"Aspiring" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Demosthenes was given to this kind of exercise. A dignified and, if I may say it, a chaste, style, is neither elaborate nor loaded with ornament; it rises supreme by its own natural purity. This windy and high-sounding bombast, a recent immigrant to Athens, from Asia, touched with its breath the aspiring minds of youth, with the effect of some pestilential planet, and as soon as the tradition of the past was broken, eloquence halted and was stricken dumb. Since that, who has attained to the sublimity of Thucydides, who rivalled the fame of Hyperides? Not ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... attendant or page, who told him, in reply, that there was one man lying on a pallet in the outer chamber who would hardly scruple to undertake anything whatever to please him. This was Sir James Tyrell, who is described by More as an ambitious, aspiring man, jealous of the ascendency of Sir Richard Ratcliffe and Sir William Catesby. Richard at once acted upon the hint, and calling Tyrell before him communicated his mind to him and gave him a commission for the execution of his murderous ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 8 - The Later Renaissance: From Gutenberg To The Reformation • Editor-in-Chief: Rossiter Johnson
... laying open again the many faults already publicly proved upon the late Duke of Marlborough, but insinuates a new crime, by seeming to attempt to acquit him of aspiring at the throne. But this is done in a manner ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. X. • Jonathan Swift
... the hills, he observed a cloud of steam ascending from the valley below. Having always believed steam a modern invention, this ancient was surprised, and when his measly charge set up a wild squeal, rushing down a steep place into the aspiring vapour, his astonishment ripened into dismay. As soon as he conveniently could Bladud followed, and there he heard the saw—I mean he saw the herd wallowing and floundering multitudinously in a hot spring, and punctuating the silence of nature with grunts of quiet satisfaction, as ...
— Cobwebs From an Empty Skull • Ambrose Bierce (AKA: Dod Grile)
... that thou wert lovely from thy birth, Of glorious parents, thou aspiring child. I wonder not; for one then left the earth Whose life was like a setting planet mild Which clothed thee in the radiance undefiled ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... of western settlement and its city building unrolled before me, as Charles L. Hutchinson, President of the Art Institute, rose in his place, and in the name of the most aspiring of Chicago's men and women, welcomed the members of the American Academy and the National Institute as representatives of American Art and American Literature. Once again and for the moment our city became a capital in something like the character of Boston a generation before. This conception ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... exteriorised in that very superman whom Khalid so much dreads, and on whom he often casts a lingering glance of admiration. So there you are. We must either rise to a higher consciousness on the ruins of a lower one, of no-consciousness, rather, or go on seeming and simulating, aspiring, perspiring, and suffering, until our turn comes. Death denies no one. Meanwhile, Khalid's rhapsodies on his way back to the city, we shall ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... evidences of Christianity—as they are styled—external and internal will be readily found by him who desires to find; convincing enough they are for him who wants to be convinced. But in truth faith is a noble venture of the spirit, an aspiring effort towards what is best, even though what is best may never be attained. The mole gropes blindly in unquestionably solid clay; better be like the grasshopper "that spends itself in leaps all day to reach the sun." A grasshopper's leap sunwards—that is ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... characters. Meg's had roses and heliotrope, myrtle, and a little orange tree in it. Jo's bed was never alike two seasons, for she was always trying experiments. This year it was to be a plantation of sun flowers, the seeds of which cheerful land aspiring plant were to feed Aunt Cockle-top and her family of chicks. Beth had old-fashioned fragrant flowers in her garden, sweet peas and mignonette, larkspur, pinks, pansies, and southernwood, with chickweed for the birds and catnip for the pussies. Amy had a bower in hers, rather small and ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... was committed almost of necessity to the Humanist movement. Scholars and artists flocked to Rome from all sides to greet the new Pope and to assure themselves of his favour and protection. Under the new regime literary merit was the principal qualification sought for in candidates aspiring to the highest ecclesiastical honours. The Roman University was reorganised; the search for manuscripts was renewed with vigour; a new college for the promotion of Greek studies in Rome was founded, ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance to the French • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... Why, my little aspiring Venus, let me tell you something. I have wandered somewhat in life—at home and over sea—and I have never looked upon a ...
— Semiramis and Other Plays - Semiramis, Carlotta And The Poet • Olive Tilford Dargan
... writer, but he had also to contend with that feeling of monopoly, which pervades the more worldly classes of talent, and which would lead politicians to regard as an intruder upon their craft, a man of genius thus aspiring to a station among them, without the usual qualifications of either birth or apprenticeship to entitle him to it. [Footnote: There is an anecdote strongly illustrative of this observation, quoted by Lord ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... twenty-three years of age, and inasmuch as, with all his moderation in respect to the pursuit of youthful pleasures, he was of a very ambitious and aspiring disposition, he began to form schemes and plans for the enlargement of his power. An opportunity was soon afforded him to enter upon a military career. Cassander, who had made himself King of Macedon in the manner already described, died about the time that Pyrrhus established ...
— Pyrrhus - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... as well as the beautiful, but he loved not virtue for its holiness, he loved it for its beauty. He would have been aspiring in imagination, although he was not ambitious by character. Had he lived in those ancient republics where men attained their full development through liberty, as the free, unfettered body develops itself in pure air and open sunshine, he would have aspired to every summit like Caesar, he ...
— Raphael - Pages Of The Book Of Life At Twenty • Alphonse de Lamartine
... years he had been the recipient of flattering attentions from fond papas and aspiring mammas. Invitations to club dinners, banquets and the most recherche lunches, on the one hand, were evenly balanced by cards to receptions, soirees and afternoon teas, on the other. Had he passed heart-whole through all these sieges, only to fall ...
— The Award of Justice - Told in the Rockies • A. Maynard Barbour
... this we find Ostentation (which might be called Vanity) and Ambition, organs which antagonize Modesty and Ideality, as those of the median line antagonize Reverence. Next to Ambition comes the region of Business Energy, a less aspiring and ostentatious element than Ambition. Next to this come the regions of Adhesiveness, the gregarious social impulse, Aggressiveness, the intermediate between Adhesiveness and Combativeness, possessing much ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, November 1887 - Volume 1, Number 10 • Various
... the third time had not ceased on the hill when out stepped Betty. She looked miraculous tall and thin in the haze of the dawn, with the aspiring firs behind her, pallid at the face, wearied in her carriage, and torn at her kirtle by whin or thorn. The child clung at her coats, a ruddy brat, ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... brew strong beer, and with it intoxicate themselves, as also with brandy, when procurable. The maritime Laplanders feed on fish of every description, even to that of sea-dog, fish-livers, and train-oil, and of these obtaining but a scanty provision; they are even aspiring to the rank of the interior inhabitants, whose nutriment is of a more delicate description, being the flesh of all kinds of wild animals, herbaceous and carnivorous, and birds of prey; but bear's flesh is their greatest ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 380, July 11, 1829 • Various
... the same ease which it showed in possessing itself of that bygone English life whence sprung the Canterbury Tales, or As You Like It. So that his tutor, who was much attached to him, and who made it one of his main objects in life to keep the boy's aspiring nose to the grindstone of grammatical minutiae, began about the time of Sir Mowbray's letter to prophesy very smooth things indeed to his mother as to his future success at college, the possibility of his getting the famous St. Anselm's scholarship, and ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... before done to Sophron. Such incentives were irresistible to a vain and ambitious mind; the young man in an instant forgot his friends, his country, and his parents, and marched away with all the pleasure that strong presumption and aspiring hopes could raise. Nor was it long before he had an opportunity of ...
— The History of Sandford and Merton • Thomas Day
... but it was unavailing. Beautiful flowers arrived from the aspiring youths. They were so lovely, so fragrant! What taste that young Hal Battlebury has! remarks Lawrence Newt, admiringly, as he smells the flowers that stand in a pretty vase upon the centre-table. Amy Waring smiles, and says that it is ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... our English character. I desire it for the sake of the educated classes, whom the distinction of language and manners keeps apart from the great empire to which they belong. At the best, the fate of the educated and aspiring colonist is, at present, one of little hope, and little activity; but the French Canadian is cast still further into the shade, by a language and habits foreign to those of the Imperial Government. A spirit of exclusion has closed the higher professions ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... between Cheyenne and Denver lies the new town of Greeley. Although not on the maps in 1870, it now contains fifteen hundred inhabitants, forty or fifty stores, six hotels, churches, schools, and all the apparatus of civilization. This aspiring town, 4779 feet above the sea-level, is an example of those colony towns so successful in the West, and on which we must depend for rebuilding society in the South. Greeley is surrounded by fertile farms, and every city lot looks fresh and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... deadening ether of dream; yet feeling to his inmost core all its powerful grief and accusation, and quietly aghast at the sinister consciousness it gave him. Still it swelled, gathering and sounding on into yet mightier pathos, till all at once it darkened and spread wide in wild despair, and aspiring again into a pealing agony of supplication, quivered and died away in a low and ...
— The Ghost • William. D. O'Connor
... wild, the impassioned. A dreamer—a muse—filled with ambitious thoughts—proud, vain, aspiring after the vague, the unfathomable! What was her joy, now that she could speak her whole soul, with all its passionate fullness, to understanding ears! Stevens and herself had already spoken together. Her books had been his books. ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... faithful one-eyed Arab guide, and after three long days of riding and talking—as I had feared—Maeterlink and Tolstoy, Henley and Verlaine (this last being utterly condemned by Marnier as a man of weak character and degraded life) we saw the towers of Beni-Kouidar aspiring above the shifting sands, the tufted summits of the thousands of palm-trees, and heard the dull beating of drums and the cries of people borne to us over the spaces of which silence is the ...
— Desert Air - 1905 • Robert Hichens
... the public will receive the work in the spirit in which it is given and any literary defects which it may have, and I am sure there are many, may be overlooked, as I am only endeavoring to rectify error, instead of aspiring to literary excellence. I express my sincere and heartfelt thanks to the half-breeds who befriended me during my captivity, and to the friends and public generally who sheltered and assisted me in many ways and by many acts of kindness and sympathy, and whose attention was unremitting ...
— Two months in the camp of Big Bear • Theresa Gowanlock and Theresa Delaney
... moved by the imaginary presence of other famous dead people. A poet's ghost is the only one that survives for his fellow-mortals, after his bones are in the dust,—and be not ghostly, but cherishing many hearts with his own warmth in the chillest atmosphere of life. What other fame is worth aspiring for? Or, let me speak it more boldly, what other long-enduring fame can exist? We neither remember nor care anything for the past, except as the poet has made it intelligibly noble and sublime to our comprehension. The shades of the mighty have no substance; ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Philip some for all. He'll deserve it more than me. Oh, God,' he would say, 'let me think to myself when I'm there, you've missed the good things of life, but your son has got them; you are here, but he is on the heights; lie still, thou poor aspiring heart, lie still in your grave ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... but more indelible emotions in a highly-excited imagination often produce those delusions, which Darwin calls hallucinations, and which sometimes terminate in mania. The haughtiness, the melancholy, and the aspiring genius of Leland, were tending to a disordered intellect. Incipient insanity is a mote floating in the understanding, escaping all observation, when the mind is capable of observing itself, but seems a constituent ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... crowned with loving-kindness and satisfied with good, so that 'their youth is renewed like the eagle's.' Think of them as again joyous, with the joy of beginning a career, which has no term but the sum of all perfection in the likeness of the infinite God. They rise like the song-bird, aspiring to the heavens, circling round, and ever higher, which 'singing still doth soar, and soaring ever singeth'—up and up through the steadfast blue to the sun! 'Even the youths shall faint and be weary, and ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... there to take my chance? He evinced great affection and gratitude to his grandfather, who, while he scrupulously observed all his obligations towards Louis Philippe, could not help feeling a secret pride in the aspiring genius of Napoleon's son. He was well educated, and day and night pored over the history of his father's glorious career. He delighted in military exercises, and not only shone at the head of his regiment, but had already ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... once into the arms of Scotland. The whole nation will then rally round their king; and as his weapon of war, I shall rejoice to fulfill the commission with which God has intrusted me!" He then briefly unfolded to the eagerly listening Bruce (whose aspiring spirit, inflamed by the fervor of youth, and winged by natural courage, saw the glory alone of the enterprise), an attack which he meant to make on the camp of Edward, while his victorious troops slept ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... hold thy course, Let virtue teach thee firmly to pursue 530 The gradual paths of an aspiring change: For birth and life and death, and that strange state Before the naked powers that thro' the world Wander like winds have found a human home, All tend to perfect happiness, and urge 535 ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... school. The classic languages formed the staple of his education, and he never had that power of verbal memory which could enable him to retain the rules of the Greek grammar or to handle the Latin language with the accuracy of a scholar. He soon gave up trying to do so. Instead of aspiring to the mastery of accidence and syntax, he aimed rather at securing immunity from the rod. At Magdalen School it was still actively in use; but there were certain rules about the number of offences which must be committed in a given time to call for its application. Green was clever enough to notice ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... senators, and fathers of this state, Our strange protractions and unkind delays Where weighty wars doth call us out to fight, Our factious wits, to please aspiring lords, (You see) have added power unto our foes, And hazarded rich Phrygia and Bithinia, With all our Asian holds and cities too. Thus Sylla seeking to be general, Who is invested in our consul's pall,[101] Hath forced murders in ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VII (4th edition) • Various
... towers We laughed away the sunny hours, You asked me for a simple rhyme; So now accept this birthday chime. No poet I—the "gift divine" Ne'er was, and never will be, mine; But take these couplets, which impart The anxious wishes of my heart, In place of more aspiring lay, To greet ...
— Young Americans Abroad - Vacation in Europe: Travels in England, France, Holland, - Belgium, Prussia and Switzerland • Various
... How many an aspiring heart has breathed the high chivalrous sentiment, never before so touchingly expressed, as in the words of this beautiful song! How many a gallant generous nature has desired with unspeakable longing to lay its wealth of loyalty and devotion at her feet who is ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... isn't safe to give her another chance," said Miss Kingston regretfully, when the fifteen aspiring Shylocks had played their parts and the committee were comparing opinions. "Yes, I agree with Barbara that Jean Eastman is by far the most promising ...
— Betty Wales Senior • Margaret Warde
... in the world comes of people's aspiring to what they have no fitness for; they have neither the dignity nor the humility to take the place God in His providence assigns them; and instead of reaching out of it by making themselves nobler and better, they attempt to build up by some appearance which ...
— The King's Daughter and Other Stories for Girls • Various
... Her wide dominion, stretching from the Nile To the far Euxine and Euphrates' flood— Her active commerce, whose expanded range Monopolized the trade of all the East— Her stately capital, whose towers and domes Vied with proud Rome in architectural grace— Her own aspiring aims and high renown— All breathed around the Asiatic queen An atmosphere of greatness, and betrayed Her bold ambition, and her rivalry With the imperial ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 4 October 1848 • Various
... sky. A gallery which ran round the upper floor looked on this court, in which a great quiet reigned, broken only by the music of a fountain. A vine climbed on the wooden pillars which supported the gallery, and, aspiring higher, embraced the wide carved eaves, and even tapestried with green the three gables that on each side of the court broke the skyline. The grapes hung nearly ripe, and amid their clusters and the green ...
— Count Hannibal - A Romance of the Court of France • Stanley J. Weyman
... that of Chopin in his B-flat minor Sonata and that of Wagner in the last act of the Goetterdaemmerung as one of the most eloquent in existence, and contains melodies so touching that they could have come only from the very soul of Beethoven. Especially noteworthy is the aspiring melody of the middle, contrasting portion (Maggiore) where the spirit, freed from earthly dross, seems to mount to the skies in a chariot of fire. The third part, where the minor mode is resumed, abounds in dramatic touches; especially that fugal passage, where the ecclesiastical ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... are ye, enshrined in the hearts of all loyal worshippers of the tuneful god. And yet (we grieve to confess it) we, even we, spite of all our enthusiasm, have been seen laughing at "old music," the aspiring psalmody of a ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... discovered the perpetual motion, goes to the bar, where the said motion is the only one he is called upon to make, forces himself into high society, wriggles his way into Parliament—the true Trophonius's cave of aspiring orators—and becomes a silent Demosthenes, as he has long been a lawless Coke; an ends at last in a paroxysm of wonder that his creditors are hard-hearted and his country ungrateful, so that, instead of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... it struck me as strange that this New Year's finishes another half of my life. I was nineteen that winter. This year I shall be just twice that. Nineteen years were all childhood, dreaming, planning, hoping, aspiring, but with no practical care, no responsibilities of any sort, the most sheltered existence a girl could have. And now nineteen of as varied an experience as most people know, teaching, housekeeping, bringing up the younger children, seven years of Paul Elder's, the ...
— Perpetual Light • William Rose Benet
... five weeks with the Peach Blossom Company on their provincial tour, and in the end the manager was sorry to lose her. He was under the impression that she had joined them as an aspiring novice, presumably able to gratify that or any other whim. He had guessed that she was clever, and could see that she was extremely good-looking. Before the month was out he was congratulating himself upon his perception much as Rattray had a habit of doing, ...
— A Daughter of To-Day • Sara Jeannette Duncan (aka Mrs. Everard Cotes)
... blazoned manuscript—suitable offering to the royal scholar. Greymount was noticed; sent for; promoted in the household; knighted; might doubtless have been sworn of the council, and in due time have become a minister; but his was a discreet ambition—of an accumulative rather than an aspiring character. He served the king faithfully in all domestic matters that required an unimpassioned, unscrupulous agent; fashioned his creed and conscience according to the royal model in all its freaks; seized the right moment to get sundry grants of abbey lands, and ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... ah! not to repose. The unusual excitement of the evening, the light, the splendor, the luxury, the guests, and among them all the figures of Claudia and the viscount, haunting memory and stimulating imagination, forbade repose. Ever, in the midst of all his busy, useful, aspiring life he was conscious, deep in his heart, of a gnawing anguish, whose name was Claudia Merlin. To-night this deep-seated anguish tortured him like the vulture of Prometheus. One vivid picture was always before his mind's ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... killed itself out. The great barons who adhered to the "Red Rose" or the "White Rose," or who fluctuated from one to the other, became poorer, fewer, and less potent every year. When the great struggle ended at Bosworth, a large part of the greatest combatants were gone. The restless, aspiring, rich barons, who made the civil war, were broken by it. Henry VII. attained a kingdom in which there was a Parliament to advise, but ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot
... Here the author harks back unconsciously to his nineteenth century individualism; he need not have done so; other socialist writers would have it that one of the everlasting boards would "sit on" every aspiring actor or author before he was allowed to begin. But we may take it either way. It is not the major point. There is no need to discuss the question of how to deal with the artist under socialism. If the rest of it were all right, no one ...
— The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice • Stephen Leacock
... these occasions. This nobleman, who had so zealously co-operated with his party in conferring the title of king on Alfonso, had intended to reserve the authority to himself. He probably found more difficulty in controlling the operations of the jealous and aspiring aristocracy, with whom he was associated, than he had imagined; and he was willing to aid the opposite party in maintaining a sufficient degree of strength to form a counterpoise to that of the confederates, and thus, while ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... moreover, to help the under man in the struggle with his uncharitable accusers and traducers. When a minister was under fire, he usually stood by the unfortunate, if there was any possible chance to save him for the good of the service. He made himself, too, a patron of young men aspiring to the ministry, raising money for their support by impressing upon the people the importance of educating them. In this connection he trained and helped to support Dr. James E. Willis, who was baptized, licensed and ordained to preach under Dr. Lee. Through ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various
... Aunt Alma could go. Marina wears "snails" now, the sight of her is enough to give one fits. Dora gets on with her quite well, which is more than I can say for myself. Only when we got out aid I notice that Siegfried's sister, Fraulein Hulda, had been sitting next the aspiring actress. She is awfully nice, and many, many years ago she must have been very pretty; she has such soft brown eyes, and her hair is the same colour as her brother's; but he has glorious blue eyes, which get quite black when he is ...
— A Young Girl's Diary • An Anonymous Young Girl
... belief in the existence of the Deity; and persuaded of this, it followed necessarily, as part of His eternal justice, that there must be another life for man who suffers so unjustly here. Hence, I argued, the sovereign reason in man for aspiring to the possession of that second life; and hence, too, a worship founded on the love of God, and of his neighbour, and an unceasing impulse to dignify his nature by generous sacrifices. I had already ...
— My Ten Years' Imprisonment • Silvio Pellico
... exercised powerful influence over the stream of thought during the present generation. The lectures on Logic and Metaphysics delivered by him at Edinburgh, for twenty years, determined the view taken of those subjects by a large number of aspiring young students, and determined that view for many of them permanently and irrevocably.[1] Several eminent teachers and writers of the present day are proud of considering themselves his disciples, enunciate his doctrines in greater or less proportion, and seldom contradict him without ...
— Review of the Work of Mr John Stuart Mill Entitled, 'Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy.' • George Grote
... open to approach, as they sought tickets to the opera, because they were not a part of it. Adams did like the rest. All thought of serious education had long vanished. He tried to acquire a few French idioms, without even aspiring to master a subjunctive, but he succeeded better in acquiring a modest taste for Bordeaux and Burgundy and one or two sauces; for the Trois Freres Provencaux and Voisin's and Philippe's and the ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... the minerals in Sarawak, bad times were tided over, and, by patient perseverance, the finances of the State have been brought to their present satisfactory condition. What the amount of the national public debt is, I am not in a position to say, but, like all other countries aspiring to be civilized, it possesses a small one. The improvement in the financial position was undoubtedly chiefly due to the influx of Chinese, especially of gambier and pepper planters, who were attracted ...
— British Borneo - Sketches of Brunai, Sarawak, Labuan, and North Borneo • W. H. Treacher
... that thou wert lovely from thy birth, Of glorious parents, thou aspiring Child. I wonder not—for One then left this earth Whose life was like a setting planet mild, Which clothed thee in the radiance undefiled Of its departing glory; still her fame Shines on thee, through the tempests dark and wild Which shake ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... foolery." The tone invited—at least it did not discourage—further inquiry. Mr. Gardner was bored. Amateurs who "occasionally write" were the bane of him who, having a signature of his own in the leading local paper, represented to the aspiring mind the gilded and lofty peaks of the unattainable. However he must play this youth as a source ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... over by midnight, and rarely last so long; while out in the country and in other towns, it is no unusual thing to have a dinner with speeches run along until the early hours of the next morning. While public men, politicians, and aspiring orators seek their opportunities upon this platform in New York, few succeed and many fail. It is difficult for a stranger to grasp the situation and adapt himself at once to its atmosphere. I have narrated in preceding pages some ...
— My Memories of Eighty Years • Chauncey M. Depew
... world 245 Of life, and life-like mockery beneath, Above, behind, far stretching and before; Or more mechanic artist represent By scale exact, in model, wood or clay, From blended colours also borrowing help, 250 Some miniature of famous spots or things,— St. Peter's Church; or, more aspiring aim, In microscopic vision, Rome herself; Or, haply, some choice rural haunt,—the Falls Of Tivoli; and, high upon that steep, 255 The Sibyl's mouldering Temple! every tree, Villa, or cottage, lurking among rocks Throughout the landscape; tuft, ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... of the master, which awed the slave into submission, was annihilated. The whip which was held over the slave, and compelled a kind of subordination—brutal, indeed, but effectual—was abolished. Here in the outset the reins were given to the long-oppressed, but now aspiring mass. No adequate force was substituted, because it was the intent of the new system to govern by milder means. This was well, but what were the milder means which were to take the place of ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... unfavourable. And yet my name once stood as high in fields and courts, as that of the Constable; nor is it aught more disgraceful than what is indeed often esteemed the worst of disgraces—poverty, which prevents my still aspiring to places of honour and fame. If my youthful follies have been numerous, I have paid for them by the loss of my fortune, and the degradation of my condition; and therein, my happy kinsman might, if he pleased, do ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... Athenians again most eagerly allied themselves with the Thebans, and, aspiring to supremacy at sea, sent embassies round to the other maritime states, and brought over to their own side those who were willing to revolt from the Spartans. Meanwhile the Thebans, alone in their country of Boeotia, constantly skirmishing with the Lacedaemonians, and not fighting ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume II • Aubrey Stewart & George Long
... riding being generally at that time on horseback. But it was not the rather broken and uneven condition of the path which caused the frown on the young pedestrian's face, or the irritability shown by the sharp slashes of the maple switch in his hand upon the aspiring weeds ...
— Dulcibel - A Tale of Old Salem • Henry Peterson
... forgotten. They returned to her like spectres stealing across the sand. They lurked like spectres among the dense masses of the trees. She strove not to see their pale shapes, not to hear their terrible voices. She strove to draw calm once more from this infinite calm of silently-growing things aspiring towards the sun. But with each step she took the torment in her heart increased. At last she came to the deeper darkness and the blanched sand, and saw pine needles strewed about her feet. Then she stood still, instinctively ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... son and a grandson of a Huguenot refugee, named David Garrick. The master and the pupil became friends, and the friendship lasted with life. Master and pupil resolved to make the adventure of the town together. The eyes of aspiring provincials turned always to the great city, every ambitious provincial heart beat with desire for the conquest of London. The priest of letters and the player of parts, the real man and the shadow of all men, packed up bag and baggage and came to London to very different fame ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... Sacheverell produced a formidable explosion of high-church fanaticism. At such a moment Atterbury could not fail to be conspicuous. His inordinate zeal for the body to which he belonged, his turbulent and aspiring temper, his rare talents for agitation and for controversy, were again signally displayed. He bore a chief part in framing that artful and eloquent speech which the accused divine pronounced at the bar of the Lords, and which presents a singular contrast ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 3. (of 4) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... horrible hypocrisy of abandoning the evil-doer and yet appropriating the fruit of the evil deed. For that reason too the opponents of Gracchus were in a certain sense not wrong, when they accused him of aspiring to the crown. For him it is a fresh impeachment rather than a justification, that he himself was probably a stranger to any such thought. The aristocratic government was so thoroughly pernicious, that the citizen, who was able to depose the senate and to put himself in its place, might perhaps ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... external good, and miserable in spiritual life; we have in abundance that which, if must be, we can go without, and are infinitely poor in the one thing needful. And when the depth of our being is stirred, with its need of loving, aspiring, fulfilling its destiny, it feels the anguish of one buried alive—is smothered under the mass of secondary things that weigh it down and deprive it ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... finally to swallow up intellect and the life of life in the heart, unless God of His mercy fetches me away by some sudden death—that death, considered as an entrance to this ghostly world, is but a postern-gate by comparison with the heaven-aspiring vestibule through which this world of the Infinite ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... myth—if we may abuse the name. Let us suppose the son of some Canadian carpenter aspiring to be a moral teacher, but neither working nor pretending to work miracles; as much hated by his countrymen as Jesus Christ was hated by his, and both he and his countrymen as much hated by all the civilised world beside, as were Jesus Christ ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers
... of wealth. There will not be the distinction of social classes which now plays such an immense part in life. The unsuccessful professional man will not live in terror lest his children should sink in the scale; the aspiring employe will not be looking forward to the day when he can become a sweater in his turn. Ambitious young men will have to dream other daydreams than that of business success and wealth wrung out of the ruin of competitors and the degradation of labor. In such a world, most of the nightmares that ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell
... "coaches." Nearly all his spare time was given up to the public service. Every afternoon you would be sure to find him in his flannels running along the bank beside some boat, or standing to be bowled at by aspiring young cricketers in the meadow, or superintending a swimming party up at ...
— The Willoughby Captains • Talbot Baines Reed
... Henry, is a deathless name on earth, Thine amaranthine wreaths, new pluck'd in Heaven! By what aspiring child of mortal birth Could more be ask'd, to whom might more ...
— The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White - With a Memoir by Sir Harris Nicolas • Henry Kirke White
... them—a young soul yet, but it will mature, if the body lives; and neither father nor mother has a spirit to compare with it. Partaking of the essence of each, it will one day be better than either—stronger, much purer, more aspiring. Rose is a still, and sometimes a stubborn girl now; her mother wants to make of her such a woman as she is herself—a woman of dark and dreary duties; and Rose has a mind full-set, thick-sown with the germs of ideas her mother never knew. It is agony to ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... to me probable that an aspiring revolutionary like Hitler, Lenin, Stalin or Trotsky) would attempt to copy Napoleon's once he had successfully taken power inside first the party and later the state. To enhance the dissolution of a democracy the opposite system, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... they would have been recognized as aspiring natures, spreading their wings for a nobler flight, seeking a higher and grander life. The smile of beauty would have urged them on. Hands innumerable would have given them a cordial and encouraging grasp. But in the land they had sought to benefit and failed, they suffered in silence and darkness, ...
— Mizora: A Prophecy - A MSS. Found Among the Private Papers of the Princess Vera Zarovitch • Mary E. Bradley
... to feel uncomfortable before that piercing gaze, so I decided to floor the aspiring detective working so zealously for the Fatherland and to point out the danger of jumping at conclusions. ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... he had led with him, and straightway he incited man to rebel against God, and gained for himself and hell the major portion of all the generations of man. Why was he beaten out of heaven? Because he was less brave than God? less proud? less aspiring? No! A thousand times no! God was more powerful, as he said, Whom thunder hath made greater. But Lucifer was a free spirit. To serve was to suffocate. He preferred suffering in freedom to all the happiness of a comfortable servility. He did ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... discourage women from aspiring to the learned professions by refusing them the advantages of higher education which they provide ...
— What eight million women want • Rheta Childe Dorr
... to the present day; the more widely my fame was spread abroad, the more bitter was the envy that was kindled against me. It was given out that I, presuming on my gifts far beyond the warranty of my youth, was aspiring despite my tender, years to the leadership of a school; nay, more, that I was making read the very place in which I would undertake this task, the place being none other than the castle of Melun, at that time a royal seat. My teacher himself had some foreknowledge ...
— Historia Calamitatum • Peter Abelard
... self-sacrificing study of its author, but it is the most complete, the most perfect, and, to me, the most satisfactory exposition of English Grammar that has come to my notice. It appears to me that every youth aspiring to become master of the English language, from the rudimental principles to the full, round, beautiful, faultless, perfect period, will make this volume ...
— A Handbook of the English Language • Robert Gordon Latham
... intercourse of men: they have most vigour when actuated in the mind by the operation of its principal springs, by the emulations, the friendships, and the oppositions which subsist among a forward and aspiring people. Amidst the great occasions which put a free, and even a licentious society in motion, its members become capable of every exertion; and the same scenes which gave employment to Themistocles and Thrasybulus, inspired, by contagion, the genius ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.
... navvy must follow his work from place to place, and lodgings are dear in the towns, and the farmers in country places will not let their cottages except to their own labourers—how was the navvy even with higher wages to keep a wife? The aspiring young fellow beside him replied at once sharply and decisively, that he did not mean to have a wife, leastways not till he had got his regular 30s. a week, which he might in time. Then John Smith made a noise in ...
— The Toilers of the Field • Richard Jefferies
... obtain, like your adorable Lord, this "ornament of a meek and quiet spirit, which, in the sight of God, is of great price." Be "clothed" with gentleness and humility. Follow not the world's fleeting shadows that mock you as you grasp them. If always aspiring—ever soaring on the wing—you are likely to become discontented, proud, selfish, time-serving. In whatever position of life God has placed you, be satisfied. What! ambitious to be on a pinnacle of the temple—a ...
— The Mind of Jesus • John R. Macduff
... the ordinary story—not by a long shot. You'll see. It seems he had fallen in love with a girl—had been in love with her for years—before he had left the East; a very young girl, nineteen, and of an aspiring family. The family, naturally, didn't look upon him with any favor whatsoever; he was poor and he didn't show the slightest inclination to engage in any of the pursuits they considered proper to the ambitions of a worthy young ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... And what Thoughts have you of me? What, that I should betray you? And coming hither only full of Ardor to be the Repose of your Life, do I bring a fatal Poison to afflict it? What Detestation must I have for the Beauty they find in me, without aspiring to make it appear? And how ought I to curse the unfortunate Day, on which I first saw the Prince?—But, Madam, it cannot be me whom Heaven has chosen to torment you, and to destroy all your Tranquillity: No, it cannot be so much my Enemy, to put me to so great ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... to the illusion more completely than she. No one had ever hunted with a more passionate determination for that correlative soul that would submerge, exalt, and complete her own aspiring soul. And what had she found? Men. Merely men. Satiety or disaster. Weariness and disgust. She had not an illusion left. She had put all that behind ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... Ellis says it is expressly stated, in this Sermon, that the King himself desired "that unto his Golden Manual might be prefixed his representation, kneeling; contemning a temporal crown, holding our blessed Saviour's crown of thorns, and aspiring unto an eternal ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 9, Saturday, December 29, 1849 • Various
... 'Life and Letters' reveals to us the youth who was to be father to the man. Skilful, aspiring, resolute, he grew steadily in knowledge and in power. Consciously or unconsciously, the relation of Action to Reaction was ever present to Faraday's mind. It had been fostered by his discovery of Magnetic Rotations, ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... my lord!—The wish'd-for day is come, When this proud idol of the people's hearts Shall now no more be worshipp'd.—Essex falls. My lord, the minute's near, that shall unravel The mystic schemes of this aspiring man. Now fortune, with officious hand, invites us To her, and opens wide the gates of greatness, The way to power. My heart exults; I see, I see, my lord, our utmost wish accomplish'd! I see great Cecil shine without a rival, ...
— The Earl of Essex • Henry Jones
... independent of all of them in its daring, yet restrained, originality. In the magnificent square tower at the center of its northern end, all the beauty and spiritual import of the Court culminate. Its aspiring length of line, unbroken from base to summit, faces poise and uplift, the broad, plain surfaces give nobility and strength and the exquisite richness and delicacy of the ornament give lightness and grace, while the sculpture blends and crowns ...
— The Architecture and Landscape Gardening of the Exposition • Louis Christian Mullgardt
... with his son,—a thoughtful and aspiring youth, who pondered deeply what he had seen and heard, as he walked by his father's side. And Mr. Williams, greatly relieved and gratified by the interview, hastened to relate to his family the good news. And the praises of Gingerford were on all their tongues, and in their ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... sent to Eton, and then to Trinity College, Oxford, where buccaneer instincts broke out and he left without a degree. Two careers were open to him, as to all aspiring sons of Noble Beef-eaters—he could enter ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... futurity reveal Her hidden worlds, unlock her cloud-hung gates, Or snatch the keys of mystery from time, Your souls would madden at the piercing sight Of fortune, wielding high her woe-born arms To crush aspiring genius, seize the wreath Which fond imagination's hand had weav'd, Strip its bright beams, and give ...
— Poetic Sketches • Thomas Gent
... come to advance himself in his chosen field of knowledge, quite such a thrill as that which must be his when he matriculates at one of the scores of educational institutions in that quarter of Paris to which the ardent, aspiring youth of all the western world have been directing their eager feet from ...
— Foch the Man - A Life of the Supreme Commander of the Allied Armies • Clara E. Laughlin
... true wealth. This the wealth that rust cannot corrupt. There is no other real wealth in the universe. Gold and silver, houses and lands, are not wealth to the longing, aspiring soul of man. The joy of the spirit, which is the reward of a good deed, comes a gift from God, a treasure worthy of being garnered into the storehouse of an ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... sacrifice all for your lover's weal, do not let the work be incomplete. Bind him not by oaths which he will regard as spiders' webs, to be burst through at pleasure. You see, as well as I do, that he is bent on being lord of Rookwood; and, in truth, to an aspiring mind, such a desire is natural, is praiseworthy. It will be pleasant, as well as honorable, to efface the stain cast upon his birth. It will be an act of filial duty in him to restore his mother's good name; and I, her father, laud his anxiety on that score; ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... how it can change his shape! How base is pride from his own dunghill put! How I have rais'd thee, Sol. I list not tell, Out of the ocean of adversity, To sit in height of honour's glorious heaven, To be the eyesore[43] of aspiring eyes: To give the day her life from thy bright looks, And let nought thrive upon the face of earth, From which thou shalt withdraw thy powerful smiles. What hast thou done, deserving such high grace? What ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... You can see that. And now that you understand the difficulties of Paris life, you will know how many roundabout ways you must take to reach your end; very well, then, you must admit that Louise was aspiring to an all but impossible piece of Court favor; she was quite unknown, she is not rich, and therefore she could not afford to neglect any means ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... the note of modern morality. This painful restless "becoming" has taken the place of harmony, equilibrium, joy, that is to say, of "being." We are all fauns and satyrs aspiring to become angels, ugly creatures labouring at our embellishment, monstrous chrysalids trying to become butterflies. Our ideal is no longer the tranquil beauty of the soul, it is the anguish of Laocoon ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... after that time he was neither directly nor indirectly concerned in the death of any person, though he sometimes was justly irritated. He swore "that he would perish himself, rather than prove the destruction of any man." Two men of patrician rank being convicted of aspiring to the empire, he only advised them to desist, saying, "that the sovereign power was disposed of by fate," and promised them, that if there was any thing else they desired of him, he would grant it. He also immediately sent messengers to the mother of one of them, who was at a great ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... succession ever-green, flower-bedecked glades, with great trees and blossoming shrubs in scattered clumps and patches, among which sinuous ribbons of jungle denoted the courses of deep hidden streams. Others were merely precipitous depressions in the unbroken mass of foliage, variegated with aspiring palms so slender of shaft that their unceasing swaying in the still air seemed an act of unconscious affectation for the display of huge bunches of gaudy fruit, seductive and dulcet to the taste. Spider-webbed tree-ferns ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... into the woods, and out under the moon, between the little grey fields. Some sheep had come out on the road and were lying upon it. "I suppose it's all very natural," he said. "The circus aspiring to the academy and the academy spying to the circus. Now, what am I going to do to-morrow? I suppose I must go ...
— The Untilled Field • George Moore
... the white, the sorrel, and the iron-gray, were not so exactly shaped as the bay, the dapple-gray, and the black; nor born with equal talents of mind, or a capacity to improve them; and therefore continued always in the condition of servants, without ever aspiring to match out of their own race, which in that country would ...
— Gulliver's Travels - into several remote nations of the world • Jonathan Swift
... democracy to the three chiefs. One of them was now gone. The more advanced section of the party was beginning to distrust Pompey. Clodius, their favorite representative, had been put forward for the praetorship, while Milo was aspiring to be made consul, and Clodius had prepared a fresh batch of laws to be submitted to the sovereign people; one of which (if Cicero did not misrepresent it to inflame the aristocracy) was a measure of some kind for the enfranchisement ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude
... sang a tuneful, rather sentimental evening hymn in the twilight. They sang fervently, especially the maids and men in the chancel pews. Their minds were stirred to soothing and vaguely aspiring thoughts. Such hymns as this at the close of an evening service were the pleasantest part ...
— The Squire's Daughter - Being the First Book in the Chronicles of the Clintons • Archibald Marshall
... heavy face before her, in full light, she was at first a little surprised on finding that it expressed not even the fond anxiety, much less the eagerness, of an aspiring wooer. The hair and whiskers, it is true, were so smoothly combed back that they made long lappets on either side of his face; unusual care had been taken with his cambric cravat and shirt-ruffles, and he wore his best blue coat, which was entirely too warm for the season. In ...
— The Story Of Kennett • Bayard Taylor
... other pet or plaything in the world, began to weep in secret—fearing that they might have been rearing by mistake some future tigress—for as to infancy, that, you know, is playful and innocent even in the cubs of a tigress. But there the ladies were going too far. Catalina was impetuous and aspiring, but not cruel. She was gentle, if people would let her be so. But woe to those that took liberties with her! A female servant of the convent, in some authority, one day, in passing up the aisle to matins, wilfully gave Kate a push; and in return, Kate, who never left her debts in arrear, gave ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... motley and miserable set. Ravaillae might have looked well swinging in chains; Charlotte Corday is said to have died like an actress; Beale hung not without dignity, but these people, aspiring to overturn a nation, bore the appearance of a troop of ignorant folks, expiating the blood-shed of ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend
... epaulets, and march as leaders in the martial band. Whilst these important canvassings are going on, it behooves even the humblest and meekest to beware how he buttons his coat, or stiffens himself to a perpendicular, lest he be more than suspected of aspiring to some military capacity. But the Harvard Washington Corps must not be passed over without further notice. Who can tell what eagerness fills its ranks on an exhibition-day? with what spirit and bounding step the glorious phalanx wheels into the College yard? with what exultation ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... the Christian ideal of spiritual life supplied to human civilization. How close the wise and broad Greek culture came to being all-sufficing, capable of effecting almost enough of impetus for the aspiring progress of the world, and yet how much it lacked a warmer element essential to be engrafted upon its lofty beauty, the reader, upon whose imaginative vision the personality of Cleon rises, ...
— Men and Women • Robert Browning
... God! who pours the living glow Of light, creation's fountain-head: Forgive the praise—too mean and low— Or from the living or the dead. No tongue thy peerless name hath spoken, No space can hold that awful name; The aspiring spirit's wing is broken;— Thou wilt be, wert, and art the same! Language is dumb. Imagination, Knowledge, and science, helpless fall; They are irreverent profanation, And thou, O God! art all in all. How vain on such a thought to dwell! Who knows Thee—Thee the All-unknown? ...
— Notes and Queries, Issue No. 61, December 28, 1850 • Various |
