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Aspiration   Listen
noun
Aspiration  n.  
1.
The act of aspirating; the pronunciation of a letter with a full or strong emission of breath; an aspirated sound. "If aspiration be defined to be an impetus of breathing."
2.
The act of breathing; a breath; an inspiration.
3.
The act of aspiring of a ardently desiring; strong wish; high desire. "Aspirations after virtue." "Vague aspiration after military renown."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Aspiration" Quotes from Famous Books



... animal form of the Subtle Body which acts as its vehicle, may go forth to tear in pieces all that obstructs, to reach to the very heart of the loved object and seize it. Au fond, it is nothing more than the aspiration for union, as I said—the splendid and perfectly clean desire to absorb utterly ...
— Three More John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood

... heart, and, I am sure, with the hearty assent of this great and representative company, I respond to the final aspiration of your toast: "May this great family in all its branches ever work together for the world's welfare." Certainly its division and alienation would be the world's misfortune. That England and America have had sharp and angry quarrels is ...
— Model Speeches for Practise • Grenville Kleiser

... technicality, or to raise and answer possible objections. The great point is, that the labor of setting, justifying, leading, and distributing types by machinery is actually done, by means of his invention. Thus the aspiration of inventive genius, in this department of art, is nobly fulfilled. Thus the links in the chain of progress are complete, from Laurentius Coster, walking in the woods of Holland, in 1430, and winning, from an accidental ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various

... returned to myself and thought, reclining in rapt thought, full of aspiration, steeped to the lips of my soul in desire. I did not then define, or analyses, or understand this. I see now that what I laboured for was soul-life, more soul-nature, to be exalted, to be full of soul-learning. Finally I rose, walked half ...
— The Story of My Heart • Richard Jefferies

... divine approbation. However natural this mode of thought may seem to us, it is utterly foreign and indeed incomprehensible to the savage. If he resists on occasion the sexual instinct, it is from no high idealism, no ethereal aspiration after moral purity, but for the sake of some ulterior yet perfectly definite and concrete object, to gain which he is prepared to sacrifice the immediate gratification of his senses. That this is or may ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer

... fundamentally physical, if the only spark of spiritual life which it ever knew is the fitful flame of our own unsteady souls, if it came from dust and to dust will return, leaving behind no recollection of the human labour, sacrifice and aspiration which for a little time it unconsciously enshrined, that outlook makes an incalculable difference to our present lives. For then our very minds themselves, which have developed here by accident upon this wandering island in the skies, represent the only kind of mind there ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick

... shade over his name. Having met with nothing but disaster from attempting to manage the visible as well as the invisible world, he probably left them both in the hands of Providence; and experienced, as he had never done, a brief period of tranquillity, before finally leaving the scene. His aspiration to control the Province had ceased. The object of his life-long pursuit, the Presidency of the College, was forever baffled. Nothing but mischief and misery to himself and others had followed his attempt to lead the great combat against the Devil and his hosts. It had fired his ...
— Salem Witchcraft and Cotton Mather - A Reply • Charles W. Upham

... her mother were still alive—that she, Melissa, had been permitted to share this great consolation with her! In a brief aspiration she uplifted her soul to the beloved dead, and as she further unrolled the manuscript her eye fell on the words: "Love your enemies; bless them that curse you, and do good to them that hate you." No, she could not do this; this seemed to her to be too much to ask; even Andreas had ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... so much to be free, not under the compulsion of any need for unification, or tortured by unsatisfied desire. Desire and aspiration should find their object without all this torture, as now, in a world of plenty of water, simple thirst is inconsiderable, satisfied almost unconsciously. And he wanted to be with Ursula as free as with himself, single and clear and cool, yet balanced, polarised ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence

... story is set in a Paris atmosphere of social aspiration and discontent. The background is one of studied contrasts, contrasts between the stolid contentment of a husband and the would-be luxuriousness of a wife, between what Madame Loisel had and what she wanted, between what she was and what she thought she could be, between her brief ...
— Short Stories Old and New • Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith

... consummation is the grand purpose of the Platonic philosophy. Its ultimate object is "the purification of the soul," and its pervading spirit is the aspiration after perfection. The whole system of Plato has therefore an eminently ethical character. It is a speculative philosophy directed to ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker

... out his freedom, acquiring that wondrous ability to express his inmost emotions. Art is the beautiful way of doing things. All art is the expression of sublime emotions; and there seems a strong necessity in every soul to impart the joy and the aspiration that it feels. And further, art is for the artist first, just as work is for the worker—it is all just a matter of self-development. And how blessed is it to think that every soul that works out its own freedom gives freedom to others! Liszt is the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard

... Voice had ceas'd (yet thou thyself Wert still before mine eyes, and round us both That happy Vision of beloved Faces! All, whom I deepliest love, in one room all!), Scarce conscious and yet conscious of it's Close, 115 I sate, my Being blended in one Thought, (Thought was it? or aspiration? or Resolve?) Absorb'd, yet hanging still upon the sound: And when I rose, I found myself in Prayer! S. ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... sincere aspiration for higher and better conditions or means to realize them, the thought-forces actively sent out for their realization, these continually watered by firm expectation without allowing the contrary, neutralizing force of fear ever to enter in,—this, accompanied by rightly directed work and activity, ...
— What All The World's A-Seeking • Ralph Waldo Trine

... pervaded by a religious feeling, and an ardent aspiration for the advancement of society,—as may be gathered from our first quotation. These two sentiments impart elevation, faith, and resignation; so that memory, thought, and a chastened tenderness, generally ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 2, July 8, 1850 • Various

... a full-blooded lecture, in the style of an American oration, as to the perils for young American girlhood lurking in the European jungle. He said that Paris was full of snakes in the grass, of which he had had bitter experience. He concluded, as they always do, poor, dear old things, with the aspiration that all American women should one day be sexless—though that is not the way ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford

... his folly and its bitterness found him out, the poor fool rocked himself, and cursed the day when he was born. If any one yet doubt that Mr. Moggridge was an inspired singer, let him turn to that sublime aspiration in Sophronia: ...
— The Astonishing History of Troy Town • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... The fact that I was really leaving an old course of life, was actually and finally breaking with it, became vividly apparent. Lea, you see, stood for what was best in the mode of thought that I was casting aside. He stood for the aspiration. The brooding, the moodiness; all the childish qualities, were my own importations. I was a little ashamed to tell him, that—that I was going to live, in fact. Some of the glory of it had gone, as if one of two candles I had been reading by had flickered out. But I told him, after a fashion, that ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad

... "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came." The one, rich in this lay of human emotion, couched in the simple language of reality; the other, a symbolic picture of the struggle and aspiration of the soul. Interpreters have tried to pin this latter poem down to the limits of an allegory, and find a specific meaning for every phrase and picture, but it has too much the quality of the modern symbolistic writing ...
— Dramatic Romances • Robert Browning

... with mother, wouldn't you?" the girl appealed. I replied with all possible emphasis that I should like to be with Mrs. Pethel. But presently, when the mother and daughter reappeared in the guise of motorists, it became clear that my aspiration had been set aside. "I am to be ...
— James Pethel • Max Beerbohm

... Maurice over the Rhone), this Protestant canton ends and a Catholic canton begins, you might separate two perfectly distinct and different conditions of humanity, by drawing a line with your stick in the dust on the ground. On the Protestant side, neatness; cheerfulness; industry; education; continual aspiration, at least, after better things. On the Catholic side, dirt; disease; ignorance; squalor; and misery. I have so constantly observed the like of this, since I first came abroad, that I have a sad misgiving, that the religion of Ireland lies as deep ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke

... meaning of which is of still more general acceptation. The idea, in fact, has doubtless flitted across the minds of most of us, though few, let us hope, would help to realize it; for, notwithstanding its agreeable form, it is not a benevolent aspiration. The reception of the individual in question into the realms of bliss has less interest with us than his removal from the earth's surface, and, consequently, from our path upon it. We may be very civil toward this person, and we often are; ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn

... chain You help'd to rivet round me did contract Since guiltless infancy from guilt in act; Of what in aspiration or in thought Guilty, but in resentment of the wrong That wreaks revenge on wrong I never wrought By excommunication from the free Inheritance that all created life, Beside myself, is born to—from the wings That range your own immeasurable ...
— Life Is A Dream • Pedro Calderon de la Barca

... thou thyself Wert still before my eyes, and round us both That happy vision of beloved faces— Scarce conscious, and yet conscious of its close I sate, my being blended in one thought (Thought was it? or aspiration? or resolve?) Absorbed, yet hanging still upon the sound— And when I rose, I found myself ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons

... Do you suppose I cannot penetrate the thin gauze that is intended to hide your motives? Your highest aspiration is after the Wealth you imagine me to possess; if I were poor, you would not even offer me your hand, let alone make such efforts to obtain it. I see through all your devices, base miscreant, including your sham repentance, which deserves the descent of God's just indignation upon your ...
— Ellen Walton - The Villain and His Victims • Alvin Addison

... around and over us, and within us, if we will but let our hearts be receptive to its influences. The greatest possible help to self-control is to learn in the moment of temptation to lift the heart to God in earnest aspiration for His help and guidance. A sense of the presence of God is always a strength, and help when we are conscious of earnest effort to do right. The Bible says: "It is God that worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure." It is one ...
— Letters to a Daughter and A Little Sermon to School Girls • Helen Ekin Starrett

... fashioning our life too much after the conduct of the children of Israel. Long after the exodus from bondage, long after the destruction of Pharaoh and his host, they kept turning back, in memory and longings, after Egypt, when they should have kept both eye and aspiration bent toward the land of promise and ...
— Sparkling Gems of Race Knowledge Worth Reading • Various

... intelligent being, appears as the ground of it. There is a view in which all the love of our neighbor, the impulses toward action, help, and beneficence, the desire for removing human error, clearing human confusion, and diminishing human misery, the noble aspiration to leave the world better and happier than we found it,—motives eminently such as are called social,—come in as part of the grounds of culture, and the main and pre-eminent part. Culture is then properly ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner

... people in harsher and more violent terms was, as far as we know, never fulfilled. No inference can be drawn from this circumstance as to the probability of the words attributed to him having been actually uttered. They express the aspiration of the first martyr of philosophy, that he would leave behind him many followers, accompanied by the not unnatural feeling that they would be fiercer and more inconsiderate in their words ...
— Apology - Also known as "The Death of Socrates" • Plato

... wanted to benefit by the experience of all the others in order to learn what things were right and what were wrong; almost as if the one feeling that absorbed him was the desire to do right and avoid wrong, and as if this were his sole aspiration. The case of this child recalls a popular superstition expressed in such terms as "too good to live." The child A seemed destined for the fate thus suggested. The needs of the body did not greatly concern him, and he seemed equally indifferent ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori

... doctrines to preach has resulted unhappily. The adults who gather seem always, or almost always, to be, not average, well-disposed citizens, but a more or less incendiary minority who want to change things—and to change them a lot and very quickly. That aspiration is not wholly indefensible, for a good many things would be the better for changing, but real light and leading have not often been found on top at meetings in schoolhouses, and experience has proved that the Teachers' Union has neither ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto

... for Antonio Luna's visible prowess than for the unseen astuteness of Aguinaldo's manoeuvres. It was characteristic of the Filipinos to split into factions, but the encouragement given to General Antonio Luna's aspiration to supersede his supreme chief was unfortunate, for Aguinaldo was not the man to tolerate a rival. He had rid himself of Andres Bonifacio (vide p. 371) in 1896, and now another disturber of that unity which is strength had to be disposed of. The point ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman

... ecstacy which results from spiritual aspiration, or they express the union of the individual soul with its mate according to the viewpoint. In any event, they are an excellent description of the realization of that much-to-be-desired consciousness which is fittingly described in Occidental phraseology as "cosmic ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad

... of England that thrills the beating blood With burning cries and yearning Tides of hidden aspiration hardly known or understood; Aspirations of the creature Tow'rds the unity of Nature; Sudden chivalries revealing whence the longing is renewed In the men that live for England, live and love and die for England: By the light of their desire They ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes

... that feeling, we shall perceive it to be, primarily, one of uneasiness, of expectation, of looking forward, of aspiration. It is a source of constant discomfort, for it behaves like a skeleton at the feast of all our enjoyments. We go to the theatre and laugh; but between the acts it raises a skinny finger at us. We rush violently for the last ...
— How to Live on 24 Hours a Day • Arnold Bennett

... to chastise his covetousness would be to steal away his wealth. This deep guilefulness was hard to detect, from such recesses of cunning did it spring; because she dissembled her longing for a change of wedlock under a show of aspiration for freedom. Blind-witted husband, fancying the mother kindled against the life of the son, never seeing that it was rather his own ruin being compassed! Doltish lord, blind to the obstinate scheming of his wife, who, out of pretended ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")

... A twofold error! The things the bourgeoisie in 1836 remembered most distinctly about Napoleon were his despotism and his taste for war; and the most lasting impression of him amongst the most intelligent in the working-classes was that whilst sowing the seeds of democratic aspiration throughout Europe, he had carefully weeded out all democratic tendencies in ...
— France in the Nineteenth Century • Elizabeth Latimer

... living death of the blank trance for the dying life of Christian charity; but none the less she caricatured and stultified his teaching. And I think it is possible to lay our finger on the place where she and so many others went wrong. The aspiration of mysticism is to find the unity which underlies all diversity, or, in religious language, to see God face to face. From the Many to the One is always the path of the mystic. Plotinus, the father of all mystical philosophy in Europe (unless, as he himself would have ...
— Light, Life, and Love • W. R. Inge

... seemed to Owen but natural; if he were a rogue my tutor would set it down to anything in the world save his own fault. Everybody could be mended if everybody else would try. Thus he brought with him into our conservative military court and society the latest breath of generous hope and human aspiration that had blown over Oxford. Surely this was a strange choice of Hammerfeldt's! Was it made in ignorance of the man, or with some idea that my mind should be opened to every variety of thought, or in a careless confidence that his own influence was beyond shaking, and that Owen's spirit ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope

... occasion, on the way to his Brazilian hunting trip, to assure the people of the great South American powers that the "Big Stick" was not intended to intimidate them. Pan-American unity was still, when President Taft went out of office in 1913, an aspiration rather than a realized fact, though the tangible evidences of unity had vastly multiplied since 1898, and the recurring congresses provided a basis of organization upon which some substantial structure ...
— The Path of Empire - A Chronicle of the United States as a World Power, Volume - 46 in The Chronicles of America Series • Carl Russell Fish

... Mount of the Beatitudes, embryonic religion and Religion adult; all, indeed, natural, yet of lower and of higher grade. Doubtless, Religion of whatever grade outranks all other human activities by its distinctive aspiration to transcend the bounds of space and time and sense, and to link the individual to the universal; and so all Religion sounds, feebly or distinctly, the note of the supernatural. But this is the resonant note of the spiritual Religion which unfolds in the moral progress ...
— Miracles and Supernatural Religion • James Morris Whiton

... victories. We saw the desolation of the sea-wife, the long lonely nights, the ever-present apprehension of loss. We understood the pathos of the scaldino. And swift upon this new interpretation we saw the great dangers of such a life to a woman of imperfect culture, strong passion and yet noble aspiration. We saw, too, another and more particular tragedy possible to her, in being forever debarred from her husband's innermost life. That vague look of distress was pregnant with meaning. She wished to say—how much! Yet in English she had not the words. For a moment there was a silence, and then once ...
— Aliens • William McFee

... man, there was an impulse to do what had never been done—when you think that we have hands today because from the first of life there have been adventurers—those of best brain and courage who wanted to be more than life had been, and that from aspiration has come doing, and doing has shaped the thing with which to do—it gives our hand a history which should make us want ...
— Plays • Susan Glaspell

... attractions. Of course I have been thinking it over, but for the present my inclination turns towards yachting. I have always been fond of the water, and had a strong wish to go to sea when I was a boy, but that aspiration was not encouraged. However, I can follow my bent now. Norton has been piling up money for me in my absence, and I can afford myself the luxury of a big yacht. Of course I shall be in no hurry about it. I shall either ...
— The Queen's Cup • G. A. Henty

... first fulness of my new happiness, there had been moments when my resolution faltered—moments when I was tempted to be safely content, now that the dearest aspiration of my life was fulfilled in the possession of Laura's love. For the first time I thought faint-heartedly of the greatness of the risk, of the adverse chances arrayed against me, of the fair promise of our new life, and of the peril in which ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins

... fallen man to the true source of pardon, and to teach him to aim at the recovery of the moral image in which he was at first created. If the passions, and prejudices, and divisions of professing Christians themselves are a distressing hindrance to the attainment of this noble and dutiful aspiration, we have much in the condition of the world around us to warn and rouse us to a vigorous and united effort to arrest the increasing tide of sin and crime. The developments of a grossly evil spirit at ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson

... is our fourth great goal. It is our highest aspiration. And our record is clear: Americans resort to force only when we must. We have never been aggressors. We have always struggled to ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Ronald Reagan • Ronald Reagan

... overwhelming troubles, but a mightier Hand than that of man, seeks on bended knee and with penitential tear, a blessing from on high, no word is spoken, no sound uttered save the sob from a contrite heart. The aspiration has gone forth inaudibly to Him who said to all mankind, then and for future ages, "Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy laden and ...
— Mysticism and its Results - Being an Inquiry into the Uses and Abuses of Secrecy • John Delafield

... her tears and regrets to herself. She cried them out on her pillow that night, all the disappointments and handicaps of that wonderful year of experience and aspiration, but as she cried she planned the arrangements ...
— The Wind Before the Dawn • Dell H. Munger

... dismemberment of the Empire. What can be stated in cold blood as a possible contingency in the case of, say, Canada or New Zealand has only to be adumbrated in that of Ireland to be denounced, not as a justifiable retort to the flouting of local demands, but as a treasonable aspiration to be put down ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell

... well as poems, and to study thoroughly a few works of a great master. Poetry is essentially a synthetic art; it unites the wandering desires of our hearts and spirits to make one single and enduring impression. Poetry speaks also the mood, the aspiration, and the deepest intent of its author; so that the great poet is the one who brings us most directly to understand its art. For most student classes it is best to take a single poet for interpretation, and to study in succession a small number—say six to ten—of his works, making one, ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 8 • Various

... mixture of sincerity and hypocrisy, self-flagellation and lust, aspiration and superstition, has gone into the making of this attitude. With the development of it we have nothing to do here. What does concern us is the effect of this profanity on the ...
— The Business of Being a Woman • Ida M. Tarbell

... wooing, and it seemed to her that she had forfeited both the confidence of her husband and the respect of her daughter. Months ago she had meant by force of some initiative to regularise this idyll which by its stealthiness wounded the self-respect of all concerned. Vain aspiration! And now the fact that Fred Ryley had begun to call at Church Street appeared to indicate between him and Uncle Meshach a closer understanding which could only be detrimental ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett

... Mrs. Paige, it is a sad task that lies before me. Woman is frail and weak by nature. Man's noblest aspiration can attain no loftier consummation than in the protection of ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers

... fills it as he can with the Spirit of God. He is not content that men should be as sheep, and look downward to earth for all the food they need. He bids them to a Banquet of another kind, whose dishes are of knowledge for the mind and heavenward aspiration ...
— The Banquet (Il Convito) • Dante Alighieri

... by which at last the race found God! It was not, remember, by directly, purposely, or consciously seeking God. The great enthusiasm of humanity which overthrew the older and brought in the fraternal society was not primarily or consciously a Godward aspiration at all. It was essentially a humane movement. It was a melting and flowing forth of men's hearts toward one another; a rush of contrite, repentant tenderness; an impassioned impulse of mutual love and self-devotion to the common weal. But 'if we love ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy

... big thronged the streets, women raised their little ones in their arms and cried, "See, the Colonel comes!" We listened with rapt attention to his superior eloquence, and no man was more deeply rooted in the affections of his people. We esteemed him too high to be low, too lofty in thought and aspiration to do a mean thing. Republican aspirants to Congress in those days were easily turned down by the Colonel who represented that district for three or more terms at the National Capitol. But there came a time when the ...
— Hanover; Or The Persecution of the Lowly - A Story of the Wilmington Massacre. • David Bryant Fulton

... slender so that a large surface has aspiration. The darkness and the light that is used is all the second day after ...
— Matisse Picasso and Gertrude Stein - With Two Shorter Stories • Gertrude Stein

... character. These were the qualities that he saw in her after a brief acquaintance. They were not striking, and yet they were qualities that commanded respect. But he looked in vain for those high ideals of a vocation and a goal that so filled his own soul. If she read of Mary Lyon, she had no aspiration to imitate her. Her whole mind seemed full of the ordinary cares of life. Albert could not abide that anybody should expend even such abilities as Isa possessed on affairs of raiment and domestic economy. The very tokens ...
— The Mystery of Metropolisville • Edward Eggleston

... disappeared, but the discussion had left its impress far in the depths of Hilda's heart. It had never occurred to her in her whole life before that any one, and especially Greif, could doubt the reality or the strength of her love. What had now passed between them had left her with a new aspiration of which she had not hitherto been conscious. She felt that hereafter she must find some means of making Greif understand her. When he had said that he understood her better, she had very nearly been offended again, for she saw how very far he was from knowing what was in her ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford

... seen, from the foregoing fragment of talk, that already the twin brothers were developing in different directions. So long as they had lived in the quiet of the humble home, they had scarce known a thought or aspiration not shared alike by both; but the experiences of the past months had left a mark upon them, and the mark was not altogether the same in the case of each. They had shared all adventures, all perils, all amusements; their ...
— In the Days of Chivalry • Evelyn Everett-Green

... you cannot take it abstractly with entire truth. It is, however, possible to find verbal equivalents for the character of the main types of lines. Horizontal lines convey a feeling of repose, of quiet, as in the wall-paintings of Puvis de Chavannes; vertical lines, of solemnity, dignity, aspiration, as in so much of the work of Boecklin; crooked lines of conflict and activity, as in the woodcuts of Durer; while curved lines have always been recognized as soft and voluptuous and tender, as in Correggio and Renoir. The supposition ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker

... his imagination kindled by the size and resources of his land, and his enthusiasm fired by the high destinies which he believes to await its people in the centuries to come. A Frenchman, republican or royalist, with all his frenzies and 'fool-fury' of red or white, still has his hope and dream and aspiration, with which to enlarge his life and lift him on an ample pinion out from the circle of a poor egoism. What stirs the hope and moves the aspiration of our Englishman? Surely nothing either in the heavens above or on the earth ...
— On Compromise • John Morley

... when it has not to contend with unfavourable environment. Beauty is perhaps the one certain result of favourable environment. The ideal within "Socialism" which makes even its opponents Socialists is the aspiration that some day everyone will ...
— George Du Maurier, the Satirist of the Victorians • T. Martin Wood

... love itself. The religion of undying hope resembles the mad cult of despair, of death, of annihilation. The difference lies in the moral motive springing from the secret needs and the unexpressed aspiration of the believers. It is only to vain men that all is vanity; and all is deception only to those who have never been ...
— Tales Of Hearsay • Joseph Conrad

... characteristic Christian prudence does not enjoin prayer for the dead, but neither does she prohibit it. In its own nature it belongs to a private aspiration; and being conditional, like all religious acts not expressed in Scripture, and therefore not combinable with a perfect faith, it is something between prayer and wish,—an act of natural piety sublimed ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge

... minister, the regularity of the doctor, and the morals of the lawyer. They read the Tribune with spectacles, and have files of The Liberator and Wendell Phillips' orations, bound in sheepskin. Heaven forbid that we should think of any of the number as a married woman, without a fervent aspiration of pity for the weaker vessel who officiates as her spouse. As to rearing children, that is not to be thought of in the connection. Show us a woman who wants to mingle in the exciting and unpurified squabble of politics, and we will show you one who ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage

... mass, in tendencies rather than in states. Especially (and this is the point on which finalism has been most seriously mistaken) harmony is rather behind us than before. It is due to an identity of impulsion and not to a common aspiration. It would be futile to try to assign to life an end, in the human sense of the word. To speak of an end is to think of a pre-existing model which has only to be realized. It is to suppose, therefore, that all is given, and that the future can be read in the present. ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson

... of Spanish character has its representatives in Castilian literature from Berceo down, but Leon was the first to give it fine artistic expression. The mystic sensation of oneness with the divine, of aspiration to heavenly joys, breathes in all his writings. He was also a devoted student of the classics, and his poems (for which he cared nothing and which were not published till 1631) show Latin rather than Italian influence. There is nothing in ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various

... that sounded strangely enough to me. They spoke of Fraternity—of that brotherhood which linked man to man in close affection; of Equality—that made all sharers in this world's goods; of Liberty—that gave freedom to every noble aspiration and generous thought; and, for an instant, carried away by the glorious illusion, I even forgot my solitary condition, and felt proud of my heritage as a youth of France I looked around me, however, and what faces met my gaze! The same fearful countenances ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various

... writing; but it is an evil thing for the man of letters when such facility is the only thing he has acquired,—when it has been, perhaps, the only thing he has striven to acquire. Such miscalculation of ways and means suggests vulgarity of aspiration, and a fatal material taint. In the life in which this error has been committed there can be no proper harmony, no satisfaction, no spontaneous delight in effort. The man does not create,—he is only desperately keeping up appearances. ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith

... innumerable stories which break the surface of American life day by day and disappear uncaught. Stories of quiet homely life, events significant for themselves that never reach a burning climax, situations that end in irony, or doubt, or aspiration, it mars in the telling. The method which makes story-telling easy, ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby

... constantly adopting and advancing pending measures of social reform. Where this is not done the socialist party tends more quickly to develop into the one powerful party of protest and of popular aspiration, receiving support from many elements of the middle and small propertied classes and from non-radical wageworkers. This movement from both sides is leaving less noticeable the contrast between the socialist party and other parties claiming to be "progressive" or "forward ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter

... from business, Franklin enjoyed seven years of what he called leisure, but they were years of study and application; years of happiness and sweet content, but years of aspiration and an earnest looking into the future. His experiments with kite and key had made his name known in all the scientific circles of Europe, and his suggestive writings on the subject of electricity had ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard

... the dawn of human faculty. When we compare man and his next of kin, we find between the two a great gulf, surely the widest betwixt any allied families in nature. Can a being of intellect, conscience, and aspiration have sprung at any time, however remote, from the same stock as the orang and the chimpanzee? Since 1859, when Darwin published his "Origin of Species," the theory of evolution has become so generally accepted that to-day it is little ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - Invention and Discovery • Various

... though keeping far below the regions of true poetry, preserving just that level which would commend them to the literary statesmen and the politicians at Will's and Button's. Perhaps some advocate of Free Trade might try upon a modern audience the lines in which Pope expresses his aspiration in a footnote that London may one day become a "FREE PORT." There is at least not one antiquated or obscure phrase in the whole. Here are ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen

... incredulity, cultured intelligence to depravity of heart. This wholly unbalanced character—which stretches evil to its utmost limits while preserving the knowledge of what is good, which mistrusts everybody and yet has at least the aspiration toward friendship and love, if not its experience—is it not the symbol and ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme

... have waged a relentless and bloody battle for ages, each striving for supremacy, because each was blind to the value and importance of the other. The individual and social instincts,—the one a most potent factor for individual endeavor, for growth, aspiration, self-realization; the other an equally potent factor for mutual ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman

... the Norman barons would fain rise a step in the social scale answering to that by which their duke had become a king; and they aspired to the same independence which they had seen enjoyed by the counts of Southern and Eastern France. Nor was the aspiration on their part altogether unreasonable; they had joined in the Conquest rather as sharers in the great adventure than as mere vassals of the duke, whose birth they despised as much as they feared his strength. William, however, was wise and wary as well as strong. While, by the insensible ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various

... poets of Irish birth or sympathies. Because of the distinctive quality of both the poetry and prose of these Celtic writers, the term "Celtic Renaissance" has been applied to their work, which glows with spiritual emotion and discloses a world of dreams, fairies, and romantic aspiration. As Richard Wagner received from the Scandinavian folk-lore the inspiration for his great music, as Tennyson found the incentive for The Idylls of the Kings in Malory's Morte d'Arthur, so the modern Celtic poets turned back to the primitive legends of their country ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck

... of sin must endure also; but when the flesh hath fallen from us, then shall the spirit shine forth clad in the brightness of eternal good, and for its common air shall breathe so rare an ether of most noble thoughts that the highest aspiration of our manhood, or the purest incense of a maiden's prayer, would prove too earthly ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard

... I am presupposing that, because I don't think the theory of education is for the apathetic and unsensitive—he would see, I believe, not only the extraordinary sublimity of language and expression, but the unparalleled audacity and magnificence of thought and aspiration. That he would realize the points in which these conceptions were wild, deficient, or childish, would not blind him, I think, to the grandeur of ...
— Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton, B. A. Of Trinity College, Cambridge • Arthur Christopher Benson

... another Friend trained in the ways of peace he had a horror of the cruelties of war, of which he had heard and seen much since the battle of Germantown, and shrank from the thought of taking any human life. On the other hand was the brave and boundless aspiration for liberty and a country of one's own, that had thrilled him when he heard the Declaration of Independence read. And now that France had held out a helping hand, and the English Parliament was divided, the aspect looked more hopeful to him. But for his parents he ...
— A Little Girl in Old Philadelphia • Amanda Minnie Douglas

... majestical above its green garth, for once gave no lift to his spirit. The great central tower rose against a sky of clearest blue, strong and foursquare as on the day when its Norman builders took down their scaffolding. White pigeons hovered or perched on niche and corbel. But fortitude and aspiration alike had deserted Mr. Simeon for the while. Life—hard life and poverty—had subdued him to be one of the petty, nameless crowd this Cathedral had seen creep to their end in its shadow. . . . "What should such creatures as I do, crawling ...
— Brother Copas • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... Mrs. Vincy is a fat, kindly soul; Mr. Vincy is a blustering good-natured middle-class man. There is no particular harm among the whole set, yet they contrive to ruin a great man; they lower him from a great career, and convert him into a mere prosperous gout-doctor. Every high aspiration of the man dies away. His wife is essentially a commonplace pretty being, and she cannot understand the great heart and brain that are sacrificed to her; so the genius is forced to break his heart about furniture and carpets and respectability, while the ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman

... there have been of late years a number of other more direct causes of unrest. Education, which we gave to India and were bound to give, had inevitably bred political aspiration, and an intelligensia had grown up hungry for political rights and powers. Simultaneously the voracious demands of a centralised bureaucracy for reports and returns had left the district officer ...
— Essays in Liberalism - Being the Lectures and Papers Which Were Delivered at the - Liberal Summer School at Oxford, 1922 • Various

... of this, that a man's gifts are not the measure of his real power. I am sure of this, that God can see what neither you nor I can see. Sometimes people feel something of it; but in proportion as a man has in reality, not as a sentiment or an aspiration, or a thought, but in reality, the very spirit and presence of Jesus upon him, there comes out from him an unseen silent influence. That secret ...
— 'Jesus Himself' • Andrew Murray

... Professor Barrett Wendell, 'William Shakspere,' p. 36.] 'Tamburlaine' expresses with 'a profound, lasting, noble sense and in grandly symbolic terms, the eternal tragedy inherent in the conflict between human aspiration ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher

... that the sweeping away of those shanties would touch the solemn majesty of the mediaeval glories of the building that rises above them? Take them away if need be, and it, in its proportion, beauty, strength, and heavenward aspiration, will stand more glorious for the sweeping away. Preach positive truth. Do not preach doubts. You remember Mr. Kingsley's book Yeast. Its title was its condemnation. Yeast is not meant to be drunk; it is meant to be kept in the dark till the process of fermentation goes on and ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren

... Religion from Superstition, Duty from Dogma, cast out Fear, release the wings of aspiration and faith; and where "the mourners went about the streets" is heard a new song of rejoicing that binds up the wounds ...
— The New Avatar and The Destiny of the Soul - The Findings of Natural Science Reduced to Practical Studies - in Psychology • Jirah D. Buck

... evil. Alas! no. She saw that she was not mistaken. Examining the society around her, men and women: everywhere was feverish excitement, dissipation, and nullity. You might rummage through their brains without finding one practical idea; in all their hearts, there was not one lofty aspiration. These people, in their daily life were like squirrels in a cage, and because they moved, they thought they were progressing. In them scepticism had killed belief; religion, family, country, were, as they phrased it, all humbug. They had only one aim, one passion—to enjoy themselves. ...
— Serge Panine, Complete • Georges Ohnet

... was no less subtle than it was noble, to what was most responsive in the best qualities of Irishmen. None the less it was a statesman's utterance addressed to a people politically quick-minded; Ireland saw as well as Redmond himself that what stood in the way of Ireland's national aspiration was the opposition of one section of Irishmen. To that extent, and to that extent only, was the speech political in its purpose. Whatever made for common action made for unity; and whatever made for unity made for Home Rule. ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn

... followed by a large number of conversions. The membership now numbers 403, making this the largest Congregational Church in the South. Great stress is laid on the quality of the membership, but quantity is not despised, and within the next seven years it is the aspiration of the church to enroll a thousand members. With a continuance of the spirit of unity and work, why, under God, should not this end be realized? The possibilities of a thoroughly organized Congregational Church of a thousand members in a ...
— The American Missionary - Volume 52, No. 1, March, 1898 • Various

... to have said thus much. These pages must now be suffered to go forth; not without a hearty aspiration that a blessing may attend them from Him sine Quo nihil est validum, nihil sanctum; and that what was intended for the strength and help of those who want helping and strengthening, (I am thinking particularly of what has been offered on the subject of Inspiration,) ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon

... may have been a trace of aspiration. Otherwise the whole affair was a hodge-podge of petty people and ignoble motives—of Una and Wilkins and S. Herbert Ross and Bessie Kraker, who married a mattress-renovator, and Bessie's successor; ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis

... I ken the manner of his gait; He rises on the toe; that spirit of his In aspiration lifts him from the earth. 113 SHAKS.: Troil. and ...
— Handy Dictionary of Poetical Quotations • Various

... this silent aspiration, which of all others must bring an answering blessing down, that the long-desired one came home. His ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)

... growing intimacy of Arthur with Italian poetry led him naturally to that of Dante. No poet was so congenial to the character of his own reflective mind; in none other could he so abundantly find that disdain of flowery redundance, that perpetual preference of the sensible to the ideal, that aspiration for somewhat better and less fleeting than earthly things, to which his inmost soul responded. Like all genuine worshippers of the great Florentine poet, he rated the Inferno below the two latter portions of the Divina Commedia; there was nothing even to revolt his taste, but rather much ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown

... must be in lofty friendship not only congenial tastes, and an aspiration after the imperishable and true, but some common end which both parties strive to secure, and which they love better than they love themselves. Without this common end, friendship might wear itself out, or expend itself in things unworthy ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord

... her, distinctly, the first visible aspiration (ambition is too low a word) to do some honest, hard work of my own, in the World ...
— McClure's Magazine, Volume VI, No. 3. February 1896 • Various

... you do that you don't want to do—or something you don't want to do, that you do—I mean that you don't do. Or if you want to eat something and don't. Or an aspiration; that's ...
— At Fault • Kate Chopin

... aware, but they truly index the situation of thousands of persons. It is this general ignorance, and this general indifference to knowledge, that make a Southern trip such wearisome work. You can touch the masses with few of the appeals by which we move our own people. There is very little aspiration for larger life; and, more than that, there is almost no opportunity for its attainment. That education is the stairway to a nobler existence is a fact which they either fail to comprehend or to which they ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various

... birch-bark of the hardest, upon which she strikes as it were a drum; and to that dull sound which the bark returns, they all dance, spinning round on their heels, quivering, with one hand lifted, the other down: other notes they have none, but a guttural loud aspiration of the word Heh! Heh! Heh! as often as the old female savage strikes her bark-drum. As soon as she ceases striking, they set up a general cry, expressed by Yah! Then, if their dance is approved, they begin ...
— An Account Of The Customs And Manners Of The Micmakis And Maricheets Savage Nations, Now Dependent On The Government Of Cape-Breton • Antoine Simon Maillard

... are the efforts of men. A few years of growth and aspiration—then the fiery bourgeoning to a climax, and, after that, incorporation in the soil of a forgetfulness that seems indifferent alike to their exertions and their ambitions. But the end is not here. Somewhere, and most certainly in some other form, the effort achieves immortality ...
— The Rapids • Alan Sullivan

... formulation of Christian doctrine and the interpretation of Aristotle's works. It was a period of revived Greek metaphysics, adapted to prevailing religious presuppositions. Into this fettered world Bacon, Galileo, Descartes, and others brought a new aspiration to promote investigation and honest, ...
— The Mind in the Making - The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform • James Harvey Robinson

... more stirred by the idea of the equal citizenship of men and women, by the realization that a big and growing organization of women were giving form and a generalized expression to just that personal pride, that aspiration for personal freedom and respect which had brought her to London; but when she heard Miss Miniver discoursing on the next step in the suffrage campaign, or read of women badgering Cabinet Ministers, padlocked to railings, or getting up in a public meeting ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells

... somewhere in the heavens, to whom we must send a messenger; not a God separated from us by some great gulf that we must bridge by some supposed atonement; a God nearer to us than our breath; a God who hears the whisper of our want, who understands the dawning wish or aspiration before it takes form or shape; a God who loves us better than we love ourselves or love those who are dearest to us; a God who knows better what we need than we know ourselves, and is more ready to give us than fathers ...
— Our Unitarian Gospel • Minot Savage

... such a tendency existed in germ, it had no effect in practice. As I look back, the relation between what we were taught and what we were to do was neither remote nor indirect. In its own sphere, in both its merits and its faults, the Academy was in aspiration as professional ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan

... face looked sadly white and he noticed that her lips trembled. He said with all the kindliness of his nature, for from the first moment he had seen her he had taken to her, her purity and earnestness and sweetness appealing to some aspiration within him: ...
— The Man • Bram Stoker

... temporary eclipse. It was a period of social unrest in which all sorts of philanthropic reforms were suggested and tried out. Measured by later events, it was a period of transition, of social awakening, of aspiration tempered by the ...
— The Armies of Labor - Volume 40 in The Chronicles Of America Series • Samuel P. Orth

... of dreamy contemplation with which the Slow Movement begins cannot be translated into words; why attempt it? We have the music which, coming from the divinely gifted imagination of the composer, reveals in its own language a message of pathetic longing and ideal aspiration. The movement is very concise but in complete Sonata-form, and with an orchestration felicitous in the treatment of the horns and the wood-wind instruments. The Minuet, noteworthy for the three-measure ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding

... their philosophers. Would not virtue be a dream, a mockery indeed, if it were, like the herb of the field, a thing of blight and change, of withering and renewal, a minion of the sunbeam and the cloud? Shall calamity deject it? Shall prosperity pollute? then let it not be the object of our aspiration, but the byword of our contempt. No: let us rather believe, with the great of old, that when it is based on wisdom, it is throned above change and chance! throned above the things of a petty and sordid world! throned ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... the house glowed with the red tendrils of the hardy vine that clung to and covered the dingy bricks with a royal mantle, as if eager to cheer the eyes and hearts of all who looked. It preached a little sermon of courage, aspiration, and content to those who had the skill to read it, and bade them see how, springing from the scanty soil of that back yard full of the commonest objects, the humblest work, it set its little creepers in the crannies of the stone, and ...
— A Garland for Girls • Louisa May Alcott

... in which we fight our battles even for goodness, and the still atmosphere which environs these quiet lives: we come back to them from the struggle, and find that while they too are full of all fine aspiration for right, and thrill with a divine indignation against wrong, their aspiration is without restlessness, their indignation has no root of bitterness in it; they are not unduly elated by successes which have turned our heads, nor daunted by failures which have ...
— Beside the Still Waters - A Sermon • Charles Beard

... disinterestedness, incur large weekly expenses in advertising their willingness to forward to sufferers the means of self-cure "on receipt of two postage stamps." In a word, one and all of these pirates have only one common aim and aspiration—to fleece the fools who are credulous enough to seek ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe

... brought forth pieces with great levity and haste, even when he had full leisure to think of posterity. If he occasionally subjected himself to stricter rules, we owe it more to his ambition, and his desire to be numbered among the classical writers of the golden age, than to any internal and growing aspiration ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black

... on, furnished, of course, a never-ending theme for controversy, and although I was too young to enter the military service when volunteers were mustering in our section, yet the stirring events of the times so much impressed and absorbed me that my sole wish was to become a soldier, and my highest aspiration to go to West Point as a Cadet from my Congressional district. My chances for this seemed very remote, however, till one day an opportunity was thrown in my way by the boy who then held the place failing to pass his examination. When I learned that by ...
— The Memoirs of General P. H. Sheridan, Complete • General Philip Henry Sheridan

... was of Themistocles," said Kennedy, "who rejected the offer of a Memoria Technicha, with the aspiration that some one could teach him to forget. Lethe is the grandest of ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar

... some notion that this was to end in marriage. We must have had some, because Dora stipulated that we were never to be married without her papa's consent. But, in our youthful ecstasy, I don't think that we really looked before us or behind us; or had any aspiration beyond the ignorant present. We were to keep our secret from Mr. Spenlow; but I am sure the idea never entered my head, then, that there was ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens

... prompts her at another time in the novel to exclaim, in regard to the Ankworks package, "'I wish it was in Jonadge's belly, I do,' appearing to confound the prophet with the whale in that mysterious aspiration,"—by observing at this point, "Rich folks may ride on camels, but it ain't so easy for 'em to see out of a needle's eye. That is my comfort, and I hope I knows it." One whole chapter of "Martin Chuzzlewit," with the exception of the merest ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent

... was seldom known to forget himself so far as to utter it while its owner was in disgrace. The hope of gaining such a name, or the fear of losing it, was in the pupil the strongest ally of the master, the most powerful enforcement of his influences. It was a scheme of government by aspiration. But it owed all its operative power to the character of the man who had adopted rather than invented it—for the scheme had been suggested by a certain passage in the book ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald

... Haldane's future was not clear by any means. It is true a desire to live a noble life had been kindled in his heart, but as yet it was little more than a good impulse, an aspiration. In the fact that his eyes had been turned questioningly and hopefully toward the only One who has ever been able to cope with the mystery of evil, there was rich promise; but just what this divine Friend could do for him he understood as little as did the fishermen ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe

... this in rhyme, on the whole, Very well, with sublime illustration. Man's heart Is a mystery, doubtless. You trace it in art:— The Greek Psyche,—that's beauty,—the perfect ideal. But then comes the imperfect, perfectible real, With its pain'd aspiration and strife. In those pale Ill-drawn virgins of Giotto you see it prevail. You have studied all this. Then, the universe, too, Is not a mere house to be lived in, for you. Geology opens the mind. So you know Something also of strata and fossils; these show The bases of cosmical ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith

... studied with sympathetic attention the lines of dejection and fatigue which marred the attractiveness of features otherwise frank, poetic, and noble. He had seen many such men. Men in their prime who had begun life full of high faith, hope, and lofty aspiration, yet whose fair ideals once bruised in the mortar of modern atheistical opinion had perished forever, while they themselves, like golden eagles suddenly and cruelly shot while flying in mid-air, had fallen helplessly, broken-winged among the dust-heaps of the world, never ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli

... always regarded as self-sufficient in contrast with man. Man seeks, strives, desires, has partial triumphs and pitiful failures, is always in travail after some ideal. His life is incomplete; at best it is a high aspiration; it is never really fulfilled. But divinity has nearly always been regarded as seeking nothing, asking nothing, needing nothing. This is what infinity in practical terms means. And, with certain exceptions presently to be noted, ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman

... island, and tilled the soil. He was teacher, sailor, workman, trader, soldier, general, dictator. He was simple, great, and good. He hated all oppressors, he loved all peoples, he protected all the weak; he had no other aspiration than good, he refused honors, he scorned death, he adored Italy. When he uttered his war-cry, legions of valorous men hastened to him from all quarters; gentlemen left their palaces, workmen their ships, youths their schools, to go and fight in the sunshine of his glory. In ...
— Cuore (Heart) - An Italian Schoolboy's Journal • Edmondo De Amicis

... and customs, and taught him thoroughly well their language." Like the rest, Burton had his Bubu. Still, he was no voluptuary. Towering ambition, enthusiasm, and passion for hard work trampled down all meaner instincts. Languages, not amours, were his aspiration, and his mind ran on grammar books rather than ghazels; though he confesses to having given whole days and nights to the tender pages of Euclid. Indeed, he was of a cold nature, and Plutarch's remark about Alexander applies equally to him: "For though otherwise he ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright

... learned nothing else, she had learned the ambition to APPEAR; of BEING anything she had no notion. She had a loving heart, though—small for her size, but lively. Of what really goes to make a LADY—the end of her aspiration—she had no more idea than the swearing father of whom, while she loved him, as did all his family, she was not a little ashamed. She was an honest girl too in a manner, and had by nature a fair share of modesty; but now her heart was sadly fluttered, for the week that had ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald

... did think for a while of going home this fall—but when I found that that was, and had been, the cherished intention and the darling aspiration every year of these old care-worn Californians for twelve weary years, I felt a little uncomfortable, so I stole a march on Disappointment and said I would not go home this fall. This country suits me, and it shall ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine

... beetle; and again, on the other hand, regardless of the impressions of typical beauty, accept from each creature, great or small, the more important lessons taught by its position in creation as sufferer or chastiser, as lowly or having dominion, as of foul habit or lofty aspiration, and from the several perfections which all illustrate or possess, courage, perseverance, industry, or intelligence, or, higher yet, of love and patience, and fidelity and rejoicing, and never wearied praise. Which moral ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin

... narrows its appeal, weakens its power, and takes from literature her highest distinction by virtue of which she grasps the whole of character and fate in her creation and informs man of the secrets of his human heart, the course of his mortal destiny, and the end of all his spiritual effort and aspiration. ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry

... general, by our organization, nor wholly by our education, but by our experience; experience of the painful consequences of the character we previously had; or by some strong feeling of admiration or aspiration, accidentally aroused. But to think that we have no power of altering our character, and to think that we shall not use our power unless we desire to use it, are very different things, and have a very different effect on the mind. A person who does not wish ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill

... surrounded during the hour, all too brief, which we devote to the world of the Ideal on one day out of seven,[2] it is hoped that thoughts will sometimes burn in many hearts, that reverence, awe, fear, regrets for the past, fervent resolutions for the future, hope, aspiration, and love; in a word, all the sanctified emotions of the human heart, which together melt into the supreme emotion of religion, will sometimes arise to sternly rebuke the selfish life, shame us out of our moral lethargy, and comfort those whose one ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan

... sweet. That power did not work with delusions, nor will it stay its hand when such are removed. Facts, rather than dogmas, have been its ministers—hunger and thirst, heat and cold, pleasure and pain, fervour, sympathy, aspiration, shame, pride, love, hate, terror, awe—such were the forces whose interaction and adjustment throughout an immeasurable past wove the triplex web of man's physical, intellectual, and moral nature, and such are the forces that will ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall

... Browning's poetry, and on which, as we shall see later, his optimism is founded. Science tells us that the matter of which the universe is composed is indestructible; Browning believes even more strongly in the permanence of spirit. Aspiration, enthusiasm, love would not be given to us to have their purposes broken off, not if this is a rational and economic universe; the important thing is not to have our hopes fulfilled here, the important thing is to keep hoping. Such love as ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps

... stations, and the smoothness of our traveling. I wish you could see what an American railroad is, in some parts where I now have seen them. I won't say I wish you could feel what it is, because that would be an unchristian and savage aspiration. It is never inclosed, or warded off. You walk down the main street of a large town; and, slap-dash, headlong, pell-mell, down the middle of the street, with pigs burrowing, and boys flying kites and playing marbles, and men smoking, and women talking, and children crawling, ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster

... wouldn't call it silly. The feeling is so widespread in time and space that we must look on it with respect as something inherent in human nature. Think—as doubtless John Bellingham did—of the ancient Egyptians, whose chief aspiration was that of everlasting repose for the dead. See the trouble they took to achieve it. Think of the Great Pyramid, or that of Amenemhat the Fourth with its labyrinth of false passages and its sealed and hidden sepulchral chamber. Think of Jacob, borne after death all those hundreds of weary ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman

... entry into the community of progressive nations, Japan's main aspiration and striving has been to play a leading and a civilizing part in the Far East, and in especial to determine China by advice and organization to move into line with herself, adopt Western methods and apply them to Far-Eastern aims. And this might well seem a legitimate as well as ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon

... bosom whiter than her soul by hiding it in gauze? How could she look so ethereal while her eyes drooped so murderously? Those almost wanton glances seemed to give promise of untold languorous delight, while by an ascetic's sigh of aspiration after a better life the mouth appeared to add that none of those promises would be fulfilled. Ingenuous youths (for there were a few to be found in the Guards of that day) privately wondered whether, in the most intimate moments, it were possible to speak familiarly to this White Lady, this ...
— The Collection of Antiquities • Honore de Balzac

... paler, also growing thicker and more formidable with that unceasing labour; the muscles feeding themselves omnivorously on their own waste, the cords toughening, the bone-tissues revitalizing themselves without end. One could imagine the whole aspiration of that mute and motionless man pouring itself out into those pallid arms, and the arms taking it up with a kind of blind greed. Storing it up. Against ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various

... religion of a race is the truest expression of its character, and reflects most faithfully its attitude and aims and policy. The religion of an age shows what at that time constituted the object of man's aspiration and endeavour, as older hopes grew pale and new hopes rose on his sight. Thus the study of the religions of the world is the study of the very soul of its history; it is the study of the desires and aspirations which throughout the course of history men have not ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies

... heaven's approval. We shall record it in the words best suited to so sublime a subject,—her own. "On the eve," she says, "of the feast of the Incarnation, 1620, I was on my way to business, which I recommended to God by my ordinary aspiration, 'In thee, O Lord, I have hoped; let me never be confounded!'—when suddenly, my progress was unaccountably arrested, and while I stood motionless in body, the action of my mind was equally suspended, all recollection of the affairs I was engaged in vanishing instantaneously from my memory. Then ...
— The Life of the Venerable Mother Mary of the Incarnation • "A Religious of the Ursuline Community"

... in religion.—Art, like music, owes much of its finest form and development to religion. Religious hope, aspiration, and devotion have always sought expression in pictorial or plastic art and in noble architecture. We owe it to our children to put them in possession of this rich spiritual heritage. They should know and love the great masterpieces ...
— How to Teach Religion - Principles and Methods • George Herbert Betts

... The other symbols generally in use are the ship, the emblem of the church; the fish, the emblem of Christ, the palm, the symbol of martyrdom. The anchor represented hope in immortality; the dove, peace; the stag reminded the faithful of the pious aspiration of the Psalmist; the horse was the emblem of strength in the faith; the hunted hare, of persecution; the peacock and the phoenix stood for signs of the resurrection. Christ, as the good pastor, was also introduced in the epitaph. Even personages ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy

... known as Olaus Petri, and more commonly as Master Olof (Master being the vernacular for Magister, which was the equivalent of our modern Doctor)—who, during two years spent in studies at the University of Wittenberg, had been in personal contact with Luther, and who had become fired with an aspiration to carry the Reformation into his native country. By recent historians Master Olof has been described as of a "naively humble nature," rather melancholy in temperament, but endowed with a gift for irony, and capable of fiery ...
— Master Olof - A Drama in Five Acts • August Strindberg

... profligate, perhaps you are fond of flirtations with your friend's wife. These last are objects in their way: but they don't last long, and, even with the most frivolous, are not occupations that satisfy the whole mind and heart, in which there is generally an aspiration after something useful. It is not vanity alone that makes a man of the mode invent a new bit or give his name to a new kind of carriage; it is the influence of that mystic yearning after utility, ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... of all religion is the complete accomplishment of that purpose. There is no religion without these elements—consciousness of kindred with God, recognition of Him as the sum of all excellence and beauty, and of His will as unconditionally binding upon us, aspiration and effort after a full accord of heart and soul with Him and with His law, and humble confidence that that sovereign beauty will be ours. 'Be ye imitators of God as dear children' is the pure and comprehensive dictate which expresses the aim of all devout men. 'To keep His ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... stone could translate so delicately the highest groping of men's hearts toward God, their most unutterable longing. And the broken stones of the Gothic ruin, in the freshness and rawness of their ruin, seemed to be bleeding out human aspiration, spilling it footlessly upon the dead earth. And of course all about these ecclesiastical ruins were the ruins of homes, and shops and stores—places just as pitifully appealing in their appalling wreck—where men had lived and loved ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White

... and of renaissance, all at once. A deeply serious crisis in a strong and complicated social system, which had been hitherto exposed to the buffets and the risks of brute force, but was intellectually full of life and aspiration, was in travail of a double yearning for reforming itself and setting itself in order, and did indeed, in the sixteenth century, attempt at one and the same time a religious and a political reformation, the object whereof, missed as it was at that period, ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume IV. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot

... were these young things, with their rhodomontade and exuberant animation and spirits, from him in whom all the sparkle and aspiration ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge

... 'pay attention,' as they say, to some young lady, and then to go to church with her, and then to start on a bridal tour, and then to run through a round of visits, and then, I suppose, to be 'having a family.' Oh, que le diable emporte!" He broke off the aspiration into which he was launching with a certain energy, and added, more calmly, "I believe women talk and think only of these things, and they naturally fancy men's minds ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte

... aspiration (believe it if you can) was to make gentlemen of us—of us, doomed to start in life as parish apprentices! And to this her curriculum recurred whether it had been divagating into history, geography, astronomy, English composition, or religious knowledge. "The author of the ...
— The Adventures of Harry Revel • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... dare to describe the productions of my female correspondents in detail. Suffice it to say, that most of them contain a smaller proportion of useless information, and a larger proportion of sentiment, vague aspiration, and would-be-picturesque description, than those of the men who pay postage on my behalf. They are longer, and sometimes crossed; it is therefore a greater task ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various

... ideas are purely personal, and are not part of some system of philosophy. The sub-titles of the work are: Von den Hinterweltern ("Of Religious Ideas"), Von der grossen Sehnsucht ("Of Supreme Aspiration"), Von den Freuden und Leidenschaften ("Of Joys and Passions"), Das Grablied ("The Grave Song"), Von der Wissenschaft ("Of Knowledge"), Der Genesende ("The Convalescent"—the soul delivered of its desires), Das Tanzlied ("Dancing Song"), Nachtlied ("Night Song"). We ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland



Words linked to "Aspiration" :   puff, ambitiousness, ventilation, desire, breathing, emulation, aspire, aspirate, inspiration, pull, dream, breath, pant, gasp, ambition



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