"Ambitiously" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... which at least make it certain that in this world they will never know a joyous heart any more. Men have died as almost briefless barristers, toiling into old age in heartless wrangling, who had their chance of high places on the bench, but ambitiously resolved to wait for something higher, and so missed the tide. Men in the church have taken the wrong path at some critical time, and doomed themselves to all the pangs of disappointed ambition. But I think a sincere man in the church has a great advantage over almost all ordinary disappointed ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... not quite deadened a good ear for music—moved the old castaway strangely. His thoughts wandered back to the misused days when he had friends, and a position, and character; when he was a householder and vestryman, and even dreamt ambitiously of a churchwardenship. He could see distinctly his own pew, with the gray, worm-eaten panels, where he had sat many and many a warm afternoon, resisting sternly, as became a man of mark in the parish, treacherous inclinations to slumber. He saw the ponderous ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... things lent interest to that field of blue—clouds, rain, sleet, snow, and fog, all in their time or season. Also, besides the birds, he occasionally glimpsed whole sheets of newspapers as they ambitiously voyaged above the house tops. And how he longed for them to blow against his own window, so that he might read them through ...
— The Rich Little Poor Boy • Eleanor Gates
... the main range of the Rockies. As the foothills sank into the valley the gulches, washed of their golden treasure, were transformed into the streets of Helena—irregular, uneven, unpaved often; in the residence part of the town young trees ambitiously spread their slender branches; the main street and intersecting steeper ones were bordered with business blocks as ambitious, in their ...
— A Man of Two Countries • Alice Harriman
... selfish way, was proud of him, so he was always sure of a reception that sent him back to his studies ambitiously happy. ...
— Miss Ashton's New Pupil - A School Girl's Story • Mrs. S. S. Robbins
... than enough may sometimes happen on something that is good and great; but very seldom: and when it comes it doth not recompense the rest of their ill. For their jests, and their sentences (which they only and ambitiously seek for) stick out, and are more eminent, because all is sordid and vile about them; as lights are more discerned in a thick darkness than a faint shadow. Now, because they speak all they can (however unfitly), they are thought ...
— Discoveries and Some Poems • Ben Jonson
... of the realm who conspired the death of this king (or conspired in the king's troubles) and assembled an innumerable host of armed men, aiming ambitiously to secure the kingly power, as manifestly appeared afterwards, the king showed no less mercy: for he forgave all, both the leaders and the men under them, what they had maliciously designed against him, provided they submitted ...
— Henry the Sixth - A Reprint of John Blacman's Memoir with Translation and Notes • John Blacman
... weight was sustained for a while by artificial barriers; and the easy condescension of the emperors invited, without satisfying, the insolent demands of the Barbarians, who had acquired an eager appetite for the luxuries of civilized life. The Hungarians, who ambitiously insert the name of Attila among their native kings, may affirm with truth that the hordes, which were subject to his uncle Roas, or Rugilas, had formed their encampments within the limits of modern Hungary,[19] in a fertile country, which liberally supplied the wants of a nation ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... Ferris, with an eye ambitiously fixed upon the Senate of the United States, had quickly become a living spirit of boundless energy in the Western Trading Company's service, and Miss Alice Worthington, on her New York visits, a girlish tyro, saw only the man, and not the lawyer, ...
— The Midnight Passenger • Richard Henry Savage
... is ten days now—ten cold days—that your last letter has kept my heart warm, and I have not been able to write before. I have just finished—Wednesday evening—a course of lectures which I ambitiously baptized "Human Culture," and read once a week to the curious in Boston. I could write nothing else the while, for weariness of the week's stated scribbling. Now I am free as a wood-bird, and can take up the pen without ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... Square, and crossing the street entered the college yard, or campus, as it is sometimes more ambitiously called. There were very few students about, for it was Saturday, when there was a morning exercise only, and, the rest of the day being a holiday, many of the students were accustomed to go to Boston, or to visit their friends elsewhere. Sam knew nothing of this, ...
— Sam's Chance - And How He Improved It • Horatio Alger
... which issued from the earth forming the walls of my apartment; and later in the summer by the gnats and sandflies which hovered on a calm night over the river." It is difficult to decide between the respective merits of this novel summer retreat and of the winter dwelling, ambitiously constructed of mud bricks dried in the sun, and roofed with solid wooden beams. This imposing residence, in which Layard spent the last months of his first winter in Assyria, would have been sufficient protection against wind and ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin
... a gun, and is a fierce Drawcansir, and you would imagine he was about to do battle to a hundred thousand, so ferocious is he in appearance; Khamisi and Kamna are before the drummers, back to back, kicking up ambitiously at the stars; Asmani,—the embodiment of giant strength,—a towering Titan,— has also a gun, with which he is dealing blows in the air, as if he were Thor, slaying myriads with his hammer. The scruples and passions of us all are in abeyance; we are contending demons under the ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... LETTER OPEN O}iwe're, and Hotcangara groups, and perhaps the Niya, were without denotive designations for themselves, merely styling themselves "Local People," "Men," "Inhabitants," or, still more ambitiously, "People of the Parent Speech," in terms which are variously rendered by different interpreters; they were lords in their own domain, and felt no need for special title. Different Dakota tribes went so far as to claim that their respective habitats marked the middle of the world, so that each ...
— The Siouan Indians • W. J. McGee
... call Minheer Hendel, [3] the Orpheus of our Age, and to acquaint us, in the same Sublimity of Stile, that he Composed this Opera in a Fortnight. Such are the Wits, to whose Tastes we so ambitiously conform our selves. The Truth of it is, the finest Writers among the Modern Italians express themselves in such a florid form of Words, and such tedious Circumlocutions, as are used by none but Pedants in our own Country; and at the same time, ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... enters the metropolis it ambitiously stays its rapid course, and, being truly enamoured with the place, forgets its way, is uncertain whither to flow, and winds in sweet meanders through the town; thence filling the pipes with its waters. That which was once a river, joys ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... came to nothing, upon the malignant aspects of [symbol: Saturn] and [symbol: Mars]. Although some of his astrological judgments did fail, more particularly those concerning himself, he being no way capable of such preferment as he ambitiously desired; yet I shall repeat some other of his judgments, which did not fail, being performed by conference with spirits. My mistress went once unto him, to know when her husband, then in Cumberland, would return, he having promised to ...
— William Lilly's History of His Life and Times - From the Year 1602 to 1681 • William Lilly
... affected. Amongst Christians I could reckon up many kings and queens, that have forsaken their crowns and fortunes, and wilfully abdicated themselves from these so much esteemed toys; [3680]many that have refused honours, titles, and all this vain pomp and happiness, which others so ambitiously seek, and carefully study to compass and attain. Riches I deny not are God's good gifts, and blessings; and honor est in honorante, honours are from God; both rewards of virtue, and fit to be sought after, sued for, ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... with him. Minos, too, being extremely pleased with him, especially because he had overthrown and disgraced Taurus, voluntarily gave up the young captives to Theseus, and remitted the tribute to the Athenians. Clidemus gives an account peculiar to himself, very ambitiously, and beginning a great way back: That it was a decree consented to by all Greece, that no vessel from any place, containing above five persons, should be permitted to sail, Jason only excepted, who was made captain of the great ship Argo, to sail ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... December day, unlit by any sunset glow, was failing fast. It was quite dark already, and the air was thick with driving snow. For some distance their high spirits, youth, and even inexperience kept them bravely up; but, in ambitiously attempting a short cut from the highroad across an open field, their strength gave out, the laugh grew less frequent, and tears began to stand in Carry's brown eyes. When they reached the road again, they were utterly exhausted. "Let us go ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... with his bride and the house on the other side of us was occupied by a postman, his progeny, and the piercing notes of his whistle—presumably a cast-off one—on which all of his numerous children, irrespective of sex or age, were ambitiously learning their father's calling, as was made clear through the thin dividing wall, which supplied visual privacy but did not prevent our knowing when they took their baths or in what terms they objected ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... it to put forth vigorous and healthy shoots. But while that rottenness is not total but partial, while some green boughs are still seen to extend a lovely and refreshing shade, what impious hand shall dare to assail the venerable queen of the forest, whose magnitude defends the saplings, which, ambitiously springing under its protection, require the room it occupies? At the time of the great rebellion, the Church of England boasted an unusual number of, not merely learned, but apostolical men, especially among the bishops and the ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... spoke, the Aigle was clawing her way bravely up a hill steeper than any we had mounted. At the top she turned abruptly, and stopped in a queer, forlorn little place, where to my astonishment our journey ended in front of a small house ambitiously named Hotel Monte Carlo. Then I remembered the story I had read: how a young prince of the Grimaldi family came begging Louis XIII. to protect him from Spain; how Louis, who didn't want Spain to grab Monaco, promptly gave soldiers; how the Grimaldi's shrewd ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... of inhabitants. Whereupon it is sayd that the French doe challenge the foresayde Island vnto themselues. For not long since, when the king of the Frankes sent certaine of his subiects ambassadours to Constantinople vnto Iustinian the Emperour, he sent English men also, ambitiously boasting, as though the sayd Isle had ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, - and Discoveries of The English Nation, v5 - Central and Southern Europe • Richard Hakluyt
... know, for, after a while, I had a note surreptitiously passed to me between folded blotting-paper. The note bore in Doe's ambitiously ornate writing the alarming statement: "I shall never like you so much after what you said this morning Yours Edgar Gray Doe." There was room for me to pen an answer, and in my great round characters I wrote: "I never really meant anything and ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... sunset. With enormous difficulty, for the ground here was mainly sandstone, we dug burrows for ourselves on the bank of the wadi. Some of them were just large enough to contain the body stretched at full length; others, more ambitiously conceived, bore an uncanny resemblance to a grave; and a few strenuous people made shelves for their belongings in the sides of ...
— With Our Army in Palestine • Antony Bluett
... literature; and it was one of which he had conceived most ambitiously. He loved and believed in good books. He said well, "Life is not habitually seen from any common platform so truly and unexaggerated as in the light of literature." But the literature he loved was ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Jericho" might, save for the prudent forethought of Mrs. Wilbur in secreting the same just as I had arrived beneath the walls and was beginning a catalogue of the various horns and their blowers, too ambitiously emulous in longanimity of Homer's list of ships, might, I say, have rendered frustrate any hope I could entertain vacare Musis for the small remainder of my days,) but only further to secure myself against any imputation of unseemly forthputting. I will barely subjoin, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... notion of the "Pioneer" being edited by an emissary, and of Brooke becoming actively political—as if a tortoise of desultory pursuits should protrude its small head ambitiously and become rampant—was hardly equal to the annoyance felt by some members of Mr. Brooke's own family. The result had oozed forth gradually, like the discovery that your neighbor has set up an unpleasant kind of manufacture which will be permanently under your nostrils without ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... necessary to retail our conversations. We gossiped of simple things. We talked very little; and, when we did talk, the most ambitiously preambled sentences were apt to result in nothing more prodigious than a wave of the hand, and a pause, and, not infrequently, a heightened complexion. Altogether, then, it was not oppressively wise or witty talk, but it was eminently satisfactory ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... and dependants; and for the skill with which they baffle or resist the aims of their opponents. A promptness in looking through the most superficial part of the characters of those men—who, by the very circumstance of their contending ambitiously for the rewards and honours of government, are separated from the mass of the society to which they belong—is mistaken for a knowledge of human kind. Hence, where higher knowledge is a prime requisite, they not only are unfurnished, but, being unconscious that they are so, they look down contemptuously ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... that the voice of the people, yea of that people that voiced themselves the people of God, did prosecute the God of all people, with one common voice, "He is worthy to die." I will not, therefore, ambitiously beg their voices for my preferment; nor weigh my worth in that uneven balance, in which a feather of opinion shall be moment enough to turn the scales and make a light piece go current, and a current ...
— Many Thoughts of Many Minds - A Treasury of Quotations from the Literature of Every Land and Every Age • Various
... frogs! Though they go on all-fours in an attitude of humility, their eyes are always turned ambitiously upwards." ...
— Tales of Old Japan • Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford
... bearing towards the princes his superiors as he was modest towards his inferiors. He always had piety in singular esteem, and a love of justice, which made him valued and honored by them of the party which he had embraced. He did not seek ambitiously for commands and honors; they were thrust upon him because of his competence and his expertness. When he handled arms and armies, he showed that he was very conversant with them, as much so as any captain of his day, and he ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume IV. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... Further, magnanimity is about honors; whereas ambition seems to regard positions of dignity: for it is written (2 Macc. 4:7) that "Jason ambitiously sought the high priesthood." Therefore ambition is ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... crush us into the very earth with utter shame and humiliation, full and awful knowledge of how weak and foolish, sinful and unworthy we were?—as it does to Gerontius in the poem, when he dreams that, after death, he demanded, rashly and ambitiously, to see our Lord, and ...
— All Saints' Day and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... shall exist, (and that, unless it is prevented from being so by your means, will be everlasting,) so long will that most mischievous interposition of your veto be spoken of. What was there that was being done by the senate either ambitiously or rashly, when you, one single young man, forbade the whole order to pass decrees concerning the safety of the republic? and when you did so, not once only, but repeatedly? nor would you allow any one ...
— The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Volume 4 • Cicero |
