"Ambitiously" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Antigonus obtained Asia, Seleucus Babylon; and of the other nations which were there, Lysimachus governed the Hellespont, and Cassander possessed Macedonia; as did Ptolemy the son of Lagus seize upon Egypt. And while these princes ambitiously strove one against another, every one for his own principality, it came to pass that there were continual wars, and those lasting wars too; and the cities were sufferers, and lost a great many of their inhabitants in these times of distress, ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... to every proconsul, and to every praetor, who exercised a military or provincial command; with the extent of conquest, the two quaestors were gradually multiplied to the number of four, of eight, of twenty, and, for a short time, perhaps, of forty; [146] and the noblest citizens ambitiously solicited an office which gave them a seat in the senate, and a just hope of obtaining the honors of the republic. Whilst Augustus affected to maintain the freedom of election, he consented to accept the annual privilege of recommending, or rather indeed of nominating, a certain proportion ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... not only abuse I can hear alleged. They say the comedies rather teach, than reprehend, amorous conceits; they say the lyric is larded with passionate sonnets; the elegiac weeps the want of his mistress; and that even to the heroical Cupid hath ambitiously climbed. Alas! Love, I would thou couldst as well defend thyself, as thou canst offend others! I would those on whom thou dost attend, could either put thee away or yield good reason why they keep ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney
... in her a certain stiffening, a certain diminution of that constant kindness which she had always shown her guest. Did Aunt Pattie blame her? Had she cherished her own views and secret hopes for her nephew and Mrs. Burgoyne? Did she feel that Lucy had in some way unwarrantably and ambitiously interfered with them? ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... out at Harvard Square, and crossing the street entered the college yard, or campus, as it is sometimes more ambitiously called. There were very few students about, for it was Saturday, when there was a morning exercise only, and, the rest of the day being a holiday, many of the students were accustomed to go to Boston, or to visit their friends elsewhere. Sam knew nothing ...
— Sam's Chance - And How He Improved It • Horatio Alger
... increase than diminish their importance by currency in certain circles instead of in the press. The prestige of some events in metropolitan cities, a marriage or a party, depends on their social repute, and they are ambitiously kept out of the journalist's range. Moreover, in politics, a few leading men meet together for consultation, and——but the mysteries of political strategy are unknown here. Certainly the journalist has great influence in them, but ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... conceit of the brisk and lively dunce is worse. The stolid dunce is comparatively quiet; his crass mind works slowly; his vacant face wears an aspect of repose; his talk is merely dull and twaddling. But the talk of the brisk dunce is ambitiously absurd: he lays down broad principles: he announces important discoveries which lie has made: he has heard able and thoughtful men talk, and he tries to do that kind of thing. There is an indescribable jauntiness about him apparent in every ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... eyes to the right to a long stone house, almost hidden in a clump of giant oaks. I could find it by our barn, for our barn would dominate any land. In the distance it seemed a mighty marble pile, lifting its white walls into the blue, and then ambitiously reaching higher with red-tipped cupolas. The Colosseum to-day is not half so large as our barn when placed in memory beside it. So there was pride in my ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... enigma of which we sought the answer without any great desire to find it. After having read, examined, and noted all that constituted the science at that time, I fancied I could discern a few theoretical principles true in their generality, doubtful in their application, ambitiously aspiring to be classed among absolute truths, often hollow or false in their formula. I had no objection to make, but my instinctive desire of demonstration was not thoroughly satisfied. I threw down the books and awaited the light. Political ...
— Raphael - Pages Of The Book Of Life At Twenty • Alphonse de Lamartine
... with a high sense of honour, and a keen perception of insult, very modest and very proud, he was not likely to feed with wholesome appetite upon the unsavoury annoyances which were the daily bread of a chief commander in the Netherlands. "I ambitiously affect not high titles, but round dealing," he said; "desiring rather to be a private lance with indifferent reputation, than a colonel-general spotted or defamed with wants." He was not the politician to be matched against ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... I know, for, after a while, I had a note surreptitiously passed to me between folded blotting-paper. The note bore in Doe's ambitiously ornate writing the alarming statement: "I shall never like you so much after what you said this morning Yours Edgar Gray Doe." There was room for me to pen an answer, and in my great round characters I wrote: "I never really meant anything and after you left I tried to be ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... second class of our bibliographies, viz.: those of various countries. Here the reader must be on his guard not to be misled into too general an interpretation of geographical terms. Thus, he will find many books and pamphlets ambitiously styled "Catalogue Americaine", which are so far from being general bibliographies of books relating to America, that they are merely lists of a few books for sale by some book-dealer, which have something American in their subject. To know what ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... and for the copying of such verses as he took a fancy to in his reading. Then inside the covers of some of these he would make pockets for papers; and so advanced to small portfolios and pocket-books, of which he would make presents to his companions, and sometimes, when more ambitiously successful, to a master. In their construction he used bits of coloured paper and scraps of leather, chiefly morocco, which his father willingly made over to him, watching his progress with an interest ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... or mare courtiers immediately stepped forward, and kneeling before the queen, announced their name and rank, which were both ambitiously high. A few silvery-toned questions were put by that royal lady and satisfactorily answered, and then the archbishop, armed with a huge tome, administered a severe and searching oath, which the candidates ...
— The Midnight Queen • May Agnes Fleming
... controlled as never before. Above all, the pressure of uniformity must be resisted if the offered supply of the essentials of life prove inadequate to the deepest needs, or the scale of living be too ambitiously set by the housing facilities adjusted to the ideas and claims of landlords rather than to the needs of ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... the dark, for all we enjoy. It seems well known that the farmers themselves are the Rebeccaites, aided by their servants, and that the Rebecca is no other than some forward booby, or worse character, who ambitiously claims to act the leader, under the unmanly disguise of a female, yielding his post in turn to other such petticoat heros. The "Rebecca" seems no more than a living figure to give effect to the drama, as boys dress up an effigy and parade it ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... not? Little boys watch their fathers swing axes and fell trees, and feel in themselves that some day they, too, will swing axes and fell trees. And so with me. The life that was in me was constituted to do what my father did, and it whispered to me secretly and ambitiously of aerial paths and ...
— Before Adam • Jack London
... to Herculaneum is, in fact, one long street; it hardly ceases to be city in Naples till it is town at Portici, and in the interval it is suburb, running between palatial lines of villas, which all have their names ambitiously painted over their doors. Great part of the distance this street is bordered by the bay, and, as far as this is the case, it is picturesque, as every thing is belonging to marine life in Italy. Sea-faring people go lounging up and ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... tricked out rather with nicety than elegance; and seldom could forbear to discover, by her uneasiness and constraint, that her attention was burdened, and her imagination engrossed: I therefore concluded, that being only occasionally and ambitiously dressed, she was not familiarized to her own ornaments. There are so many competitors for the fame of cleanliness, that it is not hard to gain information of those that fail, from those that desire to excel: I quickly found ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... art was literature; and it was one of which he had conceived most ambitiously. He loved and believed in good books. He said well, "Life is not habitually seen from any common platform so truly and unexaggerated as in the light of literature." But the literature he loved was of the heroic order. "Books, not which afford us a cowering enjoyment, but ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... favour at court, had, to pave their future path to favour, and to secure the fall of Sir Robert Walpole, sedulously, and no doubt zealously, dedicated themselves to the mistress: Bolingbroke secretly, his friend Swift openly, and as ambitiously, cultivated Mrs. Howard; and the neighbourhood of Pope's villa to Richmond facilitated their intercourse, though his religion forbade his entertaining views beyond those of serving his friends. Lord Bathurst, another of that connexion, and Lord ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... never did. And anyway I'd rather have my heart break from being too full than get hard because it didn't have anyone in it. I'd like to have the very biggest heart in the whole world!" she cried ambitiously. ...
— Mary Rose of Mifflin • Frances R. Sterrett
... on the other side of us was occupied by a postman, his progeny, and the piercing notes of his whistle—presumably a cast-off one—on which all of his numerous children, irrespective of sex or age, were ambitiously learning their father's calling, as was made clear through the thin dividing wall, which supplied visual privacy but did not prevent our knowing when they took their baths or in what terms they ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... rawness of a grey December day held sway over St. James's Park, that sanctuary of lawn and tree and pool, into which the bourgeois innovator has rushed ambitiously time and again, to find that he must take the patent leather from off his feet, for the ground on which he ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki |
