"Aspiring" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Dyotheletism (d. 662), Symeon, the New Theologian (d. circa 1040), Nicolaus Cabasilas (d. 1371), and Symeon, like Nicholas, archbishop of Thessalonica (d. 1429), were the most conspicuous representatives of this Oriental mysticism. They left all the dogmas and institutions of the Church untouched; aspiring above and beyond these, their ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... satirist and the worst man that ever lived. But instead, how humanely he clings to the most unpromising forms of human nature, insists on their right to speak for themselves as much as if they were passionate Romeos and high-aspiring Buckinghams, and does for them what he might have desired should be done for himself had he been Dogberry, or Bottom, or Abhorson, or Bardolph, or any of the rest! The low characters, the clowns and vagabonds, of Ben Jonson's ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... Rhea, and with whose affection for her cousin he must have felt some sympathy. He would not, therefore, destroy the child, but contented himself with determining to make her a vestal virgin. By this means she would be solemnly set apart to a religious service, which would incapacitate her from aspiring to the throne; and by being cut off, by her vestal vows, from all possibility of forming any domestic ties, she could never, he thought, have any offspring to dispute his claim ...
— Romulus, Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... when one remembered what patient saving, and what high respect for society in the abstract go to such furnishing that the little parlor was interesting at all. I could imagine the great day of certain purchases, the bewildering shops of the next large town, the aspiring anxious woman, the clumsy sea-tanned man in his best clothes, so eager to be pleased, but at ease only when they were safe back in the sailboat again, going down the bay with their precious freight, the hoarded money all spent and nothing to think ...
— The Country of the Pointed Firs • Sarah Orne Jewett
... she is a reality indeed—sensible, handsome, courageous, charitable, an angel for one in her station; but then," here M. Perigord shrugged his shoulders, "she knows well that the rank of monsieur our young marquis forbids the thought of her aspiring to his hand. Ah, no! you deceive yourself, my friend, but you cannot deceive me in such ...
— The King's Warrant - A Story of Old and New France • Alfred H. Engelbach
... of a summer evening a long procession of people passed through the avenues of blossoming peach and cherry trees in Mandakan, singing a high chant or song. It was sacred, yet it was not solemn; peaceful, yet not sombre; rather gentle, aspiring, and clear. The people were not of the city alone, but they had been gathered from all parts of the land—many thousands, who were now come ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... men's lives (as a clue to their notions of the good), we find three prominent varieties; the life of pleasure or sensuality,—the political life, aspiring to honour,—and the contemplative life. The first is the life of the brutes, although countenanced by men high in power. The second is too precarious, as depending on others, and is besides only a means to an end—namely, our consciousness of our own merits; ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... consideration, when asked to advise them about education, as the one most germane to their interests; and preachers and laymen, and their white teachers, approved every word, and gave me most hearty thanks. I counseled aspiring young men to abstain from unsuitable attempts at merely literary training; from overlooking the intermediate links of culture in striving after something "beyond their measure;" from expecting any more to be shot up into the United States Senatorships, etc., by ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune
... who enjoyed a reputable office under the sheriff of London and Middlesex; and his mother was the daughter of Scragg Hollow, Esq., of Hockley-in-the-Hole. He was scarce settled at school before he gave marks of his lofty and aspiring temper, and was regarded by his schoolfellows with that deference which men generally pay to those superior geniuses who will exact it of them. If an orchard was to be robbed, Wild was consulted; and though he was himself seldom concerned in the execution of the design, yet was he always ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... will be a tedious business, and just at present not at all an easy one. For in going to war in the cause of mind, who is aspiring to the second prize, I ought to have weapons of another make from those which I used before; some, however, of the old ones may do again. And must I then finish ...
— Philebus • Plato
... repeated the children, one with her eyes bent meekly down, and the other looking upward, as if she would penetrate the heavens into which her heart was aspiring. ...
— Choice Readings for the Home Circle • Anonymous
... incident is caught in the aspect which it happens to turn towards her imagination. Flaubert himself has retreated, and it is Emma with whom we immediately deal. Take, for example, the two figures of her lovers, Rodolphe and Leon, the florid country-gentleman and the aspiring student; if Flaubert were to describe these men as he sees them, apart from their significance to Emma, they would not occupy him for long; to his mind, and to any critical mind, they are both of them very small affairs. Their whole effect in the book is the effect they produce ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... master—a master of magnitude, already, and of a promise so large that in generations the world had not known the like of it—James Cobden was gravely persuaded. And this meant much to James Cobden, clear, aspiring soul, a man in pure love with his art. And there was more: grown old now, a little, he dreamed new dreams of fatherly affection, indulged in a studio which had grown lonely of late; and he promised himself, beyond this, the ...
— Harbor Tales Down North - With an Appreciation by Wilfred T. Grenfell, M.D. • Norman Duncan
... imagine one of our large cities possessing the same power over the United States that Paris wields over France, we shall take a different view of the matter. Paris governed by a commune, that commune being elected by a mob and aspiring to give laws to France, might well indeed have alarmed all Frenchmen. We may judge of its feeling towards the Provinces from the indignation expressed by Parisian Communists when during the Commune, Lyons and some other cities talked of setting ...
— France in the Nineteenth Century • Elizabeth Latimer
... reading the signs on the ten-story buildings and acquiring knowledge, than to dawdle and "Ah!" adown our pathway to the tomb and leave no record for posterity except that we had a good neck to pin a necktie upon. It is not pleasant to be called green, but I would rather be green and aspiring than blase and ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... that the druggist had for a brother a young and aspiring architect, who conceived the idea of putting up a building in keeping with a residence district. The result was a sloping-roofed structure whose shingled second story projected over the first, which was of ...
— The Pleasant Street Partnership - A Neighborhood Story • Mary F. Leonard
... life to these deadly lines is at first sight a less plausible, but on second thoughts may perhaps seem no less possible a character than Flamineo. Pure and simple ambition of the Napoleonic order is the motive which impels into infamy the aspiring parasite of Brachiano: a savage melancholy inflames the baffled greed of Bosola to a pitch of wickedness not unqualified by relenting touches of profitless remorse, which come always either too early or too late to bear any serviceable fruit of compassion or redemption. There is no deeper or more ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... His firmness stand, The ground of my immortal hope; Or nobly rise, at his command, To Pisgah's heaven-aspiring top. ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... historian does well to keep out of the way, to be humble and self-denying, making it a religious duty to prevent the intrusion of all that betrays his own position and quality, his hopes and wishes. Without aspiring to the calm indifference of Ranke, he was conscious that, in early life, he had been too positive, and too eager to persuade. The Belgian scholar who, conversing with him in 1842, was reminded of Fenelon, missed the acuter angles ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... stooping attitude; in walking he rather shuffled than decisively stepped; and a lady once remarked, he never could fix which side of the garden-walk would suit him best, but continually shifted in corkscrew fashion, and kept trying both. A heavy-laden, high-aspiring, and surely much-suffering man. His voice, naturally soft and good, had contracted itself into a plaintive snuffle and sing-song; he spoke as if preaching,—you would have said preaching earnestly, and also hopelessly, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... alone, whose valour was such that he never thought he had achieved enough, and whose search for true glory was insatiable, considered the reduction of Spain as affording but a faint idea of the hopes which his aspiring mind had conceived. He now directed his view to Africa and Great Carthage, and the glorious termination of the war, as redounding to his honour, and giving lustre to his name. Judging it therefore to be now ...
— History of Rome, Vol III • Titus Livius
... and attractive social qualities, and his home formed a Mecca for the advanced and aspiring of his race. He was a skilful violinist, and derived great pleasure from the valuable instrument he possessed. A wholesome atmosphere always surrounded him. He had never used tobacco or strong liquors, and was clean of speech and ...
— Frederick Douglass - A Biography • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... York, where he was put into prison. It is said that Lee plotted against America during his imprisonment; but General Washington did not know that, and used every exertion to have him exchanged, so that his aspiring rival soon again ...
— Stories of New Jersey • Frank Richard Stockton
... well as the beautiful, but he loved not virtue for its holiness, he loved it for its beauty. He would have been aspiring in imagination, although he was not ambitious by character. Had he lived in those ancient republics where men attained their full development through liberty, as the free, unfettered body develops itself in pure air and open sunshine, he would have aspired to every summit like Caesar, ...
— Raphael - Pages Of The Book Of Life At Twenty • Alphonse de Lamartine
... regarded her with one of those boyish adorations which are for the time being sufficient in themselves, and do not look ahead into the future; and then Raymond well knew that before he could for a moment dream of aspiring to the hand of the proud knight's daughter, he must himself have carved his way to moderate fortune ...
— In the Days of Chivalry • Evelyn Everett-Green
... Moreover, he has to give examples of the faults opposed to sublimity, he has to dive into and search the bathos, to dally over examples of the bombastic, the over-wrought, the puerile. These faults are not the sins of "minds generous and aspiring," and we have them with us always. The additions to Boileau's preface (Paris, 1772) contain abundance of examples of faults from Voiture, Mascaron, Bossuet, selected by M. de St. Marc, who no doubt found abundance of entertainment in the chastising of ...
— On the Sublime • Longinus
... compliment, "Greatly respected by all who knew him;" and in the annual catalogue of his alma mater an asterisk has been added to his name, over which perchance some gray-haired survivor of his class may breathe a sigh, as he calls up, the image of the fresh-faced, bright-eyed boy, who, aspiring, hopeful, vigorous, started with him on the journey of life,—a sigh rather for himself than for its ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... universities were, however, subject to two limitations, which prevented them from providing a higher education for all aspiring students. The expense of living at Oxford and Cambridge, and the close connexion of both universities with the Church of England, rendered them difficult of access to many. These limitations were emphasised by the ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... bygone English life whence sprung the Canterbury Tales, or As You Like It. So that his tutor, who was much attached to him, and who made it one of his main objects in life to keep the boy's aspiring nose to the grindstone of grammatical minutiae, began about the time of Sir Mowbray's letter to prophesy very smooth things indeed to his mother as to his future success at college, the possibility of his getting the famous St. ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... moment of the dawn of Christianity in Europe, with the ardent impulse the Christian ideal of spiritual life supplied to human civilization. How close the wise and broad Greek culture came to being all-sufficing, capable of effecting almost enough of impetus for the aspiring progress of the world, and yet how much it lacked a warmer element essential to be engrafted upon its lofty beauty, the reader, upon whose imaginative vision the personality of Cleon rises, can scarcely help ...
— Men and Women • Robert Browning
... mushroom speakers, who attempted to amuse them while they waited, the principal actors in this farce were miles away, chasing each other about in electric cabs, which at a distance of twenty miles or more from Brocklebank Hall collided and threw the aspiring occupants out in a deep wood. Thus doth fate pursue the over- ambitious ...
— A Woman for Mayor - A Novel of To-day • Helen M. Winslow
... survived the marriage of Richmond and Elizabeth. Left without chiefs who had any decent show of right, the adherents of Lancaster rallied round a line of bastards, and the adherents of York set up a succession of impostors. When, at length, many aspiring nobles had perished on the field of battle or by the hands of the executioner, when many illustrious houses had disappeared forever from history, when those great families which remained had been exhausted and sobered by calamities, it was universally acknowledged that the claims of all the ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... but active and worthy lad; who put forth their invisible hands from the heaven of their rest, and become the genuine guardian angels of the orphan race for ever and ever: raising from those who would otherwise have been outcasts and ignorant laborers, aspiring and useful men; tradesmen of substance; merchants the true enrichers of their country, and fathers of happy families. How glorious is such a lot! how noble is such an appropriation of wealth! how enviable is such a fame! And ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... years had not the expected aspiring march, however; ten-dollar cases, even, had not been plenty in Edwards's path, and he suspected that he was not highly valued in his office. He had been compelled to tutor a boy the second year, and the hot summers made him listless. ...
— Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories • Robert Herrick
... discussing with Philip Sidney and corresponding with Gabriel Harvey about classical metres and English rimes; the shepherd poet, Colin Clout, delicately fashioning his innocent pastorals, his love complaints, or his dexterous panegyrics or satires; the courtier, aspiring to shine in the train of Leicester before the eyes of the great queen,—found himself transplanted into a wild and turbulent savagery, where the elements of civil society hardly existed, and which had the fatal power of drawing into its own evil and lawless ways the English ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... been so much more cynical than anyone else for the public good that no one has dared since to be really cynical for anything smaller. The Chinese crackers of the frivolous cynics fail to excite us after the dynamite of the serious and aspiring cynic. Bernard Shaw and I (who are growing grey together) can remember an epoch which many of his followers do not know: an epoch of real pessimism. The years from 1885 to 1898 were like the hours of afternoon in a rich ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... the furthest stretch of her power and influence in the palace, the appointment of Mr. Quiverful should be insisted on. As she repeated the word "insisted," she thought of the bishop in his night-cap and, with compressed lips, slightly shook her head. Oh, my aspiring pastors, divines to whose ears nolo episcopari are the sweetest of words, which of you would be a bishop on such ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... please to declare it, that I may have time to prepare for the journey? One favorable word written to me in the Letter on that occasion [word favorable to France, ostensible to M. Amelot and the most Christian Majesty], one word would suffice to procure me the happiness I have, for six years, been aspiring to, of living beside you." Oh, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... their lieutenants. The military fame of a subject was considered as an insolent invasion of the imperial prerogative; and it became the duty, as well as interest, of every Roman general to guard the frontiers intrusted to his care, without aspiring to conquests which might have proved no less fatal to himself than to ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... which was, to oppose the power of Camil'lus to that of the demagogue. Camil'lus, accordingly, being made one of the military tribunes, appointed Man'lius a day to answer for his life. 24. The place in which he was tried was near the Capitol, whither, when he was accused of sedition, and of aspiring to sovereignty, he turned his eyes, and pointing to that edifice, put them in mind of what he had there done for his country. 25. The multitude, whose compassion or whose justice seldom springs from rational motives, ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith
... pale as marble, and her long dark lashes lying drooping, with a sweet expression, as if under that mystic veil of sleep the soul were seeing things forbidden to the waking eye. Only the gentlest heaving of the quiet breast told that the heavenly spirit within had not gone whither it was hourly aspiring to go. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... small towns, like Springfield, were to become cities, and certain others, like New Salem, were to disappear. Railroads were not yet, though many were planning, and manufactures were chiefly of the domestic sort. But in the matter of the opportunities it presented to aspiring youth the country was already Western, and no longer wild Western. Hunting shirts and moccasins were disappearing. Knives in one's belt had gone out of fashion. The merely adventurous were passing beyond the Mississippi, and the field was open to the ...
— Stephen Arnold Douglas • William Garrott Brown
... minor Sonata and that of Wagner in the last act of the Goetterdaemmerung as one of the most eloquent in existence, and contains melodies so touching that they could have come only from the very soul of Beethoven. Especially noteworthy is the aspiring melody of the middle, contrasting portion (Maggiore) where the spirit, freed from earthly dross, seems to mount to the skies in a chariot of fire. The third part, where the minor mode is resumed, abounds in dramatic touches; especially ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... in us the spirit of life we shall be freed from the bondage of doubt. On how many earnest and aspiring lives does doubt throw its chill shadow! The world is crossing the flood that divides the old form of faith from the new. The rising water strikes cold to many a heart. Here and there the waves sweep men off from all moral footing. I know not that for the ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... shrub-fruits are grown; while the quince, the peach, the apricot, nectarine, plum, cherry, pear, and apple may, in the order they are named, stand in succession behind them, the taller and more hardy growth of each successive variety rising higher, and protecting its less hardy and aspiring neighbor. The soil for all these varieties of tree is supposed to be congenial, and our remarks will only be directed ...
— Rural Architecture - Being a Complete Description of Farm Houses, Cottages, and Out Buildings • Lewis Falley Allen
... person of a Scotch lad, but her affections were in favor of the former, while her guardian, the chief officer in Red River, preferred the latter. In his zeal to succeed in the choice he had made for the young lady, this gentleman sent for the half-breed and reprimanded him for aspiring to the hand of a lady, accustomed, as he expressed it, to the first society. The young man, without saying a word, put on his hat and walked out of the room; but being the leading man among his countrymen, the whole ...
— The Romantic Settlement of Lord Selkirk's Colonists - The Pioneers of Manitoba • George Bryce
... if his name was Hogg, and at the same time supplying his own; he then introduced his brother Allan, who diffidently lagged behind, and proceeded to assure the Shepherd that he had brought to see him "the greatest admirer he had on earth, and himself a young aspiring poet of some promise." Hogg warmly saluted his brother bard, and, taking both the strangers to his booth on the hill-side, the three spent the afternoon happily together, rejoicing over the viands of a small bag of provisions, and a bottle of milk, ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... to our country if all those who are aspiring to office, were required by their constituents to be familiar with the pages ...
— Aunt Phillis's Cabin - Or, Southern Life As It Is • Mary H. Eastman
... around the glories of the capture of California. The methods used are hardly justified, even by the national blessings of extension to this ocean threshold of Asian trade. The descent was planned at Washington to extend the domineering slave empire of the aspiring South. The secret is out. The way is clear for the surplus blacks of the South to march in chains to the Pacific under the ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... my native soil! thou blessed plot, Whose equal all the world affordeth not! Show me who can so many crystal rills, Such sweet-cloth'd valleys or aspiring hills,.... And if the earth can show the like again, Yet will she fail in her sea-ruling men. Time never can produce men to o'ertake The fames of Grenville, Davies, Gilbert, Drake, Or worthy Hawkins, or of thousands more That by their ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... Under these circumstances nothing can be better calculated to retard their material progress than to divert them from their useful employments by prematurely exciting angry political contests among themselves for the benefit of aspiring leaders. It is surely no hardship for embryo governors, Senators, and Members of Congress to wait until the number of inhabitants shall equal those of a single Congressional district. They surely ought not to be permitted to rush into the Union ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... struggles of an ingenuous and impetuous mind to arrive at a clear insight into its own interior constitution and external relations, and to secure the composure of self-knowledge and of equally adjusted aspirations. As a poem it is likely to lay fast and enduring hold on pure and aspiring intellects, and to strengthen the claim of Wordsworth to endure with his ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Volume I. No. 9. - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 26, 1850 • Various
... royal scholar. Greymount was noticed; sent for; promoted in the household; knighted; might doubtless have been sworn of the council, and in due time have become a minister; but his was a discreet ambition—of an accumulative rather than an aspiring character. He served the king faithfully in all domestic matters that required an unimpassioned, unscrupulous agent; fashioned his creed and conscience according to the royal model in all its freaks; seized the right moment to get sundry grants of abbey lands, and contrived ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... long, convulsive sigh. "No—there is no other remedy. I have toiled in vain—my beautiful structure has fallen, and my grave is under its ruins! O my God, why may I not have a few months more of life, wherewith to crush these aspiring rebels? But no!. I must die now, and leave them to triumph over my defeat; for I dare not leave to my successor the accursed inheritance of civil war. To the last hour of my life I must humble my will before the decree of that cruel destiny which has persecuted me from boyhood! Be it ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... exclaimed. "You do not know what you say. No one but a prince or a great peer of the realm is worthy of aspiring to Dorothy's hand. When she is ready to marry you should take her to London court, where she can make her choice from among the nobles of our land. There is not a marriageable duke or earl in England who would not eagerly seek the girl for a wife. My ...
— Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall • Charles Major
... down; and he lingered amidst the fervent sympathy of the whole world, till he died nine or ten weeks later. Of all the great Ohioans he was the gentlest and kindest nature; he never did harm to any man, and his heart was as high as his aspiring intellect above anything base or low. His ambition was in all things for what ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells
... times by the fine quality of his good nature. His letters are often petulant,—especially when Murray has sent him tragedies instead of tooth-powder; but he is perhaps the only man on record who received with perfect equanimity the verses of an aspiring young poet, wrote him the cheerfullest of letters, and actually invited him to breakfast. The letter is still extant; but the verses were so little the precursor of fame that the youth's subsequent history is to this day unknown. It was with truth that Byron said of himself: ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... consider some of his definite contributions to the birth and nurture of the United States. We have borrowed his emblem, the American eagle, which matches well his bold and aspiring spirit. It is impossible to forget that his country and its freely offered hospitality are the very foundation of our national existence, but his services as a scout and soldier have scarcely been valued ...
— The Indian Today - The Past and Future of the First American • Charles A. Eastman
... principle which instinctively strove to create and to adorn at an epoch when vulgar violence and destructiveness were the general tendencies of humanity, all gathered around these magnificent temples, as their aspiring pinnacles at last pierced the mist which had so long brooded ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... play of supply and demand in the teaching profession, to foster academic snobbery by the prestige of certain privileged institutions, to transfer accredited value from essential manhood to an outward badge, to blight hopes and promote invidious sentiments, to divert the attention of aspiring youth from direct dealings with truth to the passing of examinations,—such consequences, if they exist, ought surely to be regarded as drawbacks to the system, and an enlightened public consciousness ought to be keenly alive to ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... leading in America will depend, not so much on her material wealth, or her armed force, as on what the attitude towards life and the ideals of her citizens are going to be. Americans have a certain eagerness for knowledge; they have also, for all their absorption in success, the aspiring eye. They do want the good thing. They don't always know it when they see it, but they want it. These qualities, in combination with material strength, give America her chance. Yet, if she does ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... fields and work on the sugar plantations, are no better off than previously. These are still beasts of burden, still the victims of an economic system under which they labor not as human beings with bodies to be fed or clothed, with minds to be cultivated and aspiring souls to be ministered unto, but as living machines designed only to plant so many banana suckers in an hour, or to carry so many loads of canes in a day. After seventy-eight years in this fair island, side by side, ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 • Various
... suppose a parallel myth—if we may abuse the name. Let us suppose the son of some Canadian carpenter aspiring to be a moral teacher, but neither working nor pretending to work miracles; as much hated by his countrymen as Jesus Christ was hated by his, and both he and his countrymen as much hated by all the civilised world beside, as were Jesus Christ and the Jews: let us further suppose him forbidding ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers
... be reminded of the ferment which is moving in the world of social affairs, of the obscure but powerful tendencies which are forcing society out of its grooves and leaving it, aspiring but dubious, in new and uncharted regions. This may affect different minds in different ways. Some regret it, others rejoice in it; but all are aware of it. Time-honoured political and economic formulae are become "old clothes" for an awakened ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... thou wert lovely from thy birth, Of glorious parents, thou aspiring child. I wonder not; for one then left the earth Whose life was like a setting planet mild Which clothed thee in the radiance undefiled Of ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... collection were in no proper ratio to the number of aspiring lovers; there were five females to twenty males. No matter; there was no rivalry, no hustling; all went peacefully and sooner or later ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... originally for a lay audience and for popular consumption, will be to the aspiring medical student and the hardworking practitioner a lift into the blue, an inspiring vista or "Pisgah-sight" of the evolution of medicine, a realization of what devotion, perseverance, valor and ability on the part ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler
... characters intensely human, than does the less sensational story of the Elects finding peace and happiness in a realm transcending the experiences of human nature. Dante's Purgatorio also finds a wider circle of readers because his penitents, suffering, struggling and aspiring, like people upon earth, have more human traits and exhibit more human interest than the saints confirmed in ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... blue, This is no home for you. In fleshly walls confined Frets the aspiring mind; Imprisoned here in human clay, We pine and long to soar away. The soul would burst these prison bars, And find ...
— Love's Final Victory • Horatio
... measurement[44] of the respective books examined—not so much for the sake of making those unhappy whose copies are of less capacious dimensions, as for the consolation of those whose copies may lift up their heads in a yet more aspiring attitude. One further preliminary remark. I send you this list precisely in the order in which chance, rather than a preconcerted plan, happened to present the ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... be that earth was given for our abiding place, Or that for nought we're darkly doomed the storms of life to face; It cannot be our being's cast from 'neath the ocean wave Of vast Eternity, to sink again within its grave. Else tell me why the aspiring thoughts, the glorious hopes of man, Which spring up from his 'heart of hearts,' brook not earth's narrow span; Oh! tell me why unsatisfied forever here they roam, And seem to claim in higher spheres a refuge ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various
... sensitiveness on my part. They distress me in two ways:—first, as being in some sense protests and witnesses to my conscience against my own unfaithfulness to the English Church, and next, as being samples of her teaching, and tokens how very far she is from even aspiring ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... glancing over his shoulder, he perceived Susan, who was leaning from her window. The venturesome rose, which had clambered as high as the second story, was gone; plucked, alas, by the wayward hand of a coquette. Saint-Prosper bowed, and stooped for the aspiring but now hapless flower ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... faint praise." I have known fervid authors who, if they read or communicated a piece before it was finished, never went on with it. They thought it became blown upon, and turned from it with coldness, disgust, and despair. Yet the hearer is commonly not in fault: who can satisfy the warm hopes of aspiring ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... Conrad had just genius enough to make himself miserable—to wit, by aspiring after those honours it was impossible to attain, keeping him thereby in a constant fret and disappointment, instead of being content with his station, or striving for objects within his reach. Could ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... most part be systematically misplaced; that though the beneficent and disinterested spirit of Christianity, and her obvious tendency to promote domestic comfort and general happiness, cannot but extort applause; yet that her aspiring after more than ordinary excellence, by exciting secret misgivings in others, or a painful sense of inferiority not unmixed with envy, cannot fail often to disgust and offend. The word of God teaches us, that though such of the doctrines and precepts of Christianity, as are coincident ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... describes a Scotch scone as an aspiring but unsuccessful soda-biscuit of the New England sort. Stevenson, in writing of that dense black substance, inimical to life, called Scotch bun, says that the patriotism that leads a Scotsman to eat it ...
— Penelope's Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... this circle of young Humanists, Luther was on terms of personal friendship. Crotus was able to remind him in after life how, in close intimacy, they had studied the fine arts together at the university. But there is no mention of him in the numerous letters and poems left to posterity by the aspiring Humanists at Erfurt. He had made himself, Crotus adds, a name among his companions as the 'learned philosopher' and the 'musician,' but he never belonged to the 'poets,' which was the favourite title ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... artificial. A sentimentalism arose, which is in art what the metaphysical method is in philosophy. Yet a literature was born of it, whose freshness, force, elevation, and, above all, a self-assertion and peculiar aspiring freedom that have never been surpassed, still exert an irresistible attraction, even over minds that are furthest removed from the moral storm and disorder, and the confused intellectual convictions, of that extraordinary group. ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 3: Byron • John Morley
... got up with the sun (as 'tis called), to go a journey, or upon a foolish whole day's pleasuring, but we suffered for it all the long hours after in listlessness and headaches; Nature herself sufficiently declaring her sense of our presumption in aspiring to regulate our frail waking courses by the measures of that celestial and sleepless traveler. We deny not that there is something sprightly and vigorous, at the outset especially, in these break-of-day excursions. ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... social or picturesque. He is a constant and ready speculator; but all speculations, even those which come of philosophy, are with him more or less material. In his aspirations the American is more constant than an Englishman— or I should rather say he is more constant in aspiring. Every citizen of the United States intends to do something. Every one thinks himself capable of some effort. But in his aspirations he is more limited than an Englishman. The ambitious American never soars so high as the ambitious Englishman. He does not even see up to so great ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope
... "Clarion" and other reprints, adorned as to their covers with bald or bearded apostles of humanity. Selecting a bald one, he began at once to read, occasionally exclaiming, "That's got them," "That's knocked Genesis," with similar ejaculations of an aspiring mind. She glanced at the pile. Reran, minus the style. Darwin, minus the modesty. A comic edition of the book of Job, by "Excelsior," Pittsburgh, Pa. "The Beginning of Life," with diagrams. "Angel or Ape?" by Mrs. Julia P. Chunk. She was amused, ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... for the names which I now heard successively announced. Instead of the moderate condition from which I had supposed Mordecai and his pretty daughter, aspiring as she was, to have chosen their society, I found myself in a circle of names of which the world had been talking since I was in my cradle, if not for a dozen centuries before. I was in the midst of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... and my native country, where I might be well introduced, and had a prospect of raising my fortune by application and industry, with a life of ease and pleasure. He told me it was men of desperate fortunes on one hand, or of aspiring, superior fortunes on the other, who went abroad upon adventures, to rise by enterprise, and make themselves famous in undertakings of a nature out of the common road; that these things were all either too far above me or too far below me; that ...
— Robinson Crusoe • Daniel Defoe
... a fiercer glow of enthusiasm and with a doubtless finer sensualism, one alone attempts to offer up her life to a God! The glorious folly of her! How I love to see her, vainly tormenting her beauty, seeking infinity, aspiring to bear peace across the world. I see her soul like a walled garden in which all the flowers lift themselves higher and higher, struggling to offer themselves to a moment of light. But, in a day of greater discontent and in an hour of maturity, ...
— The Choice of Life • Georgette Leblanc
... so much shocked in my life;—never. I had no idea that you had any thought of aspiring to the hand of Miss Effingham." The lord's voice as he said this ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... that had been no more than a common Soldier, from which he had sprung to be, by turns, Oda-Bashee or Lieutenant, Bullock-Bashee or Captain, Tiah-Bashee or Colonel, and Aga or General. For among these strange people every valiant and aspiring Soldier,—I wish 'twas so in England,—though taken yesterday from the Plough, may be considered as Heir-Apparent to the Throne. Nor are they ashamed of the obscurity of their birth. This Mahomet Bassa, in a dispute ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 3 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... little aspiring Venus, let me tell you something. I have wandered somewhat in life—at home and over sea—and I have never looked upon a woman ...
— Semiramis and Other Plays - Semiramis, Carlotta And The Poet • Olive Tilford Dargan
... regularized in 1344, and speedily became a saleable charge. The remnant of the original clerks constituted the new Basoche, which thenceforward consisted only of those who worked as clerks for the procureurs, the richer ones among them aspiring themselves to attain the position of procureur. They all, however, retained some traces of their original conditions. "They are admitted," writes an 18th-century author, "to plead before M. le lieutenant civil sur les referes[1] and before M. le juge auditeur; ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... that, if we are to exercise this blessed hallowing of common things, of which He has set us the example, we must use them as He did; that is, in such sort as that our communion with God shall not be broken thereby, and that nothing in them shall darken the vision and clip the wings of the aspiring and heavenward-gazing spirit. Brethren! the tendency of this day—and one rejoices, in many respects, that it is so—is to revolt against the extreme of narrowness in the past that prescribed and proscribed a great many arbitrary and unnecessary abstinences ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... Buren, aspiring again to the Presidency, desired to avoid the Texas issue. Mr. Calhoun determined that he should meet it. He had every motive for distrusting, opposing, even hating, Van Buren. The contest between them ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... Queen was fixed for the 10th of February, and many eager, aspiring young couples throughout the country elected that it should be their wedding-day, also. They wished that the gala of their lives should fit in with hers, and that all future "happy returns of the day" might have ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... the young student, come to advance himself in his chosen field of knowledge, quite such a thrill as that which must be his when he matriculates at one of the scores of educational institutions in that quarter of Paris to which the ardent, aspiring youth of all the western world have been directing their eager ...
— Foch the Man - A Life of the Supreme Commander of the Allied Armies • Clara E. Laughlin
... writer of a truly loving letter, such as greets one from time to time, remember that, though he never hears a word from it, it may prove one of the best rewards of an anxious and laborious past, and the stimulus of a still aspiring future. ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... that he received a call there. At first all the signs were favorable; the young minister was well liked, and his parishioners were only afraid that a man of such rare ability would soon gravitate to a larger congregation. So he might have done, if his ardent, aspiring soul would have permitted him to temporize with his conscience, and to be content with mere popularity and doing good on a small scale. But the thought that was matured within him could no longer be restrained. The dangerous seed sown by reading "Sartor Resartus" had now become a strong young ...
— Sketches from Concord and Appledore • Frank Preston Stearns
... rather than be plagued with servants who had so much liberty. All the novels, poetry, and light literature of the world, which form the general staple of female reading, are based upon aristocratic institutions, and impregnated with aristocratic ideas; and women among us are constantly aspiring to foreign and aristocratic modes of life rather than to those of native republican simplicity. How many women are there, think you, that would not go in for aristocracy and aristocratic prerogatives, if they were only sure that they themselves should be of the privileged ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... remarked that all would be most conveniently over in bed: The solemn, the most important moment approached, but her soul ardently aspiring after immorality [immortality was of course the author's intention], she imagined the time moved slowly; and with great presence of mind, she gave orders in relation to her body, directing her nurse and the maid of the house, as soon as ...
— Forgotten Books of the American Nursery - A History of the Development of the American Story-Book • Rosalie V. Halsey
... the pews in the old meeting-houses had towering partition walls, which extended up so high that only the tops of the tallest heads could be seen when the occupants were seated. Permissions to build were often given with modifying restrictions to the aspiring pew-builders, as for instance is recorded of the Haverhill church, "provided they would not build so high as to damnify and hinder the light of them windows," or of the Waterbury church, "if the pues will ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... I discovered my idolatry, and I recognised the forces of death to which I had bound myself. I broke away and escaped, and in place of all my idols I substituted my aspiring human heart, and it beat like a sacred presence in the clear temple of ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... the purpose of propagating the Gospel, but with more reality aspiring to extend their subtile influence over all mankind, this society, with means the most slender and in the face of obstacles the most disheartening, have, with indomitable courage and supernatural patience, ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... Saint-Albin, on account of the irregular life which his mother, La Florence, has led. He fears being laughed at for acknowledging children so different. The Abbe Dubois was a chief cause, too, why my son would not acknowledge this son. It was because the Abbe, aspiring to the Cardinal's hat, was jealous of every one who might be a competitor with him. I love this Abbe Saint-Albin, in the first place, because he is attached to me, and, in the second, because he is really very clever; ...
— The Memoirs of the Louis XIV. and The Regency, Complete • Elizabeth-Charlotte, Duchesse d'Orleans
... in a quarter of a century to enlist the enthusiasm of a younger generation of mercurial spirits; but it is certain that at the period of which we write, Edison himself, still under thirty-five, was the centre of an extraordinary group of men, full of effervescing and aspiring talent, to which he gave ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... tone invited—at least it did not discourage—further inquiry. Mr. Gardner was bored. Amateurs who "occasionally write" were the bane of him who, having a signature of his own in the leading local paper, represented to the aspiring mind the gilded and lofty peaks of the unattainable. However he must play this youth as a source ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... right to discard the favorite of to-day as he has discarded the favorite of yesterday. In this audience, there is no such thing as subordination; the lowest demagogue, any noisy subaltern, a Hebert or Jacques Roux, aspiring to step out of the ranks, overbidding the charlatans in office in order to obtain their places. Even with a complete and lasting ascendancy over an organized band of docile supporters, the Jacobin leaders would ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... culture, and of elegant enjoyment, on the other hand, we knew nothing of its social distinctions. Not depressed by the consciousness of privations too sordid, not tempted into restlessness by the consciousness of privileges too aspiring, we had no motives for shame, we had none for pride. Grateful also to this hour I am, that, amidst luxuries in all things else, we were trained to a Spartan simplicity of diet—that we fared, in fact, very much less sumptuously than the servants. And if (after the model of the ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... was a sure and rapid worker. Mary posed for him every morning, and at the end of a week the picture had advanced to a thing of wonderful promise and beauty. Mary would stand before it almost awed. Was this she, she pondered, this aspiring woman of flame? It troubled her a little that his ideal of her should rise to such splendor; this apotheosis left no place for the pitying tenderness of love, only for its glory. The color of this picture was like the sound of silver trumpets; the heart-throb ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... man to whom Edward addressed himself for bringing over the Flemings to his interests; and that prince, the most haughty and most aspiring of the age, never courted any ally with so much assiduity and so many submissions as he employed towards this seditious and criminal tradesman. D'Arteville, proud of these advances from the king of England, and ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part B. - From Henry III. to Richard III. • David Hume
... its tether was in Robert's garret. And that was to him a sense of power, a thought of glad mystery. There was henceforth, while the dragon flew, a relation between the desolate little chamber, in that lowly house buried among so many more aspiring abodes, and the unmeasured depths and spaces, the stars, and the unknown heavens. And in the next chamber lay the fiddle free once more,—yet another magical power whereby his spirit could forsake the ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... religious in the earlier ages of this empire they eminently were, and they are religious now, though in less degree—I behold and acknowledge the providence of God, who has so framed us that our minds tend by resistless force to himself; satisfied at first with low and crude conceptions, but ever aspiring after those that shall be ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... mind of the artist must be cultured; in fact, quite as cultured as that of the composer who conceived the music. Culture comes from the observation of many things: Nature, architecture, science, machinery, sculpture, history, men and women, and poetry. I advise aspiring music students to read a great deal ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... other species of weakness, do you mean? Ah, Herbert, your aspiring hopeful, confident old friend is considerably taken down in his ideas of himself, his success and life in general! I went to the West with high hopes. Six months of struggling against indifference, neglect and accumulated debts lowered them down! I carried out letters and made friends, ...
— Capitola the Madcap • Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... naturally infer that this aspiring negro lad now began fully to reap the benefit of having been for many months subjected to the uncompromising discipline of the domestic martinet—the general's wife—at Malden. If it had not been for this preliminary household education we can hardly suppose ...
— From Slave to College President - Being the Life Story of Booker T. Washington • Godfrey Holden Pike
... like your adorable Lord, this "ornament of a meek and quiet spirit, which, in the sight of God, is of great price." Be "clothed" with gentleness and humility. Follow not the world's fleeting shadows that mock you as you grasp them. If always aspiring—ever soaring on the wing—you are likely to become discontented, proud, selfish, time-serving. In whatever position of life God has placed you, be satisfied. What! ambitious to be on a pinnacle of the temple—a higher place in the Church, or in the world?—Satan might hurl you down! "Be not ...
— The Mind of Jesus • John R. Macduff
... this happy and independent subsistence was, that he should retire into Wales, and receive an allowance of fifty pounds a year, to be raised by a subscription, on which he was to live privately in a cheap place, without aspiring any more to affluence, or having any further care ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... wife of the preceding. Born in 1789. At thirty-eight she was still pretty, and, having always been somewhat aspiring, she endeavored (in 1827), by hook or by crook, to entangle Charles Grandet, lately returned from the Indies. She wished to make a son-in-law out of him, ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... actors in the drama of the French reformation a third must now be added. Guillanme Briconnet, Bishop of Meaux, stood in the front rank of aspiring and fortunate churchmen. His father, commonly known as the Cardinal of St. Malo, had passed from the civil administration into the hierarchy of the Gallican Church. Rewarded for services rendered to Louis the Eleventh and Charles the Eighth by the gift of the ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... together, Traitors both He to the common wealth and thou to him And worse to a good Prince.—What? is he dead? Hath feare encourag'd him and made him thus Prevent our punishment? Then die with him: Fall thy aspiring at thy Master's ...
— Old English Plays, Vol. I - A Collection of Old English Plays • Various
... inclined to sacrifice all for your lover's weal, do not let the work be incomplete. Bind him not by oaths which he will regard as spiders' webs, to be burst through at pleasure. You see, as well as I do, that he is bent on being lord of Rookwood; and, in truth, to an aspiring mind, such a desire is natural, is praiseworthy. It will be pleasant, as well as honorable, to efface the stain cast upon his birth. It will be an act of filial duty in him to restore his mother's good name; and I, her father, laud ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... Aspiring young heavyweights, one after another, were climbing into the ring and being presented to the audience by the referee. Also, he ...
— When God Laughs and Other Stories • Jack London
... was so hedged about with servitors and assistants that her wishes were acted upon before a stranger could surmise them, and her Cabinet, from the Leader of the Line to the Monitor of the Gold-Fish Bowl, presented an impregnable front to the aspiring public. ...
— Little Citizens • Myra Kelly
... heart desires. He acknowledges the existence of the gods, but knows that the ordinary ideas about them do not solve the great problems of existence. He seeks a wisdom which is jealously guarded by a community of priest-sages. His aspiring soul seeks a refuge in this community. If he is found by the sages to be sufficiently prepared, he is led up by them, step by step, to higher knowledge, in places hidden from the eyes of outward observers. What then happens to him is concealed from the uninitiated. He ...
— Christianity As A Mystical Fact - And The Mysteries of Antiquity • Rudolf Steiner
... mind as he heard the whistle of the "Lark" flying a mile a minute over the rails to what might be a horrible disaster that here was a real "thriller" exceeding the imagination of any cheap novelist, aspiring playwright or industrious scenario writer. Later when he rehearsed in his mind what happened that night, he realized that in fact truth was often stranger than fiction. Every newspaper man eventually comes to ...
— Spring Street - A Story of Los Angeles • James H. Richardson
... son, were the attributes that gave wings to the man's ambition and found him aspiring to one of the high places in the temple of fame. The nation gave him a thorough military education at West Point, and he afterwards learned the practical duties of a soldier in the Black Hawk war. On the return of peace, he resigned and sought distinction in ...
— Siege of Washington, D.C. • F. Colburn Adams
... quite beneath the notice of the aspiring Layelah. She never noticed her, she never spoke of her, and she always made her visits to me after Almah ...
— A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder • James De Mille
... ministry will find some advice worthy of serious consideration. . . . It is an age of 'experts'; as an 'expert' of undoubted merit in the sphere of missionary work Father Phelan well may claim the right of giving authoritative advice to those aspiring to that field of labour in which his own efforts have been crowned with such signal success. . . . Were the revered author not, in fact what he is, a Jesuit missionary of acknowledged excellence and wide ...
— The Young Priest's Keepsake • Michael Phelan
... apprehensions of the sensitive, but sagacious Ames. Hamilton's prosperity bred its natural consequences, and he became the target at which many aspiring men directed their attacks,—Thomas Jefferson standing at their head. The cause of this, which has been sought in the French Revolution, in opposition to the supposed centralizing tendencies of the Hamiltonian policy, and so forth, really lies on the surface. It grew ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... of a novel by Voltaire, the object of which is to show the folly of aspiring to too ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... say of Lover's Leap is a little melancholy. On the east side of Lake Pepin, on the Mississippi, stands a bold rock, lifting up its aspiring head some six or seven hundred feet above the surface of the lake. Some years since, as the story goes, an Indian chief wished his daughter to take a husband that she did not like. The daughter declined, but the father ...
— History, Manners, and Customs of the North American Indians • George Mogridge
... the vigor of youth; and thy mother in the Lord, who vies with the former, and strives by new and unwonted endeavors to dissolve the bands of custom; and thy sister likewise, in some things their imitator, and in some aspiring to excel them, and to surpass in the merits of virginity the attainments of her progenitors, and both in word and deed diligently inviting thee, her sister, as is meet, to the same competition. ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... ground, not the sublime flower of her fancy, but the hairy, twisted limbs of the black mandragora." Modeste suddenly found herself brought down from the mystic heights of her love to a straight, flat road bordered with ditches,—in short the work-day path of common life. What ardent, aspiring soul would not have been bruised and broken by such a fall? Whose feet were these at which she had shed her thoughts? The Modeste who re-entered the Chalet was no more the Modeste who had left it two hours earlier than an actress in the street is like an actress ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... way of symphony, and a most facetious sniff or two, which afford general delight, sings a comic song, with a fal-de-ral—tol-de-ral chorus at the end of every verse, much longer than the verse itself. It is received with unbounded applause, and after some aspiring genius has volunteered a recitation, and failed dismally therein, the little pompous man gives another knock, and says 'Gen'l'men, we will attempt a glee, if you please.' This announcement calls forth tumultuous ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... regiment which now ranks as first of the line. Though borne on the English establishment, that regiment, from the time when it first fought under the great Gustavus, had been almost exclusively composed of Scotchmen; and Scotchmen have never, in any region to which their adventurous and aspiring temper has led them, failed to note and to resent every slight offered to Scotland. Officers and men muttered that a vote of a foreign assembly was nothing to them. If they could be absolved from ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... on English goods, and giving privileges to Irish ships over foreign, especially over English, was the result of sound, practical patriotism. It was necessary to guard our trade, manufactures, and shipping against the rivalry of a near, rich, and aspiring neighbour, that would crush them in their cradles. It was wise to raise the energies of infant adventure by favour, and not trust it in a reckless competition. The example, too, of all countries which had reared up commerce by ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... the same proposals which he had before done to Sophron. Such incentives were irresistible to a vain and ambitious mind; the young man in an instant forgot his friends, his country, and his parents, and marched away with all the pleasure that strong presumption and aspiring hopes could raise. Nor was it long before he had an opportunity ...
— The History of Sandford and Merton • Thomas Day
... sounds of war are shrill, And clarion shrieks, and battle roars, Once more set free, she leaps and soars A Soul of flame, aspiring still! ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... No aspiring author should content himself with a mere acquisition of technical rules. As Mrs. Renshaw remarked in the preceding article, "Impression should ever precede and be stronger than expression." All attempts at gaining ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... tall aspiring Gordonia lacianthus ... gradually changing colour, from green to golden yellow, from that to a scarlet, from scarlet to crimson, and lastly to a brownish purple, ... so that it may be said to change and renew its garments every morning ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... the prince of Han, one of the two generals who were the leaders of the rebellion. He afterwards fell into the hands of Hiang Yu, the other chieftain, who put him and his family and associates to death. Hiang Yu aspiring to imperial honours, war broke out between him and Liu Pang. After five years' conflict Hiang Yu was killed in a decisive battle before Wu-kiang. Liu Pang was then proclaimed emperor (206 B.C.) under the title of Kao-ti, and the new ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... man secures an appointment for a henchman, as the saying is in Washington—and it is a very true one—he makes one ingrate and twenty enemies. The result is that after he has served a term or two, he begins to find those aspiring constituents, whom he did not appoint, rising like snakeheads to strike ...
— Ethics in Service • William Howard Taft
... close of a fine spring afternoon James Farnum and Alice Frome were walking at the lower end of Powers Avenue. In the conventional garb he affected since he had become a man of substance the lawyer might have served as a model of fashion to any aspiring youth. His silk hat, his light trousers, the double-breasted coat which enfolded his manly form, were all of the latest design. The weather, for a change, was behaving itself so as not to soil the chaste glory of Solomon thus displayed. There had been rain ...
— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine
... morality is almost necessarily too general; it is not elastic enough to fit the infinite variations in specific cases, not detailed enough to fit all needs. It therefore often causes needless and cruel repression; the most sensitive and aspiring spirits have often revolted from the morality of their times because of its harshness. It is well for the marriage-tie to be binding; divorce has generally been deemed unchristian. But if this judgment is rigidly enforced, special cases arise, very piteous, very ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... campanile in all its harmonious variety of colour and form led the eyes upward, high into the clear air of this April morning, it seemed a prophetic symbol, telling that human life must somehow and some time shape itself into accord with that pure aspiring beauty. ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... sweeping a condemnation, but it is not. There are some honorable exceptions of course, but only just enough of them to attract notice by the contrast, and thus to prove the rule. If an aspiring young composer wishes to appear in print, the point to which he must direct his attention is to secure, not a good original melody or a piquant accompaniment, but a "catching" title, like "Timber-Thief Galop," ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... But raise your eyes, and behold a second flight of stairs still higher, on which again Piranesi is perceived, but this time standing on the very brink of the abyss. Again elevate your eye, and a still more aerial flight of stairs is beheld, and again is poor Piranesi busy on his aspiring labours; and so on, until the unfinished stairs and Piranesi both are lost in the upper gloom of the hall. With the same power of endless growth and self- reproduction did my architecture proceed in dreams. In the early stage of my malady the splendours of my dreams were indeed ...
— Confessions of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas De Quincey
... an honest drive, a human aspiring drive, a drive of Christians, a glorifying and uplifted drive, a drive worthy of remembrance for ever. The moon has shone on but few like it though she is old; the lake of Bolsena has glittered beneath ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... they sought tickets to the opera, because they were not a part of it. Adams did like the rest. All thought of serious education had long vanished. He tried to acquire a few French idioms, without even aspiring to master a subjunctive, but he succeeded better in acquiring a modest taste for Bordeaux and Burgundy and one or two sauces; for the Trois Freres Provencaux and Voisin's and Philippe's and the Cafe Anglais; for the Palais Royal Theatre, ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... Instead of vainly aspiring to the gravity of a Magistrate; I would advise him, when he sits down to write, to place himself in the imaginary situation of a cross-examining Pleader. He may comment, in a vein of agreeable irony, upon the profession, the manner of life, the look, ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... republic, which stood chiefly by his influence, and was supported by his victories. How early he entertained thoughts of taking into his hand the reins of government, is uncertain. We are only assured, that he now discovered to his intimate friends these aspiring views; and even expressed a desire of assuming the rank of king, which he had contributed with ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume
... added that he was chef de cuisine to the Duke of ——, and that Monsieur, pointing to the youth opposite, was an aspirant, who had been placed under his auspices. The young man bowed assent, and appeared most sensibly to feel the vast magnitude of the honours to which he was aspiring; but the whole was announced with such an air of solemnity and consequence, that a minister of state with his secretary would never have attempted to assume. An Englishman under the same circumstances would have merely said, "I am head cook to the Duke of —— and that young man is my 'prentice." ...
— How to Enjoy Paris in 1842 • F. Herve
... these occasions he, Montholon, and Antommarchi are the debaters. To the former he suddenly flashed out: "I know men well, and I tell you that Jesus Christ was not a man"; then he curtly attacks the pretentious doctor by informing him that "aspiring to be an atheist does not make ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... Every year that passed gave him a fuller understanding of his father's devotion to that word in all its significance; he himself knew something of the same fervour, and was glad to foster it in his heart. Peace! What better could a man pursue? From of old the desire of wisdom, the prayer of the aspiring soul. ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing |
