"Aspiration" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... dismiss him, and she could not even do that, for there he was at the required periods, always primed with the wrong reply to any question, the wrong aspiration, the wrong conjecture; a perpetual trampler on mental corns, a person for whom one could do ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... thoughts must be turned, now that Mr. Gladstone is gone, to that solitary and pathetic figure who, for sixty years, shared all the sorrows and all the joys of Mr. Gladstone's life; who received his every confidence and every aspiration; who shared his triumphs with and cheered him under his defeats; who, by her tender vigilance, I firmly believe, sustained and prolonged his years. I think that the occasion ought not to pass without letting Mrs. Gladstone know that she is in ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... deliberately conceived in order to warp the nature and produce complexes in the mind of the German people for the end of preserving and perpetuating the power of the Junkers. We have no quarrel with the duped and oppressed, but we war against the agents of oppression. To the conservative mind such an aspiration appears chimerical. But America, youngest of the nations, was born when modern science was gathering the momentum which since has enabled it to overcome, with a bewildering rapidity, many evils previously held by superstition to be ineradicable. As a ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... central tower rose against a sky of clearest blue, strong and foursquare as on the day when its Norman builders took down their scaffolding. White pigeons hovered or perched on niche and corbel. But fortitude and aspiration alike had deserted Mr. Simeon for the while. Life—hard life and poverty—had subdued him to be one of the petty, nameless crowd this Cathedral had seen creep to their end in its shadow. . . . "What should such creatures as I do, crawling between earth ...
— Brother Copas • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... cultivated to the utmost and every effort be made to give back to him his manhood." "There is no greater mistake in the whole compass of penal discipline, than its studied imposition of degradation as a part of punishment. Such imposition destroys every better impulse and aspiration. It crushes the weak, irritates the strong and indisposes all to submission and reform. It is trampling, where it ought to raise, and is therefore as unchristian in principle as it is ...
— The Prison Chaplaincy, And Its Experiences • Hosea Quinby
... into God, and can be made by a simple mental glance cast towards Him. Cast thy care, or thoughts, upon the Lord,[3] says David. The more vigorously an arrow is shot from the bow the more swift is its flight. The more vehement and loving is an aspiration, the more truly is it a spiritual lightning-flash. These transports or aspirations, of which we have so many formulas, are the better the shorter they are. One of St. Bruno seems to me excellent on account of its brevity: O goodness of God; that also of St. Francis, My God ...
— The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales • Jean Pierre Camus
... William Romaine. His spiritual maturity was early, and his habits of thought were formed amid associations such as the young Wesleys and Whitefield sought. Like them, even in his student days he proved his aspiration for purer religious life by an evangelical zeal that cost him the ridicule of many of his school-fellows, but the meetings for conference and prayer which he organized among them were not unattended, and were lasting and salutary ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth
... negative forces of error, he seems to have hit the central fact of civilization. Without freedom of thought and absolute freedom to speak out the truth as one sees it, there can be no advancement, no high civilization. To the orator who has heard the call of humanity, what nobler aspiration than to enlarge and extend the freedom we have inherited from our Anglo-Saxon forefathers, and to defend the ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... view that a peaceable and just society would necessarily also be one that is uninspired. That view seems to me to proceed from our incurable materialism. We think there is no conflict except with arms; no rivalry except for bread; no aspiration except for money and rank. It is my own belief that the removal of the causes of the material strife in which most men are now plunged would liberate the energies for spiritual conflict; that the passion to know, the passion to feel, the passion ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... philosophy, prefigures itself to us as one of the most potent factors in the social evolution of the last quarter of the nineteenth century. History shows the curious fact that the closing years of every century are years of more intense life manifested in unrest, or in aspiration, and scholars of special research, like Professor Max Muller, assert that the end of a cycle, as is the latter part of the present century, is marked by peculiar ...
— Pulpit and Press (6th Edition) • Mary Baker Eddy
... man (DE CE GRAND HOMME). With whom, thanks to Barberina, he had, in a day or two, the honor of an Interview (judgment favorable, he could hope); and before many months, Accident also favoring, the inexpressible honor of seeing himself the great man's Secretary,—how far beyond hope or aspiration, in these ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle
... seriously present to the thoughtful Hindu some of the higher conceptions and deepest yearnings of the soul. Of all the faiths of the "Far East" none dwells so much upon these profound religious realities, or engages in such lofty flights of spiritual aspiration, as does this religion of the Brahmans. And no one can study these products of the greatest minds and most sensitive religious souls of India without entertaining a great and growing ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... use it, and was seldom known to forget himself so far as to utter it while its owner was in disgrace. The hope of gaining such a name, or the fear of losing it, was in the pupil the strongest ally of the master, the most powerful enforcement of his influences. It was a scheme of government by aspiration. But it owed all its operative power to the character of the man who had adopted rather than invented it—for the scheme had been suggested by a certain passage in ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... men are the lives of martyrs; we cannot regard them as examples to follow, but rather as types of human excellence to study and to admire. The life of Schiller was not one which many of us would envy; it was a life of toil and suffering, of aspiration rather than of fulfillment, a long battle with scarcely a moment of rest for the conqueror to enjoy his hard-won triumphs. To an ambitious man the last ten years of the poet's life might seem an ample reward for the thirty years' war of life which he had to fight single-handed. But Schiller ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... national security and the triumph of right over wrong. No one would belittle the worth of the sacrifice. But in the narrower sense of production, of bread winning, there came nothing; or nothing except a new power of organization, a new technical skill and a new aspiration towards better things. But the burden of peace finance directed towards social efforts will bring a direct return. Every cent that is spent upon the betterment of the population will come back, ...
— The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice • Stephen Leacock
... qualities of Irishmen. None the less it was a statesman's utterance addressed to a people politically quick-minded; Ireland saw as well as Redmond himself that what stood in the way of Ireland's national aspiration was the opposition of one section of Irishmen. To that extent, and to that extent only, was the speech political in its purpose. Whatever made for common action made for unity; and whatever made for unity made for Home Rule. That is the key to Redmond's attitude throughout the war—perhaps ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn
... to whom he has but recently been married, move hither or thither vaguely, their faces upturned, making vain efforts to lure down the elusive creature. The haze of very early morning pervades the garden which is the scene of their faint aspiration. One cannot see very clearly there. The ladies' furbelows are blurred against the foliage, and the lilac-bushes loom through the air as though they were white clouds full of rain. One cannot see the ladies' faces very clearly. One guesses them, though, to be supercilious ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... doctrine, in art, is a continual contemplation of sin and disease, and of imaginary states of purification from them; thus we have an architecture conceived in a mingled sentiment of melancholy and aspiration, partly severe, partly luxuriant, which will bend itself to every one of our needs, and every one of our fancies, and be strong or weak with us, as we are strong or weak ourselves. It is, of all architecture, the basest, when base people build it—of all, the noblest, ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... would not send deputies, a congress that assembled at Tucuman voted on July 9, 1816, to declare the "United Provinces in South America" independent. Comprehensive though the expression was, it applied only to the central part of the former viceroyalty, and even there it was little more than an aspiration. Mistrust of the authorities at Buenos Aires, insistence upon provincial autonomy, failure to agree upon a particular kind of republican government, and a lingering inclination to monarchy made progress toward national unity impossible. In 1819, to be sure, a constitution ...
— The Hispanic Nations of the New World - Volume 50 in The Chronicles Of America Series • William R. Shepherd
... his child may marvel at what to him must seem a mere arbitrary or even unkind refusal of an innocent desire. That hapless man of genius, the late John Davidson, condensed the truth into one illuminating phrase when he spoke of prayer rightly uttered as {215} "submissive aspiration"; it would be difficult to devise another form of words equally brief yet containing so much of the essence of the matter. Even short of actual fulfilment, it is an immeasurable privilege simply to speak to God about all ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... heart, and, I am sure, with the hearty assent of this great and representative company, I respond to the final aspiration of your toast: "May this great family in all its branches ever work together for the world's welfare." Certainly its division and alienation would be the world's misfortune. That England and America have had sharp and ...
— Model Speeches for Practise • Grenville Kleiser
... the victory of his foes, and the dire calamity of the Dhartarashtras.[180] And Suyodhana said, "Behold, O preceptor, this immense slaughter of kings.[181] I came to battle, placing that grandsire of mine, viz., the heroic Bhishma, at our head. Having slain him, Sikhandin, his aspiration fulfilled, stayeth at the very van of all the troops, surrounded by all the Panchalas, covetous of another triumph.[182] Another disciple of thine, viz., the invincible Savyasachin, having slain seven Akshauhinis ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... existence and the next he called a discrete degree, while the community between different bodies on the same plane he called a continuous degree. Thus there is community of sensation between bodies of the same nature, community of feeling, community of thought, and community of desire or aspiration, each on its own plane of existence. But desire is translated into thought, thought into feeling, and feeling into action. The spirit, soul (rational and animal in its higher and lower aspects), and the body appear to ...
— Second Sight - A study of Natural and Induced Clairvoyance • Sepharial
... seems to be, to express in musical numbers, and as it were with undivided breath, some occasional thought or personal feeling, 'some fee-grief due to the poet's breast.' It is a sigh uttered from the fulness of the heart, an involuntary aspiration born and dying in the same moment. I have always been fond of Milton's Sonnets for this reason, that they have more of this personal and internal character than any others; and they acquire a double ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... holidays; and his example had a great influence over the parish-priests in this particular, as also over the laity, both young and old. He inculcated to all the making, every hour when the clock struck, the sign of the cross, with a fervent aspiration on the passion of Christ. He severely forbade the custom of Valentines or giving boys, in writing, the names of girls to be admired and attended on by them; and, to abolish it, he changed it into giving billets with the names of certain saints for them to ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... Even among the clergy and monastic orders the type was very low, in spite of the endeavours of Bishop Kennedy, who had not yet been able to found his university at St. Andrews; and it had been agreed between him and Sir Patrick that young Malcolm Drummond, a devout and scholarly lad of earnest aspiration, should be trained at the Paris University, and perhaps visit Padua and Bologna in preparation for that foundation, which, save for that cruel Eastern's E'en, would have been commenced by the uncle ...
— Two Penniless Princesses • Charlotte M. Yonge
... reason to join in the aspiration; for our vigil was a long and bitter one. Slowly the shadows darkened over the long, sombre face of the old house. A cold, damp reek from the moat chilled us to the bones and set our teeth chattering. ...
— The Valley of Fear • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... that she was not mistaken. Examining the society around her, men and women: everywhere was feverish excitement, dissipation, and nullity. You might rummage through their brains without finding one practical idea; in all their hearts, there was not one lofty aspiration. These people, in their daily life were like squirrels in a cage, and because they moved, they thought they were progressing. In them scepticism had killed belief; religion, family, country, were, as they phrased it, all humbug. They had only one aim, ...
— Serge Panine, Complete • Georges Ohnet
... may not have the knowledge of life, the insight into character, the comprehensiveness of some, but we must all agree that a poet's far more essential qualities are hers: usefulness, fervor, a noble aspiration, and above all a tender, far-reaching nature, loving and beloved, and touching the hearts of her readers with some virtue from its depths. She seemed even in her life something of a spirit; and her view of life's sorrow and shame, of its hearty and eternal hope, is something ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... begin in the Greek islands, where European fleets could absolutely control the issue and no question of Continental partition need arise. In Crete the Sultan could, Sir Charles believed, have been compelled to accept a nominal sovereignty, such as he retained over Cyprus; and the aspiration towards Hellenic unity, the need for Hellenic expansion, ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... feelings of the nation. Sicily wanted to be independent of Naples, but it had not the same wish to be separated from the despotic principle. An independent nation, without a free people, was the highest aspiration of revolted Sicily. England and France left her to her fate, except so far as Lord Minto's meddling complicated her condition. The temporarily vanquished Neapolitans returned to the contest, and the ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... like a spirit of consolation, speaking of peace, of love which needs no reward save its own sweetness, of aspiration which looks forever beyond the thing of the hour to find attainment in that which is eternal. So insidiously did it whisper these things, so delicately did the simple and perfect melodies creep upon the spirit—that Boyce felt no resentment, but from ...
— The Shape of Fear • Elia W. Peattie
... laws': yet this is not wholly true, and applies to the latter rather than to the first half of it. The book rests on an ethical and religious foundation: the actual laws begin with a hymn of praise in honour of the soul. And the same lofty aspiration after the good is perpetually recurring, especially in Books X, XI, XII, and whenever Plato's mind is filled with his highest themes. In prefixing to most of his laws a prooemium he has two ends in view, to ...
— Laws • Plato
... With an aspiration like that on the ranch, all cursing and swearing would disappear; smallness, meanness, jealousy, covetousness and greed could not live in that atmosphere. That spiritual air in circulation would kill out ...
— A California Girl • Edward Eldridge
... years of education at Westminster School, and when Southey was expelled by an unwise headmaster for a boyish jest, his uncle's faith in him held firm, and he was sent on to Balliol College, Oxford. Those were days of wild hope among the young. They felt all that was generous in the aspiration of idealists who saw the golden cities of the future in storm-clouds of revolution. Robert Southey at Oxford dreamed good dreams as a poetical Republican. He joined himself with other young students—Coleridge among them—who planned an experiment of their ...
— Chronicle Of The Cid • Various
... expressly {247} forbidden "by duty," to affirm personality of God as much as to deny it of Him. How such a being can be presented as an object on which to exercise religious emotion it is difficult indeed to understand.[251] Aspiration, love, devotion to be poured forth upon what we can never know, upon what we can never affirm to know, or care for, us, our thoughts or actions, or to possess the attributes of wisdom and goodness! The worship offered in such a religion ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... you have been diluted with the physical sciences and stirred about by Positivists and missionaries. "I would I were a protoplastic monad!" may sound very rhythmical, poetical, and all that; but even for a Baboo the aspiration is not an easy one to ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... greeted her ear pleasantly. The one human being who really dwelt in her inmost heart was her boy Felix, her first-born child. Hilda was an unnecessary supplement to the page of her maternal love. But for Felix she dreamed day-dreams of extravagant aspiration; no lot on earth seemed too high or too good for him. He was a handsome boy, the very image of her father, the late Lord Riversdale, and now as she gazed down on him, her eyes slightly dewed with ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton
... labors have been unceasing. Great as his triumphs have been, he does not regard himself as freed from the necessity of study. His studies have become more intelligent than in former years, but not the less faithful. He has the true artist's aspiration after the rarest perfection in his art, though to those of us without the charmed circle it is difficult to see how he can excel his present excellence. Yet that he does so we have undoubted proof, for we see him rising ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... his old age and the old age of his seven sons and thirty-one grandsons now safely provided for, retired from the practise of his art, and devoted himself to a tedious scientific inquiry (long the object of his passionate aspiration) into the precise physiological relation between gravel in the lower lobe of the heart and the bursting of arteries ...
— A Book of Burlesques • H. L. Mencken
... purity, integrity, veracity, and active benevolence. It implies a profound submission to the will of the Almighty, which puts to silence every murmuring or repining thought under any dispensation of his providence. It comprehends the habitual suppression of every selfish principle, and the constant aspiration after a state of moral feeling, which proposes to itself no lower standard than that which will bear the inspection of a being of infinite purity. This character seems to correspond with that high tone of morals enjoined in the sacred writings. Its elements are defined and clear;—would we seek to ...
— The Philosophy of the Moral Feelings • John Abercrombie
... intimacy of Arthur with Italian poetry led him naturally to that of Dante. No poet was so congenial to the character of his own reflective mind; in none other could he so abundantly find that disdain of flowery redundance, that perpetual preference of the sensible to the ideal, that aspiration for somewhat better and less fleeting than earthly things, to which his inmost soul responded. Like all genuine worshippers of the great Florentine poet, he rated the Inferno below the two latter portions of the Divina Commedia; there was nothing even ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... sublime illustration. Man's heart Is a mystery, doubtless. You trace it in art:— The Greek Psyche,—that's beauty,—the perfect ideal. But then comes the imperfect, perfectible real, With its pain'd aspiration and strife. In those pale Ill-drawn virgins of Giotto you see it prevail. You have studied all this. Then, the universe, too, Is not a mere house to be lived in, for you. Geology opens the mind. So you know Something also of strata and fossils; these show The bases of cosmical structure: ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith
... future, Kate— Your fondest aspiration! Who knows the solemn laws of fate, That govern all creation? Who knows what lot awaits your boy— Of happiness or sorrow? Sufficient for to-day is joy, Leave tears, Sweet, ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... amid the splendors of fortune, who with good reason are classed among the most elevated in society, come every week to pass long hours with the miserable prisoners. Observing in these degraded beings the least aspiration after virtue, the least regret for a past crime, they encourage the better tendencies and repentance; and, by the powerful magic of the words "duty," "honor," "virtue," sometimes they rescue from the depths of degradation one abandoned, ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... there," I said, "and you owe that to New York. The air, the very same air which forbids completion, is charged with aspiration. We all feel it. The city itself aspires. Since the great days when men set out to build a tower the top of which should reach unto heaven, there has never been such aspiration anywhere in the world. Look at the ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... shame, to assert that Dickens would have trusted the poor to a State Department. Dickens did not merely believe in the brotherhood of men in the weak modern way; he was the brotherhood of men, and knew it was a brotherhood in sin as well as in aspiration. And he was not only larger than the old factions he satirised; he was larger than any of our great social schools that have ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... is true that any one who "asks," who really wants a spiritual blessing, will obtain it, it is equally true that a man may have no heart to ask,—may have no desire, no yearning, no aspiration at all, and be unable to produce one. In this case there is no promise. Whosoever thirsts, and only he who thirsts, can obtain the water of life. Cherish, therefore, the faintest influences and operations of the Comforter. If He enlightens your conscience so that it reproaches ...
— Sermons to the Natural Man • William G.T. Shedd
... Speaking without disrespect to the poet Shelley"—here he lifted his hat and replaced it—"a new Peneus does not roll his fountains against the morning star, whatever that precise—er—operation may have been. But let us honour the aspiration, Smiles, though the chill monitor within forbid us to endorse it. 'A loftier Argo'"—Mr. Mortimer indicated the Success to Commerce with a sweep of ...
— True Tilda • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... distinguish it. These persons prejudge nothing, criticise nothing. To some extent, their attitude to the universe is that of children: and because this is so, they participate to that extent in the Heaven of Reality. According to their measure, they have fulfilled Keats' aspiration, they do live a life in which the emphasis lies on sensation rather than on thought: for the state which he then struggled to describe was that ideal state of pure receptivity, of perfect correspondence with the essence ...
— Practical Mysticism - A Little Book for Normal People • Evelyn Underhill
... an attempt had been made by one of the over-righteous upon Spinoza's life soon after he became an object of official displeasure. Although Spinoza was, throughout his life, ready to suffer the consequences of his opinions and actions, he at no time had the least aspiration to become a martyr. When Spinoza heard of his excommunication he sent a spirited and unyielding reply. The spirit if not the words of that reply (not yet discovered) eventually made its way into the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... point to one intelligible signification; as to the rest, this word is not a subject for scientific propositions, and the attempt at such can lead only to contradictions. The Infinite is a phrase most various in its purport: it is for the most part an emotional word, expressing human desire and aspiration; a word of poetry, imagination, and preaching, not a word to be discussed under science; no intellectual definition would ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... the only treaty,' Voltaire declares, 'that was ever made without an oath, and the only treaty that never was broken.' By means of this treaty with the Indians, William Penn is beginning to realize the greatest aspiration of his life. For William Penn has set his heart on being ...
— A Handful of Stars - Texts That Have Moved Great Minds • Frank W. Boreham
... opened eyes that were a question and hands that were a demand and began a mind and memory that dies not when men die, but lives and increases for ever, an over-mind, a dominating will, a question and an aspiration that reaches to the stars.... Hunger and fear and this that you make so much of, this sex, are but the elementals of life out of which we have arisen. All these elementals, I grant you, have to be provided ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... her beauty, her sweetness, her lark-like ballading too, she was a very ordinary woman in that region of her which knew what she meant when she said "I." Of this fact she had hardly a suspicion, however; for until aspiration brings humility, people are generally pretty well satisfied with themselves, having no idea what poor creatures they are. She saw in her mirror a superior woman, regarded herself as one of the finer works of creation. The worst ...
— Stephen Archer and Other Tales • George MacDonald
... men who fashioned parties in their beginning; and, if need be, we can refashion them. For the aim of government is not to preserve parties but to give range to free individual action in a democracy. And it is in this spirit of national aspiration that we welcome our distinguished guest of honor—a man now placed above parties, and too just to regard the Republic by sections, our best equipped citizen for the highest office ...
— The South and the National Government • William Howard Taft
... significance beyond the fortunes of individuals and parties. Something more had happened than a replacement of Republicans by Democrats. He believed that he had been elected as a result of a stirring of the American conscience against thinly masked "privilege" and, a reawakening of American aspiration for government which should more nearly meet the needs of the plain people of the country. He knew that he would have to disappoint many a hungry office-seeker, whose chief claim to preferment lay in his boast that he "had always voted the Democratic ticket." Among the new ...
— Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him • Joseph P. Tumulty
... these groups after another. It was as interesting to watch the listeners as the speakers. I wished I might paint the sea of faces, eager, anxious, stolid, attentive, happy, and unhappy: histories written on many of them; others blank, unmarked by any thought or aspiration. I stole a sidelong look at the Honourable Arthur. He is an Englishman first, and a man afterwards (I prefer it the other way), but he does not realise it; he thinks he is just like all other good fellows, although he is mistaken. He and Willie ...
— Penelope's English Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... are not. I don't think marriage can be too close. I believe that every hope, and thought, and aspiration should be in common. I could never get as near to your heart and soul as I should wish to do. I want every year to draw me closer and closer, until we really are as nearly the same person as it is ...
— A Duet • A. Conan Doyle
... the needless questiones of their order and formes; of them, five be vouales, ane a noat of aspiration, ...
— Of the Orthographie and Congruitie of the Britan Tongue - A Treates, noe shorter than necessarie, for the Schooles • Alexander Hume
... was something akin to those emotions which the accustomed gamester experiences when counting his ready money before starting out for his club. Besides that, despite their asexuality, they still had not lost the chiefest instinctive aspiration ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... romantic movement was an assertion of freedom for the imagination, and an assertion of the rights of individuality. Love, wonder, hope, measureless desire, strange fears, infinite sadness, the sentiment of nature, aspiration towards God, were born anew. Imagination, claiming authority, refused to submit to the rules of classic art. Why should the several literary species be impounded each in its separate paddock? Let them mingle ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... mankind a religious theory of life, Judah gave it a thrilling example of tenacious vitality and power of resistance for the sake of conviction. This uninterrupted life of the spirit, this untiring aspiration for the higher and the better in the domain of religious thought, philosophy, and science, this moral intrepidity in night and storm and in despite of all the blows of fortune—is it not an imposing, soul-stirring spectacle? The inexpressible tragedy ...
— Jewish History • S. M. Dubnow
... measure of his real power. I am sure of this, that God can see what neither you nor I can see. Sometimes people feel something of it; but in proportion as a man has in reality, not as a sentiment or an aspiration, or a thought, but in reality, the very spirit and presence of Jesus upon him, there comes out from him an unseen silent influence. That ...
— 'Jesus Himself' • Andrew Murray
... fullness and vigor of youth, in the pledge of their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to the cause of freedom and of man-kind; and on the last, extended on the bed of death, with but sense and sensibility left to breathe a last aspiration to Heaven of blessing upon their country, may we not humbly hope that to them too it was a pledge of transition from gloom to glory, and that while their mortal vestments were sinking into the clod of the valley their emancipated spirits ...
— State of the Union Addresses of John Quincy Adams • John Quincy Adams
... if invited to drink as the guest of another, he would drain tumbler after tumbler continuously, until his entertainer stopped him, and would appear no further over-seas at the end than at the outset. There was something pathetic in his comparative sobriety, like an unfulfilled aspiration. ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland
... an answer: and what was I to say? Oh, for some good spirit to suggest a judicious and satisfactory response! Vain aspiration! The west wind whispered in the ivy round me; but no gentle Ariel borrowed its breath as a medium of speech: the birds sang in the tree-tops; but their song, however ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... government can try, as ours tries, to sense the deepest aspirations of the people, and to express them in political action at home and abroad. So long as action and aspiration humbly and earnestly seek favor in the sight of the Almighty, there is no end to America's forward road; there is no obstacle on it she will not surmount in her march toward a lasting peace in a free and ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Dwight D. Eisenhower • Dwight D. Eisenhower
... the first visible aspiration (ambition is too low a word) to do some honest, hard work of my own, in the World ...
— McClure's Magazine, Volume VI, No. 3. February 1896 • Various
... kindled into fury, and blood for blood, tooth for tooth, eye for eye, are the precepts of mutual action. Fame is arrested in its course and turned backwards. Honour is thrown into the dust. Worth is cast into the streets; usefulness is perverted into mischievousness. Noble aspiration is said to be selfishness. Whatever slander touches, it leaves upon it the slimy trail of the old serpent, and infuses its poisonous venom; and were it not for the angel of truth which destroys both, irretrievable ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate
... expression is also affected by his experience,—not experience in time and space, but soul-experience,—joy, sorrow, pleasure, pain, love, hope, aspiration, and all intense feeling by which the genesis of the inward man unfolded. What one has lived, that alone can he adequately say. The outward is the measure of the inward; it is as the earth and ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... reference to the President of the United States. His great, strong, human heart beats in unison with everything that is noble in the heart of any nation and with every aspiration of true manhood. Every effort tending to help a people on in civilization and in prosperity finds a reflex and response in his desire for their happiness. He is a true and genuine friend of all Americans, north and south. In his name I thank you ...
— Latin America and the United States - Addresses by Elihu Root • Elihu Root
... Lance's voice was, if possible, more perfect in sweetness, purity, and expression than it had been at twenty, and never had the poem, connected with all the crises of their joint lives, come more home to their hearts, filling them with aspiration as well ...
— The Long Vacation • Charlotte M. Yonge
... "complementarity," is revealed only in the mass, in tendencies rather than in states. Especially (and this is the point on which finalism has been most seriously mistaken) harmony is rather behind us than before. It is due to an identity of impulsion and not to a common aspiration. It would be futile to try to assign to life an end, in the human sense of the word. To speak of an end is to think of a pre-existing model which has only to be realized. It is to suppose, therefore, ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... the social evolution of the last quarter of the nineteenth century. History shows the curious fact that the closing years of every century are years of more intense life, manifested in unrest or in aspiration, and scholars of special research, like Prof. Max Muller, assert that the end of a cycle, as is the latter part of the present century, is marked by peculiar intimations of man's ...
— Pulpit and Press • Mary Baker Eddy
... some days after on that pious aspiration of her grandfather's old friend, but the ache and tedium of life did not return upon her. Her sense of duty and natural affection were very strong. She told herself that if it were her lot to watch for many years beside this dwindling flame, it was a lot of God's giving, not of her own ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... by a religious feeling, and an ardent aspiration for the advancement of society,—as may be gathered from our first quotation. These two sentiments impart elevation, faith, and resignation; so that memory, thought, and a chastened tenderness, generally predominate over deep grief. The grave character of the theme forbids much indulgence ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 2, July 8, 1850 • Various
... noted too, that each separate thought seemed to be hallowed and enclosed in an atmosphere of prayer or heavenly aspiration, as a seed is enclosed in the heart of a flower, or a fruit in its odorous rind, and that this prayer or aspiration presently appeared to bear the thought away, whither I knew not. Moreover, all these thoughts, even of the humblest things, were beauteous ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... is not a vague effort after righteousness—an ill-defined, pointless struggle for an ill-defined, pointless end. Religion is no dishevelled mass of aspiration, prayer, and faith. There is no more mystery in Religion as to its processes than in Biology. ...
— Beautiful Thoughts • Henry Drummond
... or less the aspiration to realize an ideal. It is a hope, a prayer, rather than an actual fact, since nothing human is absolutely perfect. Ysaye, perhaps, with his golden tone, comes nearest to my idea of what violin mastery should be, both as regards breadth ...
— Violin Mastery - Talks with Master Violinists and Teachers • Frederick H. Martens
... doomed to fight another campaign in which he nearly lost his life. It is not a part of my plan to write the life of Caesar, nor to meddle with it further than I am driven to do in seeking after the sources of Cicero's troubles and aspiration; but the story must be told in a few words. Caesar went from Alexandria into Asia, and, flashing across Syria, beat Pharnaces, and then wrote his famous "Veni, vidi, vici," if those words were ever written. Surely he could not have written them and sent them home! Even the subservience ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope
... unity alone has the Khilafat brought to India. The great block in the way of Indian aspiration for full freedom was the problem of external defence. How is India, left to herself defend her frontiers against her Mussalman neighbours? None but emasculated nations would accept such difficulties and responsibilities as an answer to the demand for ...
— Freedom's Battle - Being a Comprehensive Collection of Writings and Speeches on the Present Situation • Mahatma Gandhi
... and catalogued unerringly in the books of heaven, the Church or Kingdom of Jesus. To both sects it seemed a thing to be striven for that as much of civil society as possible should be brought into these vortices or concourses; nay, the aspiration of both was that the whole world should be Christianized. But, looking about them, they knew, in fact, that the vortices or concourses did and could involve but a small proportion of the society in which they occurred. ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... the day after his nomination for governor, Horace Greeley voiced the sentiment of men irrespective of party. "Wealthy without pride, generous without ostentation, simple in manners, blameless in life, and accepting office with no other aspiration than that of making power subserve the common good of his fellow citizens, Hamilton Fish justly and eminently enjoys the confidence and esteem of all who ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... tolerance of man towards man, the absence of petty prejudices, and the large appreciation of individual liberty that belonged to the character of a brave, self population to be manifestations of an absolute freedom; he found the men fired with a passionate aspiration for liberty, just as the masses in England had been five years earlier, and possessed of even more substantial reasons for revolt. The idea of the young republic delighted him; he was already prepared to shed his blood in establishing that glorious ideal. ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... was a true type of the lofty aspiration and manifold activity of Elizabethan England. He was scholar, poet, courtier, diplomatist, statesman, soldier, all in one. Educated at Oxford and then introduced at court by his uncle, the Earl of Leicester, he had been sent to France when a lad ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... the air of shopkeeping he was compelled to breathe when he visited Twybridge nauseated and repelled him. He recognised the suitability both of Oliver and Charlotte for the positions to which life had consigned them—they suffered from no profitless aspiration; but it seemed to him a just cause of quarrel with fate that his kindred should thus have relapsed, instead of bettering the rank their father had bequeathed to them. He would not avow to such friends as Moxey and Earwaker the social standing ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... soul by hiding it in gauze? How could she look so ethereal while her eyes drooped so murderously? Those almost wanton glances seemed to give promise of untold languorous delight, while by an ascetic's sigh of aspiration after a better life the mouth appeared to add that none of those promises would be fulfilled. Ingenuous youths (for there were a few to be found in the Guards of that day) privately wondered whether, in the most intimate moments, it were possible to speak familiarly to this ...
— The Collection of Antiquities • Honore de Balzac
... service I have been removed altogether from feminine attractions. Of course I have been thinking it over, but for the present my inclination turns towards yachting. I have always been fond of the water, and had a strong wish to go to sea when I was a boy, but that aspiration was not encouraged. However, I can follow my bent now. Norton has been piling up money for me in my absence, and I can afford myself the luxury of a big yacht. Of course I shall be in no hurry about it. I shall either build or buy a biggish craft, for racing ...
— The Queen's Cup • G. A. Henty
... She signs this pamphlet as Adeline D. T. Whitney. I have read it twice, and read it to pure and gentle and intellectual women. I shall not read it today for my strength does not suffice.[59] ... There is not one impure, unintellectual aspiration or thought throughout the whole of it. Would to God that I knew her, that I could thank her on behalf of the society and politics of the United States for this production. She says to her own sex: "After all, ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... can understand the Sea, until He knows all passions of the senses; all The great emotions of the heart; and each Exalted aspiration of the soul. Then may he sit beside the sea and say: 'I, too, have flung myself against the rocks, And kissed their flinty brows with no return; And fallen spent upon unfeeling sands. I, too, have gone forth yearning, to far shores, Seeking that something ...
— The Englishman and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... back to fall, Absorbed and lost, when, countless ages passed, They should complete their round as souls of men, Of beasts, of birds and of all creeping things. And, even worse, the cruel iron castes, One caste too holy for another's touch, Had every human aspiration crushed, The common brotherhood of man destroyed, And made all men but Pharisees or slaves. And worst of all—and what could e'en be worse?— Woman, bone of man's bone, flesh of his flesh, The equal partner of a double life, Who in the world's best days stood by his side To lighten ...
— The Dawn and the Day • Henry Thayer Niles
... The cherished aspiration for national unity which for ages has inspired the many millions of people speaking the same language, inhabiting a contiguous and compact territory, but unnaturally separated and divided by dynastic jealousies and the ambition of short-sighted rulers, has been attained, and Germany ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Ulysses S. Grant • James D. Richardson
... reaching and aspiration is an instinct with which all nature consists and cooperates, and therefore it is not in vain. If a man believes and expects great things of himself it makes no odds where you put him, he ...
— Leaves of Life - For Daily Inspiration • Margaret Bird Steinmetz
... three letters. It happened as I dropped them on the table that they fell of themselves into complete literary sequence, "c-o-w." But Vesty handed me eleven shuffled letters, a ladylike aspiration, and looked at me with a little appealing blush—the Basin school is so brief, so limited ...
— Vesty of the Basins • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... we shall perceive it to be, primarily, one of uneasiness, of expectation, of looking forward, of aspiration. It is a source of constant discomfort, for it behaves like a skeleton at the feast of all our enjoyments. We go to the theatre and laugh; but between the acts it raises a skinny finger at us. We rush ...
— How to Live on 24 Hours a Day • Arnold Bennett
... said to be a transcendental defence of the world as it is. There is no room for aspiration and no need of any: 'What is actual is rational, what is rational is actual.' But a good man will not readily acquiesce in this aphorism. He knows of course that all things proceed according to law whether for good or ...
— Sophist • Plato
... already suggested in a previous chapter, the authority of the moral law over man is rooted in man's endowment. Its imperative is nothing but the voice of the future self, bidding the present self aspire, while its reproof is only the expression of a moral aspiration which has misunderstood itself. Contrition is not a bad moral state which should bring despair, but a good state, full of promise of one that is still better. It is, in fact, just the first step which the ideal takes ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... citizenship. Let us leave this place with this feeling stimulated by the sentiments born of the occasion. Let us appreciate more keenly than ever how vitally necessary it is to our country's wealth that every one within its citizenship should be clean minded in political aim and aspiration, sincere and honest in his conception of our country's mission, and aroused to higher and more responsive patriotism by the reflection that it is a solemn thing to belong to ...
— New York at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St. Louis 1904 - Report of the New York State Commission • DeLancey M. Ellis
... as it were, down an apparently break-neck height. About midway of the ascent stood a shabby brick church, towards which a difficult path went scrambling up the precipice, indicating, one would say, a very fervent aspiration on the part of the worshippers, unless there was some easier mode of access in another direction. Immediately on the shore of the Potomac, and extending back towards the town, lay the dismal ruins of the United States arsenal and armory, consisting of piles of broken bricks and a waste ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... design would be beautiful as the subject of a poem— as the aspiration of a great mind to arrive at an ideal perfection, which could not however be realised until evil itself had ceased to exist. That to attempt to move the Mestua Mountain[1] would be a task not less hopeless: that I might as well endeavour to walk up our great ...
— Another World - Fragments from the Star City of Montalluyah • Benjamin Lumley (AKA Hermes)
... these you may put from you, to gird on a filthy apron and assume a servile guise; then will you handle crowbars and graving tools, mallets and chisels; you will be bowed over your work, with eyes and thoughts bent earthwards, abject as abject can be, with never a free and manly upward look or aspiration; all your care will be to proportion and fairly drape your works; to proportioning and adorning yourself you will give little heed enough, making yourself of less ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... forests, with lofty solemn rows of trees, with clean straight stems, through which you can see far, lengthy vistas, as you see here. Only in Ukawendi you can almost behold the growth of vegetation; the earth is so generous, nature so kind and loving, that without entertaining any aspiration for a residence, or a wish to breathe the baleful atmosphere longer than is absolutely necessary, one feels insensibly drawn towards it, as the thought creeps into his mind, that though all is foul ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... character of a nation by its homes. For it is mainly through the hope of enjoying the ownership of a home that the latent energy of any citizenry is called forth. This universal yearning for better homes and the larger security, independence and freedom that they imply, was the aspiration that carried our pioneers westward. Since the preemption acts passed early in the last century, the United States, in its land laws, has recognized and put a premium upon this great incentive. It has stimulated the building of rural ...
— Better Homes in America • Mrs W.B. Meloney
... voices of nature, in sky, and sea, and storm; the voices of childhood and of early youth; the voices of playfellows and companions,—voices long stilled, it may be, in death; the voices of lover and beloved; the voices of ambition, of sorrow, of aspiration, ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... do to condemn every minor painter utterly, the moment we see he is foggy. Copley Fielding, for instance, was a minor painter; but his love of obscurity in rain clouds, and dew-mist on downs, was genuine love, full of sweetness and happy aspiration; and, in this way, a little of the light of the higher mystery is often caught by the simplest men when they ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... idea, we accompany you. We stand near you while you are setting sail. We watch your eyes that linger on the white cliffs and we hear the patriarchal blessing which your soul pours out on the land of your nativity, the aspiration that ascends to God for its peace, its freedom and its prosperity. Again, do we participate in your feelings on first beholding Nature in her noblest scenes and grandest features, on finding man busied in rendering himself worthy of Nature, but more than all, on contemplating ...
— Priestley in America - 1794-1804 • Edgar F. Smith
... H was looked upon as a mere mark of aspiration. Victorinus says that Nigidius Figulus so ...
— The Roman Pronunciation of Latin • Frances E. Lord
... say of one who seeks after truth and righteousness, and yet does not yield obedience to him who is the source of all things—the truth, the righteousness? We should probably conclude that his search was a fancy, his aspiration an illusion. No! What we need is to love the Lord our God with all our heart, to feel that he is the wisest, the most lovely—the embodiment and the source of all other wisdom and goodness; the Sun by which the other planets shine, by whose rays the ...
— Joy in Service; Forgetting, and Pressing Onward; Until the Day Dawn • George Tybout Purves
... moccasin. The visitor saw that the limb was injured and tenderly rested the foot upon his knee, the owner thereof making no objection, gently turned down the stocking and spent a minute or two in inspecting the swollen ankle. Then with a sympathetic aspiration he slowly stroked it with his hand. In doing so he drew downward each time and never ...
— Deerfoot in The Mountains • Edward S. Ellis
... The aspiration of our author, so warmly expressed in 1850, that the German Episcopate should, in mind and action, be one body in the nation, acting and suffering together, appears, in these later days, to have been realized. It was also his firm conviction that it behooved them to labor to obtain complete liberty ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... ecstacy which results from spiritual aspiration, or they express the union of the individual soul with its mate according to the viewpoint. In any event, they are an excellent description of the realization of that much-to-be-desired consciousness which is fittingly described in Occidental phraseology as "cosmic consciousness." Whether ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... Cynthia, the Moon, though aware that his aspiration must remain for ever hopeless. Tellus, the Earth, herself enamoured of Endymion, jealously resolves to punish his indifference to her by deep melancholy. Accordingly she visits the witch, Dipsas, by whose magic aid the youth, ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... proceedings of South Carolina. I have often rejoiced that we have you to rest upon and confide in. I do not know what we could do without you. That God may preserve you to us, and that your mind may retain all its vigor to carry us through these perilous times, is my most fervent aspiration. ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan
... think, generally acknowledged. The feeling in Canada is one of strong aversion to the United States government and of predilection for self-government under the English Crown. A faineant governor and the prestige of British power is now the political aspiration of the Canadians in general; and I think that this is understood in the States. Moreover, the States have a job of work on hand which, as they themselves are well aware, is taxing all their energies. Such being the case, I do not think that England needs to fear any invasion of Canada ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope
... aphorism in literature and life. It swept away any lingering thought or expectation that in the mind of Him who had so recently ridden into Jerusalem as King of Israel and Prince of Peace, there was even the semblance of aspiration for earthly power or dominion. It established for all time the one righteous basis of relationship between spiritual and secular duties, between church and state. The apostles in later years builded upon this foundation and enjoined obedience to ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... plain downright sense,—the sense in which it embodied popular imaginations,—it was false and shocking. The proposal to hold by the words evacuated of the old meaning is a concession of the whole case to the unbeliever, and a substitution of sentiment and aspiration for a genuine intellectual belief. Explaining away, however dexterously and delicately, is not defending, but at once confessing error, and encumbering yourself with all the trammels of misleading associations. The more popular method, therefore, at ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... intensity of his aspiration and hushed expectance the world seems only a turbulent passing pageant, or a hard wayfaring, suffered in ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... fear that assailing none, I may have offended all. Neutrality may degenerate into an ignominious isolation. An honest and unprejudiced attempt to discern the truth is my sole defence, as the good opinion of the reader has been throughout my chief aspiration, and can be in the end my ...
— The Story of the Malakand Field Force • Sir Winston S. Churchill
... own dignity and rights in presence and despight of the Creator. Sahib the Sufi declares that the secret of man's soul (i.e. its emanation) was first revealed when Pharaoh declared himself god; and Al-Ghazali sees in his claim the most noble aspiration to the divine, innate in the human spirit. (Dabistan, ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... to her her aspiration concerning the pink silk which she had found among Abrahama's possessions, Rose did not laugh at all, but she looked at ...
— The Shoulders of Atlas - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... traversed this grand and gentle spirit occupied with eternal things. Certainly, such a man would have done well not to entertain any political opinions. Let there be no mistake as to our meaning: we are not confounding what is called "political opinions" with the grand aspiration for progress, with the sublime faith, patriotic, democratic, humane, which in our day should be the very foundation of every generous intellect. Without going deeply into questions which are only indirectly connected ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... Friend, but still our kind Master and very good Lord, who speaks to His servants from behind the clouds that hide His face, and assures them of His abiding favour and approving love. More than that, nature cannot look for: such aspiration were unnatural, unreasonable, mere madness: it is enough for the creature, as a creature, in its highest estate to stand before God, hearing His voice, but seeing not His countenance, whom, without His free grace, none can look ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... does not with the white man possess that towering ambition, that soars aloft in climes ethereal. There is with the African no motive to spur him to action; no incentive to the acquisition of wealth; no aspiration for power; no desire for honor or fame. Self reliance and enterprise, are the peculiar characteristics of the Anglo-Saxon race; on the contrary, the African in his native state, is content with his hut and his palm-leaf shade, and he is now what he was centuries ago; there is no improvement ...
— A Review of Uncle Tom's Cabin - or, An Essay on Slavery • A. Woodward
... strove to still the giddy whirl in his brain. And as his folly and its bitterness found him out, the poor fool rocked himself, and cursed the day when he was born. If any one yet doubt that Mr. Moggridge was an inspired singer, let him turn to that sublime aspiration ...
— The Astonishing History of Troy Town • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... seemed a symbol of barbarism. During the war Lincoln's chief purpose was the restoration of national unity, and his day-dream was that it should be achieved as a sincere and hearty reunion in feeling as well as in fact. As he dwelt with much earnest aspiration upon this consummation, he perhaps came to imagine a possibility of its instant accomplishment, which did not really exist. His longing for a genuinely reunited country was not a pious form of expression, but an intense sentiment, and an end which he definitely expected to bring to pass. Not improbably ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. II • John T. Morse
... itself. In the wide range from the hut in the wilderness to a Gothic cathedral, from the rude scratches recorded on the cave walls of prehistoric man to the sublimities of the Sistine Chapel, there is no break in the continuity of effort and aspiration. Potentially every man is an artist. Between the artist, so-called, and the ordinary man there is no gulf fixed which cannot be passed. Such are the terms of our mechanical civilization to-day that art has become specialized and the practice of it is limited to a few; in consequence artists ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes
... admission to the United is earnest literary aspiration. Any member will furnish the candidate for admission with an application blank, signed in recommendation. This application, filled out and forwarded to the Secretary of the association with the sum of fifty cents as dues for the first year, and accompanied by a "credential," or sample of the candidate's ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... deep and abiding sympathies for the oppressed and sorrowing of every nation, class, or color, to plead my excuse for sending forth simple, unvarnished facts and experiences, hoping they may increase an aspiration for the active doing, instead of saying what ought to be done, with excusing self for want of ability, when it is to be found in Him who is saying, "My grace is sufficient for thee, for my strength ...
— A Woman's Life-Work - Labors and Experiences • Laura S. Haviland
... perfection of the human soul—the perfection which it may attain—is distinctly unfolded, and also the unity of the great ideas of the beautiful, just, and good. The "Phoedo" enforces the supremacy of wisdom, and the "Philebus" the "summum bonum." Love is the aspiration after a communion with perfection. The chief excellence of the philosophy which Plato taught, consists in the immutable basis assigned to the principles of moral truth; the defects are a want of distinct apprehension of the claims of divine justice ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... is bravely faithful to the passing of that last fence, who reclines under that tree even for so long as one aspiration, comes a substantial gain: ever after, when he goes into any solitude, he becomes more than himself. Then he reads the first lesson of the tree of Truth, which is that the spirit of Life ages yet is ageless; and suffers yet ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... has ten steps, namely, the intellectual ladder and the moral ladder." These ladders constitute, in fact, a series of precepts, warnings, and exhortations; some easily comprehensible, others demanding profound thought, and the whole calculated to educate an absorbing aspiration for the "transcendental virtues," to possess which is to attain to perfect Buddhahood. Unquestionably the offspring of a great mind, this Shingon system, with its mysterious possibilities and its lofty morality, appealed ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... my life is gone, and I have let The years slip from me and have not fulfilled The aspiration of my youth, to build Some tower of song with lofty parapet. Not indolence, nor pleasure, nor the fret Of restless passions chat would not be stilled, But sorrow, and a care that almost killed, Kept me from what I may accomplish yet; Though, half way up the hill, I see the Past Lying beneath ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... mainspring of contentment, and contentment the bed-rock of happiness; but it is all to no purpose. A note from the other world will strike upon the chord of my being, and the spirit which has been dozing within me awakens and fiercely beats at its bars, demanding some nobler thought, some higher aspiration, some wider action, a more saturnalian pleasure, something more than the peasant life can ever yield. Then I hold my spirit tight till wild passionate longing sinks down, down to sickening dumb despair, and had I the privilege extended ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin
... and I can't ever see him, nothing can save him! But, damn it! what can I do?" he would say. He tried to reassure himself by counting up Lily's good points; her present uprightness; her honest friendliness to him; her almost insane devotion to Jacky, and her pathetic aspiration for respectability, which was summed up in that one word of collective emptiness,—"Society." But immediately her bad points clamored in his mind; her ignorance and unmorality and vulgarity. "Truth ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... Love. The drive of spirit is ever upward towards progress, aspiration, and unity. If we take a drop of quicksilver and separate it into smaller particles, as soon as ever the conditions allow, these smaller globules will amalgamate themselves with the larger body from ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... diamonds, and domestic virtues, and who would bear him, in deep awe for his unapproachable superiority, five or six robust children; and a romantic connexion with a married woman or a widow, a woman all passion and intellect and aspiration, with whom he should go through a course of mutual soul improvement, who should be the sharer of all his higher life, and whom he would diligently deck out as a Beatrice or a Laura ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... of good timber, have induced in the north a general steep pitch of gable, which, when rounded or squared above a tower, becomes a spire or turret; and this feature, worked out with elaborate decoration, is the key-note of the whole system of aspiration, so called, which the German critics have so ingeniously and falsely ascribed to a devotional sentiment pervading the Northern Gothic: I entirely and boldly deny the whole theory; our cathedrals were for the most part built by worldly people, ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... grew larger, so that the elder ones could be of assistance in the care of the house, Mrs. Frankland's opportunity came. The fame of such women as Mrs. Livermore, Miss Willard, and Mrs. Bottome had long been a spur to her aspiration. She did not set up as a reformer. Denunciation and contention were not proper to her temperament. She was, above all, pathetic and sympathetic. She took charge of a Bible class of young ladies in the Sunday-school, and these ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston
... satisfaction. It was an extension of duty, of the exercise of the more recondite virtues; but neither Mr. Wentworth, nor Charlotte, nor Mr. Brand, who, among these excellent people, was a great promoter of reflection and aspiration, frankly adverted to it as an extension of enjoyment. This function was ultimately assumed by Gertrude Wentworth, who was a peculiar girl, but the full compass of whose peculiarities had not been exhibited before they very ingeniously found their pretext in the presence of these possibly ...
— The Europeans • Henry James
... grip released him, heard a deep curse in his ear growled by a voice he well knew, and then he felt himself hurled with gigantic force from the quay wall. Before the base, cheating, faithless scoundrel could make one exclamation, he was plunged into the Liffey—even before one mental aspiration for mercy, he was in the throes of suffocation! The heavy splash in the water caught the attention of those whose approach had alarmed the murderers, and seeing a man and woman running, a pursuit commenced, ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover
... thoughts; you will receive that which you earn; no more, no less. Whatever your present environment may be, you will fall, remain, or rise with your thoughts, your Vision, your Ideal. You will become as small as your controlling desire; as great as your dominant aspiration: in the beautiful words of Stanton Kirkham Davis, "You may be keeping accounts, and presently you shall walk out of the door that for so long has seemed to you the barrier of your ideals, and shall find yourself before an audience—the pen still behind ...
— As a Man Thinketh • James Allen
... heroic deeds; Demosthenes as a symbol of the convincing powers of oratory and Pericles as the crystallization of Grecian life in its totality of beauty, learning and social and civic life. Greece is a type, is an attitude, is a protest against oppression, is an aspiration towards beauty, is an inspiration and a guide for men who live in the higher planes of feeling and thought. But Greece is not all that as a people; Greece is all that through men ...
— Simon Bolivar, the Liberator • Guillermo A. Sherwell
... is even yet rather an aspiration towards the future than a knowledge of reality, it must be admitted that the elements of this study are all included in political economy; and I believe that I express the general sentiment in saying that this opinion has become that of the vast majority of minds. The present finds ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... once more. It was not Wilson who failed there, but humanity itself. It was not the statesmen that failed so much as the spirit of the peoples behind them. The hope, the aspiration for a new world order of peace and right and justice—however deeply and universally felt—was still only feeble and ineffective in comparison with the dominant national passions which found their expression ...
— Woodrow Wilson's Administration and Achievements • Frank B. Lord and James William Bryan
... aspiration unreasonable let me commend a renowned and life-giving precedent of English history. As early as the days of Queen Elizabeth, a courtier boasted that the air of England was too pure for a slave to breathe, and the Common Law was said to forbid Slavery. And yet, in the face of ...
— American Eloquence, Volume II. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various
... to make every one I meet discontented with themselves; I should like to awaken in them, about their physical, their intellectual, their moral condition, that divine discontent which is the parent first of upward aspiration and then of self-control, thought, effort to fulfil that aspiration even in part. For to be discontented with the divine discontent, and to be ashamed with the noble shame, is the very germ and first ...
— Daily Thoughts - selected from the writings of Charles Kingsley by his wife • Charles Kingsley
... principle in man under the image of an immortal steed; (3) The notion that the divine nature exists by the contemplation of ideas of virtue and justice—or, in other words, the assertion of the essentially moral nature of God; (4) Again, there is the hint that human life is a life of aspiration only, and that the true ideal is not to be found in art; (5) There occurs the first trace of the distinction between necessary and contingent matter; (6) The conception of the soul itself as the motive power ...
— Phaedrus • Plato
... is the monogram of Christ. The other symbols generally in use are the ship, the emblem of the church; the fish, the emblem of Christ, the palm, the symbol of martyrdom. The anchor represented hope in immortality; the dove, peace; the stag reminded the faithful of the pious aspiration of the Psalmist; the horse was the emblem of strength in the faith; the hunted hare, of persecution; the peacock and the phoenix stood for signs of the resurrection. Christ, as the good pastor, was also introduced in the ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... whom, amidst the gibes of his contemporaries, he likened himself, he wanted everything; and those with this aspiration must necessarily be heedless of their neighbours' smaller ambitions. "Without genius, I am undone!" he cried in despair; but when it was proved beyond dispute that this gift of debatable beneficence was his, he was ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars |
