"Ambition" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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
... ambition mar, And load his breast with hopeless pain, And seem to blot out sun and star, Love, won or lost, is countless gain; His sorrow boasts a secret bliss Which sorrow of itself beguiles, And Love in tears ...
— The Angel in the House • Coventry Patmore
... 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 |
