"Ambition" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... is," quoth Tommy, "I am a society bird, and Nature has marked out for me a course beyond the range of the commonplace, and my wife must learn to accommodate. If she has a brilliant husband, whose success gratifies her ambition and places her in a distinguished public position, she must pay something for it. I'm sure Billy Wren's wife would give her very bill to see her husband in the circles where I am quite at home. To say the truth, my wife was all well enough content till old Mother ...
— Queer Little Folks • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... white men—we had been cordially received and entertained at that very place, and our money refused—but there is little doubt that the abandonment of the telegraph-line will be a good thing for these natives. Put two or three young men of no special intellectual resource or ambition down in a lonely spot like this, with no society at all save that of the natives and practically nothing to do, and there is a natural and almost inevitable trend to evil. To the exceptional man with the desire ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... I was actuated by ambition. I was delighted to possess superior power; I was prone to manifest that superiority, and was satisfied if this were done, without much solicitude concerning consequences. I sported frequently with the apprehensions of my associates, and threw out a bait for their wonder, and supplied them with ...
— Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist - (A Fragment) • Charles Brockden Brown
... kiss her lips was ultimate satisfaction. But it was indeed only the beginning of desires. I told her my one ambition was to marry her. ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... new conditions. No overseer was to stand over them with the whip, for their new master was the necessity of earning their daily bread. Very soon new and higher motives would come; fresh encouragements, a nobler ambition, would grow into their new condition. Then in the simplest language she explained the difference between their former relations with the then master and their new relations with the northern people, showing that labor here was voluntary, and that they could only expect to secure kind employers ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... The ambition of Theodore was still boundless. He gathered an increased following, conquered tribe after tribe in Abyssinia proper, and prosecuted a most successful crusade in the country of the Gallas, subduing descendants of those who had wrought havoc in his native land from ...
— Our Sailors - Gallant Deeds of the British Navy during Victoria's Reign • W.H.G. Kingston
... twenty. At twenty he loves sincerely and devotedly; he respects the woman who has inspired him with the noblest sentiment of which his soul is capable. At thirty his heart, hardened by deceit and ill-requited affection, and pre-occupied by projects of worldly ambition, regards love only as an agreeable pastime, and woman's heart as a toy, which he may fling aside the moment it ceases to amuse him. At twenty he is ready to abandon everything for her whom he idolises—rank, wealth, the future!—they weigh as nothing in the balance against ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... the archbishop, turning up his fine eyes, "your vices are your children. Ambition is your eldest child, Cruelty is your second child, Luxury is your third child; and you have nourished them from your youth up. Separate yourself from these sinful ones, and prepare your soul, for the ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Caffyn turned about and came strolling back. He is a long lantern-jawed lad with a sardonic drawl of speech. He has spent two years in the ville lumiere, having come to it moth-like from somewhere afar in Texas. His ambition—no, wait!—the ambition of his father, a 'cattle king,' is that he should acquire the difficult art of painting in oils. 'Want me?' asked Caffyn, as I pushed a chair for him. 'What for? If it's to admire the 'rainbow' you've been mixing, I'm a connoisseur and I don't pass it. Your hand's steady ...
— Foe-Farrell • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... but, at the age of nineteen, it is not easy for a prince, educated in the supreme rank, to understand the true characters of his ministers and generals. He attempted to weigh, with an impartial hand, their various merits and defects; and, whilst he checked the rash confidence of ambition, he distrusted the cautious wisdom which despaired of the republic. As each moment of delay diminished something of the power and resources of the future sovereign of the East, the situation of ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... not look so low. Here are the facts of the case. Our defunct sister, whose canonisation the order are now endeavouring to obtain at the court of the Pope, and would have had it if they could have paid the proper costs of the papal brief; this Petronille, then, had an ambition to have her name included in the Calendar of Saints, which was in no way prejudicial to our order. She lived in prayer alone, would remain in ecstasy before the altar of the virgin, which is on the side of the fields, ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... his heart is humbled and warmed. And who knows,—for, with all his sincerity and aspiration, he has an eye to temporal uses,—who knows but this stumbling-block an enemy has placed in his way may prove the stepping-stone of his ambition? ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... pleasant to think of poor Alda's delight," said Geraldine, over her writing-case. "After all her troubles, to have her utmost ambition fulfilled at last; and yet-and yet it does seem turning that pretty creature over to a life ...
— The Long Vacation • Charlotte M. Yonge
... sickened upon him. He no longer took delight in arms. His heart, that used to be roused at the sight of troops and banners and battle array, and would stir and leap at the sound of a drum or a trumpet or a neighing war-horse, seemed to have lost all that pride and ambition which are a soldier's virtue; and his military ardor and all his old joys forsook him. Sometimes he thought his wife honest, and at times he thought her not so; sometimes he thought Iago just, and at times he thought him not so; then he would wish that he had never ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... Bonaparte mathematics at the college of Brienne, but he had left there to join the army. The revolution found him a sergeant in the artillery. His talent and courage raised him rapidly to the rank of general. It was he who achieved the conquest of Holland, in the middle of winter, but ambition was his downfall. He allowed himself to be seduced by agents of the Prince de Cond, and entered into correspondence with the Prince, who promised him great rewards and the title of "Constable" if he would use the influence which he had with ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot
... cease, thy frantic Tumults cease, Ambition, Sire of War! Nor o'er the mangled Corse of Peace Urge on thy scythd Car. And oh! that Reason's voice might swell 35 With whisper'd Airs and holy Spell To rouse thy gentler Sense, As bending o'er the chilly bloom The Morning wakes its soft ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... Wheelwright first visited Argentina it was little more than an unknown land, whose inhabitants had no ambition, and no desire to acquire wealth—except at the expense of broken heads. There was a standard of wealth, but it lay in the number of cattle owned; land was of little value, save for feeding cattle, and therefore counted for naught, but cattle could be boiled down for tallow; bones and hides ...
— Argentina From A British Point Of View • Various
... flattering opinion, mon ami, if I can by application realize the bright pictures my ambition paints. I shall be so much happier when I have tested myself; for now, all is untried, the present is restless, and the future perplexing. It is so difficult for me to curb my impatience, to remember that our progressive ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 5. May 1848 • Various
... part clean and commendable, for they rigidly adhered themselves to those laws which they would gladly have forced at the sword's point upon others. It is true that among so many there were some whose piety was a shell for their ambition, and others who practised in secret what they denounced in public, but no cause however good is free from such hypocritical parasites. That the greater part of the saints, as they termed themselves, were men of sober and God-fearing lives, ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Cuthbert said, "that when ambition and greed are in one scale, reverence for the holy church will not weigh much in the other. Had King Richard been killed upon his way home, or so long as nothing was heard of him, Sir Rudolph might have been content to allow matters to remain as they were, until at least Lady Margaret attained ...
— The Boy Knight • G.A. Henty
... the active ministry, as the colleague of Dr. Channing. He had youth, zeal, and executive force. Writing of him after his death, Dr. Bellows said: "He had rare administrative qualities and a statesmanlike mind. He would have been a leader anywhere. He had the ambition, the faculties, and the impulsive temperament of an actor in affairs. He had the fervor, the concentration of will, the passionate enthusiasm of conviction, the love of martyrdom, which make men great in action."[9] Throughout his life Gannett labored assiduously ...
— Unitarianism in America • George Willis Cooke
... ambition is to live a quiet life, in a corner of the world. We came not into this wilderness to seek great things to ourselves; and, if any come after us to seek them here, they will be disappointed. We ...
— The Real America in Romance, Volume 6; A Century Too Soon (A Story - of Bacon's Rebellion) • John R. Musick
... was naturally the imperial city that contained by far the most. Rome was by no means the only city in which doles of free corn were made and free spectacular exhibitions given. But in other places the distributions were occasional and depended on the bounty of local men of wealth or ambition, whereas at Rome the dole was regular, and the spectacles frequent and splendid. Rome was the capital, and the abode of the emperor. It claimed the privileges of the Mistress City, including the enjoyment of the surplus revenues. Policy also demanded that the rabble ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... rostrum a man who held in his hand a contract between the king and the people; he began by saying that glory was a beautiful thing, and ambition and war as well; but there was something still more beautiful, ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... that Mr. BIRRELL has lately thrown off one of his obiter dicta—to the effect that Mr. Asquith and his colleagues have expressed an ambition to go down in the pages of history as the "Ministry of All ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, May 10, 1916 • Various
... possible," said Athos, smiling, "that my friend, D'Artagnan, who, after having raised me to the skies, making me an object of worship, casts me down from the top of Olympus, and hurls me to the ground? I have more exalted ambition, D'Artagnan. To be a minister—to be a slave,—never! Am I not still greater? I am nothing. I remember having heard you occasionally call me 'the great Athos;' I defy you, therefore, if I were minister, to continue to bestow that ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... every doubt and fear; I know the truth, and for that truth I live. Considered from certain aspects such knowledge, I admit, is not altogether desirable. Thus it has deprived me of my interest in earthly things. Ambition has left me altogether; for years I have had no wish to succeed in the profession which I adopted in my youth, or in any other. Indeed I doubt whether the elements of worldly success still remain in me; whether they are not entirely burnt away by that fire of wisdom in which I have bathed. How can ...
— The Mahatma and the Hare • H. Rider Haggard
... of this beautiful passage is worthy our careful study and prayerful obedience. Are we ambitious to govern: be it our honour to rule our own spirits and tongues. Are we for war? let it be levied upon our unruly passions. This is laudable ambition. This is honourable war, producing the peace and happiness of man. This is real glory to God and man, the very opposite to those horrors of desolation which gives joy among the devils of hell—the burning cities, the garments ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... false glory For which now you peril life,— For no worthless aim unholy, Do ye plunge into the strife; No unstable, fleeting vision Bright before your gaze hath shone, No day dream of wild ambition, Now your footsteps ...
— The Poetical Works of Mrs. Leprohon (Mrs. R.E. Mullins) • Rosanna Eleanor Leprohon
... King's Gate. The King and Jack Bute used him for a tool, and then cast him out. You wonder why I am of the King's party?" said he, with something sinister in his smile; "I will tell you. When I got my borough I cared not a fig for parties or principles. I had only the one definite ambition, to revenge Lord Holland. Nay," he exclaimed, stopping my protest, "I was not too young to know rottenness as well as another. The times are rotten in England. You may have virtue in America, amongst a people which is fresh from a struggle with the earth and its savages. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... the much toasted Miss Katherine Jones is too big for mere sunny paths. Showing that she has a latent ambition to climb a ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell
... true victory comes when the fight is won: that our foe is never so noble nor so dangerous as when she is fallen, that the crowning triumph is that we celebrate over our conquering selves. Sir, you are right. Kindness, ay kindness after all. And with age, to become clement. Yes, ambition first; then, the rounded vanity - victory still novel; and last, as you say, the royal mood of the mature man; to abdicate for others . . . Sir, you touched me hard about my dead friend; still harder about my living duty; and I am not ...
— The Plays of W. E. Henley and R. L. Stevenson
... Diet holden in the month of April last; resolutions which bear not only the characters of wisdom, but also those of the best intentioned solicitude, and the purest love of our country; and which prove, in the most convincing manner, that your noble Mightinesses have no greater ambition than its universal prosperity; assiduously proposing to yourselves, as the most important object of your attention, of your enterprises, and of your attachment, the rule, Salus Populi suprema Lex esto; resolutions, in fine, which ought perfectly to re-assure the good Citizens of this Province, ...
— A Collection of State-Papers, Relative to the First Acknowledgment of the Sovereignty of the United States of America • John Adams
... than the rest, Smoke, blasted as by envy's thunderbolts; So better far in quiet to obey, Than to desire chief mastery of affairs And ownership of empires. Be it so; And let the weary sweat their life-blood out All to no end, battling in hate along The narrow path of man's ambition; Since all their wisdom is from others' lips, And all they seek is known from what they've heard And less from what they've thought. Nor is this folly Greater to-day, nor greater soon to ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius
... those obtuse youths who can never take in more than one idea at a time. His present idea was football. He had come up this term with a consuming ambition to get into the fifteen, and had played hard and desperately to secure his end. Last week, when Brinkman was obliged to retire, he thought his chance was come, and great was his mortification when he found that his nomination was not accepted ...
— The Cock-House at Fellsgarth • Talbot Baines Reed
... Benedict Arnold. As boys they had gone to the same school, and when they left school they entered college and graduated at the same time. During all those years Eli had always looked upon Arnold as a superior being. When the men were enrolled as guards Eli felt that the height of his ambition was reached, for, with Arnold as captain, the guards would rival any military body ...
— The Hero of Ticonderoga - or Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys • John de Morgan
... given to the conqueror was a garland of wild olive; but this was valued as one of the dearest distinctions in life. To have his name proclaimed as victor before assembled Hellas was an object of ambition with the noblest and the wealthiest of the Greeks. Such a person was considered to have conferred everlasting glory upon his family and his country, and was rewarded by ...
— A Smaller History of Greece • William Smith
... reproduction, as over all the other functions of the body, a powerful influence. Love is said to be the ruling passion in the sanguine temperament, as ambition is in the bilious. There is also in some cases a peculiar condition of the nervous system which impels to, or diverts from, sexual indulgence. In some women, even in moderation, it acts as a poison, being followed by headache ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... contrary to the current opinion of criticism and blame, and direct attention to other causes for whatever unsatisfactory part that Negroes are playing in this line of service in the City. These causes may be looked for in the increasing number of European immigrants; in the growing ambition and effort of Negro wage-earners, sharing the feeling of all native-born Americans, to get away from personal and domestic service and to enter fields of work with better wages, shorter hours, and more independence.[64] To this may be added the increasing ...
— The Negro at Work in New York City - A Study in Economic Progress • George Edmund Haynes
... present fortune betrayed itself again in a phrase to Warren, "I have nothing so much at heart as the faithful discharge of my duty, and in such manner as will give satisfaction both to the Lords of the Admiralty and yourself. This shall ever be my utmost ambition, and no lucre of profit, or other views, shall induce me to act otherwise." Not prize-money; but honor, through service. And this in fact not only ruled his thought but in the moment of decision inspired his act. ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... that some one had gone before us. Archie was great in those days at tracking, his ambition running in Indian paths. He would walk always with his head bent and his eyes on the ground, whereby he several times found lost coins and once a trinket dropped by the provost's wife. At the edge of the burn, where the path turns downward, there is a patch of shingle ...
— Prester John • John Buchan
... nature, and excite a disgust of which it is divested in civilized life. In the latter case we see certain privileges even hereditarily enjoyed; but the weak and strong, the rich and poor, the young and old have paths of honourable ambition laid open to them by entering on which they can gain like immunities. While in the savage condition we find the female sex, the young, and the weak, condemned to a hopeless state of degradation and to a lasting deprivation of particular ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 2 (of 2) • George Grey
... see why a widow should ever marry again. She has gained the benefits of matrimony—freedom and consideration—and she has got rid of the drawbacks. Why should she put her head into the noose again? Her usual motive is ambition: if a man can offer her a great position, make her a princess or an ambassadress she may think ...
— The American • Henry James
... is the ambition of every one to live fashionable, it is their chief wish to be laid in the grave in the same style. Undertakers at fashionable funerals are generally the sexton of some fashionable church, that, perhaps, of the church the deceased was ...
— The Secrets Of The Great City • Edward Winslow Martin
... is the best policy," but because it is a duty to God and to man. The heart that can be gratified by dishonest gains; the ambition that can be satisfied by dishonest means; the mind that can be devoted to dishonest purposes, must be of ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous
... seek the satisfaction of the needs of the moment, without much forethought, and without considering that by sufficient effort the whole conditions of their lives could be changed. A certain percentage, guided by personal ambition, make the effort of thought and will which is necessary to place themselves among the more fortunate members of the community; but very few among these are seriously concerned to secure for all the advantages which they seek for themselves. It is only a few rare and exceptional men who have ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell
... distinct, personal talent entitled to its place in the republic of painting. At that point we leave him. But we may be sure that, with his remarkable gift and even more remarkable power of turning it to account, his energy, his patience, and his manifest ambition, he will soon have gone ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... these impressions on my mind. My knowledge of the interior is, however, too limited to justify me in any conclusion with regard to the central parts of Australia. An ample field is open to enterprise and to ambition, and it is to be hoped that some more decisive measures will be carried into effect, both for the sake of the colony and of geography, to fill up the blank upon the face of the chart of Australia, and remove from us the ...
— Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia, Complete • Charles Sturt
... fellow, an orphan, who goes to the wars as substitute for his friend Jean. After rising from rank to rank by bravery, he returns to his home just as his sweetheart, Perrine, enters the church to wed Jean. The girl had been his one ambition, and now in his despair he reenlists and begs to be placed in the thickest of danger. When he falls, they find on his breast a withered spray from the pear-tree under which Perrine had first plighted troth. On these simple lines the music builds ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... sinewy, with a faint hint of rib and a wonderful bust; her brain was good, intuitive in its non-educated state, and subtle from inheritance; her ambition was superb, it knew no limits, it ...
— Desert Love • Joan Conquest
... where and how I would be admired, if ever such a luxury could come to me, I would be Joe Wurzel under present circumstances. A young hero, handsome, tall, in the uniform of the Hussars, with a loved one near and all the village girls fixing their eyes on me! That for once only, and my utmost ambition would be gratified. Life could have no greater pride for me. I don't know whether the sermon made much impression that day, but of the two, I verily believe Joe made the most; and as they streamed out of the little church all the young ...
— The Humourous Story of Farmer Bumpkin's Lawsuit • Richard Harris
... the President alone and each might be removed alone, without explanation given by the President to the others. I imagine that the late practice of the President's cabinet has in some degree departed from this theory; but if so, the departure has sprung from individual ambition rather than from any pre-concerted plan. Some one place in the cabinet has seemed to give to some one man an opportunity of making himself pre-eminent, and of this opportunity advantage has been taken. I am not now intending to allude to any individual, but am endeavoring ...
— Volume 2 • Anthony Trollope
... manoeuvre performed, and learning the arts of knotting and splicing, reefing and steering, as well as studying navigation. The captain told me that he was well pleased with my progress, and this encouraged me to persevere. My great ambition was to learn a profession, and thus to be independent. It is what all boys should aim at. I had originally no particular taste for the sea; but having chosen it, I was determined to be a thorough sailor. How many among my schoolfellows could not make up their minds what ...
— In the Eastern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... prick the sides of my intent, but only Vaulting ambition; which o'erleaps itself, And falls on ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... stream which probably flowed past her father's cottage, as it still flows, bathing the base of cottages as humble and as rudely built as his could have been. There might, perchance, have been one, amongst the youths who admired her beauty, whom she preferred to the rest; her ambition might have been to become his bride, her dreams might have imaged his asking her of her father, whose gracious consent made them both happy: in her ears might have rung the pealing bells of St. Gervais—the vision of maidens, ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... departed from the wife of his youth, nor could Sarah ever have intended to relinquish her hold upon his affection. It is the last claim a woman foregoes. And on the other hand, Hagar could have felt no love for her master, so much her superior in age and station. Unholy pride and rank ambition were all the feelings which such an alliance could awaken in the heart of Hagar. Yet Hagar was the least blameworthy, and, perhaps, not eventually the greatest sufferer. By the customs of society, she had no voice in the disposal of herself. Her heart was ...
— Notable Women of Olden Time • Anonymous
... time have nobly worn this jewel of courage in the eyes of the world. John Addington Symonds was for many years an invalid whose life hung on a thread. He had youth, gifts of a high order, culture, ambition, but a desolating shadow blackened the landscape of his life; he might have yielded to the lassitude which came with his disease; he might have become embittered and poured his sorrows into the ear ...
— Essays On Work And Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... fact that he trusted her; that he, a strong man, put his faith in her, a woman. He flattered her as she had never been flattered, not too subtly, yet not so broadly as to arouse her suspicion of his intent. He spoke quietly at first, then his voice seeming charged with his leaping ambition set responsive chords within her thrilling. He pictured to her the state he was going to found, organize, rule, an uncertain number of fair miles stretching along a tropical coast; he made her see again a palatial dwelling with servants in livery, ...
— The Bells of San Juan • Jackson Gregory
... Those fellows are done for, I tell you. I know the symptoms. They've lost their morale, lost the ambition for success. I've seen soldiers fall in precisely that way, too far gone even to shelter ...
— A Captain in the Ranks - A Romance of Affairs • George Cary Eggleston
... by NICHOLAS LONGWORTH, near Cincinnati, whom we may justly call one of the founders of American grape culture. He adopted the system of leasing parcels of unimproved land to poor Germans, to plant with vines; for a share, I believe, of one-half of the proceeds. It was his ambition to make the Ohio the Rhine of America, and he has certainly done a good deal to effect it. In 1858, the whole number of acres planted in grapes around Cincinnati, was estimated, by a committee appointed for that purpose, at twelve hundred acres, of which ...
— The Cultivation of The Native Grape, and Manufacture of American Wines • George Husmann
... was that Caesar had always shown signs of courage and ambition, and had always been confident of his future greatness. Now that his position in the country was assured men began to remember these stories of his youth. In the days when Sulla was master of Rome, Caesar had been one of the very few who had ventured to resist the great man's will. Marius, the ...
— Roman life in the days of Cicero • Alfred J[ohn] Church
... of life are all that are worth striving for. They come to us fresh from Nature and from Nature's God. The complex are but concoctions of man after recipes in the devil's alchemy. So much gold, so much ambition, so much lust. Mix well. ...
— Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall • Charles Major
... are to be reprehended, and not uncommon is it that we hear of health ruined and even life jeopardized by some foolish or thoughtless effort. Young men ought to guard against strife in labor, which usually accompanies an ambition to excel. We know of an instance where a company of boys, by lifting against each other, one was ruptured. And again, an "itinerant" came along with a machine known as a lung-tester; one fair-haired, slender youth, having fears he would fall below the ...
— Minnesota; Its Character and Climate • Ledyard Bill
... different breeds. These animals will then be found to deserve the encomiums bestowed upon them by Buffon, "as possessing such an ardour of sentiment, with fidelity and constancy in their affection, that neither ambition, interest, nor desire of revenge, can corrupt them, and that they have no fear but that of displeasing. They are, in fact, all zeal, ardour, and obedience. More inclined to remember benefits than injuries; more docile and tractable than ...
— Anecdotes of Dogs • Edward Jesse
... mind how hard the work is," answered Alec. "I hate to give up the one thing that has been my ambition all my life, but I have come to the point where I'd do anything honest to get a place somewhere out of this town. I'd even scrub floors. You don't know what I've been through this summer, Uncle Dick. Of course, you ...
— Flip's "Islands of Providence" • Annie Fellows Johnston
... boarding-school of some pretension, with ambition which had been awakened years before under the apple-trees, had given Miss Phrony the full number of accomplishments that are to be gained by such means. The years had also changed the round, school-girl plumpness into a slim yet strong figure; and as she entered the parlor,—quite casually, be ...
— Gordon Keith • Thomas Nelson Page
... Boys in a Graded School had a Burning Ambition to be a Congressman. He loved Politics and Oratory. When there was a Rally in Town he would carry a Torch and listen to the Spellbinder ...
— More Fables • George Ade
... educated in the Dominican Cloister at Siena, under the care of his uncle Cristoforo Tolomei. There, and afterwards in the fraternity of S. Ansano, he felt that impulse towards a life of piety, which after a short but brilliant episode of secular ambition, was destined to return with overwhelming force upon his nature. He was a youth of promise, and at the age of sixteen he obtained the doctorate in philosophy and both laws, civil and canonical. The Tolomei ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... her!" cried Rudolph. "Her mother is an unworthy creature, a being bronzed by egotism and ambition. Sometimes I ask myself if it were not better my child should be dead, than to have remained in the hands of ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... village. There were more. I heard the calls and cries of others in the wood and various places, but refused, except in the case of the too elusive crake, to set down any in my list that I did not see. It was not my ambition to make a long list. My greatest desire was to see well those that interested me most. But those who go forth, as I did, to look for birds that are a sight for sore eyes, must meet with many a disappointment. In all those fruit and shade trees that covered the village ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... musicke, like the chime of spheares, Did rauish pleasure, till this paire did rise: More wonder then that sound was to men eares Was her rare beauty to the gazers eyes. Ioy was so violent, the rockes it teares, The noise and triumphs beates vpon the aire, And like ambition pierceth through the skies, That Ioue loo'kt downe on ...
— Seven Minor Epics of the English Renaissance (1596-1624) • Dunstan Gale
... this disaster, lies in the future, for as yet Winslow is only seven-and-twenty, and yet the lines of ambition, of weariness, of hauteur are foreshadowed upon his face; already Time with his light indelible pencil has faintly traced the furrows he by and by will plow that all who ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... Louis Phillippe, who then reigned in France—for Bonaparte had died in St. Helena—banished from his throne and his adopted country, and brought to see the folly of his mad ambition; and this Bazaar was held in the Place de la Concorde, a suitable locality for such an object,—for Concorde, you know, means peace and harmony, instead ...
— The Young Emigrants; Madelaine Tube; The Boy and the Book; and - Crystal Palace • Susan Anne Livingston Ridley Sedgwick
... temporary, has become apparent in its quality. This applies, at least, to certain sections of the party. A sordid practicalism has made itself felt, due to a feverish desire to play an important role in the detail of current politics. Personal ambition and the mechanical working of the party system have also had their evil influence in the movement in recent years. Nevertheless, we have reason to believe that the core of the party is as sound and as true to principle as ever it was, and that on the restoration of international peace this ...
— German Culture Past and Present • Ernest Belfort Bax
... such a tired feeling that he didn't have the ambition of an oyster. He didn't have enough energy to realize he was all in. He took it for granted that the whole race was as tired ...
— The Iron Puddler • James J. Davis
... installments. Such a vessel is needed for the safety of that State against the native African races, and in Liberian hands it would be more effective in arresting the African slave trade than a squadron in our own hands. The possession of the least organized naval force would stimulate a generous ambition in the Republic, and the confidence which we should manifest by furnishing it would win forbearance and favor toward the ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... the King of Prussia, Lady Hervey, in a letter of the 17th, says, "I think it very well and very artfully drawn for his purpose, and very impertinently embarrassing to our King. He is certainly a very artful prince, and I cannot but think his projects and his ambition still more extensive, than ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... roses and Canterbury bells, and lilies and pinks, and sweet-peas and daisies, and put them over the posts. And I think if Bill Simpkins had known how sorry we were, he would have been glad. Oswald only hopes if he falls on the wild battlefield, which is his highest ambition, that somebody will be as sorry about him as he was ...
— The Wouldbegoods • E. Nesbit
... extravagances, such as Cowley would have admired, and which he might have envied. The suddenness of the impression, so to speak, made by great poets, their direct communication with the heart, belongs to another time. It is our ambition to come to the same end by feats of ingenuity; and instead of touching the feelings, and setting the imagination of the reader instantaneously aglow, to exercise his skill in unravelling and interpretation. We expect the pleasure of success ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 443 - Volume 17, New Series, June 26, 1852 • Various
... which he at this time endured. "I felt impressed," said he, "with a feeling that I should never rise in my profession. My mind was staggered with a view of the difficulties I had to surmount and the little interest I possessed. I could discover no means of reaching the object of my ambition. After a long and gloomy reverie, in which I almost wished myself overboard, a sudden glow of patriotism was kindled within me, and presented my king and country as my patron. 'Well then,' I exclaimed, 'I will be ...
— The Life of Horatio Lord Nelson • Robert Southey
... good writer, but had a bad heart. Even to the last he was devoured by ambition, which he pretended to despise. Would you believe that, after finding his opposition to the ministry fruitless, and, what galled him still more, contemned, he summoned up resolution to wait on Sir Robert Walpole? Sir Robert seeing Swift look pale and ill, inquired the state ...
— A Letter From a Clergyman to his Friend, - with an Account of the Travels of Captain Lemuel Gulliver • Anonymous
... a year!" thought Salmon, deeming that man enviable who had constant employment, an assured position, and eight hundred a year. His ambition was to get a living simply,—to place his foot upon some certainty, however humble, with freedom from this present gnawing anxiety, and with a prospect of rising, he cared not how slowly, to the place which ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... ambition and energy in his son were a grievance to him almost as great as his lack of physical powers, and he saw that although, so far there was still an absence of ambition, yet the boy had gained firmness and decision from the influence of his friend, and that he was far more likely to attain eminence ...
— A March on London • G. A. Henty
... without a sense of beauty. And now I shoot a second rapid—I want you to practise verse, and to practise it assiduously.... I am quite serious. Let me remind you that, if there ever was an ancient state of which we of Great Britain have great right and should have greater ambition to claim ourselves the spiritual heirs, that state was Imperial Rome. And of the Romans (whom you will allow to have been a practical people) nothing is more certain than the value they set upon acquiring verse. To them it was not only (as Dr Johnson said of Greek) 'like ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... made of gun-boxes covered with condemned blankets, another settee, two pails, a tin cup, tin basin (we prize any tin or wooden ware as savages prize iron), and a valise, regulation size. Seriously considered, nothing more appears needful, unless ambition might crave another chair for company, and, perhaps, something for a wash-stand ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... which in after-life render him humbly celebrated in subordinate positions. At school he will have had the good fortune to be attached as fag to a big boy who occupied an important place as an athlete, and whose condescending smiles were naturally an object of greater ambition to the small fry than the approval of the school authorities. For him he performed with much assiduity the various duties of a fag, happy to shine amongst his companions as the recipient of the great boy's ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, Sept. 27, 1890 • Various
... than my head. This friend might well have caused my portrait, which the famous Don Juan de Jauregui would have given him, to be engraved and put in the first page of this book, according to custom. By that means he would have gratified my ambition and the wishes of several persons, who would like to know what sort of face and figure has he who makes bold to come before the world with so many works of his own invention. My friend might have written under the portrait—"This person whom you see here, with an oval visage, ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... was the right person to ask for advice about getting some employment. He was in a great way of business; he had not the narrow notions of uncle Glegg; and he had risen in the world on a scale of advancement which accorded with Tom's ambition. ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... that "Imperial Majesty, for some time past, spends half of her time in praying to the Virgin, and the other half in weeping." "I wish her," adds the ungallant D'Argens, "as punishment for the mischiefs her ambition has cost mankind these seven years past, the fate of Phaethon's Sisters, and that she melt altogether into water!" [Ib. xix. 320 ("24th May, 1762").]—Take one other little utterance; and then to Colonel Hordt and the Petersburg ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... attained by those whose systems are untainted by secret influences, such as love, envy, ambition, food, college education and ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... Being. Boethius, life; the first scholastic; an independent philosopher; his philosophic ambition; his achievement; a Christian; perhaps a martyr; son-in-law of Symmachus; his wife; his sons; early training; youthful poetry; premature old age; his learning; his library; his lofty position; his principles; the champion of the oppressed; of the Senate; his ...
— The Theological Tractates and The Consolation of Philosophy • Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius
... these is jealousy, or the feeling of grief and anger produced in an individual when the object of his sexual appetite is disputed by another individual of the same sex. Jealousy may also arise from other instincts, such as those of nutrition, ambition, etc.; but it forms one of the most typical complements of the sexual appetite, and leads, as we know, to furious combats, especially between males, sometimes ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... (he was eighty-one when he died) was almost exactly divided, by the nature of his occupations, into two equal periods. During the first, up to his forty-first year, he was wholly the artist, enthusiastic, filled with a laudable ambition to excel, not only for personal reasons, but, as appears from his correspondence, largely from patriotic motives, from a wish to rescue his country from the stigma of pure commercialism which it had incurred in the eyes of the rest of the world. It is true that his active brain and ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Samuel F. B. Morse
... matter settled, the Penney girls arose in their might upon the wings of ambition. There ...
— People of the Whirlpool • Mabel Osgood Wright
... look of gratitude. She, at least, understood his profession. She entered into his feelings far better than Jacqueline, who had been his first confidante—Jacqueline, to whom he had confided his purposes, his ambition, and his day-dreams. He thought Jacqueline was selfish. She seemed to care only for herself. And yet, selfish or not selfish, she pleased him better than all the other girls he knew— a thousand times more than ...
— Jacqueline, v1 • Th. Bentzon (Mme. Blanc)
... white, dusty road, the fires of his ambition kept on kindling with every step, and his pace, even in the cool of the early morning, sent his hat to his hand, and plastered his long lank hair to his temples and the back of his sturdy sunburnt neck. The sun was hardly star-pointing the horizon when he saw the luminous ...
— The Heart Of The Hills • John Fox, Jr.
... when the fit was upon him. Slowly, by a gradual study of him, she learned what few had ever guessed, namely, that beneath the experienced man of the world, under his modest manner and his gentle ways, there lay a powerful mainspring of ambition, a mine of strength, which would one day exert itself and make itself felt upon his surroundings. He had developed slowly, feeding upon many experiences of the world in many countries, his quick Italian intelligence ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford
... incapable of large designs or sustained effort, lose every aspiration and forget every ideal. Our gilded youth want such examples as this of Motley, not a solitary, but a conspicuous one, to teach them how much better is the restlessness of a noble ambition than the narcotized stupor of club-life or the vapid amusement of a dressed-up intercourse which too often requires a questionable flavor of forbidden license to render it endurable to persons ...
— Memoir of John Lothrop Motley, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... which to my mind was the result of his having passed so much of his life amongst the wild and lawless tribesmen, with whom his authority was supreme. Intercourse with this man amongst men made me more eager than ever to remain on the frontier, and I was seized with ambition to follow in his footsteps. Had I never seen Nicholson again, I might have thought that the feelings with which he inspired me were to some extent the result of my imagination, excited by the astonishing stories I had heard of his ...
— Forty-one years in India - From Subaltern To Commander-In-Chief • Frederick Sleigh Roberts
... leaving Rene to finish his porringer of buckwheat in boiled milk. Du Bousquier, still in bed, was revolving in his mind his plans of fortune; for ambition was all that was left to him, as to other men who have sucked dry the orange of pleasure. Ambition and play are inexhaustible; in a well-organized man the passions which proceed from the brain will always survive the ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac
... anything), the apparently opulent M. Prosper Sauvage—wasn't it?—had not long before, unless I mistake, inherited the place as a monument of "family," quite modestly local yet propitious family, ambition; with an ample extension in the rear, and across the clearest prettiest court, for his own dwelling, which thus became elegant, entre cour et jardin, and showed all the happy symmetries and proper conventions. Here flourished, or rather, I surmise at this time of ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... greatly from weakness, seemed to be tired all the time, and had no ambition to do anything or go any place. My nerves were in bad shape, I could not sleep at night and then came a breakdown. I read of Lydia E. Pinkham's Vegetable Compound in the newspapers and several of my friends advised me to use it. It surely put new life into me and now I am quite able to do all my ...
— Food and Health • Anonymous
... thought turn when it would heal itself? To the disconsolate there has always been comfort in recalling the early home where childhood was nourished, the orchard and the meadow where first love came to the meeting, the eager city where ambition, full-panoplied, sprang from the brain. The mind is hung with pictures of what once was. But there must always be a local habitation for these rekindled heats. Somewhere, in scene and setting, the boy played, the youth loved, the man struggled. That richness of feeling is interwoven with a place. ...
— Young Hilda at the Wars • Arthur Gleason
... Ambition Which, upon a rival's fall, Winds above its old condition, With a reptile's slimy crawl, Shall the pleading voice of sorrow, shall the slave in ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... it to find profit; to face defeat after defeat and therein acquire faith in his own permanence; to live for years within a frail, defective body, with a mind unable to respond to the promptings of ambition and inspiration, and thereby take on the greatness of gentleness-the conviction comes clear, a conviction which will not comfortably stay put aside, that life is intended to develop ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll
... or rather when the Prince de Conti desired it for him, the President de Mesmes, a man of great capacity, but by fear and ambition most slavishly attached to the Court, made an eloquent and pathetic harangue, preferable to anything I ever met with of the kind in all the monuments of antiquity, and, turning about to the Prince de Conti, "Is it possible, monsieur," said he, "that a Prince of the blood of France ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... vices which his age regarded more as the characteristics than the failings of a gentleman. The most scurrilous of the many scurrilous chroniclers of the Covenanters' wrongs has owned in a characteristic passage that his life was uniformly clean.[3] Gifted by nature with quick parts, of dauntless ambition and untiring energy both of mind and body, he was not the man to have let slip in idleness any chance of fortifying himself for the great struggle of life, or to have neglected studies which might be useful to him in ...
— Claverhouse • Mowbray Morris
... turn and however we regard it, at the close of more than a century of independent existence we find ourselves, historically speaking, involved in a mesh of contradictions with our past. Under a sense of obligation, impelled by circumstances, perhaps to a degree influenced by ambition and commercial greed, we have one by one abandoned our distinctive national tenets, and accepted in their place, though in some modified forms, the old-time European tenets and policies, which we supposed the world, ...
— "Imperialism" and "The Tracks of Our Forefathers" • Charles Francis Adams
... move smoothly. Umako, with all his zeal and enthusiasm for Buddhism, was suspected of personal ambition, and was looked upon with distrust. A plot to assassinate the emperor was planned by Umako, which terminated his life, after a reign of only four years, in the seventy-third year of ...
— Japan • David Murray
... certainly not very learned in the archaeologies of his own country; where all men had gone astray, he went astray. And in geography, as regarded the Italian movements of Hannibal, he erred with his eyes open. But these were no objects of Livy's ambition: what he aspired to do was, to tell the story, 'the tale divine,' of Roman energy and perseverance; and he so told it that no man, as regards the mere artifices of narration, would ever have presumed to tell it after him. I cite this particular case as illustrating the ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... dolce far niente. But, just as the first warm day in June fills you with a physical vitality which you feel convinced that you must live for ever, so autumn makes you realise that life is fleeting and the mind has not yet reached its full development, nor intellectual ambition its complete fruition. Perhaps it is the touch of winter in the air which braces your mind and soul and gives you the impression that, given the long autumn evenings over the fire undisturbed, your brain ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... emolument - in short, popular religion may be summed up as respect for ecclesiastics. (26) The spread of this misconception inflamed every worthless fellow with an intense desire to enter holy orders, and thus the love of diffusing God's religion degenerated into sordid avarice and ambition. (27) Every church became a theatre, where orators, instead of church teachers, harangued, caring not to instruct the people, but striving to attract admiration, to bring opponents to public scorn, and to preach only novelties ...
— A Theologico-Political Treatise [Part I] • Benedict de Spinoza
... for a quarter of a dollar or so, and since then ever so many had been to buy them. Could he tell me where I might find one? Yes, he sold one to the barber last week, down near the depot. Didn't believe but what he would sell it. Was it a female bird? For my ambition had grown by what it fed on, and, instead of contenting myself simply with a companion for Cheri, I was now planning for a whole brood of canaries, with all the interests of housekeeping, baby-tending, and the manifold small cares incident upon domestic life. In ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... which make for ambition, for right living, for honor and position, but how pitifully small and inconsequential besides the mighty tomes which, circling the globe, comprise the lexicon of love. Love—the symbol and sequel of birth, the solace of death—the essence of divinity! Frozen indeed is the heart which ...
— Reno - A Book of Short Stories and Information • Lilyan Stratton
... think that he would live long. Disappointed men—those who have failed in their ambition—do not live to make old bones. There were men like him in every profession—the arts are crowded with them. He had met barristers and soldiers and clergy-men, just like himself. One hears of their deaths—failure of the heart's action, paralysis of the brain, a hundred other ...
— Vain Fortune • George Moore
... his will, Publius Cornelius Scipio lived no more; his ambition might reach without hindrance the utmost limits of his desires, and yet he could not rejoice; he could not escape from a deep horror of himself, and he struck his broad forehead with his clenched fists. He was face to face with ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... was founded for the relief of sick and wounded soldiers, and he told his eager listener what she did not know, that back of the Society was the Geneva Treaty, which had been providing for such relief work, signed by all the civilized nations except her own. From that moment a new ambition was born in Clara Barton's heart—to find out why America had not signed the treaty, and to know more about the Red ...
— Ten American Girls From History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... chapter show that a book may decide the future character and destiny of a man, by inspiring thought, kindling ambition and a lofty aim, stimulating the mental powers, inspiring practical and, perhaps, elegant composition, and consecrating the whole being to a definite purpose. All this was true ...
— From Boyhood to Manhood • William M. Thayer
... reputation would induce to visit his lodge. They assured him that he would soon be acknowledged as a chief, and that in this case a second wife was indispensable. Their pleadings and flattery infused new ideas into his mind, and ambition soon succeeded in dispelling love, and the remembrance of years of conjugal endearment. Fired with the thought of obtaining high honours, he resolved to increase his importance by a union with the daughter of an influential man of his tribe. ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 2 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... in a good cause or a foolish one, let those judge who call themselves wise; there was no taint of selfishness in him, no thought of ambition for his own name, and there was no spot upon his life in an age of which the evils cannot be written down, and are better not guessed. He died for something in which he believed enough to die for it, and belief cannot be ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... to destruction because freedom is man's inalienable birthright, man's undying passion. Germany! fated to execration by future generations for that she ahs crucified the Son of God afresh and put Him to an open shame. Germany! for the balking of whose insolent and futile ambition, and for the crushing of whose archaic military madness we Canadians are tramping on this Dominion Day these English fields and these sweet English lanes 5,000 miles from our Western Canada which dear land we can ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy
... I used the reason that God has given me, and resolved to marry a gentleman after my own heart. And this I did not to gratify the lust of the eye, for you know that he is not handsome; nor the lust of the flesh, for there has been no carnal consummation of our marriage; nor the ambition and pride of life, for he is poor and of small rank; but I took account purely and simply of the worth that is in him, for which every one is constrained to praise him, and also of the great love ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. III. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... posted in the current literature of the day. Another man learned in the law was the ponderous Senator Davis, of Illinois, who had left the Supreme Court for the Senate, thinking it was the better avenue to the White House, and whose political views were bounded by his personal ambition. ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... Richard turned his attention to, when he found himself securely seated on his throne, was the preparation for a crusade. It had been the height of his ambition for a long time to lead a crusade. It was undoubtedly through the influence of his mother, and of her early conversations with him, that he imbibed his extraordinary eagerness to seek adventures in the Holy Land. ...
— Richard I - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... have alluded, did not exist, and if we could be perfectly satisfied with the kinetic theory of gases founded on the collisions of elastic solid molecules, there would still be beyond it a grander theory which need not be considered a chimerical object of scientific ambition—to explain the elasticity of solids. But we may be stopped when we commence to look in the direction of such a theory with the cynical question, What do you mean by explaining a property of matter? As to being stopped by ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 460, October 25, 1884 • Various
... a steady, sober man, who disliked excitement, and the quiet plodding along in Mossvale just suited him. He was only a journeyman, and it is doubtful if his ambition had ever risen beyond his present station. By frugality he and his wife had saved enough to buy a half acre of land in this pretty New Jersey village, on which they had erected a neat cottage, and here apparently John Dare was content to spend ...
— Richard Dare's Venture • Edward Stratemeyer
... somewhere between a thousand and fifteen hundred, these play no part in political history, except as this or that one of them may have been thrust prominently forward for a moment as a pawn in the game of ambition played by the greater vassals. Nominally the Emperor was direct suzerain lord of all vassals, great or small; but in practice the greater vassal princes seem to have been what in the Norman feudal system were called ...
— Ancient China Simplified • Edward Harper Parker
... This was a surprise to Janet if not to the lamb; he had shaken himself off his feet; everything had to be done over again. He seemed a little stultified by this turn of affairs; but though he was down the fall had not knocked any of the ambition out of him; he immediately went at it again. This time he conquered and stood right up to the bar of life, ...
— The Wrong Woman • Charles D. Stewart
... usual coolness, the young rancher thought he saw the explanation of other matters which had puzzled him, but he bestowed little thought upon them, for his whole ambition for the time was to reach ...
— The Young Ranchers - or Fighting the Sioux • Edward S. Ellis
... arch, its ruined wall, Its chambers desolate, its portals foul; Yes, this was once Ambition's airy hall— The dome of thought, the palace of ...
— Strange Pages from Family Papers • T. F. Thiselton Dyer
... explode) will be rendered an uneasy struggle, and sometimes almost a curse, by the envy of those who deny approval while blind to success, and the affected disdain of those who exaggerate demerit. Yet these obstacles warm the spirit of honest ambition, and enhance ...
— Lippincott's Magazine. Vol. XII, No. 33. December, 1873. • Various
... took Myra's hand. He looked up into the sky. "You may be wrong, my dear. Possibly it's the other way. A man's ambition—" he smiled. "Lee called it an obsession once. A man's ...
— The Big Tomorrow • Paul Lohrman
... until she died, leaving two children. Don Sebastian, a man of strong passions, was almost vehement in his paternal feelings—those two beings were the image of the poor dead woman, the remembrance of the only idyll which had softened a life wholly given over to ambition, and the calumnies circulated by his enemies, founded on the presence of his daughter in the archiepiscopal palace ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... her arm, started to make her way into the gardens. Despite Louise's cynicism she had no intention of abandoning her studies. She had decided to fit herself for a teacher before Aunt Jane's invitation had come to her, and this ambition would render it necessary for her to ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces • Edith Van Dyne
... surprise, which told him almost as plainly, as he soon forced her to tell him in words, that she had never seen any gardens at all equal to them before; and he then modestly owned that, "without any ambition of that sort himself—without any solicitude about it—he did believe them to be unrivalled in the kingdom. If he had a hobby-horse, it was that. He loved a garden. Though careless enough in most matters of eating, he ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... The ambition of the ardent viscount required that his young wife should be the rival of his learned, verse-writing aunt, the Baroness Fanny de Beauharnais; that Josephine, if not the most beautiful and most intellectual woman of Paris, ...
— The Empress Josephine • Louise Muhlbach
... accompanied to Mooltan by two officers—Mr Vans Agnew, of the Civil Service, and Lieutenant Anderson, of the 1st Bombay European Fusiliers—and a considerable body of troops. Moolraj, however, had no intention of losing his government, and either prompted by his own ambition, or instigated by evil counsellors, he resolved to rebel. By bribes he won over the native troops who had accompanied the commissioners, and whom, there can be little doubt, he instigated his followers to murder. Both Mr Agnew and Lieutenant Anderson ...
— Our Soldiers - Gallant Deeds of the British Army during Victoria's Reign • W.H.G. Kingston |
