"Ambition" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... sense of the word. My hope flies ever in front of my best success, and that momentary success does not deceive me in the very least. I know exactly how much, or rather how little, I am worth; that I lack the imagination, the industry, the training, the ambition, to achieve any lasting results. I have the artistic temperament in so far that it is impossible for me to work merely for money or popularity, or indeed for anything less than the desire to express the best that is in me without fear or favour. ...
— Penelope's English Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... ambition was to become the owner of a fishing-boat, when he could live at home and be his own master. He was fonder of fishing than anything else, and when he could not get out to sea he passed much of his time with his rod and lines on the banks of the ...
— Dick Cheveley - His Adventures and Misadventures • W. H. G. Kingston
... lost the election; for cotton was very high, and Alexander urged that it was in consequence of the Tariff. Two years passed away, which Crockett spent in the wildest adventures of hunting. He was a true man of the woods with no ambition for any better home than the log cabin he occupied. There was no excitement so dear to him as the pursuit and capture of a grizzly bear. There is nothing on record, in the way of hunting, which surpasses the exploits of this renowned bear-hunter. But there is a certain degree of sameness ...
— David Crockett: His Life and Adventures • John S. C. Abbott
... humble and modest was the ambition that it quite took Boswell by surprise. Priscilla did not notice the uplifting of the shaggy brows. She went ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock
... He was a chap who thought very well indeed of himself and his accomplishments, and held a somewhat slighting estimation of others. In connection with baseball, he had always entertained an overweening ambition to become a pitcher, although little qualified for such a position, either by temperament or acquired skill. True, he could throw the curves, and had some speed, but at his best he could not find the plate more than once out of six times, and, when disturbed or rattled, ...
— Rival Pitchers of Oakdale • Morgan Scott
... unlike many of his contemporaries, as for example the psalmists, he found little joy or inspiration in his religion. According to the conclusion, which he proclaimed in the beginning of his essay and held consistently throughout, all human striving and ambition, even life itself, are but superlative vanity, nor can man attain any permanent or complete satisfaction. The one positive teaching which Koheleth reiterates is that it is man's highest privilege to extract from passing experiences the small measure of joy and happiness that they offer, and therewith ...
— The Makers and Teachers of Judaism • Charles Foster Kent
... being at least more classical and definite than any other which modern euphuism has invented to convey the same meaning. Highly educated, and with natural abilities considerably above mediocrity, Mr. Cleveland early in life had glowed with the ambition of an author.... He had written well and gracefully—but his success, though respectable, did not satisfy his aspirations. The fact is, that a new school of literature ruled the public, despite the critics—a ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of the absurdity of this ambition. I lacked the ghost of an idea of how to set about the thing. But the general craziness of events had unhinged me. I was forming the habit of trusting to pure luck and vogue la galere! I can't swear that I hadn't visions of conquering all my adversaries in some miraculous ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... phenomenally short space of twenty-four hours. The children's favorite amusement is the "net." Sailors of the guard set up a full-rigged ship's mast, surrounded, about two feet from the ground, by a wide sweep of close-meshed rope netting well tarred. Boys and girls of ambition climb the rigging, swing, and drop into the net. The little ones never weary of dancing about on its yielding surface. A stalwart, gentle giant of a sailor watches over the safety of the merrymakers, and warns, teaches, or helps them, if ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... at an under rent, and for a long tenure, almost universally leads to poverty and ruin; and any person who knows the Irish character can easily account for this seeming anomaly. The love of display and the spirit of ambition which pervade all classes in Ireland, leads every one to assume a station, and incur an expenditure, far beyond what his circumstances would entitle him to. The shopkeeper styles himself a merchant, and must have a car and a country-house; the man who has a long lease of fifty or ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... by Henry III., to whose sister, the Countess Dowager of Pembroke, he paid his addresses, and was married, with the consent of her brother. For the favour thus shown him by his sovereign, he, however, proved ungrateful: his inordinate ambition, cloaked by a pretended zeal for reform, was the cause of those rebellions which, in the reign of Henry III., kept the kingdom in such a continued turmoil. The different oppressions and successes of the confederate barons, who at length got possession of the king's person, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 345, December 6, 1828 • Various
... matter where, if I be still the same, And what I should be, all but less than he Whom thunder hath made greater? Here at least We shall be free the Almighty hath not built Here for his envy, will not drive us hence; Here we may reign secure; and, in my choice, To reign is worth ambition, though in Hell: Better to reign in Hell than serve ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... Apollonius was a distinguished rhetorician, and had the reputation of being a man of a good disposition. Caesar is said to have had a great talent for the composition of discourses on political matters, and to have cultivated it most diligently, so as to obtain beyond dispute the second rank; his ambition to be first in power and arms, made him from want of leisure give up the first rank, to which his natural talents invited him, and consequently his attention to military matters and political affairs by which he got the supreme power, did not allow him to attain perfection ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... any influence besides, interfered to soothe the fierce passions and temper the violent acts of her lord. Her devotion to him was perfect: she partook his labours as far as he would permit her to do so, submitted to all his caprices, and, with a dark presentiment that his ambition would one day cast her aside, continued to centre the whole of her existence in the contemplation of ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart
... man's work was a failure, and the saddest kind of a failure, for he did not realize that he had failed until years afterward. He failed, not because he lacked ambition and enthusiasm; he had a large measure of both these indispensable qualities. He failed, not because he lacked education and a certain measure of what the world calls culture; from the standpoint of education, he was better qualified than most teachers in schools of that type. ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... was rendered famous as being the last residence of the unhappy Wolsey; "within its walls," says Gilpin, "was once exhibited a scene more humiliating to human ambition, and more instructive to human grandeur than almost any which history hath produced. Here the fallen pride of Wolsey retreated from the insults of the world, all his visions of ambition were now gone; his pomp and pageantry and crowded levees! On this spot he told the listening monks, the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume XII, No. 347, Saturday, December 20, 1828. • Various
... he stood in rank with every particle of his hair cut off, as if shaved, and his head as bare as a door knob. "What style is that, Ben?" the boys asked. "The 'horse thief' cut," he gravely announced. Their one ambition now, was to ...
— From the Rapidan to Richmond and the Spottsylvania Campaign - A Sketch in Personal Narration of the Scenes a Soldier Saw • William Meade Dame
... boy whose one ambition was to have people grow ashen and tremble at the mention of his name," McKnight jibed. But they were serious enough, both of them, under it all, and when they had told me what they planned, ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... sinner is to be compelled to labour, like a beast of burden, for no personal benefit to himself, but only for the good of the community—a world where there are to be no men, but only numbers—where there is to be no ambition and no hope and no fear,—but the Socialism of free men, working side by side in the common workshop, each one for the wage to which his skill and energy entitle him; the Socialism of responsible, thinking ...
— Diary of a Pilgrimage • Jerome K. Jerome
... cloudless skies, As man forever temp'rate, calm, and wise. If plagues or earthquakes break not heaven's design. Why then a Borgia, or a Cataline? Who knows but He whose hand the lightning forms, Who heaves old ocean, and who wings the storms; Pours fierce ambition in a Caesar's mind; Or turns young Ammon loose to scourge mankind? From pride, from pride our very reas'ning springs; Account for moral as for nat'ral things: Why charge we heaven in those, in these acquit? In both, to reason right, ...
— Lectures on Language - As Particularly Connected with English Grammar. • William S. Balch
... mate's name is Tomkins; he has served his six years three times over, and has now outgrown his ambition; which is fortunate for him, as his chances of promotion are small. He prefers a small vessel to a large one, because he is not obliged to be so particular in his dress—and looks for his lieutenancy whenever there shall be ...
— The Pirate and The Three Cutters • Frederick Marryat
... The ambition of a great mother centers on her son. Pythagoras was filled with the thought that he was different, peculiar, set apart to ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... Skookum, put up a number of ruffed grouse. These perched in the trees above their heads and the travellers stopped. While the dog held their attention Rolf with blunt arrows knocked over five that proved most acceptable as food. But his thoughts were now on deer, and his ambition was to go out alone and return with a ...
— Rolf In The Woods • Ernest Thompson Seton
... bishop he often wandered up into the neighbourhood of St. Mark's with a vague hope that he might see again the man who seemed to his boyish imagination a very king among men. It had long been Tode's secret ambition to grow into a big, strong man himself—bigger and stronger than the common run of men. Now, whenever he thought about it, he said to himself, "Just like ...
— The Bishop's Shadow • I. T. Thurston
... the background of things, unreal as a dream, hovered the unlovely figure of Nancy Simms, and nearer, but still almost as unreal, the bright, cold figure of Anne Champneys, that Anne Champneys who had wished to marry Berkeley Hayden to gratify pride and ambition. The woman kneeling by the window, watching the glory of the morning, looked back upon those two as a winged butterfly might remember its ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... country he exercised the powers of an absolute monarch. He was the fountain head of all government and the real chief of every department. The accounts of the government and his private accounts were treated by him as one and the same thing. His ambition to remain in power necessitated the expenditure of large sums which he obtained through improvident foreign loans and usurious contracts with local merchants. Those whom he favored grew rich; his enemies ...
— Santo Domingo - A Country With A Future • Otto Schoenrich
... the Peninsular war. This was, perhaps, the least selfish war of which history tells. It was not a war of aggrandisement or of conquest: it was waged to deliver not merely Spain, but the whole of Europe, from that military despotism with which the genius and ambition of Napoleon threatened to overwhelm the civilised world. And on what a scale Great Britain, when aroused, can fight, let the Peninsular war tell. At its close the fleets of Great Britain rode triumphant on every sea; ...
— Deeds that Won the Empire - Historic Battle Scenes • W. H. Fitchett
... hope and desire that the list of books he has given, limited as it is, may prove of value to those seeking self-education, and that the books may encourage the disheartened, stimulate ambition, and serve as stepping stones to higher ideals and ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... who practised it with impunity: it gave a finish to the character of a woman, proved she would sometimes act for herself, not always be in leading-strings; it gave a taste of power, gratified her ambition; in short, flirtation was the very acme of enjoyment, and gave a decided ton before ...
— The Mother's Recompense, Volume I. - A Sequel to Home Influence in Two Volumes. • Grace Aguilar
... another letter; and another yet, when you have looked into my Dictionary. If you find faults, I shall endeavour to mend them; if you find none, I shall think you blinded by kind partiality: but to have made you partial in his favour, will very much gratify the ambition of, Sir, your most obliged and ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... rich! Ah! my friend! 'tis not civil war that disunites us. It is that we are each of us twenty years older; it is that the honest emotions of youth have given place to suggestions of interest, whispers of ambition, counsels of selfishness. Yes, you are right; let us go, Porthos, but let us go well armed; were we not to keep the rendezvous, they would declare we were afraid. Halloo! Planchet! here! saddle our ...
— Twenty Years After • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... understands the mysteries of old-fashioned strawberry shortcake. If you hear her shrieking Suicidio! invoking Agamemnon, or appealing to the Casta Diva among the kettles and pots be not alarmed.... For the love you bear of good food, man, do not discourage your wife's ambition. The more she loves to sing, the better she ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... is monopolistic. It has been shown that pair marriage is monopolistic. It produces an exclusive family, and nourishes family pride and ambition. It is interwoven with capital, and we have hardly yet reached the point where we can see what it will become with great wealth, and under the treatment of a plutocratic class. From what has been said it is evidently most important that man and wife ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... account of his well-known laziness, so Turk and I continued to adorn the rear of the column. I reckon the foreman thought it better to have Turk and me late than no dinner. I tried a hundred different schemes to instill ambition and self-respect into that ox, but he was an old dog and contented with ...
— The Outlet • Andy Adams
... poet walked alone in a quiet valley. His heart was heavy, and the voices of Nature consoled him. His life had been a lonely and sad one. Many years ago a great grief fell upon him, and it took away all his joy and all his ambition. It was because he brooded over his sorrow, and because he was always faithful to a memory, that the townspeople deemed him a strange old poet; but they loved him and they loved his songs,—in his life and in his songs there was a gentleness, ...
— A Little Book of Profitable Tales • Eugene Field
... "it is not in this world that one receives the recompense of so many virtues; he has a more exalted ambition." ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... did he know of himself or the world, that, with small genuine impulse to action, and moved chiefly by the anticipated results of it, he saw success already his, and a grateful country at his feet. His inspiration was so purely ambition, that, even if, his mood unchanged, he were to achieve much for his country, she ...
— Heather and Snow • George MacDonald
... valiant genius and hard frugality which built up their fortunes; how many acknowledge the stern and heavy responsibility of their opportunities; how many refuse to dream their lives away in a Sybarite luxury; how many are smitten with the lofty ambition of achieving an enduring name by works of a permanent value; how many do not dwindle into dainty dilettanti, and dilute their manhood with factitious sentimentality instead of a hearty human sympathy; how many are not satisfied with having the fastest horses and the "crackest" carriages, and an ...
— The Potiphar Papers • George William Curtis
... first and most potent tendency of the human mind, ambition, becomes finally dominating. Here was Cowperwood at fifty-seven, rich beyond the wildest dream of the average man, celebrated in a local and in some respects in a national way, who was nevertheless feeling that by no means had his true aims been achieved. He was not ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... crust floated as far as the Shetland and Orkney islands. The King of Denmark named this fiery apparition "Nyoe," or "New Island," and doubtless prided himself not a little on this addition to his limited dominions. But, alas, for human ambition! About a year after the date of its first appearance, Nyoe sank into the depths out of which it arose, and its position is now marked only by a ...
— Wonders of Creation • Anonymous
... he added by way of soliloquy, as he stood looking after him. 'Although you ARE a damper to a honourable ambition. You little think it, but you was the first to dash my hopes. Pecksniff would have built me up for life, but your sweet temper pulled me ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... and learning; in adolescence, ambition; and in early manhood, love—no footlight passion." Chaffery was very solemn and insistent, with a lean extended finger, upon ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells
... civilisation that called loudest to him. He loved the life and he adored the man whom he thought was his father. To be the son and heir of Ahmed Ben Hassan seemed to him to be the highest pinnacle that any man's ambition could reach. He was perfectly indifferent to the flattery and attention that his money and his good looks brought him. My father entertained very largely and Ahmed became the fashion—'Le bel Arabe' he was called, and he enjoyed a succes fou which bored ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... cannot reasonably be doubted, that if Homer or Xenophon were to hear their works read by a professor of Greek, they would mistake them for the sounds of an unknown language. All this is true; but it is not the ambition of a gentleman to read Greek like an ancient Grecian, but to understand it as well as the generality of his contemporaries; to know whence the terms of most sciences are derived, and to be able, in some degree, to ...
— Practical Education, Volume II • Maria Edgeworth
... continued she, "to see and be acquainted early in life with superior people. It enables one to form a standard of excellence, and raises that standard high and bright. In men, the enthusiasm becomes glorious ambition to excel in arts or arms; in women, it refines and elevates the taste, and is so far a preventive against frivolous, vulgar company, and all their train of follies and vices. I can speak from my ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... whatever treaties they wished, not presenting them for ratification to the people's representatives, and yet binding every individual citizen to abide by the terms adopted. Such secret provisions have often been agreed to simply upon the whim or the ambition or the likes and dislikes of the rulers. They have sometimes been opposed to the true interests of the nations involved. They are undemocratic, and are not in accord with ...
— A School History of the Great War • Albert E. McKinley, Charles A. Coulomb, and Armand J. Gerson
... Senator Ward at one end of the table and Burleigh at the other, who finally started the topic of Miss Madison's intended salon, not only that those unacquainted with her ambition might be enlightened, but that the great intention should receive a concrete form without further delay. A half-hour later, when the women left the table, Betty had the satisfaction of knowing that whatever the final result of her venture, ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... succeeded in identifying during my sojourn at the village. There were more. I heard the calls and cries of others in the wood and various places, but refused, except in the case of the too elusive crake, to set down any in my list that I did not see. It was not my ambition to make a long list. My greatest desire was to see well those that interested me most. But those who go forth, as I did, to look for birds that are a sight for sore eyes, must meet with many a disappointment. In all those fruit and shade trees ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... said that if Athens, and Lacedmon could but make up their minds to be good friends and make a common cause, they would be masters of the world. The wealth, the science, the maritime enterprise, and daring ambition of the one, assisted by the population, the territory, the warlike spirit, and stern institutions of the other, could not fail to carry the whole world before them. That was a project hostile to the peace and prosperity of mankind, and ministering only to national vanity. ...
— The trade, domestic and foreign • Henry Charles Carey
... assembly for the election of decemvirs was proclaimed for the third market-day, the flame of ambition burst out so powerfully that even the first men of the state began to canvass individuals—fearing, I suppose, that the possession of such high authority might become accessible to persons not sufficiently worthy if the post were left unoccupied by themselves—humbly ...
— Roman History, Books I-III • Titus Livius
... words to say about our voyage; for I find it necessary to repress the ambition of some of my passengers," continued the captain. "Some of them wish to visit all the Philippine Islands, and there are about ...
— Four Young Explorers - Sight-Seeing in the Tropics • Oliver Optic
... his hair, which was now silvered with many streaks, had been raven black in its day. His carriage was upright and fearless, and he was very tall and powerfully proportioned. It was Bertram's keenest ambition to grow up in all points like his father, and he copied him, consciously and unconsciously, in a fashion that often raised a smile on his ...
— The Secret Chamber at Chad • Evelyn Everett-Green
... perfect, woman who unconsciously revealed to me the glory of human love, I had dedicated my life, and all my powers—poor enough, I fear—of mind and body to the service of the Church. I was ambitious in those days. Ambition is dead, killed by the knowledge of my own shortcomings. I have proved an unprofitable servant—for which may God in His great mercy forgive me. But, while my faith in myself has withered, my faith in Him has ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... the plan of exalting his own fortunes by trading on his sister's beauty. He worked upon the Duke of Bracciano's mind so cleverly, that he brought this haughty prince to the point of an insane passion for Peretti's young wife; and meanwhile so contrived to inflame the ambition of Vittoria and her mother, Tarquinia, that both were prepared to dare the worst of crimes in expectation of a dukedom. The game was a difficult one to play. Not only had Francesco Peretti first to be murdered, but the ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... in which they take overt expression. It needs no special knowledge to recognize the fact that the normal interests and enterprises of life are quickened and sustained when some great emotional drive can be roused in their support. Ambition, loyalty, love, or hate may stir men to and sustain them in long and difficult enterprises which they would neither undertake nor continue were these motive forces removed. The soldier does not fight persistently and well wholly, or often even in part, because he has ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... precision, and imagery of technical language that, created by simple men with keen eyes for the real aspect of the things they see in their trade, achieves the just expression seizing upon the essential, which is the ambition of the artist in words. Therefore the sailor will never say, "cast anchor," and the ship-master aft will hail his chief mate on the forecastle in impressionistic phrase: "How does the cable grow?" Because "grow" is the right word for the long drift of a cable ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... were not always wise, and were sometimes the better for being told the truth. At her niece's table she felt at liberty to speak her mind, which she invariably did, with a frankness that sometimes bordered on brutality. She had long ago outgrown the period where ambition or passion, or its partners, envy and hatred, were springs of action in her life, and simply retained a mild enjoyment in the exercise of an old habit, with no active malice whatever. The ruling passion merely grew stronger as the restraining ...
— The Marrow of Tradition • Charles W. Chesnutt
... work to be useful to all must cater for all, and include information which will be useful to the smaller storekeeper as well as the larger maker. To begin at the bottom, one can easily imagine a person whose only ambition is to make a little candy for the window fit for children. This could be done with a very small outlay for utensils. The next move is the purchase of a sugar boiler's furnace not very costly and certainly indispensable where quality and variety are required, it will be a ...
— The Candy Maker's Guide - A Collection of Choice Recipes for Sugar Boiling • Fletcher Manufacturing Company
... do decide to accept her," remarked Miss Whalley. "You forget that she is now Lady Evesham, my dear Mrs. Lorimer, and little likely to remember old friends now that she has attained the summit of her ambition." ...
— The Bars of Iron • Ethel May Dell
... portraits of old admirals, comprising the whole line of heroes who have trod the quarter-decks of British ships for more than two hundred years back. Next to a tomb in Westminster Abbey, which was Nelson's most elevated object of ambition, it would seem to be the highest need of a naval warrior to have his portrait hung up in the Painted Hall; but, by dint of victory upon victory, these illustrious personages have grown to be a mob, and ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... for walking the moonlit street with her hand in willing and undisguised captivity. She was a large and strong, but extremely neat, well-spoken, and good-looking Irish woman, who might have seemed at ease but for a faintly betrayed ambition. ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... our days (thank God for all His mercies!) everybody is not writing a book. There are people whose talk has inimitable touches, and whose lives are art, but who never sit down to a quire of foolscap. I believe that Congreve naturally was one of these, that his literary ambition was a result of accidental necessity, and that had he lived as a boy in the society he was of as a very young man—for all its literary ornaments—we should have had of him only odes and songs. His ...
— The Comedies of William Congreve - Volume 1 [of 2] • William Congreve
... mechanical engineering, and common sense told him that skilled labor rarely went begging if the laborer were worthy his hire. None the less, the prospect of touting for such employment affrighted him beyond words. He felt that he could not again abase himself for a few paltry shillings a week. The ambition to make of this misfortune a stepping-stone to better things rested on no greater security than his pride and yet it would not be wholly conquered. He spent a long morning by the riverside planning schemes so futile that even the boy's mind rejected ...
— Aladdin of London - or Lodestar • Sir Max Pemberton
... can give no security that they will be either good subjects, faithful servants of the public, or honest in their mutual dealings; since there is no other tie through which the pride, or lust, or avarice, or ambition of mankind will not certainly break one time ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IV: - Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Volume II • Jonathan Swift
... Basil, informer. Being. Boethius, life; the first scholastic; an independent philosopher; his philosophic ambition; his achievement; a Christian; perhaps a martyr; son-in-law of Symmachus; his wife; his sons; early training; youthful poetry; premature old age; his learning; his library; his lofty position; his principles; the champion of the oppressed; of ...
— The Theological Tractates and The Consolation of Philosophy • Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius
... Thurber, whose timid clasp upon his arm troubled him then and pained him now. He had so little to give in return for her devotion—therefore he had given nothing. He had said good-bye almost harshly—his ambition hardening his ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... was a man of genius and of soaring ambition—well-born, well-nurtured, but as the younger son of a younger son absolutely without patrimony. At his school and his university he had won his way through a course of honors, and he would disappoint all who knew him if he did not revive the traditions of his name and go ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... small, to make others happier and better, is the highest ambition, the most elevating hope, which can inspire a ...
— Life and Literature - Over two thousand extracts from ancient and modern writers, - and classified in alphabetical order • J. Purver Richardson
... truth, casting off from us all unrighteousness and iniquity, together with all covetousness, strife, evil manners, deceit, whispering, detractions; all hatred of God, pride and boasting; vain-glory and ambition; ...
— The Forbidden Gospels and Epistles, Complete • Archbishop Wake
... of December was the time appointed for the commencement of their revolutionary work, which was to be simultaneous all over the country. The profoundest secrecy was to be preserved, and the most influential men, whose ambition induced them to seek preferment, were alone to be made acquainted with the plot. No woman was to be privy to it, lest it should be divulged. The sound of the church bell was to be the signal, and at midnight all were to enter the Plaza at the same moment, seize the pieces of artillery, ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman
... of the Bishops of Rome. [Sidenote: Further claims to temporal authority.] Later, instead of advisers they claimed to be absolute judges in ecclesiastical matters, and when the temporal possessions of the Popedom made the chair of St. Peter an object of ambition to covetous, designing men, the character of Bishop was too often merged in that of Prince, and spiritual power ceased to satisfy those who thought it their duty or their interest to enforce what was in fact ...
— A Key to the Knowledge of Church History (Ancient) • John Henry Blunt
... towards the Louis Quinze. His step was light, his head laid slightly to one side, as if in pleased and inquiring reverie, and there was a lifting of one corner of the mouth, suggesting an amused disdain. Was it that disdain which comes from conquest not important enough to satisfy ambition? The social conquest of a village—to be conspicuous and attract the groundlings in this tiny theatre of life, that ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Durbach and General Solignac, went to him, and declared, that they were acquainted with his manoeuvres; that his ambition blinded him; that no compact could ever subsist between Louis XVIII. and the murderer of his brother; and that sooner or later France would take ...
— Memoirs of the Private Life, Return, and Reign of Napoleon in 1815, Vol. II • Pierre Antoine Edouard Fleury de Chaboulon
... Lambert at night. She endeavours to dazzle him by showing the regalia richly set out and adorned with lights. He puts by, however, crown and sceptre and rebukes her overweening ambition. Suddenly the Committee, who have been drinking deep, burst in upon them dancing a riotous dance. Loveless is hurriedly concealed under the coverlet of a couch, and Lady Lambert sits thereon seemingly at her devotions. Her ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... remain. In nineteen-six Brodrick found himself planted with apparent security on the summit of his ambition. He had a unique position, a reputation for caring, caring with the candid purity of high passion, only for the best. He counted as a power unapproachable, implacable to mediocrity. Authors believed in him, adored, feared, detested him, according to their quality. Other editors admired him cautiously; ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... removal, now that it begins to be like something, and now that there is a prospect of the Company getting its own again. And now that many of the inhabitants are themselves in a better condition than ever, this is evidently the cause of the ambition ...
— Narrative of New Netherland • Various
... name Meyer was prefixed to his own later, as a condition of inheriting certain property from a distant relative. As the boy showed talent for music at a very early age, he was put to the study of the pianoforte, and it was his ambition to distinguish himself as a virtuoso, which his talent undoubtedly permitted, if he had not been diverted from it by the success of his early attempts at opera. He was taught by a pupil of Clementi, and for a while by Clementi himself, as well as by other distinguished teachers, and if reports ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... you liked, say what you chose!—that was all. Of inward liberty, of freedom from mental or spiritual oppression, from passion, from prejudice, from envy, from jealousy, from selfishness, from unfairness, from ambition, from false admiration, from the power of public opinion, from any motive energy save that of love and truth—a freedom of which outward freedom is scarce the shadow—of such liberty, for all the good books he had read, for all the good poems he had admired, Richard ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... many things that I should have liked to tell him first. My clever sister taught him how to pronounce the name of the bishop who began building the cathedral; she led him over the crypt, and told him how old it was. He was interested in the crypt; he talked to Helena (not to me) of his ambition to write a work on cathedral architecture in England; he made a rough little sketch in his book of our famous tomb of some king. Helena knew the late royal personage's name, and Philip showed his sketch to her before he showed it to me. How can I blame him, ...
— The Legacy of Cain • Wilkie Collins
... spirit of "non-separateness" is inculcated as steadily from childhood up, as in the West the spirit of rivalry. Personal ambition, personal feelings and desires, are not encouraged to grow so rampant there. When the soil is naturally good, it is cultivated in the right way, and the child grows into a man in whom the habit of subordination of one's lower to one's higher Self is strong ...
— Studies in Occultism; A Series of Reprints from the Writings of H. P. Blavatsky • H. P. Blavatsky
... because the United States was preparing wisely for a long struggle and it seemed necessary that the foundations should be broad and deep. "America was straining her energies towards a goal," said the Director of Munitions, "toward the realization of an ambition which, in the production of munitions, dropped the year 1918 almost out of consideration altogether, which indeed did not bring the full weight of American men and materiel into the struggle even in 1919, but which left it for 1920, if the ...
— Woodrow Wilson and the World War - A Chronicle of Our Own Times. • Charles Seymour
... Janet Balchrystie cherished a great ambition. When the earliest blackbird awoke and began to sing, while it was yet gray twilight, Janet would be up and at her work. She had an ambition to be a great poet. No less than this would serve her. But not even her father had known, and no other had any chance of knowing. In the black leather ...
— Stories by English Authors: Scotland • Various
... the whole reign of Numa, there was neither war, nor sedition, nor innovation in the state, nor any envy or ill-will to his person, nor plot or conspiracy from views of ambition. Either fear of the gods that were thought to watch over him, or reverence for his virtue, or a divine felicity of fortune that in his days preserved human innocence, made his reign, by whatever means, a living example and verification of that saying which Plato, long afterwards, ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... applause, is gradually sullying some of the finest talents, once the chastest, too, upon the stage. In his Rosabelle (Mrs. Wilmot) he might see admirable comic powers, and great histrionic skill, which the public applause of years has not yet misled into the vulgar track—"the pitiful ambition of setting on some quantity of barren spectators ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 4, April 1810 • Various
... against every allurement of interest. Those examples are not furnished by the great alone; nor by those, whose activity in public affairs may render it suspected that they make such a character one of the rounds in their ladder of ambition; but by men more quiet, and more in the shade, on whom an unmixed sense of honor alone could operate. Such examples indeed are not furnished in great abundance amongst those who are the subjects of the author's panegyric. He must look ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... remarked Dic, speaking softly to the black waves of lustrous hair, "I must take Iago's advice and put money in my purse. I have always hoped to be something more than I am. Billy Little, who has been almost a father to me, has burned the ambition into me. But with all my yearning, life has never held a real purpose compared with that I now have in you. The desire for fame, Rita, the throbbing of ambition, the lust for gold and dominion, are considered by the world to be the great motives of human action. But, Rita, they ...
— A Forest Hearth: A Romance of Indiana in the Thirties • Charles Major
... but afterwards conformed, and managed to come out of all political troubles as the proprietor of a respectable family estate. Young women of such birth, living in a quiet country-house, and attending a village church hardly larger than a parlor, naturally regarded frippery as the ambition of a huckster's daughter. Then there was well-bred economy, which in those days made show in dress the first item to be deducted from, when any margin was required for expenses more distinctive of rank. Such reasons would have been enough to account for plain dress, quite ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... their grime. I fell upon him eagerly, but he could tell me nothing. He had left the Pottawatamies the day after the wedding, and had heard no rumors of any Englishman. I did not take him into my confidence. He had outlived the time when the abstract terms "ambition" and "patriotism" had meaning to him. The story of my hopes would have tinkled in his ears like the blarings of a child's trumpet. But in one matter ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... Saskatchewan, as Rector of our Cathedral. For three years you lived with us. The possibilities of our great West soon appealed to your enthusiastic heart. The various problems which here engage the attention of the Church fired your soul with noble ambition. I shall never forget the good you have done in the parish committed to your care. I shall be ever grateful for the zeal with which you devoted yourself, heart and soul, to the guidance of those under your charge. You found your happiness in making ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly
... glory, the haughty duke had beheld these changes of fortune with affected composure, and concealed, under a glittering and theatrical pomp, the dark designs of his restless genius. Torn by burning passions within, while all without bespoke calmness and indifference, he brooded over projects of ambition and revenge, and slowly, but surely, advanced towards his end. All that he owed to the Emperor was effaced from his mind; what he himself had done for the Emperor was imprinted in burning characters ...
— The History of the Thirty Years' War • Friedrich Schiller, Translated by Rev. A. J. W. Morrison, M.A.
... or hope or ambition of the cosmos, which we call attempted positivism: not to find out the new; not to add to what is called knowledge, but ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... of the mother and a whole-hearted acceptance of the new faith on the part of AEneas. Unlike most of his fellows in the college classrooms, he refused to regard an English curacy as the goal of his ambition. It seemed to him that his conversion ought not to end in his parading the streets of Liverpool in a black coat and a white tie. He wanted to return to his people and tell them in their own tongue the Gospel which he had ...
— Hyacinth - 1906 • George A. Birmingham
... Pisa, Genoa, Florence, Venice, and many others had early succeeded in throwing off their feudal burdens and had become independent, self-governing communities. Democracy flourished in them, as in the old Greek city-states. Noble birth counted for little; a man of ability and ambition might rise to any place. The fierce party conflicts within their walls stimulated mental activity and helped to make life full, varied, and intense. Their widespread trade and thriving manufactures made them prosperous. Wealth brought leisure, ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... habit, and the living God in their hearts. It will appear strange to you that he should rate these above wealth and a castle in Ireland and a seat in Parliament; but in fact he would. I know him. Think what you will of his ambition, it has this much of sincerity, that he is willing to pinch and starve for it. This, ...
— Hetty Wesley • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... of his career in Glasgow drew near, some of us could see that all through he had been preparing for some great work on which the whole ambition of his life was set. He always shrank from speaking about himself, and in those days was not in the habit of obtruding sacred things on his fellow-students. His views on personal dealing then were changing, and became very decided in after years. Earnest, honest, faithful to his convictions, ...
— James Gilmour of Mongolia - His diaries, letters, and reports • James Gilmour
... reversed in the case of John Wesley. Posterity has fully acquitted him of the charge of being actuated by a mere vulgar ambition, of desiring to head a party, of an undue love of power. It has at last owned that if ever a poor frail human being was actuated by pure and disinterested motives, that man was John Wesley. Eight years before his death he said, ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... make your son the excuse for your own vanity, pride, and ambition. What you did, Lady Lanswell, proved how little you loved your son; you parted us knowing that he loved me, knowing that his whole heart was bound up in me, knowing that he had but one wish, and it was ...
— A Mad Love • Bertha M. Clay
... and slavery so many of our unfortunate fellow-citizens; the relieving and restoring of which to the bosom of their families and friends are, with that of having an opportunity to chastise their cruel oppressors, objects of our greatest ambition and which we anticipate with all the ardor of officers, ...
— The Story of Commodore John Barry • Martin Griffin
... "It's a fine ambition," Thirlwell remarked. "However, it will cost you something, and you'll find some resistance from the people you want to help; but if the ore's as good as we think, you'll be able to carry ...
— The Lure of the North • Harold Bindloss
... school, the play-ground, the freedom of boyish sports, the early departure from home to college or business, the prizes offered to ambition, all exercise a powerful influence upon the boy, tending to modify the action of the mother's conscious training. More powerful than her intellectual and determined effort is usually her affectional influence, swaying him unconsciously and giving him always ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... precept had failed, Richard found himself converted by example. He contrasted himself in that stressful hour with great-souled Anthony Wilding, and saw himself as he was, a weakling, strong only in vicious ways. Repentance claimed him; repentance and a fine ambition to be worthier, to resemble as nearly as his nature would allow him this Anthony Wilding whom he took for pattern. He changed his ways, abandoned drink and gaming, and gained thereby a healthier countenance. Then in his zeal he overshot his mark. He developed a taste for Scripture-reading, ...
— Mistress Wilding • Rafael Sabatini
... In this ambition Mr. Sparling encouraged him, in fact did everything possible to aid the lad in acquiring a far-reaching knowledge of the vocation he had ...
— The Circus Boys on the Plains • Edgar B. P. Darlington
... to execute the laws-to preserve the Union by all constitutional means"—he concludes with the prayer, "May the great Ruler of Nations grant, that the signal blessings with which He has favored, ours may not, by the madness of party, or personal ambition be disregarded and lost; and may His wise providence bring those who have produced this crisis to see the folly before they feel the misery, of civil strife; and inspire a returning veneration for ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan
... the persistence of courage and the endurance of imagination to enter the continent and see the gates close behind him—Jacques Cartier, a master pilot of St. Malo, commissioned of his own intrepid desire and of the jealous ambition of King Francis I to bring fresh tidings of the mysterious "square gulf," which other Frenchmen, Denys and Aubert, may have entered a quarter of a century earlier, and which it was hoped might disclose a passage to ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... and more daring and showy than even his best friends are? What's his game? What does he expect to get out of it? He don't do it just for the fresh air and exercise. What would you say, now, Bill, that an ordinary man expects, generally speaking, for his efforts along the line of ambition and extraordinary hustling in the marketplaces, forums, shooting-galleries, lyceums, battle-fields, links, cinder-paths, and arenas of the civilized and vice ...
— Options • O. Henry
... those days! I remember that my aunt had sixty dollars which she had saved, little by little, by selling eggs and chickens. She had planned to use it to buy a tombstone for her mother and father—a long-cherished ambition. My uncle needed the most of it to help pay the note. We drove to Potsdam on that sad errand and what a time we had getting there and back in deep mud and sand and ...
— The Light in the Clearing • Irving Bacheller
... unscrupulous cad. I have kept an eye on him for years because he interests me. He has never run a straight course since he came into the field; he has consistently sacrificed truth, honour, and his best friend to his own ambition ever ...
— From One Generation to Another • Henry Seton Merriman
... refutation of any who should attempt to deny it. So that it was only for the structure of his own pieces that he had no thought to spare? This he left to the dominion of chance, which blew together the atoms of Epicurus. But supposing that, devoid of any higher ambition to approve himself to judicious critics and posterity, and wanting in that love of art which longs for self-satisfaction in the perfection of its works, he had merely labored to please the unlettered crowd; still this ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... who took pleasure in saying that Napoleon was incapable of tender sentiments, and that the happiness of being a father could not penetrate this heart so filled with ambition as to exclude all else. I can cite, among many others in my knowledge, a little anecdote which touched me exceedingly, and which I take much pleasure in relating, since, while it triumphantly answers the calumnies of which I have spoken, it also proves the special ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... house to be blown away every moment, and Zebbie was playing what he called "Bonaparte's Retreat." It all seemed to flash before me—I could see those poor, suffering soldiers staggering along in the snow, sacrifices to one man's unholy ambition. I verily believe we were all bewitched. I shouldn't have been surprised to have seen witches and gnomes come tumbling down the chimney or flying in at the door, riding on the crest of the storm. I glanced at Mrs. O'Shaughnessy. ...
— Letters of a Woman Homesteader • Elinore Pruitt Stewart
... glory I covet, nor riches I want, Ambition is nothing to me; The one thing I beg of kind heaven to grant, Is a ...
— Sweets for Leisure Hours - Amusing Tales for Little Readers • A. Phillips
... having dressed herself out in this sack, with a new laced cap, and some other ornaments which Tom had given her, repairs to church with her fan in her hand the very next Sunday. The great are deceived if they imagine they have appropriated ambition and vanity to themselves. These noble qualities flourish as notably in a country church and churchyard as in the drawing-room, or in the closet. Schemes have indeed been laid in the vestry which would hardly disgrace ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... not Ambition[363-13] mock their useful toil, Their homely joys and destiny obscure; Nor Grandeur hear, with a disdainful smile, The short and simple annals ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... chemists, instead of directing their ambition to the vain attempt of producing any of the original substances in nature, rather aim at analysing and imitating her operations, and have sometimes succeeded in forming combinations, or effecting decompositions, no instances of which occur in the chemistry of Nature. ...
— Conversations on Chemistry, V. 1-2 • Jane Marcet
... poverty. For three years in succession the highest prizes at the competitions rewarded him for his efforts; but these successes, far from elating him unduly, seemed to afford him but little satisfaction. "This is only glory," he thought; and his great ambition was to support himself. ...
— The Count's Millions - Volume 1 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... nations, of whom we shall have but a very imperfect idea, unless we have recourse to the inspired writers. They alone display, and bring to light, the secret thoughts of princes, their incoherent projects, their foolish pride, their impious and cruel ambition: they reveal the true causes and hidden springs of victories and overthrows; of the grandeur and declension of nations; the rise and ruin of states; and teach us, what indeed is the principal benefit to be derived from history, the judgment which the Almighty forms both ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... have lost a brother's favor through it. And yet——Ah well, you are, as I understand, a clerk, so I must think of you as one step further in orders, and make you my father-confessor. Know then that this man has been a suitor for my hand, less as I think for my own sweet sake than because he hath ambition and had it on his mind that he might improve his fortunes by dipping into my father's strong box—though the Virgin knows that he would have found little enough therein. My father, however, is a proud man, ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... not been used to this laborious life. Have you no further ambition, and do you like it?" asked Helen, flashing a quick ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss |
