of his ambition. The confirmation of Isaac V. Baker as superintendent of prisons with the aid of Tammany's three senators, especially illustrated his skill in reaching men. But he had done more than organise. His numerous ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... principles alike made him the consistent friend of religious liberty. It was generally supposed that his views of government were monarchical; and as he was the undoubted representative of the Irish monarchy, it was also believed that he had sufficient ambition to look forward to the time when independent Ireland would restore to him his family honours. The personal and moral influence of Mr. O'Brien were such as to qualify him to be a leader. He was much loved, and deserved to be so. As a man he was amiable, as a gentleman courteous, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... for their independence in the permanence of their appointments, but this only applies to those who have reached the summit of their profession, or are on the point of retiring, or have no further interest in promotion. The young magistrate who wants to get on, a perfectly legitimate ambition, is by no means independent, for if he does not give satisfaction, he may enjoy a peculiar kind of permanence, the permanence of standing still at the starting point. The only independent judges, to whom justice is the sole interest, are either those who have served for forty years or the President ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet
... the pale, listless woman on the lounge, who knows her mother's ambition has been sorely crossed ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... Harry's estimation; for he waited all day, and all evening, without hearing a word from the firm of Wake & Wade. He had actually begun to doubt whether the accomplished young man had as much influence with the firm as he had led him to suppose. But his ambition would not permit him longer to be satisfied with the humble sphere of a stable boy; and he determined, if he did not hear from Edward, to ...
— Try Again - or, the Trials and Triumphs of Harry West. A Story for Young Folks • Oliver Optic
... intent, intention, intentionality; purpose; quo animo[Lat]; project &c. 626; undertaking &c. 676; predetermination &c. 611; design, ambition. contemplation, mind, animus, view, purview, proposal; study; look out. final cause; raison d'etre[Fr]; cui bono[Lat]; object, aim, end; "the be all and the end all"; drift &c. (meaning) 516; tendency &c. 176; destination, mark, point, butt, goal, target, bull's-eye, quintain[obs3][medeival]; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... may put the little chap to an inland trade where he is almost bound to become a lesser man than his father, be removed from the enlarging influence of the sea, and have it given him as the height of ambition to grow up a dram-drinking or psalm-smiting, Sunday-top-hatted tradesmen. Then I desire savagely to have the power of a God, not that I might direct his life—he can sail his own boat better than I,—but ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... striking divergences begin to appear. The play mood, instead of approaching the calm contemplative mood of the lover of beauty, involves feelings and impulses which lie at the roots of our practical interests, viz. ambition, rivalry and struggle. It has, moreover, in all its stages a palpable utility—-even though this is not realized by the player—-serving for the exercise and development of body, intelligence and character. Beauty and art rise high above play ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... one day sit on the throne of Granada, he impiously set the stars at defiance. "The sword of the executioner," said he, "shall prove the fallacy of those lying horoscopes, and shall silence the ambition ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... With ambition luring her on, a young choir soprano leaves the little village where she was born and the limited audience of St. Judo's to train for the opera in New York. She leaves love behind her and meets love more ardent but not more sincere in her new environment. ...
— Friendship Village • Zona Gale
... the best. Possesses a spark of ambition and is really trying to make a go of the farm, which is more than most of them do around here. His wife, by all accounts, is a wonder. Used to be the cook-housekeeper here when the Rafaels had the place. LeFleur still talks ...
— Ralestone Luck • Andre Norton
... persons will attaint Men, against whom there's no complaint. Hence simple folks too may be taught How to form judgments as they ought, And not see with another's glass; For things are come to such a pass, That love and hate work diff'rent ways, As int'rest or ambition sways. Them you may know, in them confide, Whom by experience you have tried. Thus have I made a long amends For that ...
— The Fables of Phdrus - Literally translated into English prose with notes • Phaedrus
... been obliged to create a line of conduct for himself, having to deal with an entirely new combination of circumstances without any precedent to guide him. And he implored the Queen to believe that the accusations which had, of late, poured in against him, were prompted by the disappointed ambition and the jealousy of his enemies, and had not any solid ...
— The Life of Columbus • Arthur Helps
... fausse humilite ne met plus en credit. Je scais ce que je vaux, et crois ce qu'on m'en dit, Pour me faire admirer je ne fais point de ligue; J'ai peu de voix pour moi, mais je les ai sans brigue; Et mon ambition, pour faire plus de bruit Ne les va point queter de reduit en reduit. Mon travail sans appui monte sur le theatre, Chacun en liberte l'y blame ou idolatre; La, sans que mes amis prechent leurs sentimens, J'arrache quelquefois ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... is not so. The excuse we are trying to make for the mechanicians is illusory. There is no mistaking their ambition, Notwithstanding the prudence of some and the equivocations in which others have rejoiced, they have drawn their definition in the absolute and not in the relative. To take their conceptions literally, ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... 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 so young but ...
— The Plays of W. E. Henley and R. L. Stevenson
... vague dream in his eyes, and a vaguer, far-looming hope in his heart, is sitting on his trunk wondering at the variety of things Shakib is cramming into his. For our Scribe, we must not fail to remind the Reader, is contemplating great things of State, is nourishing a great political ambition. He will, therefore, bethink him of those in power at home. Hence these costly presents. Ay, besides the plated jewellery—the rings, bracelets, brooches, necklaces, ear-rings, watches, and chains—of which he is bringing enough to supply the peasants of three ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... general to whom he was secretary were remarkably well written, and that Dominick O'Reilly, Esq. returned to England, after several years' absence, not miraculously rich, but with a fortune equal to his wishes. His wishes were not extravagant: his utmost ambition was to return to his native country with a fortune that should enable him to live independently of all the world, especially of some of his relations, who had not used him well. His ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... stage as a member of Frank Benson's company, and in his time played many parts, receiving on one occasion a curtain call as the Ghost in Hamlet. This experience—with the early Stratford inspiration—probably fired his ambition to become a dramatist. The late Sir George Alexander produced Paolo and Francesca; Herod was acted in London by Beerbohm Tree, and in America by William Faversham. Neither of these plays was a failure, but it is ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... almost hope, in the event of a new administration of your affairs which shall confine itself to the same forbearance, and manifest no symptoms of intended interference, the objects of my arrangements will be effectually attained; for I leave them in the charge of agents whose interests, ambition, and every prospect of life are interwoven with their success, and the hand of Heaven has visibly blest the soil with every elementary source of progressive vegetation: but if a different policy shall be adopted, if new agents are sent into the country and armed with ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XII. (of XII.) • Edmund Burke
... one throne and it cannot have three occupants[68]." Or, again, he cowed them by the sheer force of his personality: "If I were a weak man, I would flatter you," he once exclaimed. In the last resort he replied to their hints of his ambition and self-seeking by offering his resignation. Here again the logic of facts was with him. For many months he was the necessary man, and he and they ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... the energy of our desires had gone up in the ambition to avoid being cast on the beach. Now we saw that that was not enough. It was necessary to squeeze around the point where lay the Golden Horn, in order to avoid the fate that had overtaken her. Handy Solomon yelled something at us. We could not hear, but our own knowledge ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... serious looking canes they so carefully carry gave place to the foppish switches they so artfully carried in their younger days." Here the gilded doors of idleness and pleasure are ever ajar but they never lead to the halls of noble aims and the palaces of worthy ambition. Here the entrances are always crowded with that class of people whose motto is, "Things are good enough as they are," or "Eat, drink and be merry," or "We ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... self-knowledge. She was, my dear sir, what you suppose the true woman to be,—a bundle of blind instincts; and among these the strongest was that of property in her husband, and power over him. She had lived in her power over men; it was her field of ambition. She knew them thoroughly. Women are called ivy; and the ivy has a hundred little fingers in every inch of its length, that strike at every flaw and crack and weak place in the strong wall they mean to overgrow; and so had Lillie. She saw, at a glance, that the sober, thoughtful, ...
— Pink and White Tyranny - A Society Novel • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... "the leaf-gold which the devil has laid over the backside of ambition, to make it glitter ...
— Daniel Defoe • William Minto
... calm and wise way," observes Mr. Justin M'Carthy, "did the husband of the Queen, who had always shared with her whatever of danger there might be in the attempts, argue as to the manner in which they ought to be dealt with." The historian adds, "The ambition which moved most or all the miscreants who thus disturbed the Queen and the country, was that of the mountebank rather than the assassin." It merited contempt no less than severity. A bill was brought forward on the 12th ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... after this, Eva was pleased to inform Beatrice that she had been so happy as to reach that point which in her eyes was the apex of feminine ambition. ...
— Earl Hubert's Daughter - The Polishing of the Pearl - A Tale of the 13th Century • Emily Sarah Holt
... and he did not hesitate to take a bold part in its proceedings. Royer-Collard said to him after one of these meetings, "Guizot, you will rise high." Guizot demanded an explanation He replied, "You have ambition; you have much head but no heart; you will rise high. When the restoration comes the abbe will be minister, and he will make you secretary-general." Such was the fact eighteen months after. The Calvinistic religion of Guizot was no bar to his promotion, so long as his ...
— Paris: With Pen and Pencil - Its People and Literature, Its Life and Business • David W. Bartlett
... is brewed and Tim settles down to count the gain in money and in the interest he will make with Regan; the old building reels and shingles whir away like bats in the gale, but he only laughs dourly, the scrawny little breast hurting and straining with the ambition to be mounting on bigger storms than this. By dawn he is as drunk with scheming as ever his old grandfather with whisky, and yet his nerves do not tremble as he goes about the business of the day, kicking Charley to his feet and hitching with a scowl ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... books, did dedicate my whole time to the bettering of my mind. My brother Antonio being thus in possession of my power, began to think himself the duke indeed. The opportunity I gave him of making himself popular among my subjects, awakened in his bad nature a proud ambition to deprive me of my dukedom; this he soon effected with the aid of the king of Naples, a powerful ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... nothing," Quest replied. "She is in a room apparently at the top of a house and the only window is in the roof. She can see nothing, hear nothing. When I get hold of the man who put her there," Quest continued slowly, "it will be my ambition to supplement personally any punishment the law may be ...
— The Black Box • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... large extent of territory; but the attempt and the success temporarily attending it are memorable circumstances, and were probably long held in remembrance through Western Asia, where they served as a stimulus and incentive to the ambition of ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 1. (of 7): Chaldaea • George Rawlinson
... teaching of justification by faith without works. They declare that Luther's theory of the utter depravity of man by reason of inherited sin and his incapacity to perform any work that can be accounted good in the sight of God kills every ambition to virtuous living in man. They argue that when you tell a person that he is not capable to do good, he is apt to believe you and make no effort to perform a good deed. The situation becomes still worse when the divine predestination is introduced at this point, as has been done, ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... midst of that excitement which accompanied the Revolution of France and the succeeding wars, the ambition of the nation, unexhausted by its fatal passion for military renown, was at the same time directed to some of the nobler and more permanent triumphs which mark the era of a people's greatness and which receive the applause of posterity long after their conquests have been wrested from them, ...
— On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures • Charles Babbage
... against them by an arbitrary denial of the right of suffrage, and consequent ineligibility to office. Thus a large and powerful class of incitements to mental effort, which have been operating continually upon the whites, have never once stirred the sensibilities nor waked the ambition of the colored community. Parents, however wealthy, had no inducement to educate their sons for the learned professions, since no force of talent nor extent of acquirement could hope to break down the granite walls and iron bars which prejudice had ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... want, need, exigency. mind, inclination, leaning, bent, animus, partiality, penchant, predilection; propensity &c 820; willingness &c 602; liking, love, fondness, relish. longing, hankering, inkling; solicitude, anxiety; yearning, coveting; aspiration, ambition, vaulting ambition; eagerness, zeal, ardor, empressement [Fr.], breathless impatience, overanxiety; impetuosity, &c 825. appetite, appetition^, appetence^, appetency^; sharp appetite, keenness, hunger, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... 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 by no means a very interesting one, so far as regards the character of the ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... to the horrid scenes of savage cruelty, it can no longer boast of the noble and generous principles which dignify a soldier. No longer sympathize with the dignity of the royal banner, nor feel the pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war that makes ambition virtue. What makes ambition virtue? the sense of honour. But is this sense of honour consistent with the spirit of plunder, or the practice of murder? Can it flow from mercenary motives? or can it ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 2 (of 5) • John Marshall
... who exerted considerable influence on English religious thought in the eighteenth century. In the "Biographia Literaria" (chap. 9) Coleridge writes: "A meek and shy quietist, his intellectual powers were never stimulated into feverous energy by crowds of proselytes, or by the ambition of proselyting. Jacob Behmen was an enthusiast in the strictest sense, as not merely distinguished, but as contradistinguished from a fanatic.... The writings of these Mystics acted in no slight degree to prevent my mind from being imprisoned within ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... for the madness of the meeting is nothing to the white-hot passion we get later; and in spite of the terminology the meaning of both Tristan and Isolda is perfectly clear. Light has been, and is, the enemy of their love; in the garish light of day Tristan, filled with daylight dreams of ambition, first made over to Mark, so to speak, his rights in Isolda; "is there a pain or a woe that does not awaken with daylight?" he asks; and now, declared lovers, they may only meet in the dark: during the day they must be distant strangers. They know whither fate is driving them: Isolda has ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... fact may be surmised to have intensified their feeling of revolt against the degraded position to which they were relegated by the Hindus. Though slovenly cultivators and with little energy or forethought, the Chamars have the utmost fondness for land and an ardent ambition to obtain a holding, however small. The possession of land is a hall-mark of respectability in India, as elsewhere, and the low castes were formerly incapable of holding it; and it may be surmised that the Chamar feels himself to be raised ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell
... on at his own wonderful picture of St. Mark descending to rescue a Christian slave? An Academician or a new English Art Clubbite who had done only one tiny corner of this picture would so swell as to the head that his laurel-wreath wouldn't fit him any longer. There's no ambition nowadays—Degas, Whistler, yes. But for the rest—dwarfs. Modern improvements indeed! Science may improve, but not art. Art, like religion, is an absolute in life—nobody will ever paint better than Velasquez, ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... that time between the warriors and Fred and Terry, who had set out with the ambition to keep up their traveling through the entire night. The Winnebagos did not wait long, when they moved on at their ...
— The Hunters of the Ozark • Edward S. Ellis
... silently continued, ought to be torn down and rebuilt in solid expensive structures. It made him hot and uncomfortable just to pass through the shabby quarter. The people in it were there for the excellent reason that they lacked the ambition, the force to demand better things. They ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... fifth year an ancient use renews In Crete the games and offerings unto Jove. The love of glory and innate ambition Lure to that coast the youth; and by his side Goes Pylades, inseparable from him. In the light car upon the arena wide, The hopes of triumph urge him to contest The proud palm of the flying-footed steeds, And, too intent on winning, there his life ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... any one thing in her uniformly self-denied life that had been a personal ambition and a personal desire, it had been that her son should have a college education. It was the center of her earthly wishes, hopes and efforts. That wish had been cut off in a moment, that hope had sunk under her feet, and now only remained ...
— Betty's Bright Idea; Deacon Pitkin's Farm; and The First Christmas - of New England • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... delight whenever a marquis or a count deigns to honour them with a stiff salutation. Indeed, the dream of every citizen of the new town is to be admitted to a drawing-room of the Saint-Marc quarter. They know very well that their ambition is not attainable, and it is this which makes them proclaim all the louder that they are freethinkers. But they are freethinkers in words only; firm friends of the authorities, they are ready to rush ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... usually meets with. If, therefore, as I think I have proved, the same parts which qualify a man for eminence in a low sphere, qualify him likewise for eminence in a higher, sure it can be no doubt in which he would chuse to exert them. Ambition, without which no one can be a great man, will immediately instruct him, in your own phrase, to prefer a hill in Paradise to a dunghill; nay, even fear, a passion the most repugnant to greatness, will shew him how much more safely he may indulge himself in the free ...
— The History of the Life of the Late Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great • Henry Fielding
... in ambition, she is vivacious and happy and dignified, till she is called upon to pay anything. Then the Frenchwoman in the French nation reveals herself. The eyes become small, the lips thin, the cheeks pale, the whole being shrinks into itself and goes ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... with some flash of witty irrelevance: the argument is long and tedious, why not relieve it by wandering into some of those green enclosures that open alluring doors upon the wayside? To roam at will, spring-heeled, high-hearted, and catching at all good fortunes, is the ambition of the youth, ere yet he has subdued himself to a destination. The principle of self-denial seems at first sight a treason done to genius, which was always privileged to be wilful. In this view literature is a fortuitous ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... which has been assigned to me, therefore, doubly pleasant. Memorable as was this event, and of great importance to the future growth of the Republic, it left its imprint not only upon America, but upon Europe as well. Through it the Napoleonic ambition to develop a vast plan of colonization which threatened the peace of the world was thwarted. The dismemberment of the French possessions which soon followed resulted in the grouping together of the various ...
— New York at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St. Louis 1904 - Report of the New York State Commission • DeLancey M. Ellis
... 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
... for becoming nations. And while everywhere else parts were uniting and union was becoming organization—and neither geographical remoteness nor unwieldiness of number nor local interests and differences were untractable obstacles to that spirit of fusion which was at once the ambition of the few and the instinct of the many; and cities, even where most powerful, had become the centres of the attracting and joining forces, knots in the political network—while this was going on more or ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... landing, cross a marsh, which must have suggested the beginning of the Pilgrim's Progress, for it seemed almost bottomless, and pass along the narrow end of the lake, still marked by light-houses, where steamers once struggled and panted "like fish out of water," fulfilling the Yankee's ambition of running a boat on a heavy dew. Then winding in and out along the shore, ...
— The Hudson - Three Centuries of History, Romance and Invention • Wallace Bruce
... the impression of being exquisitely lovely, was she remarkable, but rather for that receptive attitude that made her an inspired listener. In me, who had known her for but a little while, she awakened my deepest and drowsiest ambition, the desire to express in pictures the light and the shade of the London I knew. With her I could feel the power, and the glory, and the fear, and the terror of the city as I never did at other times. It was not alone that she was ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... wonder whether it were returned. Zuleika's behaviour during dinner... But that was how so many young women had behaved. It was no sign of disinterested love. It might mean merely... Yet no! Surely, looking into her eyes, he had seen there a radiance finer than could have been lit by common ambition. Love, none other, must have lit in those purple depths the torches whose clear flames had leapt out to him. She loved him. She, the beautiful, the wonderful, had not tried to conceal her love for him. ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... had been commanded to his mother's chamber so soon as he had come out from his converse with the Squire. There befell an anxious interview, Mistress Fitzooth arguing for and against the Squire's project in a breath. Robin was perplexed indeed: his ambition was fired by the Squire's rosy pictures of what he, as a true Montfichet, must adhere to without fail upon assuming the ...
— Robin Hood • Paul Creswick
... for some moments, many new thoughts revolving in her head. How many country boys were there who taught themselves in this way? How many, among the clever girls at Mademoiselle Haut-ton's school, had this sort of ambition to learn, of pride in learning? Had she, the best scholar in her class, had it? She had always known her lessons, because they were easy for her to learn, because she had a quick eye and ear, and a good memory. She could not help learning, Mademoiselle ...
— Queen Hildegarde • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
... industry, sobriety, and, when engaged in your Majesty's service, have been distinguished for an exact obedience to discipline, and a faithful discharge of duty; and we hope, if called forth to action in one combined corps, it will be their highest ambition to merit a favorable report to your Majesty from their superior officers. At the same time, it is our most ardent prayer to Almighty God, that the eyes of our deluded fellow-subjects in America may soon be opened, to see whether ...
— An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch Highlanders in America • J. P. MacLean
... between the House of Representatives and their constituents. Duty, gratitude, interest, ambition itself, are the chords by which they will be bound to fidelity and sympathy with the great mass of the people. It is possible that these may all be insufficient to control the caprice and wickedness of man. But are they not all that ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... the first time you have been on a pony;" for Mark held up one leg, which the man took in his hand and gave him a hoist; and the boy making a spring at the same time dropped on the pony's glossy back, but like vaulting ambition overleaped himself and rolled over on the other side, startling the pony into making off. But the dealer made a snatch at the halter, just in time, and it ...
— Dead Man's Land - Being the Voyage to Zimbambangwe of certain and uncertain • George Manville Fenn
... perhaps they ought to be, but they have put the flattering notion into their heads that he had made fiasco, which is not true; as, in fact, he has so far been rather successful, and has convinced people in England that he is a mild and good-natured man, himself and his Empire, without any ambition. Now it is high time I should finish my immense scrawl, for which I claim your forgiveness, remaining ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Vol 2 (of 3), 1844-1853 • Queen Victoria
... her pouring the balm of her sympathy into the bleeding wounds of Hungary, that, regenerated by the faithful spirit of America, she may rise once more independent and free, a breakwater to the flood of Russian ambition, which oppresses Europe and ...
— Select Speeches of Kossuth • Kossuth
... Yes, if she wished to make a marriage of ambition she could not do better. All Washington was laughing at him; but she felt she had penetrated beneath the surface that excited their mirth—had seen qualities that would carry him wherever he wished to go—wherever she, with her grandmother's own ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... forward, all a-tingle with a new ambition and a firm resolve, she came face to face with her reflection in one of the polished glass doors of the bookcase. The intent eagerness of its gaze seemed to challenge her. She lifted her head as if the victory were already won, and confronted the ...
— The Little Colonel: Maid of Honor • Annie Fellows Johnston
... against Kief, where Yaropolk, who seems to have had more ambition than courage, shut himself up within the walls. These walls were strong, the people were faithful, and Kief might long have defied its assailant had not treachery dwelt within. Vladimir had secretly bought over a villain named Blude, one of Yaropolk's trusted councillors, who filled his master's ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 8 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... engineer, whose chief ambition is to become an artist, but who has no friends with whom to realize his hopes, has a way opened to him to try his powers, and, of ...
— The Peace of Roaring River • George van Schaick
... mastery of the lessons of experience. For a day or so all went well in the inner consciousness of Nehemiah Yerby. The letter had satisfied his restless craving for some action toward the consummation of his ambition, and he had not the foresight to realize how soon the necessity of following it up would supervene. He first grew uneasy lest his letter had not reached its destination; then, when the illimitable field of speculation ...
— The Moonshiners At Hoho-Hebee Falls - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... an immodest slave could not dance with decency." [57] Such might have been the reflections of a puritan had he entered a modern dancing-academy. We may be permitted to question the immorality of the exhibition thus displayed, but there can be no doubt as to the social ambition which it reveals—an ambition which would be perpetuated throughout the whole of the life of the boy with the castanets, which would lead him to set a high value on the polish of everything he called his own—a polish determined by certain ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... disciples: "Except your righteousness exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye can in no wise enter the kingdom of heaven." Their righteousness proceeded all from the love of self and the world. Their ambition culminated in the honor, respectability, credit and wealth such a life procured for them; and on this account the Lord Jesus said of them: "Verily, they have ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline
... indeed it was disclosed later that he intended to study forestry because he loved the country and the open air, and spent all his vacations camping out and taking long walking trips. But there was nothing of the gypsy in him. He was full of energy and ambition and infused such a wholesome vigor into whatever he did that the young people felt a new enthusiasm in ...
— Grace Harlowe's Plebe Year at High School - The Merry Doings of the Oakdale Freshmen Girls • Jessie Graham Flower
... nearly in the centre of the island, and upon the road from Port Louis to Port Bourbon. It was here that the man lamented by the good and well-informed of all nations, whom science illumined, and humanity, joined to an honest ambition, conducted to the haunts of remote savages, in this spot he once dwelt, perhaps little known to the world, but happy; when he became celebrated he had ceased to exist. Monsieur Airolles promised me ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... elsewhere. There the rebel loss had not been one-tenth as great as our own. Notwithstanding our frequent repulses, and despite the fact that our road was continually blocked by an army behind powerful defenses, our march had been straight on toward the goal of our ambition, ...
— Three Years in the Sixth Corps • George T. Stevens
... C. Elliot wrote in the Hoshangabad Settlement Report: "Garden crops are considered as a kind of fancy agriculture and the true cultivator, the Kisan, looks on them with contempt as little peddling matters; what stirs his ambition is a fine large wheat-field eighty or a hundred acres in extent, as flat as a billiard-table and as black as a Gond." Similarly Mr. Low [160] states that in Balaghat the Panwars, the principal agricultural caste, look down on the Marars as growers of petty crops like sama and ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... had dropped in his mind the seed of that passion, which, in a man of fifty, can take the place of all others,—ambition. Thus he came to Paris with the secret desire and the hope of becoming a leader in politics, and making his mark in some ...
— The Clique of Gold • Emile Gaboriau
... to have had at first a bit more ambition stirring within him than his ancestors. He started in the lumber business for himself in a small way but with the first call for troops sold out and enlisted. He did not distinguish himself but he fought in more battles than many a man who came out a captain. He didn't quit until ...
— One Way Out - A Middle-class New-Englander Emigrates to America • William Carleton
... we know as literary ambition, I believe myself to have been as destitute at that time as any girl who ever put pen to paper. I was absorbed in thought and feeling as far removed from the usual class of emotions or motives which move men and women to write, as Wachusett ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 6, No. 5, April, 1896 • Various
... things which happened and were found at S. DOMINGO, I may not omit to let the world know one very notable marke and token, of the vnsatiable ambition of the Spanish king & his nation, vvich was found in the kings house, vvherein the chiefe Gouernor of that Citie and countrey is appointed alwaies to lodge, vvhich vvas this: In the comming to the hall or other romes of this house, you must first ascend vp by a faire large ...
— A Svmmarie and Trve Discovrse of Sir Frances Drakes VVest Indian Voyage • Richard Field
... lives were built on an ardent faith fashioned of stoicism, religion, and noble ambition. All their endeavor was directed towards the one end: Olivier's success. Antoinette accepted every kind of work, every humiliation that was offered her: she went as a governess to houses where she was treated almost as a servant: she had to take her pupils ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... forty-six, should have worked himself, solely by his own talents and integrity, to the head of one of the largest publishing-houses of the country. But it was not merely by strength and tenacity of purpose, and by clearness of judgment, that Mr. Phillips was distinguished. He had also a generous ambition, and aims which transcended the sphere of self and the limits of merely commercial success. Showing, as he did, a rare courage (and that of the best kind, for it was a courage based upon experience and qualified by discretion) in beginning the publication of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... of merit, not only each is stimulated to do his very utmost, but the influence is felt in every place of liberal education throughout the country. It becomes with every schoolmaster an object of ambition and an avenue to success to have furnished pupils who have gained a high place in these competitions, and there is hardly any other mode in which the state can do so much to raise the quality of educational ...
— Considerations on Representative Government • John Stuart Mill
... 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 ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... with the surly Dignity of a Briton. I could almost hear this fellow grimace; and he was never tired of bemoaning his bygone happy state as a Hairdresser's Journeyman in the Rue St. Honore at Paris. "Why did a Vain Ambition prompt me to journey from Marseilles to Constantinople?" cried he about Fifty times a day. "Why did I rely on the protection of my Wife's Cousin, who gave me recommendations to his brother, Cook-in-Chief to the Ambassador of France at the court ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 3 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... an additional motive for the treatment you received from me. My personal projects and cares had hitherto prevented me from reading Lodi's manuscript; a slight inspection, however, was sufficient to prove that the work was profound and eloquent. My ambition has panted, with equal avidity, after the reputation of literature and opulence. To claim the authorship of this work was too harmless and specious a stratagem not to be readily suggested. I meant to translate it into English, and to enlarge it ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... garrison of Manila, and levy a thousand Indians from the two provinces to help them and transport the supplies, they would subdue those savages without difficulty, if the man who does it is prudent and has ambition to make the enterprise a success. This is not the place to discuss the other measures and affairs in detail; but if your Majesty should be pleased to have this done, I offer to give information of all that is necessary to provide, and to solve any doubts ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 • Emma Helen Blair
... are exceedingly anxious to be independent. Their highest ambition is to hold a farm. So strong is this principle in them, that they will, without a single penny of capital, or any visible means to rely on, without consideration or forethought, come forward and offer ...
— Phelim O'toole's Courtship and Other Stories • William Carleton
... at sea. Unrest grappled with him blindly, urging him nowhere, seeming merely to wrestle with him aimlessly and maliciously... What was it all about, anyhow? Why was he mixed up in the struggle? Why could not he be left alone in quiet? If he had owned a definite purpose, a definite ambition, a describable desire, it would have been different, but he had none. He was merely bitterly uncomfortable without the slightest notion what event or course of action could ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... was true in a far more wonderful way of the friendship of Jesus. We have only to recall the story of his three years with his disciples. They gave him at the best a very feeble return for his great love for them. They were inconstant, weak, foolish, untrustful. They showed personal ambition, striving for first places, even at the Last Supper. They displayed jealousy, envy, narrowness, ingratitude, unbelief, cowardice. As these unlovely things appeared in the men Jesus had chosen, his friendship did not slacken ...
— Personal Friendships of Jesus • J. R. Miller
... pressure of humanity, or wearying politics of the market-place. He found himself in one of those moods that visit all men sometimes, when the world appears, after all, a homely and a genial place; when the simplest things are the best; when no excitement or ambition or furious zeal can compare with the gentle happiness of a tired body that is in the act of refreshment, or of a driven mind that is finding its relaxation. At least, he said to himself, he would enjoy this night and the next day and ...
— Come Rack! Come Rope! • Robert Hugh Benson
... has not yet been done. And, besides, I don't take much interest in the pole, and have no ambition to conquer it. In any case it is ...
— An Antarctic Mystery • Jules Verne
... treated more as equals by the officers, and that they were trotted out to show off the merits of the institution, while we young blockheads were kept in the background. This, I think, did much toward inspiring me with ambition. My progress at first was slow, having to learn how to use the appliances. My fingers must be trained, my memory disciplined and ...
— The World As I Have Found It - Sequel to Incidents in the Life of a Blind Girl • Mary L. Day Arms
... ties; of a wonderfully vivid and varied experience acquired in many lands and through many phases of activity; and, even in his blackest hour, of a noble love retained and richly repaid. No trace will be found of a nature soured or warped by balked ambition, nor any resentful withdrawal from ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... discord, and fury in its name: the fear of the gods, far from having a salutary influence over their own morals, far from submitting them to a wholesome discipline, frequently do nothing more than increase their avarice, augment their ambition, inflate their pride, extend their covetousness, render them obstinately stubborn, and harden their hearts. We may see them unceasingly occupied in giving birth to the most lasting animosities, by their unintelligible disputes. We see them hostilely wrestling with the sovereign ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 2 • Baron D'Holbach
... himself to the making and operating of the simple apparatus therein depicted, will be usefully and happily employed. He will, furthermore, be developing into a useful citizen. For this reason we recommend it as an excellent gift for all boys with energy, application, and ambition." ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Life-Savers • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... Musidora's smile; - Go then! and taste a yet unfelt distress, The fear that guards the captivating press; Whose maddening region should ye once explore, No refuge yields my tongueless mansion more. But thus ye'll grieve, Ambition's plumage stript, "Ah, would to Heaven, we'd died in manuscript!" Your unsoil'd page each yawning wit shall flee, - For few will read, and none admire like me. - Its place, where spiders silent bards enrobe, Squeezed betwixt Cibber's Odes and Blackmore's Job; Where froth and mud, that ...
— Inebriety and the Candidate • George Crabbe
... "Well, Polly hasn't much ambition. Nice contralto voice, not much cultivated. Rather a contralto little woman, don't you know? The kind that somehow warms the cockles of your heart. Lots of character, too. There's nothing weak ...
— A Venetian June • Anna Fuller
... the ambition for river life had remained with him—and now there seemed some possibility of realizing these ambitions. He first wanted to be a cabin boy; then his ideal was to be a deck hand, because of his splendid conspicuousness as he stood on ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... from her earliest days she had been able to twist her father round her little finger. He sent her to a smart boarding school, and no money was spared in order to give her pleasure. It was the dream of Farmer King, and Nancy's dearest ambition also, that she should be turned into a lady. But, alas and alack! Miss Nancy could not overcome the stout yeoman blood in her veins. She was no aristocrat, and nothing could make her one. She was just a hearty, healthy happy-minded English girl; vulgar in voice and loud in speech, but fairly ...
— Girls of the Forest • L. T. Meade
... enough in this visit, to quicken all their desires for riches, and to set them in motion towards the antarctic circle. With such a people, distance and difficulties are of no account; a man who has been cradling oats, to-day, in his own retired fields, where one would think ambition and the love of change could never penetrate, being ready to quit home at twenty-four hours' notice, assuming the marlingspike as he lays aside the fork, and setting forth for the uttermost confines of the earth, with as little hesitation as another ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper
... age of thirty, with a modest competence, and married his cousin, Theresa Furse, of Halsdon, near Torrington, to whom he had long been attached. He lived a quiet, upright, peaceable life at Torrington, content with little, and discharging simple, kindly, neighbourly duties, alike removed from ambition and indolence. William Cory had always a deep love of his old home, a strong sense of local sanctities and tender associations. "I hope you will always feel," his mother used to say, "wherever you live, ...
— Ionica • William Cory (AKA William Johnson)
... would on ambition wait, And laying waste the world be counted great, But one good-natured act more praises gain, Than armies overthrown, and thousands slain; No more would brutal rage disturb our peace, But envy, hatred, war, and discord cease; Our own and others' good each hour employ, And ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... 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 ...
— A Treatise on the Six-Nation Indians • James Bovell Mackenzie
... business of Clock making has never been written. I am the oldest man living who has had much to do with it, and am best able to give its history. To-day my name is seen on millions of these useful articles in every part of the civilized globe, the result of early ambition and untiring perseverance. It was in fact the "pride of my life." Time-keepers have been known for centuries in the old world; but I will not dwell on that. It is enough for the American people to know that their country supplies the whole world with its most useful time-keepers, (as well as ...
— History of the American Clock Business for the Past Sixty Years, - and Life of Chauncey Jerome • Chauncey Jerome
... was more esteemed than intellectual gifts, there was sometimes a tendency to consider them as rather above than below the human race. The lion, the eagle, and the stag possessed qualities to which it was man's highest ambition to aspire, and, in some cases, he even went so far as to worship them. In the ancient civilisation of Egypt we find the most numerous traces of this culture and feeling—gods, kings, rulers, and disembodied spirits being represented entirely or partially ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... although he might have been all that his mother described him—the tenderest and most loving of husbands, a gentleman, and estimable in all respects—his father must have been wanting in energy and ambition, deficient in the qualities that would fit him to fight his own battle, and content to gain a mere competence, instead of struggling hard to make his way up the ladder. He had accounted for his going up as interpreter, with Hicks Pasha, by the fact that his work with the contractor ...
— With Kitchener in the Soudan - A Story of Atbara and Omdurman • G. A. Henty
... informant. Mr. Wiley overtook Harry sauntering in the Forest, and asked him how he did, adding that he regretted to hear from his mother that there was a doubt of his being able to continue his law-studies in London, and reminding him of his own unheeded warnings against his ambition to rise ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... that she interested him and that he was a man not readily interested in ordinary human beings. He had seen too many and judged too shrewdly and too swiftly to be easily held for very long. She had no ambition to hold him, and had never in her life consciously striven to attract or retain any man, but she was woman enough to find his obvious pleasure in her society agreeable. She thought that her genuine adoration of the garden ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... and he rides several with a singularly intimate and finished method, he hands the umbrella to a reverential bystander; when the trial is over the umbrella is reassumed. If anything were needed to accent its artless domesticity, it would be the group of boys, horse copers in ambition, possibly in achievement, who sit in a row under a fence, with their teeth grimly clenched upon clay pipes, their eyes screwed up in perpetual and ungenial observation. Their conversation is telegraphic, smileless, esoteric, and punctuated with expectoration. If Phaeton and the horses of the ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... depredations when the church at Fourvieres was sacked, and the shrine desecrated with that ingenious impiety which is characteristic of the French; but it still retained somewhat of its former heavy grandeur. The chateau was much too large for the needs, tastes, or ambition of its present owner, who was too wise, if even he had been of an ostentatious disposition, not to have sedulously resisted its promptings. The jealousy of the nation of brothers was easily excited, and ...
— A Stable for Nightmares - or Weird Tales • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... fault is past. But O what form of prayer Can serve my turn? Forgive me my foul murder?— That cannot be; since I am still possessed Of those effects for which I did the murder,— My crown, my own ambition, and my queen. May one be pardoned and retain the offence? In the corrupted currents of this world, Offence's gilded hand may shove by justice, And oft 'tis seen the wicked prize itself Buys out the law; but 'tis not so above. There is ...
— The Poets' Lincoln - Tributes in Verse to the Martyred President • Various
... supposed to talk like this in the first blush of passion, before he has won Julia, before he even knows that she loves him. Is that natural? Or is it not rather Shakespeare's confession of what two wasted years of married life in Stratford had done for him? It was ambition—desire of fame and new love—that drove the tired and discontented Shakespeare from ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... Middle Ages was by way of monarchy; but strong monarchy was contrary to the traditions of Germania, and in Norway, a country of great extent and great difficulties of communication, the ambition of Harold Fairhair was resisted by numbers of chieftains who had their own local following and their own family dignity to maintain, in their firths and dales. Those men found Norway intolerable through the tyranny of King Harold, ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... than either; and as the knowledge of arms tends so apparently to the good and quiet of the world—and particularly that branch of it which we have practised together in our bowling-green, has no object but to shorten the strides of Ambition, and intrench the lives and fortunes of the few, from the plunderings of the many—whenever that drum beats in our ears, I trust, corporal, we shall neither of us want so much humanity and fellow-feeling, as to face ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... contrast to costly plate and rich food in a house where a gold Croesus with diamond eyes and necklace should have been on the mantelpiece as the household god, with the thought that even war is a good thing if it centers ambition on objects other than individual gain. Without knowing it, Joffre, Castelnau, Foch, Petain, Nivelle and others were the richest ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... now and then at the downright fashion in which the thirteen-year-old Catie made known her matrimonial plans. Mrs. Brenton liked Catie well enough, but not too well. She could have dreamed of another sort of wife for her boy, for Catie's crudeness occasionally irritated her, Catie's self-centred ambition, her intervals of density sometimes came upon Mrs. Brenton's nerves. However, girls were scarce upon the horizon of the Brentons. Catie was not perfect; but, at least, she might be infinitely worse. And Scott would be sure to need a practical wife, to ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... ferocity and her cunning, we have a hideous picture of corrupted womanhood. We cannot but wonder whether, in after days, remorse ever did its merciful work upon Herodias. She urged Herod to his ruin at last by her ambition, which sought for him the title of king, and, with one redeeming touch of faithfulness, went with him into dreary exile in Gaul. Perhaps there, among strangers, and surrounded by the wreck of her projects, and when the hot fire of passion had died down, she may have remembered ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... 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
... scrutinizer into the rights of charity cannot here start one objection that a little consideration will not supersede. No votaries of pleasure, ruined by extravagance and luxury, forfeit pity in censure by imploring your assistance; no slaves of idleness, no dupes of ambition, invite reproof for neglected concerns in soliciting your liberality. The objects of this petition are reduced, indeed, from affluence to penury, but the change has been wrought through the exaltation of their souls, not through ...
— Brief Reflections relative to the Emigrant French Clergy (1793) • Frances Burney
... well: Is he prepared to sacrifice the nation on the shrine of his own ambition? Ambition, although it may cost us our lives, can never lead to martyrdom. A martyr is made ...
— Three Years' War • Christiaan Rudolf de Wet
... a young man in his prime, set out with two companions for the sunny shores of Australia. He had served his time as a carpenter, and his employers had cause to regret the loss of a fine workman when Whyte became fired with the ambition of travel at the time when the glorious accounts of the richness of Australia attracted the energetic youth of Britain. Arriving in Melbourne in '52, when the gold fever was at its height, he and his companions lost no time in finding their way to the fields in search of the ...
— Australia Revenged • Boomerang
... of low life, which he had found by long experience was the best state in the world, the most suited to human happiness, not exposed to the miseries and hardships, the labour and sufferings of the mechanic part of mankind, and not embarrassed with the pride, luxury, ambition, and envy of the upper part of mankind, he told me, I might judge of the happiness of this state by this one thing, viz. that this was the state of life which all other people envied; that kings have frequently lamented the miserable consequences of being born to great things, and ...
— The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1808) • Daniel Defoe
... five years for that sum, which can't be dear.' Fervent though this appeal was, it left the great publisher in Fleet Street very cold. Mr. Taylor replied, with some sarcasm, that he could not see what put the ambition into Clare's head to become a 'landed proprietor.' Very likely, Mr. Taylor thought it would raise the cost price of the verses, if they were to be manufactured at a 'Poet's Hall.' Therefore, while declining to advance the two hundred ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin
... my path. What motives for resentment has Aemilianus against me, even assuming him to be correctly informed when he accuses me of magic? No least word of mine has ever injured him in such a way as to give him the appearance of pursuing a just revenge. It is certainly no lofty ambition that prompts him to accuse me, ambition such as fired Marcus Antonius to accuse Cnaeus Carbo, Caius Mucius to accuse Aulus Albucius, Publius Sulpicius to accuse Cnaeus Norbanus, Caius Furius to accuse Manius Aquilius, Caius Curio ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... than one man of letters—judicious, judicial, disinterested, patient, happy, temperate, delighted. The colonial days, with the 'painful' divines who brought the parish into the wilderness; the experimental period of ambition and attempts at a literature that should be young as the soil and much younger than the race; the civil-war years, with a literature that matched the self-conscious and inexpert heroism of the army;—none of these ...
— The Rhythm of Life • Alice Meynell
... "I might have more successfully applied to the grand opera in New York; but my ambition was ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... my poor, yielding parent for your own needs, you now wish to employ his innocent child in the same manner. Is there no limit to your ambition?" ...
— The Silver Horde • Rex Beach
... hesitate to say, since both are so captivating; but this I know, that, considered as descriptive sketches or personal episodes, each of the twenty-two chapters is a separate delight. For the ready writer material is not wanting in the Near East; a fine theme is provided in the national ambition of the Greek, who cannot forget his glorious past and be content with his less conspicuous present. As for the love interest, who should supply this better than the Turk? In these days of cosmopolitanism there are bound to be romantic complications ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, July 1, 1914 • Various
... 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 ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... time, indeed, the queen was, as she had long been, playing a double game with the Netherlands. Holland and Zeeland were begging the prince to assume absolute power. The Prince of Orange, who had no ambition whatever for himself, was endeavouring to negotiate with either England or France to take the Estates under their protection. Elizabeth, while jealous of France, was unwilling to incur the expenditure in men and still more money that would be necessary were she to assume protection ...
— By Pike and Dyke: A Tale of the Rise of the Dutch Republic • G.A. Henty
... for the possession of his pictures, took the second place in his mind; and, in their stead, sprang up the new resolution that he would win independently, with his own brush, no matter at what sacrifice of pride and ambition, the means of surrounding his sick wife with all those luxuries and refinements which his own little income did not enable him to obtain, and which he shrank with instinctive delicacy from accepting ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... disappointment when, after toiling through so many miles of savage life, all the time emaciated by divers sicknesses and weakened by great privations of food and rest, I found, on approaching the zenith of my ambition, the Great Lake in question nothing but mist and glare before my eyes. From the summit of the eastern horn the lovely Tanganyika Lake could be seen in all its glory by everybody but myself. The fact was, that fevers and the influence of a vertical sun had reduced my system so, that inflammation, ...
— What Led To The Discovery of the Source Of The Nile • John Hanning Speke
... better than the people knew, had to be excited. Roses are not a substitute for bread,to the uncultured mind,' he added smiling; 'and men that are ground in the dust of poverty need first of all to get ambition enough to raise their heads and wash their faces. The very first thing I did, was to make the pay sufficient for decent living. That gave them from the beginning some confidence in ...
— The Gold of Chickaree • Susan Warner
... forfeited lands would be the salvation of that pitiable creature, the victim of the 8 per cent. grind. The homeless wanderer can get shade and shelter from the burning sun and driving storm, and with these is content, for he has long since resigned ambition to those who are willing to continue the hopeless struggle; but the man, on the 8 per cent. treadmill, who has not yet acknowledged defeat, has no way of escape from the glare of the master's eye, except by self-murder or the pauper's grave. There is nothing that ...
— Confiscation, An Outline • William Greenwood
... is a story about the fight between man and nature. It is told by Miss SHEILA KAYE-SMITH with considerable power and a quickening touch of symbolism that lifts it into romance. The ambition of Reuben Backfield was to enlarge the Sussex farm that he had inherited from his easy-going father till its bounds should include a certain coveted moor. The book shows how his entire life was spent in the achievement of this end; how for it he sacrificed ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 15, 1916 • Various
... Ambition is the most conservative of influences upon a radical mind. No sooner had Tertius Marrineal formulated his political hopes than there were manifested in the conduct of The Patriot strange symptoms of a hankering ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... "laborious nothings," to compare them with useful and elegant inventions, and to show that vain curiosities can be but the wonder and amusement of a moment. Children who begin with trifling inventions, may be led from these to general principles; and with their knowledge, their ambition will necessarily increase. It cannot be expected that the most enlarged plan of education could early give an intimate acquaintance with all the sciences; but with their leading principles, their general history, their present state, and their immediate desiderata,[58] young people may, and ...
— Practical Education, Volume II • Maria Edgeworth
... mounted the 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
... conditions. Standing behind this policy, and constantly reinforcing it, are the serried ranks of the new democracy which education and the great increase in material prosperity have been so rapidly creating. The soaring ambition which springs from the sea lends to the attacks developed by such a people the aspect of piracies; and it is but natural in such circumstances that for Chinese Japan should not only have the aspect of a sea-monster but that their country should appear as hapless Andromeda bound to ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... the Academy of Sciences, which took place on the 6th of January, 1879, satisfied the ambition of his life. He was for two years President of the Central Commission of the Geographical Society; he was also President of the Geological Society. He was not long to enjoy the noble position acquired by ...
— Scientific American Suppl. No. 299 • Various
... carrying trade throughout the Caribbean Sea; and that this now comparatively deserted nook of the ocean will become, like the Red Sea, a great thoroughfare of shipping, and will attract, as never before in our day, the interest and ambition of maritime nations. Every position in that sea will have enhanced commercial and military value, and the canal itself will become a strategic centre of the most vital importance. Like the Canadian Pacific Railroad, it will be a link between the two oceans; but, unlike it, ...
— The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future • A. T. Mahan
... king, and so far as or whenever he might require it, his chief confidante, she warned her also against ever wishing to rule him. But Mercy was a statesman above every thing, and, feeling secure of being able to guide the queen, he desired to instill into her mind an ambition to govern the king. On one most important question she proved wholly unable to do so, since the decision taken was not even in accordance with the judgment or inclination of Louis himself; but he allowed himself to be persuaded by two of his ministers to adopt a course against which Joseph ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge
... her looks of 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, ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... uncle at Thorley, who—a childless man himself—gave him delightful books, and showed him others still more delightful, who talked to him on the subjects which chiefly attracted him, and was the first to fire his brain with an ambition to write and be famous. Aunt Bessy was tolerated for her husband's sake, but it was Uncle Samuel who drew the lad to Thorley. In due time Alan began to teach in his father's school, and before he was twenty-one had taken his degree at London University. Then his mother died, and shortly afterwards ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... of the home life must be seriously disturbed. Consideration for the one who is ill, and effort to alleviate the suffering, should take the place of every other thought and ambition. It is necessary, of course, that the routine of living should be sufficiently preserved for the health of the others not to be affected, but matters of comfort and well-being for all take ...
— The Etiquette of To-day • Edith B. Ordway
... share of it as a preparation. I thought of the amazing prize I was about to be instrumental in securing for my friend—for the lady had really thirty thousand pounds—and I could not conceal my triumph at such a prospect of success in comparison with the meaner object of ambition. They all seemed to envy poor Fitzgerald. I struggled with my secret for some time—but my pride and the claret together got the better of me, and I called out, "Fifty pounds on it, then, that before ten to-morrow morning, I'll make a better hit of it than you—and the mess ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 2 • Charles James Lever
... horrors. But trusting that we had to do with those who possessed some feelings of humanity and some love of their country, we willingly accepted the magistracy, thinking that by our gentleness we should overcome your ambition. But we perceive from experience that the more humble our behavior, the more concessions we make, the prouder you become, and the more exorbitant are your demands. And though we speak thus, it is not in order to offend, but to amend you. ...
— History Of Florence And Of The Affairs Of Italy - From The Earliest Times To The Death Of Lorenzo The Magnificent • Niccolo Machiavelli
... villager by choice. A village might appear fair as Paradise to the casual eye; but closer inspection always revealed the serpent of discontent among the flowers. Where every outward object breathed of rest, there was universal restlessness among the people. The common ambition of all the younger generation was to get to London by almost any means, and in almost any capacity. There was not a household that had not children or relatives in London. The young ploughman went to London as a carter or ostler; the milkmaid as a servant. The village carpenter was invariably a middle-aged ...
— The Quest of the Simple Life • William J. Dawson
... distinguished son; an interesting but puzzling notice in a life of Lucan speaks of him as famous at Rome "from his pursuit of the quiet life." This may imply refusal of some great office when his elder brother was practically ruler of the Empire; whatever stirrings of ambition he suppressed broke out with accumulated force in his son. Lucan's short life was one of feverish activity. At twenty-one he made his first public sensation by the recitation, in the theatre of Pompeius, of a panegyric on Nero, who had already murdered his own ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... Greystock, who in the latter years of his life was much perplexed by the possession of a daughter. The admiral was a man who liked whist, wine,—and wickedness in general we may perhaps say, and whose ambition it was to live every day of his life up to the end of it. People say that he succeeded, and that the whist, wine, and wickedness were there, at the side even of his dying bed. He had no particular fortune, and yet his daughter, ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... Vice-President coincidently with Jefferson's election as President; but his ambition was far from satisfied. He was determined to make another bid for the higher place, and as a preliminary he put himself forward as candidate for the Governorship of New York State. It was as favourable ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton
... either from persons whose good word was in my opinion no praise, or from others who evidently meant to be civil to me, or to the family, by speaking well of my brother. I believe him to have much pride, some ambition, a high sense of fashionable honour; that he spurns at threats, disdains reproof, and that he does not want generosity, or those accomplishments which would make him pass with the world for a man whose alliance ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... seeks the tranquil scenes of early days, Leaving the dazzling haunts of vain ambition; And now, he longs to meet a kindly gaze And hear ...
— Life and Literature - Over two thousand extracts from ancient and modern writers, - and classified in alphabetical order • J. Purver Richardson
... surely a woman of blood. He had known enough of beautiful women, who played the parts of men, to know that on the far side of their beauty was neither mercy nor love nor compassion, that their lovers were many steps to ambition, and that they were venomous. So his smile died away, and his blue eyes glittered cold and dark, and this the Bird Daughter ...
— Nuala O'Malley • H. Bedford-Jones
... work all my life and some public work. I got the same ambition to work as I used to have but I can't hold it. I start out but ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Arkansas Narratives Part 3 • Works Projects Administration
... is to be a young lady at large! Eh, Vera? Only I don't quite see how that is to be managed, even if it is quite a worthy ambition. But we will talk that over another time. Do you see how pretty those sails ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... On the other hand, my grandmother's two sisters, elderly spinsters who shared her nobility of character but lacked her intelligence, declared that they could not conceive what pleasure their brother-in-law could find in talking about such trifles. They were ladies of lofty ambition, who for that reason were incapable of taking the least interest in what might be called the 'pinchbeck' things of life, even when they had an historic value, or, generally speaking, in anything that was not ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... and many a successor, so rapt in the admiration of his own good fortune, and so blinded by his folly, that, while physically he saw to the right and to the left as well as ever, his mental vision was completely obscured in the clouds of ambition. ...
— The Red Rover • James Fenimore Cooper
... The former had given him person, parts, and constitution, in all which he was superior to almost every other man. The latter had given him rank in life, and riches, both in a very eminent degree. Whom then should this happy man envy? Here, lest ambition should mislead the reader to search the palaces of the great, we will direct him at once to Gray's-inn-lane; where, in a miserable bed, in a miserable room, he will see a miserable broken lieutenant, in a miserable ...
— Amelia (Complete) • Henry Fielding
... 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 gods, ...
— The Primadonna • F. Marion Crawford
... from the stimulus of imagination. What among us makes for the immensity of emotion, is the great weight of accumulated emotional tradition stored up in literature and art, almost entirely wanting in the camps of the aboriginals. There the two greatest themes of modern drama, love and ambition, are modified, the one by the more or less communal nature of tribal labor, the other by the plain fact that in the simple, open-air life of the Indian the physical stress of sex is actually much less ...
— The Arrow-Maker - A Drama in Three Acts • Mary Austin
... season of their predominance passes away; and the disappointment which sinks the deepest and lasts the longest of all the disappointments which are fanciful rather than material, is that which reaches a man through his ambition and his self-love,—principles in his nature which outlast the heyday of the heart's supremacy, and which endure to man's latest years. The bitter and the enduring disappointment to most human beings is that which makes them feel, in one way or other, that ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... rapturously. "You captured my years to come, my hope, ambition, love—all. All centred in your heart and eyes, sweet Nell, from the hour ...
— Mistress Nell - A Merry Tale of a Merry Time • George C. Hazelton, Jr.
... by me. I respect an ambition that prompts you to go out and hunt an engagement, but, believe me, yours is not the best way. There are agents and agents. Some would do right by you, and perhaps some would be unscrupulous. I am not going on record in this ...
— The Art of Stage Dancing - The Story of a Beautiful and Profitable Profession • Ned Wayburn
... man say, "I will run as far as God has any ground," and that is our ambition. We are to travel north and keep on going till we strike the Arctic,—straight up through Canada. Most writers who traverse The Dominion enter it at the Eastern portal and travel west by the C.P.R., ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... should be content with his condition, And shut his ears to counsels of ambition, More faithless than the wreck-strown sea, and which Doth thousands beggar where it makes one rich,— Inspires the hope of wealth, in glorious forms, And blasts the ...
— A Hundred Fables of La Fontaine • Jean de La Fontaine
... though only of a very mediocre description. As soon as I had acquired a very imperfect knowledge of fingering I begged to be allowed to play overtures in the form of duets, always keeping Weber as the goal of my ambition. When at length I had got so far as to be able to play the overture to Freischutz myself, though in a very faulty manner, I felt the object of my study had been attained, and I had no inclination to devote any further attention ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... practice. What a refutation of the theories of those who hold that cunning and trickery are unavoidable some time in the course of a long and successful mercantile career lies in the story of this man, who, beginning life penniless, filled with a burning ambition to be rich and famous, never swerved from the straight path of integrity, and by the exercise of only the highest traits of his nature more than realized his boyish dreams! Ponder it well, young man, and learn from it that honesty is indeed the best ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... the astonishing number of bottles of Vichy water which she consumed. Francoise was avaricious only for my aunt; had she had control over my aunt's fortune (which would have more than satisfied her highest ambition) she would have guarded it from the assaults of strangers with a maternal ferocity. She would, however, have seen no great harm in what my aunt, whom she knew to be incurably generous, allowed herself to give away, had she given only to those who were already rich. Perhaps she felt that such persons, ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... the services of Pitt as War Minister during the first phases of the conflict we must remember that the ambition of his life was to be a Peace Minister. Amidst the exhaustion caused by the American War, he deemed it essential to ensure the continuous growth of savings and investments which, under favourable ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... prospect into literature. The work is gruelling and at the same time monotonous. Constant change of scene and absence of home ties are (I speak subject to correction) demoralizing; after the coveted chief's certificate is won, ambition has little further to look forward to. A small and stuffy cabin in the belly of the ship is not an inviting study. The works of Miss Corelli and Messrs. Haig and Haig are the only diversions of most of the ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... enthusiastic effort, with the common aim of bringing the class to master more fully the matter of the lesson. There should be no feeling that the teacher has one aim and the class another aim, or that their interests are in any way antagonistic; no feeling that the teacher's highest ambition is to catch pupils in errors, and the pupil's highest achievement to avoid being caught. There should be no attempt at bluffing, or covering up errors ...
— The Recitation • George Herbert Betts
... the next week witnessed the sallying forth of Harvey What's-His-Name, moved to energy by a long dormant and mournfully acquired ambition. ...
— What's-His-Name • George Barr McCutcheon
... who had thought his record of adventure and triumph so full that it could hold no more, realized that there is always for ambition a ...
— Camp and Trail - A Story of the Maine Woods • Isabel Hornibrook
... ill nature, and the ambition of many clergymen has sharpened my spirits perhaps too much against them; so I warn my reader to take all that I say on these heads with some grains of allowance.—Swift. I will ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. X. • Jonathan Swift
... eloquent platform orators in New York. Less electrical than John Van Buren, he was more persuasive; less witty, he was more logical; less sarcastic, he was more candid; less denunciatory of antagonists, he was more convincing to opponents. These two remarkable men had little in common except lofty ambition and rare mental and social gifts. Their salient characteristics were widely dissimilar. Seymour was conciliatory, and cultivated peace. Van Buren was aggressive, and coveted war."—H.B. Stanton, ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... given by Mr. R—, he made a call through the press. Mr. R—responded in a proper and courteous manner, acknowledging the due respect to which Mr. C—'s private character was entitled; thus increasing the ambition of the board generally, who, with the expectation of Mr. R—making a like acknowledgment to them as a body, (not excepting their honorable head,) made a demand in joint-officio. This being duly signalized ...
— Manuel Pereira • F. C. Adams
... caught a diamond-sparkle from beneath the thick folds of lace which cover Helen's bosom; but, on the other hand, we fear his arm has been round the gypsy's graceful waist, and that she has learnt the secret of the private chamber. Is demure Manetho a flirt, or do his affections and his ambition run counter to each other? Helen would bring him the riches of this world,—but what should a clergyman care for such vanities?—while Salome, to our thinking, is far the prettier, livelier, and more attractive woman of the two. Brother ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... or of using the myth at least for her own restoration to her husband. For what seemed more probable than that the fate foretold lay with these very children? They were marvellously brave, and the Bulikans cowards, in abject terror of animals! If she could rouse in the Little Ones the ambition of taking the city, then in the confusion of the attack, she would escape from the little army, reach her house unrecognised, and there lying hidden, ...
— Lilith • George MacDonald
... Count Ulrich's ambition was boundless, his passions unbridled; but the hostile judgments passed by Aeneas Sylvius and other contemporaries upon him ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... not been able to sell their plantations at any fair price, if they desired to do so. The white men with capital who went to the South from the North after the war seemed to acquire the true Southern ambition to be large land owners and planters; and when the ante-bellum owners lost their plantations the land usually went in bulk to the city factors who had made them advances from year to year, and had taken mortgages on their crops and broad ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... cast in the wilderness, and the land of his birth needed his arm and experience. The desire of rising above his present situation never disturbed the tranquillity of Pathfinder; nor had he ever known an ambitious thought, as ambition usually betrays itself, until he became acquainted with Mabel. Since then, indeed, distrust of himself, reverence for her, and the wish to place her in a situation above that which he then filled, had caused ...
— The Pathfinder - The Inland Sea • James Fenimore Cooper
... hold fast for'ard there, an' wait for her to lift on the wave. You'll make a good landin' if you're smart; right on the port-hand side!" the captain called excitedly; and I, standing ready with high ambition, seized my chance and leaped over to ...
— The Country of the Pointed Firs • Sarah Orne Jewett
... it were, quickening into life. From them the proposition to us appeared respectful and friendly; from us to them it could scarcely have been made without exposing ourselves to suspicions of purposes of ambition, if not of domination, more suited to rouse resistance and excite distrust than to conciliate favor and friendship. The first and paramount principle upon which it was deemed wise and just to lay the corner stone of all our future relations with them was ...
— A Compilation of Messages and Letters of the Presidents - 2nd section (of 3) of Volume 2: John Quincy Adams • Editor: James D. Richardson
... had friends to stimulate it;—summer friends, alas! too many of them proved to be. His character was without reproach; his disposition easy and genial; his mind of that happy middle order which always commands respect, while it feels none of the restless ambition and impotent longing for public recognition that usually attend the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... Decree of Congress of publishing cruel and groundless assertions or Libels without a hearing when actually fighting for Liberty is intolerable in a free Country and has a direct tendency to check the ambition, and even disaffect those Men by whose wisdom Valour and perseverance America is to be made free, not to mention the dangerous president such trials may afford. Your Petitioner therefore implores Congress to reconsider their determination on the impeachment of Genl. Arnold, as there ...
— Colonel John Brown, of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, the Brave Accuser of Benedict Arnold • Archibald Murray Howe
... for two years, saving her pay. Her ambition was to have her sons study in a seminary and graduate as priests. And now came the return of Manuel, the elder son, to upset her ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja
... of sixteen years, I fear it must be admitted that I was unnaturally parsimonious, and a good deal of what schoolboys used to call a smug and a swatter. It really was curious, because I do not recall that I had any ambition to be actually rich. Mr. Smiles and his Self Help would have left me cold if I had read that classic. I indulged no Whittingtonian dreams of knighthood, mayoral chains, vast commercial or financial operations, or anything of that sort. The things that interested me were ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... high-priest of poetry; it only enhances it, that with such unmitigated evil for his material, he should build up his most goodly structure. But in historically canonizing on earth the condemned below, and lifting up and lauding the illustrious damned, we do but make examples of wickedness; and call upon ambition to do some great iniquity, and be sure ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... the goslin appeared, and Billy fed it from his own scanty fare, taking it with him when he was herding. By Christmas it had become a large fat goose, and its owner was offered half-a-crown for it. But he had a higher ambition for it than this, and he was not to be tempted from his purpose by the prospect of present gain. The following spring he set her on twelve eggs, which she had herself produced, and by and by twelve goslins appeared. Our hero was now obliged to exercise some ingenuity ...
— Tales for Young and Old • Various
... sometimes. Metaphorically, he was one of those men who disdained the use of stirrups for mounting a horse, and liked to vault into the saddle, which he could do with ease and grace, but sometimes he would, in his efforts to show off, over-leap himself—vaulting ambition fashion—and come down heavily ...
— A Life's Eclipse • George Manville Fenn
... The career and character of Curtis is typical at once of the strength and the weakness of the group. As a young man Curtis had intended to enter a business career, but finding it unsuited to his tastes he had abandoned his ambition, spent some years in European travel and then devoted himself to literary work, first on Harper's Magazine and afterwards, for many years, as editor of Harper's Weekly. He had early interested himself ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley
... breath. Enthusiasm for his friend and interest in Ralph's ambition to get an education had carried him beyond the limit of his usual brief remarks. Such a long speech was a surprise to himself as well as to his auditors. They listened attentively, and not a few among them caught the spirit ...
— The Boy Scouts of the Geological Survey • Robert Shaler
... go farther, who was this George Stephenson? A collier-boy,—his father fireman to an old pumping-engine which drained a Northumbrian coal-mine,—his highest ambition of boyhood to be "taken on" to have something to do about the mine. And he was taken on to pick over the coal, and finally to groom the engine, which he did with the utmost care and veneration, learning how to keep it well and doctor it when ill. He took wonderfully to steam-engines, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... for myself. Don't hate me, Dennie. Elinor looks upon me as her future husband. I have promised to provide for her with the comforts denied her by her father, and I have lived in the ambition of holding that Harvard chair—Oh, it is all a hopeless tangle. I could never go to Victor Burleigh now. He would not believe that I had been ignorant of his claim all this time. He was never wrapped up ...
— A Master's Degree • Margaret Hill McCarter
... by incredulous pioneers who had come "der Horn aroundt," as the illustrious Hans Breitmann phrases it; but in its rarer and more marvelous manifestations, the mirage is still a rock upon which many a reputation for veracity is wrecked remediless. With an ambition intrepidly to brave this disaster, and possibly share it with the hundreds of devoted souls whose disregard of the injunction never to tell an incredible truth has branded them as hardy and impenitent liars, I purpose ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... Bavaria. An alliance, too, between the Empress of Russia and the Republic of Venice, seems to have had him in view, as he had meditated some exchange of territory with that republic. This desertion of the powers heretofore thought friendly to him, seems to leave no issue for his ambition, but on the side of Turkey. His demarkation with that country is still unsettled. His difference with the Dutch is certainly agreed. The articles are not yet made public; perhaps not quite adjusted. Upon the whole, we may count on another year's peace ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... and evidently a thoroughly steady and reliable man, for I understand that he had served under Captain Matthews for several years. No one of us ever saw him touch wine, spirits, or drink of any description; yet only four days after he had attained to what we may consider the summit of his ambition, by securing the command of this fine ship, he was missing. Williams, our present skipper, offers us the exceedingly improbable explanation that the poor fellow jumped out of his cabin window, and was drowned, ...
— A Middy in Command - A Tale of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... December, 1901. The day I never shall forget in my life's history, and in the history of the Anglo-Boer War. The sun rose in splendour that morning, casting his rays upon me—a man in the prime of life, full of energy and martial ambition. At eventide the scene was changed! Weary, wounded and bleeding on a lonely plain, shrouded in darkness, I lay, no more the man of the day, or of bygone days, but weak ...
— In the Shadow of Death • P. H. Kritzinger and R. D. McDonald
... was a baronet, of a very ancient and wealthy family; and his mother was a woman of some talent and more ambition. She made her house one of the most recherchee in London. Seldom seen at large assemblies, she was eagerly sought after in the well winnowed soirees of the elect. Her wealth, great as it was, seemed the least prominent ingredient of her establishment. There was ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... vulgar—they were only common. They did and said vulgar things because they had not the sensitive vitality to shrink from them. They had not been well taught—that is roused to LIVE: in the family was not a breath of aspiration. There was plenty of ambition, that is, aspiration turned hell-ward. They thought themselves as far from vulgar as any lady in any land, being in this vulgar—that they despised the people they called vulgar, yet thought much of themselves for not being vulgar. There was little in them the world ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... this, and my lips parted to give utterance to the ejaculation, "Oh!" as I felt I was grasping the reason of my messmate's conduct. Could it be ambition? ...
— Sail Ho! - A Boy at Sea • George Manville Fenn
... these schemes. For a long time he had wished for repose. Often he had feared that his wife's ambition would lead them too far. But now, since she stopped of her own accord, it ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... been brought up each with his one faint, polite little hunger, his one ambition, his one pale downy desire in life, looking forward day by day, year by year, to the fine frenzy, to the fierce joy of ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... what 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
... Greeks, both in Greece and Turkey, since the freedom of Greece from Turkish rule; and money, time, and labor could be more profitably expended on other equally needy populations in that part of the world. The old ambition for the recovery of Constantinople and the restoration of the Eastern Empire, had been quickened into life; and the unity of the Greek Church as a means to this end, was craftily kept before the minds of the people by Russian agency, and had a wonderful influence, ...
— History Of The Missions Of The American Board Of Commissioners For Foreign Missions To The Oriental Churches, Volume I. • Rufus Anderson
... beyond his means is often actuated by a passion as intense, and we fear too, as criminal, as is the gamester, who in the haunts of fashionable dissipation, stakes beyond his fortune. But it is not the injury alone, which the ambition that precipitates him into such deep and desperate hazards, brings upon his own character, neither is it the ruin that the splendid bankruptcy in which it terminates brings upon his ...
— Usury - A Scriptural, Ethical and Economic View • Calvin Elliott
... was accosted, late that afternoon, by two young women whose presence on board he had noticed with a certain amount of disapproval. They were obviously of the chorus-girl type, a fact which they seemed to lack the ambition to conceal. After several would-be ingratiating giggles, they finally pulled up in front of him whilst he was ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... praising anything involves the statement that the speaker could live with that thing alone, there lies the germ and essence of asceticism. When William Morris, for example, says that 'love is enough,' it is obvious that he asserts in those words that art, science, politics, ambition, money, houses, carriages, concerts, gloves, walking-sticks, door-knockers, railway-stations, cathedrals and any other things one may choose to tabulate are unnecessary. ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... the fancy and delights the eye. Such times are when the heart has been long solitary, and when some interval of idleness and rest succeeds to periods of harsher and more turbulent excitement. It was precisely such a period in the life of Vaudemont. Although his ambition had been for many years his dream, and his sword his mistress, yet naturally affectionate, and susceptible of strong emotion, he had often repined at his lonely lot. By degrees the boy's fantasy and reverence ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Hidatsa dies, his shade lingers four nights around the camp or village in which he died, and then goes to the lodge of his departed kindred in the "village of the dead." When he has arrived there he is rewarded for his valor, self-denial, and ambition on earth by receiving the same regard in the one place as in the other, for there as here the brave man is honored and the coward despised. Some say that the ghosts of those that commit suicide occupy a separate part of the village, but that their condition ...
— A Further Contribution to the Study of the Mortuary Customs of the North American Indians • H.C. Yarrow
... and the respect accorded him in the community. Sutton suggested to the young man that he should come to New York presently, there to learn the details of manufacture, with the prospect of return, later on, to manage the business in the mountains. Naturally, the project was splendid to Zeke's ambition. His only fear had been lest his departure be delayed by lack of money, for pride would not let him confess his extremity to Sutton. There must be some cash in hand for his mother's support, until he should be able ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... said to have his peculiar ambition. Whether it be true or not, I can say, for one, that I have no other so great as that of being truly esteemed of my fellow men, by rendering myself worthy of their esteem. How far I shall succeed in gratifying this ambition, is yet to be developed. I am young and unknown to many of you. I was born ...
— Lincoln's Inaugurals, Addresses and Letters (Selections) • Abraham Lincoln
... as early as 1886 and discovered he had an aptitude for its grueling demands on several minor expeditions to Greenland and the arctic ice cap. In 1893 he became determined to reach the North Pole, and he spent the next 15 years in unsuccessful attempts to achieve his ambition. In 1908 Peary left on another polar expedition; after a hazardous trip, he reached his goal on April 6, 1909. His victory seemed a hollow one because of the claim of a rival explorer that was finally ...
— Presentation Pieces in the Museum of History and Technology • Margaret Brown Klapthor
... he was my superior in observation and deduction. If the art of the detective began and ended in reasoning from an arm-chair, my brother would be the greatest criminal agent that ever lived. But he has no ambition and no energy. He will not even go out of his way to verify his own solutions, and would rather be considered wrong than take the trouble to prove himself right. Again and again I have taken a problem to him, and have received an explanation which has afterwards proved to be the ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... died in the assured hope that he would be the leader of a heavenly choir. It does not seem far fetched to believe that his ambition is gratified. At this very hour he may be a director of those harpers that ...
— Love's Final Victory • Horatio
... grand-daughter; be specially careful, and amid the many interests, intrigues, and temptations that will surround the young queen, distrust particularly the affection of Bertrand d'Artois, the beauty of Louis of Tarentum; and the ambition of Charles ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... proprietor, farming a few acres, living parsimoniously, marrying early, and producing a large family, who must either clear the soils of the inclement north, or become factory operatives in the States. They are a simple, kindly, pious, and cheerful folk, with few wants, little energy, and no ambition; ignorant and credulous, Catholic by religion, and devoted to the priest, who is their oracle, friend, and guide in all the relations of life. Such are the people—a complete contrast with Americans—who began, some twelve years ago, to emigrate to the mills ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 481, March 21, 1885 • Various
... on politics were not so much fantastic as those of an idealist. He dreamed of a monarchy which should submit to the control of righteousness; he mourned over the pride and extravagance of the court; he constantly pleaded against wars of ambition; he desired that a powerful and Christian nobility should mediate between the crown and the people; he conceived a system of decentralisation which should give the whole nation an interest in public affairs; in his ecclesiastical views he was ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... satisfaction of that prodigious crowd you have been entertaining there. All members of our society that have had the happiness of being acquainted with you, desire to be kindly remembered; and a continuation of your valuable friendship shall for ever be the utmost ambition my lord of your most sincerely ...
— Baron d'Holbach - A Study of Eighteenth Century Radicalism in France • Max Pearson Cushing
... avocations, which chain me, like a slave, to the galley-oar of politics and power, have kept us separate. You do not know me. I am willing to hazard the experiment of that knowledge. To devote my life to you, to make you partaker of my ambition, my career, to raise you to the highest eminence in the matronage of England, to transfer pride from myself to you, to love and to honour and to prize you,—all this will be my boast; and all this will win love for me at last. Fear not, Evelyn,—fear ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... making such an excursion a most precarious adventure. This is what appears on the surface. Hawaiian poets, however, did not indulge in landscape-painting for its own sake; as a rule, they had some ulterior end in view, and that end was the portrayal of some primal human passion, ambition, hate, jealousy, love, especially love. Guided by this principle, one asks what uncouth or romantic love adventure this wild mountain climb symbolizes. All the Hawaiians whom the author has consulted on this question deny any hidden meaning ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... messenger of trouble, an' we know it. An' so, when we see this one, we tried ever' way to coax him to let us take it out, but he wouldn't, of co'se. He never will, an' somehow the Lord seems to give 'em ambition to work their own ...
— Sonny, A Christmas Guest • Ruth McEnery Stuart
... care therefore, and mine, to elevate the minds of our children, and exalt their courage, to accelerate and animate their industry and activity, to excite in them an habitual contempt of meanness, abhorrence of injustice and inhumanity, and an ambition to excel in every capacity, faculty, and virtue. If we suffer their minds to grovel and creep in infancy, they will grovel and creep all ...
— Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams - Sixth President of the Unied States • William H. Seward
... he was so indifferent to his own fame (for virtue and ambition, unfortunately, seldom lodge together), and since he lived in an age when others were too dull or too jealous to witness to his character, I have it marvellously at heart that his memory, at all events, to which I owe the good offices of a friend, should enjoy the recompense ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... be serious, this young man is very anxious to be a master, instead of a man. What do you say? Will you help his ambition, ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... submission to the will of the chieftains, very much in the condition of slaves, being compelled to toil in the cultivation of their masters' lands, or to go out as soldiers to fight in their quarrels, without receiving any compensation. The great ambition of every noble and knight was to have as many of these retainers as possible under his command. The only limit to the number which each chieftain could assemble was his power of feeding them. For in those days men could be more easily found to fight than to engage in any other employment, and ...
— Margaret of Anjou - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... has an awful squinting. It squints toward monarchy;... your president may easily become a king.... If your American chief be a man of ambition and ability how easy it is for him to render himself absolute. We shall have a king. The army will ...
— The Fathers of the Constitution - Volume 13 in The Chronicles Of America Series • Max Farrand
... walking," Alice said. "Too much altogether, over at his new plant. But there isn't any stopping him." She laughed and shook her head. "When a man gets an ambition to be a multi-millionaire his family don't appear to have much weight with him. He'll walk all he wants to, ...
— Alice Adams • Booth Tarkington
... rarity; but who has not some small ambition, none the less keen for being narrow—keener, perhaps? Mrs. Bazalgette burned to be great by dress; Mr. Fountain, member of a sex with higher aims, aspired to ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... our makeshift camp on the spit, it being impossible for him to undertake a boat voyage to Sierra Leone with so many wounded on his hands. It is true that he might have sent away the launch, with an officer and half a dozen hands, to Sierra Leone to summon assistance; but his ambition was not to be so easily satisfied. We had done splendid service in capturing two factories and destroying one of them—the second would also, of course, be destroyed when we abandoned it—but the loss of the Psyche was a very serious matter, which must be atoned for in some shape ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood
... benefactor, while at home he is an egoist and a tyrant. The individual dispositions of recent phylogeny are combined in every way with education, customs, habit and social position to produce results which are often paradoxical, and the factors of which are ambition, vanity, temper, etc. Recent phylogeny is reflected also in many of the irradiations of the sexual appetite of which we have spoken in Chapter V. Audacity, jealousy, sexual braggardism, hypocrisy, prudery, pornography, ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... the throne of Poland, kept Denmark in submission, held the hosts of Russia at bay, humbled Austria, and made his name, ere yet he was twenty, at once a wonder and a terror in all the courts of Europe. How, at last, his ambition getting the better of his discretion, he thought to be a modern Alexander, to make Europe Protestant, subdue Rome, and carry his conquering eagles into Egypt and Turkey and Persia. How, by unwise measures and foolhardy endeavors, he lost all the fruits of his hundred victories and ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... resolution. No longer will he darken his father's door. He becomes a muleteer and accomplishes the success of which we have spoken. His first beau ideal was to own the best horse in Baalbek; and to be able to ride to the camp of the Arabs and be mistaken for one of them, was his first great ambition. Which he realises sooner than he thought he would. For thrift, grit and perseverance, are a few of the rough grains in his character. But no sooner he is possessed of his ideal than he begins to loosen his hold upon it. He sold his mare to the tourist, ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... try to answer your sarcastic reference to the grocery store. It is a good investment and an honorable business, fully as honorable as cheating the prison or the gallows of what is due them; but the summit of my ambition is by no means reached. I am young yet and have plenty of time to study the ground before expanding my career, but I will tell you, privately and confidentially, that my friends have asked me to ...
— Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks - A Picture of New England Home Life • Charles Felton Pidgin
... with her since the passing of it, in which she had felt that she had crossed it in vain, that she had thrown away the splendid security of the other bank without obtaining the perilous object of her ambition,—though there had been moments in which she had almost regretted her own courage and noble action, still, having passed the river, there was nothing for her but to go on to Rome. She was not going to be stopped now by the want of a house in which to hide herself for a few weeks. ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... Fluette was not only a collector of gems, but his collection was and still is one of the most famous in the world. Perhaps Page was willing to sacrifice a fortune merely to thwart a rival's ambition; perhaps he was only satisfying some old grudge about which the world knew nothing—it was all speculation, and speculation of a most unsatisfying sort, too. He got the stone, at any rate; and here we have another instance of the ...
— The Paternoster Ruby • Charles Edmonds Walk
... in the rooms of a young Cavendish, who had been at school with Theo. But that was all, and it mortified the girls, who were not prepared to find themselves so much at a disadvantage. This was the only notice that was taken of his downfall at home, where there was no academical ambition, and where everybody was quite satisfied so long as he kept his health and did not get into any scrape. Perhaps this made him feel it all the more, that his disappointment and disenchantment were entirely shut up in his own bosom, and that he could not confide to any one the terrible disillusionment ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... too much occupied with her own revolution, she had to wait. And when Henry IV., the first Lancastrian, was king, he needed both hands to hold his crown firmly on his head. But when the young Henry V. came to the throne, with the energy and ambition of youth, the time was ripe for the recovery of ...
— A Short History of France • Mary Platt Parmele
... having anything to do with her. Mrs. Macanany was distinctly ugly. Mrs. Phillips was neither ugly nor pretty nor anything else. She was a poor thin draggled woman, who tried to be clean but who had long ago given up in despair any attempt at looking natty and had now no ambition for herself but to have something "decent" to go out in. Once it was her ambition also to have a "I room." She had scraped and saved and pared in dull times for this "room" and when once Joe had a long run of steady work she had ...
— The Workingman's Paradise - An Australian Labour Novel • John Miller
... Zulus. On the death of Dingiswayo, Tshaka was chosen its chief by the army, and the tribes that had obeyed Dingiswayo were thenceforward known under the name of Zulus. Tshaka, who united to his intellectual gifts a boundless ambition and a ruthless will, further improved the military system of his master, and armed his soldiers with a new weapon, a short, broad-bladed spear, fit for stabbing at close quarters, instead of the old light javelin which had been theretofore used. He formed ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce
... nature that was not cold and unresponsive, yet many who would gladly have won the heiress for her own sake found her as elusive as only a woman of perfect tact and self-possession can be. She had no vulgar ambition to count her victims who had committed themselves in words. With her keen intuition and abundant experience she recognized the first glance that was warmer than mere friendliness, and this was all the committal she wished for. She loved the admiration ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... near the friends he lov'd, the man behold, In truth unshaken, and in virtue bold, Whose patriot zeal and uncorrupted mind Dared to assert the freedom of mankind; And, whilst extending desolation far, Ambition spread the hateful flames of war Fearless of blame, and eloquent to save, 'Twas he—'twas Fox—the warning counsel gave, Midst jarring conflicts stemm'd the tide of blood, And to the menac'd world a sea-mark stood! Oh! had his voice in mercy's cause ...
— Beaux and Belles of England • Mary Robinson
... into the lists where rank and wealth and genius had arrayed themselves, and competition fled from him as from the glance of destiny. He knew no motive but interest—he acknowledged no criterion but success—he worshiped no God but ambition, and, with an Eastern devotion, he knelt at the shrine of ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... Calderon, laughing scornfully. "Did true ambition ever know fear? Have we not the old Castilian proverb, that tells us 'He who has climbed the first step to power has left terror a thousand leagues behind'? No, it is not fear that renders me irresolute; it is wisdom, and some touch, some remnant of human nature—philosophers ...
— Calderon The Courtier - A Tale • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... result too much bile is mixed with the food to be absorbed—the blood becomes tainted with biliary secretions showing itself in a yellow skin, dizziness of the head, dull, sleepy condition and lack of ambition. This overtaxing of the organ results in what is known as acute congestion, the symptoms of which are tenderness to touch and a feeling of painful tension on right side just above the edge of the ribs, slight jaundice, furred tongue, ...
— The Royal Road to Health • Chas. A. Tyrrell
... 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
... escaped him of what was going on. His ferocious egoism, his unbounded ambition was even now calculating what advantages to himself might accrue from this idea of the new religion and of the National fete, what personal aggrandisement he ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... 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 ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... North and South. North was familiar ground to them—one voyage to England, another to Iceland, another to Scandinavia; there was nothing impossible about that. Southward was another matter; but even here there was no ambition to discover the limit of the world. It is an error continually made by the biographers of Columbus that the purpose of Prince Henry's explorations down the coast of Africa was to find a sea road to the West Indies by way of the East. It was nothing of the kind. There was no idea in ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... scenes of early days, Leaving the dazzling haunts of vain ambition; And now, he longs to meet a kindly gaze And hear a ...
— Life and Literature - Over two thousand extracts from ancient and modern writers, - and classified in alphabetical order • J. Purver Richardson
... fear, think me disinterested," said Dantes seriously. "I should blush, indeed, at praise so little deserved. You know all my early history. I suffered—I was wronged—I was revenged. But was I happy? I sought happiness. All men do so, even the most miserable. Some seek happiness in gratified ambition, some in gratified avarice, some in gratified vanity, and some in the gratification of a dominant lust for pleasure or for power. I ...
— Edmond Dantes • Edmund Flagg
... which happened. But we do not see that Pompey's party succeeded; we know, on the contrary, that it fell, and Caesar was victorious. But the God of the infernal regions, that is to say, the devil, found it very good for him, since it sent him so many unhappy victims of revenge and ambition.[628] ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... Northumberland was the first who experienced her savage resentment. Within a month after his confinement in the Tower, he was condemned, and brought to the scaffold, to suffer as a traitor. From his various crimes, resulting out of a sordid and inordinate ambition, he died unpitied ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... hand, was plunged into a fervor of delight at the news. For to win the Shepherds' Trophy was the goal of his ambition. David was now less than nothing to the lonely little man, Red Wull everything to him. And to have that name handed down to posterity, gallantly holding its place among those of the most famous sheep-dogs of all ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant
... West Indies and her stations in India, together with the valuable right of fishery in her former American possessions, put before her the possibility and the inducement to restore her shipping, her commerce, and her navy, and thus tended to recall her from the path of continental ambition which had been so fatal to her interests, and in the same proportion favorable to the unprecedented growth of England's power upon the ocean. The opposition, and indeed some of the ministry, also thought that so commanding and important a position as Havana was ...
— The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783 • A. T. Mahan
... maker of pictures by photography are the same as those of the painter and the especial ambition of the former's art is to be painter-like, separations have been thought unnecessary in the address of the text. It is the best wish of the author that photography, following painting in her essential principles as she does, may prove herself a well met companion along art's ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore
... 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 ...
— Studies in Occultism; A Series of Reprints from the Writings of H. P. Blavatsky • H. P. Blavatsky
... best of spirits the two boys started off, Bob handling the reins like a veteran driver. Bob loved horses, and his one ambition in life was to handle a "spanking team," ...
— The Bobbsey Twins - Or, Merry Days Indoors and Out • Laura Lee Hope
... what I can to carry out his wish; and it may amuse you, years after, to see this little scrap of paper and to read what I write. I must begin by testifying that you yourself took no interest whatever in the introduction, and in the most proper spirit displayed a single-minded ambition to get back to play, and this I thought an excellent and admirable point in your character. You were also (I use the past tense, with a view to the time when you shall read, rather than to that when I am writing) a very pretty ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... before, it is almost impossible to make our light-minded times comprehend the earnestness with which those people lived. It was, in the beginning, no vulgar nor mercenary ambition that made her seek the Doctor as a husband for her daughter. He was poor, and she had had offers from richer men. He was often unpopular; but he of all the world was the man she most revered, the man she believed in with the most implicit faith, the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... considerably impaired his fortune by an inordinate love of horse-racing. Having been from his infancy accustomed to no other conversation than about winning and losing money, he had acquired the idea that, to bet successfully, was the summit of all human ambition. He had been almost brought up in the stable, and therefore had imbibed the greatest interest about horses; not from any real affection for that noble animal, but merely because he considered them as engines for the winning of money. ...
— The History of Sandford and Merton • Thomas Day
... of failure from all high things. What did his life amount to anyway, that he should count one thing more trivial than another? He loved his wife and children dearly, but he remembered a time when his ambition had not thought of being satisfied with the daily grind for a living and a dreamless sleep ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. VI., No. 6, May, 1896 • Various
... varies according to my emotions. Madame Potocka was charming at the French ambassador's ball; the prince royal danced with her twice, and no one could avoid remarking her. But, in truth, what more can I desire? My whole ambition was to see him, and to be noticed by him during a few moments; my wishes have been gratified, and yet I long for more, still more.... The heart has, then, infinite faculties ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... qualifications for membership. It was necessary that the paper should be signed by his mother as evidence of her consent to his enlistment since he was not yet twenty-one years of age. She signed it readily enough, for she quite approved of his ambition, and she took a motherly pride in the evidences of patriotism that he was ...
— The Flag • Homer Greene
... pinching his chin, "an I am neither hanged nor murdered you shall one day find me a worshipful magistrate, Martin, Justice o' the Peace and quorum—custos rotulorum and the rest on't, there my ambition lies. As for you, Martin, Lord Wendover, there is your enemy, ha?—bloody vengeance and murder and ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... just married and, I believe, well married my daughter to an artist of powerful inspiration and will. I had for her but one ambition—namely, that she should love and be loved; my wish is realised. The future is in the hand of God, but I believe in the duration of ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... there were certain factors in the present position of the Army which seemed to him to indicate its future growth and continuity. Speaking impersonally, he said that the present General had become an important man not by his own choice or through the workings of ambition, but by the will of Providence. He had acquired a certain standing, a great hold over his community, and an influence which helped to concentrate and keep together forces that had grown to be worldwide in their character. It was natural, therefore, that people should ...
— Regeneration • H. Rider Haggard
... not Agnes Fitz-Henry. It is true that on the preceding night her better feelings had been touched, her heart had relented, and she had banished, as she thought, the evil counsellors, ambition, envy, jealousy, and distrust, from ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol. XXXII No. 2. February 1848 • Various
... effect on Walter's disposition, and created in him a secret ambition of making a figure in the same way. He became more than ordinarily attentive whenever stories of that sort were told, and sought every opportunity of putting his fellow sailors upon such relations. Men of that profession have usually ...
— Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining or other offences • Arthur L. Hayward
... here everything is expected to symbolise its moral relations. The irrational in the human has something about it altogether repulsive and terrible, as we see in the maniac, the miser, the drunkard, or the ape. A barbaric civilisation, built on blind impulse and ambition, should fear to awaken a deeper detestation than could ever be aroused by those more beautiful tyrannies, chivalrous or religious, against which ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... thought, Cry Iced!—that's sure going to be one tyrannosaur of a prologue. And how you'll ever shift back to being Lady Mack beats me. Greta, if this is what it takes to do just a bit part, you'd better give up your secret ambition of playing walk-ons some ...
— No Great Magic • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... His ambition is to see the road connecting his district with Podgorica finished, which would bring the two towns within a six hours' drive of each other, instead of the present two days' very hard riding. The benefit to Kolasin is obvious. At present the vast beech forests, literally rotting, ...
— The Land of the Black Mountain - The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro • Reginald Wyon
... thing that 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. She had been a crusader herself during ...
— Richard I - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... official of his household, he remained in Rome, closely shut up in his palace, a spectacle to the world at large of ungovernable prejudice and foiled ambition. His cogitations, however, were very grateful, for he was working out in his intriguing brain a ready method for ridding himself, not alone of the two children, bars to his pretensions, but of the Grand Duke and Grand Duchess also! Ferdinando was determined to succeed ...
— The Tragedies of the Medici • Edgcumbe Staley
... her ambition had scope to work— Riches, they say, are a burden at best; Her onerous burden she did not shirk, But carried it all with commendable zest; Leaving her husband with nothing in life But to smoke, eat, drink, and obey his wife. She built a house with a double front-door, A marble house ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... inchoate coalescence of the kind. Its purpose is the safeguarding of the common peace and freedom, which is also the avowed purpose and justification of all those modern nations that have outlived the regime of dynastic ambition and so of enterprise in dominion for dominion's sake, and have passed into the neutral phase of nationality; or it should perhaps rather be said that such is the end of endeavour and the warrant of existence and power ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... prepared them for becoming nations. And while everywhere else parts were uniting and union was becoming organization—and neither geographical remoteness nor unwieldiness of number nor local interests and differences were untractable obstacles to that spirit of fusion which was at once the ambition of the few and the instinct of the many; and cities, even where most powerful, had become the centres of the attracting and joining forces, knots in the political network—while this was going on ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... done well for herself on the whole, she thought. Looking back over her life, over the ten years she had ruled at Ansdore, she saw success consistently rewarding hard work and high ambition. She saw, too, strange gaps—parts of the road which had grown dim in her memory, parts where probably there had been a turning, where she might have left this well-laid, direct and beaten highway for ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... shows the same typical inconsequence, the same freedom from the pedantry of logic. Eliza Doolittle's ambition is to become fitted for the functions of a young lady in a florist's shop. Henry Higgins, professor of phonetics, undertakes for a wager to teach her the manners and diction of a duchess—a smaller achievement, of course, in Mr. SHAW'S eyes, but ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 22, 1914 • Various
... beware how you indulge that dangerous element of character, ambition. Misdirected, it will be everlasting ruin to yourself, and perhaps to me also. Oh, my love, let nothing earthly excite it; let not the wish to be great fire it. Fix it on the Throne of the Eternal, and let it find ...
— Catherine Booth - A Sketch • Colonel Mildred Duff
... story of a young French 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 up a drama. From ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... Immediately a petition was brought forward, that I would play one game with the bailiff. He had heard much of the extraordinary skill of Englishmen in this noble game, and being a little of an amateur himself, it had long been his ambition to measure his strength with that of an Islander. Alas for my country! she had but a sorry champion to sustain her honour; for, if the truth must be spoken, though I get very much interested in chess after the game has fairly begun, I always sit down to it as Dr. Johnson says he did ...
— Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary, Visited in 1837. Vol. II • G. R. Gleig
... his, at once, proud and diffident spirit. As long as they confined themselves to blackening his moral and social character, so far from offending, their libels rather fell in with his own shadowy style of self-portraiture, and gratified the strange inverted ambition that possessed him. But the slighting opinion which they ventured to express of his genius,—seconded as it was by that inward dissatisfaction with his own powers, which they whose standard of excellence is highest ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... to his own camp, but soon returned, mounted on a beautiful horse, with a handsome saddle, bridle and lariat. I thought he was a magnificent looking man. I envied his appearance, and my ambition just then was to become as skillful a horseman as he was. He had rigged himself out in his best style in order to make a good impression on his uncle at Weston, whither father and I accompanied ...
— The Life of Hon. William F. Cody - Known as Buffalo Bill The Famous Hunter, Scout and Guide • William F. Cody
... in the Roman papacy made the office one to attract eager ambition. It has a political history of its own. At first the Christian populace that continued to dwell in Rome despite the repeated spoliations, elected, from among themselves, their own pope or bishop, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various
... all else, courteous and considerate. He is master of himself, and that at all points,—in his carriage, his temper, his aims, and his desires. Calm, quiet, and temperate, he will not allow himself to be hasty in judgment, or exorbitant in ambition; nor will he suffer himself to be overbearing or grasping, arrogant ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.
... spectacle of the followers of him "who had not where to lay his head" become, in the Middle Ages, the greatest owners of land in Europe; and we can see how temptations and abuses without number might and did often arise from this very fact. Ambition, the desire of wealth, the mere love of ease, led many to profess a religious life who had never passed through that transformation of will and understanding which is the essence of religion. The very purpose of religion ...
— Ireland, Historic and Picturesque • Charles Johnston
... not to admit that,—but why must holy and gracious works be thrust on her in particular? There were saints enough who liked such things; and people could get to heaven without,—if not with a very abundant entrance, still in a modest way,—and Elsie's ambition for position and treasure in the spiritual world was of a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... justice. Restlessly to seek among the ancient institutions for illustrations (rarely apposite) of the modern, is, indeed, to desert the character of a judge for that of an advocate, and to undertake the task of the historian with the ambition of the pamphleteer. Though designing this work not for colleges and cloisters, but for the general and miscellaneous public, it is nevertheless impossible to pass over in silence some matters which, if apparently trifling in themselves, have acquired dignity, ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... time I reluctantly acknowledged that I had seen enough of a sailor's life; that on trial it did not realize my expectations; that if not a decided humbug, it was amazingly like one. With my health the buoyancy of my spirits departed. Hope and ambition no longer urged me with irresistible power to go forth and visit foreign lands, and traverse unknown seas like a knight errant of old in quest of adventures. While shivering with ague, and thinking of my wretched fare on board ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... world stopped moving the moment you caught me. I don't suppose you want to make an end of all business and pleasure, and war and love, and misery and ambition and everything else, do you? Not a watch has ticked since you tied me up here ...
— American Fairy Tales • L. Frank Baum
... experience of society), the world soon discovered a true poet. He taught himself to write, by copying the letters of a printed book as he lay watching his flock on the hillside, and believed that he had reached the utmost pitch of his ambition when he first found that his artless rhymes could touch the heart of the ewe-milker who partook the shelter of his mantle during the passing storm. If "the shepherd" of Professor Wilson's "Noctes Ambrosianae" may be taken as a true portrait ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... wad staw them. They are ne'er a hair better than them that shamena to take upon themsells the persecuting name of bludethirsty tories. Self-seekers all of them, strivers after wealth, power, and worldly ambition, and forgetters alike of what has been dree'd and done by the mighty men who stood in the gap in the great day of wrath. Nae wonder they dread the accomplishment of what was spoken by the mouth of the worthy Mr Peden, (that precious servant ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... trunk. By the victim stand the bloody actors in the tragedy. Ladies and gentlemen! When I review the awful guilt of Marat and Robespierre, humbly do I give thanks that I have been kept from yielding, like them, to fierce ambition and lust of power, and that I can lay my head upon a peaceful pillow at my ...
— Five Hundred Dollars - First published in the "Century Magazine" • Heman White Chaplin
... ways it is a good ambition," Mrs. Halliday agreed, although she was puzzled, for she thought Bernard had an object he had not stated. He certainly was ...
— Partners of the Out-Trail • Harold Bindloss
... not only to have one of the biggest places, but the biggest place," said Paul. And although he did not mention the fact to Preston, he knew that his new-found ambition was associated with the meeting of Mr. Bolitho's daughter a ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking
... painted in 1618; the S. Sebastian at Munich, and the Christ Mocked, at Berlin. The familiar portrait of Cornelius van der Geest in the National Gallery, is one of his very earliest, probably before 1620. Again, on his first visit to Genoa, in 1621, on the advice of Rubens, his ambition was not to paint portraits, as on his second visit some years later, but to rival Rubens in the composition of great historical pieces. It was not until 1627, when he left behind him in Genoa the superb series of Balbi, Brignole-Sala, Cattaneo, and Lomellini ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... of the patriarchs, is the type of the political life, the model of the man of action and ambition. Taken alone, this is inferior to the life of the saint and philosopher, but mixed with the other it produces the perfect man, for the truly good man must take his part in public life. The story of Joseph, then, illustrates the full ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich
... left one thing out in your brilliant picture," replied Zillah. "All this may, indeed, be mine—but—mine on sufferance. If I can only get this as Lord Chetwynde's wife, I beg leave to decline it. Besides, I have no ambition to shine in society. Had you urged me to remember all that the Earl has done for me, and try to endure the son for the sake of the father, that might possibly have had weight. Had you shown me that my marriage was irrevocable, and that the best ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... everything was gone. She was the sun that melted the frozen torrents and set them boiling; with that sun removed, they froze again, and the army and all France became what they had been before, mere dead corpses—that and nothing more; incapable of thought, hope, ambition, or motion. ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc Volume 2 • Mark Twain
... ignorant, narrow, impulsive, strangers to self-control, critical, exasperating—what an undertaking God had to make a nation, the nation of history, about which centred His deep reaching, far-seeing love ambition for redeeming a world out of such stuff! Only paralleled by the church being built upon such men as these Galilean peasants! What victories these! What a God to do such things! Only a God could do either and both! What immense patience it required to shape this people. ...
— Quiet Talks on Prayer • S. D. (Samuel Dickey) Gordon
... towns, who are chained for eleven hours a day to a monotonous toil, with the eye of the overseer and the fear of dismissal spurring them on to an exertion which leaves them at the end of their day's work physical wrecks, with no ambition but to restore their wasted energies at the nearest public-house. Let them go with their talk of the blessings of civilisation to the pottery and chemical workers, whose systems are poisoned, whose sight is destroyed, where, ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... by his father, who was no longer able to contain himself. "And now I suppose he's got WHISKERS!" he burst forth. "There's an ambition for ...
— Seventeen - A Tale Of Youth And Summer Time And The Baxter Family Especially William • Booth Tarkington
... with honor to Robert. The conduct which his parents had ascribed to indifference really sprang from affection; he had neither obeyed the voice of ambition nor of avarice, nor even the nobler inspiration of inventive genius; his whole motive and single aim had been the happiness of Genevieve and Michael. The day for proving his gratitude had come, and he had returned ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... able to prevail upon Napoleon III to withdraw his troops. Without the support of French arms, the sham empire in Mexico collapsed like a house of cards and the unhappy Maximilian, the victim of French ambition and intrigue, met his death at the hands of a Mexican ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard
... mused. "No, naturally not; otherwise there might have been no sixth notch. The third or the fourth, even the second object of his favor might have blasted his fair young career as a wood-carver. Has he set any limit to his ambition? Is he going to make it an even hundred and ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... consequently into pecuniary difficulties, and the prostitute No-matter-who was now on the lookout for a dinner, and would have been only too happy to get it at some table-d'hote at Montmarte. Machin had had a return of ambition with regard to his poetry and his dramas, but then, his verses of former days had lost their freshness, and his youthful dramas appeared to him to be childish. He would have to write others, and, by Jove! he felt himself capably of doing it, for he had plenty of ideas and ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... Wood-god. Resolve and action are much more one with children than with women. To be the first who should carry to the father the important tidings, "Father, I have seen the Wood-god!" was a temptation too strong for Petrea's ambition and craving ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... truthfully the only answer he could give. His ambition, as far as this world's gear went, was quietly to earn his thirty or thirty-five shillings a week somewhere near home, and then, when his father died, have a cottage with his mother, paint and go out as he liked, and live happy ever after. That was his programme as ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... the hand of Mildred Jocelyn in everything he says and does," Susan remarked one day after a long fit of musing, "and yet I don't believe she cares a straw for him." Her intuition was correct; it was Roger's ambition to become such a man as Mildred must respect in spite of herself, and it was also true that she was not merely indifferent, but for the reasons already given—as far as she had ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... possible that there could be danger in hastening this change, is drawn from the observation of what takes place sometimes with regard to intellectual advancement. It is seen that some young men of great ambition, or remarkable love of knowledge, do really injure their health, and exhaust their minds, by an excess of early study. I always grieve over such cases exceedingly; not only for the individual's sake who is the sufferer, ...
— The Christian Life - Its Course, Its Hindrances, And Its Helps • Thomas Arnold
... "I suffered 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 ...
— Food and Health • Anonymous
... have been a Drake or a Frobisher. And to-day, even, if he'd followed the lead of his real ability, he'd have made a great financier, a captain of industry or a party boss. But, you see, he was brought up to think that book-education was the whole cheese. The only ambition he knows is to make good in the university world. How I hated that college atmosphere and its insistence on culture! That was what riled me most about it. As a general thing, I detest a professor. Can't help ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... are the only pictures of the unnatural in Shakspeare; the pure unnatural—and you will observe that Shakspeare has left their hideousness unsoftened or diversified by a single line of goodness or common human frailty. Whereas in Edmund, for whom passion, the sense of shame as a bastard, and ambition, offer some plausible excuses, Shakspeare has placed many redeeming traits. Edmund is what, under certain circumstances, any man of powerful intellect might be, if some other qualities and feelings were cut off. Hamlet is, inclusively, an Edmund, but different ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... there was, during the remaining months of winter, a passive endurance, mingled with some murmuring about the horrors caused by one man's ambition. The Emperor set his men an example of uncomplaining cheerfulness. His health continued as exuberant as it had been for the year past, and his activity, though no longer feverish, lost nothing of its intensity. Savary thought he outdid himself, accomplishing ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... 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 that experience ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... Vavasor, who would have her learn to look on the world and its affairs as they saw them who by long practice had disqualified themselves for seeing them in any other than the artificial light of fashion. Thus early did Vavasor conceive the ambition of having a hand in the worldly education of this young woman, such a hand that by his means she should come to shine as she deserved in the only circle in which he thought shining worth any one's while; his reward should be to see her so shine. Through his aunt he could gain her entrance ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... down the power of the great nobles of Western Europe, and so created absolute monarchies, appears to have had any just conception of the business in which he was engaged; but all were instruments in the hands of that mighty Power which overrules the ambition of individuals so that it shall promote ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... has been spent in vain—that my heart and mind are all for the nation—my experience, my life, my handjar. And when all is for her, why should I shrink to exercise on her behalf my riper judgment though the same should have to combat my own ambition? For ten centuries my race has not failed in its duty. Ages ago the men of that time trusted in the hands of my ancestors the Kingship, even as now you, their children, trust me. But to me it would be base to betray that trust, even by the smallest tittle. ...
— The Lady of the Shroud • Bram Stoker
... with the fall of paganism, the supernatural endowments they had, and retaining in some their ideality, they have hightened and fired the human nature they depict by the addition of wilder and more flaming passions, of love that consumes, and ambition, revenge, and hatred that destroy. Thus we again obtain consistent characters governed by human laws, but raised above the ordinary mass of men by different qualities from those which ennobled ideal creations among the ancients. Repose still constitutes greatness in some instances; but the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 2, August, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... very fact of Hugo's all-perfectness. Marrying upward, in the nature of the case, involved a large material one-sidedness: that was the object and the glory of it all. Yet now, in her romantic situation, there woke new emotions in Cally Heth, and she dimly perceived that her lifelong ambition carried, through its very advantages, a subtle disadvantage to the heart. Unsuspected tendernesses seemed to stir within her, and she was aware of the vague wish to bestow upon her lover, to make him a full gift for a gift. However, it was clear that Canning had everything. For the priceless ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... is a boundlessness in his nature at times trying to his patience. He looks at the map of the German Empire and painfully admits that the present frontiers and area are practically those bequeathed by the great William. To a divine-right monarch this is exasperating. The loftiest ambition of a sovereign is to have the national area expand under ...
— East of Suez - Ceylon, India, China and Japan • Frederic Courtland Penfield
... uprising had been put down by Cossack troops and the leaders were in hiding. Kerensky stepped into Lvov's position as Premier and continued to address himself to the task of bringing order out of the chaos. There could not have been any selfish ambition in this; no place-hunter would have attempted to bear the heavy burden Kerensky then assumed, especially with his knowledge of the seriousness of the situation. He knew that the undertaking was practically hopeless, yet he determined ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... that is not the case with her. She would trample upon a hecatomb of hearts to arrive at the object of her ambition. I think she might have made more than one brilliant marriage since she has been out—something like ten years, you know—only she was too cold, too obviously mercenary. I am very sorry ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... newest social 'beauty,'—with the magical expression, the glamour in the eyes of Lotys,—and perfection of feature becomes the rankest ugliness! Once in a hundred centuries a woman is born like Lotys, to drive men mad with desire for the unattainable—to fire them with such ambition as should make them emperors of the world, if they had but sufficient courage to snatch their thrones—and yet,—to fill them with such sick despair at their own incompetency and failure, as to turn them into mere ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... beauty and grace alone"—(It never is with a man, oh, no!)—"but her truth and frankness and friendliness. And then she doesn't care for money, and she isn't eaten up with ambition. She is absolutely untouched by the world yet. Then she is natural, yet reserved, with other men. She's not husband-hunting, like so many of them. And she's loving, not merely of those ...
— The Honorable Peter Stirling and What People Thought of Him • Paul Leicester Ford
... that excitement which accompanied the Revolution of France and the succeeding wars, the ambition of the nation, unexhausted by its fatal passion for military renown, was at the same time directed to some of the nobler and more permanent triumphs which mark the era of a people's greatness and which receive the applause of posterity long after their ...
— On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures • Charles Babbage
... off. Hudson found him in this condition, took pity upon him, and received him into his house in London. When it was determined that he should command this expedition, Hudson resolved to take Greene with him, in the hope, that, by exciting his ambition, and by withdrawing him from his accustomed haunts, he might reclaim him. Greene was also a good penman, and would be useful to Hudson in that capacity. With much difficulty Greene's mother was persuaded to advance ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 5 • Charles Sylvester
... and post-horses, and those driven up by travellers in their gigs: I was not compelled, nor indeed expected, to do so; but I took pleasure in the occupation; and I remember at that period one of the principal objects of my ambition was to be a first-rate groom, and to make the skins of the creatures I took in hand look sleek and glossy like those of moles. I have said that I derived valuable hints from the old man, and, indeed, became a very ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... accustomed, particularly when so doing entails a degradation. Such is human nature that the unwillingness to give up something to which one is accustomed is a far stronger spur to action than the ambition to get something to which one is not accustomed; and a social rank once attained is not surrendered without a struggle. A tenacious maintenance of status is the motive which figures most prominently in controlling the growth ...
— Essentials of Economic Theory - As Applied to Modern Problems of Industry and Public Policy • John Bates Clark
... itself slightly diminished on Monday morning. The front room had not yet been restored to its normal state, and Mrs. Mills, before rising to start the boy with his delivery of morning newspapers, had given a brief lecture on the drawback of excessive ambition, the advisability of not going on to Land's End when you but held a ticket for Westbourne Park. Ten minutes later she brought upstairs an important-looking envelope that bore her name and address in handwriting which left ...
— Love at Paddington • W. Pett Ridge
... himsilf to his grave the crather is," said poor Mrs. Ginniss, and tried in many a motherly way to make home pleasant to her boy, and to re-awaken the ambition that seemed quite dead in his heart. No more reading aloud now, of which he had been so fond; no more recitals of interesting or humorous scenes in office or street; no more wise opinions upon public events: all the boy's boyish conceit and self-esteem, germs in a strong ...
— Outpost • J.G. Austin
... use of tying your heartstrings around a man, and then have ambition slip the knot and leave ...
— The Lady and Sada San - A Sequel to The Lady of the Decoration • Frances Little
... opinion after a time, and persuade himself it was his duty to repudiate her. Then, indeed, all would be lost! Since early youth she had cherished a dream that some day she would rule over a great empire. As an important step towards attaining this ambition, she had deserted Philip, her first husband, and married the tetrarch, who now she ...
— Herodias • Gustave Flaubert
... rock, rose abruptly at the northern edge of the village and gave the place its name. Cimarron River, sluggish and yellow, bounded the town on the south. The dominant note of Eagle Butte was a pathetic mixture of regret for glories of other days and clumsy ambition to assume the ways of a city. Striving hard to be modern it succeeded only in ...
— The Ramblin' Kid • Earl Wayland Bowman
... should begin to rise. The Father, far from yielding to these arguments, was offended at the captain and the merchants for desiring to hinder him from the crown of martyrdom which he had taken so long a journey to obtain. "My brother," said he to Gama, with a fervour which expressed the holy ambition of his soul, "how happy should I be, if I could receive what you reckon a disgrace, but what I account a sovereign felicity! but I am unworthy of that favour from Almighty God; yet I will not render myself more unworthy of it, which assuredly I should if I embarked ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume XVI. (of 18) - The Life of St. Francis Xavier • John Dryden
... innumerable herds of buffalo that Lewis and Clark saw here, at the great fork of the road into the Rockies; and soon the last pelt was baled from the beaver. If you go to the Blackfeet now you find them a thinned and broken people, and the highest ambition of their best men is to dress up in modern beef-hide finery and play circus Indian ...
— The Young Alaskans on the Missouri • Emerson Hough
... hypocrisy of courts and statesmen, die and leave no wisdom to their sons. They believe their own newspaper, as their fathers did at their age. With such an ignorant and deceivable majority, States would soon run to ruin, but that there are limitations beyond which the folly and ambition of governors cannot go. Things have their laws, as well as men; and things refuse to be trifled with. Property will be protected. Corn will not grow unless it is planted and manured; but the farmer will not plant or hoe it unless ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... work the sense of relief and refreshment was astonishing. In this barber-shop I learned for the first time in what the perfection of earthly happiness consists. The sudden cessation of protracted and severe pain brings with it so exquisite a sense of enjoyment that I do not believe that successful ambition, or requited love, or the gratification of the wildest wishes for wealth, has a happiness to bestow at all comparable to the calm, contented, all-satisfying happiness that comes from a remission of ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... marrying Edmund than it had ever been before. On his side the inclination was stronger, on hers less equivocal. His objections, the scruples of his integrity, seemed all done away, nobody could tell how; and the doubts and hesitations of her ambition were equally got over—and equally without apparent reason. It could only be imputed to increasing attachment. His good and her bad feelings yielded to love, and such love must unite them. He was to go to town as soon as some business relative to Thornton Lacey ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... spiritual change in the king or his people—such they would be on the morning after St. John's day, as on the morning before it—i. e., filled with all elements (though possibly undeveloped) of strife, feud, pernicious ambition, ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... was neither crazed nor inspired; and quite rightly they put no credence in the charge that he had sold himself for pieces of silver to the enemy of his own nation. They knew what ailed the Honourable Jason Mallard—that he was a victim of a strangulated ambition, of an egotistic hernia. He was hopelessly ruptured in his vanity. All his life he had lived on love of notoriety, and by that same perverted passion he was being eaten up. Once he had diligently besought the confidence and the affections of a majority ...
— The Thunders of Silence • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... you, Ma'am, If, like Ariadne, you'd give me a clue, Ma'am. I'll never—like treacherous Theseus—desert you; My constancy's staunch, like my valour and virtue. Through Fire, Water, Wilderness trackless I'll follow, But astray in a Maze high ambition seems hollow! ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, July 25, 1891 • Various
... scholars at the private school which she had entered a week after her arrival in Boston, and her letters to father and mother, Aunt Prudence and to her friends at the little district school were full of enthusiasm for study and ambition ...
— Randy and Her Friends • Amy Brooks
... pig must have very frequently done before me,—satisfied a keenly-whetted appetite on fish exclusively. I need hardly remind the reader that Lord Gardenstone's inn was not that of Gardenstone, but that of Laurence-kirk,—the thriving village which it was the special ambition of this law-lord of the last century to create; and which, did it produce only its famed snuff-boxes, with the invisible hinges, would be rather a more valuable boon to the country than that secured to it by those ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... as to prevent him stopping, when in the street, and introducing himself to any dog he met. In a strange house, his first act was to assemble the canine population, roll it on its back or backs, and punch it in the ribs. As a boy, his earliest ambition had been to become a veterinary surgeon; and, though the years had cheated him of his career, he knew all about dogs, their points, their manners, their customs, and their treatment in sickness and in health. In short, he loved dogs, and, had they met under happier conditions, he would undoubtedly ...
— Indiscretions of Archie • P. G. Wodehouse
... deceive myself. There is no doubt that it is our duty to take these two maidens prisoners, but my heart aches at the thought that they might pass years of their lives in a prison. They are not responsible for their father's misdeeds and ambition, and it may be that, if they are restored, Glendower may be induced to treat those who fall into his hands mercifully. None but ourselves know of this, and ...
— Both Sides the Border - A Tale of Hotspur and Glendower • G. A. Henty
... Featherloom Petticoat Company, through the years spent on the road, up to the very time when the crown of success came to her in the form of the secretaryship of the prosperous firm of T. A. Buck, there was a minor but fixed ambition in her heart. That same ambition is to be found deep down in the heart of every woman whose morning costume is a tailor suit, whose newspaper must be read in hurried snatches on the way downtown in crowded train or car, and to whom nine A.M. ...
— Emma McChesney & Co. • Edna Ferber
... the Free States of America. I must examine many things minutely, not often touched upon in courts like this. For mine is a Political Trial; I shall treat it accordingly. I am charged with no immoral act—with none even of selfish ambition. It is not pretended that I have done a deed, or spoken a word, in the heat of passion, or vengeance, or with calculated covetousness, to bring money, office, or honor, to myself or any friend. I am not suspected ...
— The Trial of Theodore Parker • Theodore Parker
... to whom Nature a mind thus attuned may have given! 'Tis by him that we all are fed. And happy the townsman Of the small town who unites the vocations of town and of country. He is exempt from the pressure by which the poor farmer is worried, Is not perplex'd by the citizens' cares and soaring ambition, Who, with limited means,—especially women and maidens,— Think of nothing but aping the ways of the great and the wealthy, You should therefore bless your son's disposition so peaceful, And the like-minded wife whom we soon may expect ...
— The Poems of Goethe • Goethe
... girl once," began Aunt Hope's gentle voice. "She had two things she loved especially—an Ambition and a Brother. She spelled them both with capitals, they were so dear to her. Sometimes she told herself she hardly knew which one she loved the better. But there came a time when she must choose between them, and then she knew. Of course it was the ...
— Glory and the Other Girl • Annie Hamilton Donnell
... under the encouragement of our approval, and that later fails to develop the germs of altruistic ideals because we fail to recognize, or at least to encourage, them. We cannot expect from the schools an early change of emphasis from the competitive type of ambition to the ideal of cooperation or service, although the teachers who have tried to encourage the latter have found the school work to proceed more satisfactorily than it does under the spirit of emulation. But in the home it should be much easier to encourage these higher types of ideals, ...
— Your Child: Today and Tomorrow • Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg
... innkeeper's wife, now came out, a buxom and vigorous Egyptian woman of middle age, carrying some of the puffs for which she was famous, and which she had just made with her own hands. She also served them with milk, grapes and other fruit, her eyes sparkling with delight and gratified ambition; for the son of the great Mukaukas, the pride of the city, who in former years had often been her visitor, and not only for the sake of her cakes, in water parties with his gay companions—mostly Greek officers who now ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... ETAT, 'She is satisfied with her condition.' While already in the seventeenth century the ambition of rich bourgeois to gain admission to the exclusive circles of the nobility had been sufficiently marked to induce Moliere to attack it in his Bourgeois gentilhomme, it was even more noticeable in the eighteenth, and mesalliances between noblemen and women of the middle ...
— A Selection from the Comedies of Marivaux • Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux
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