"Ambitious" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... I exclaimed. Visions of an ambitious and angry mother came to me with abrupt vividness. "You don't mean to tell me ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... on the grass, and worked myself slowly forward until I could see the middle of the stream; then quietly raising my pole, I gave my grasshopper a good swing, as if he had made a wager to jump over the stream at its widest part. But as he certainly would have failed in such an ambitious endeavor, especially if he had been caught by a puff of wind, I let him come down upon the surface of the water, a little beyond the middle of the brook. Grasshoppers do not sink when they fall into the water, and ...
— Amos Kilbright; His Adscititious Experiences • Frank R. Stockton
... all things, one would discourage such a proud and ambitious spirit in any of them, as should want to raise itself by favour instead of merit; and this the rather, for, undoubtedly, there are many more happy persons in low than in high life, take number for number all the world over. I am sure, although ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... dear Bertie, a happy and tranquil, if not very ambitious existence stretches before us. We are both in our twenty-fifth year, and I suppose that without presumption we can reckon that thirty-five more years lie in front of us. I can foresee the gradually increasing routine of work, the wider circle ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro
... exercises called gymnastic are in esteem, those who enter the lists never concern themselves about dangers: that where the praise of riding and hunting is highly esteemed, they who practise these arts decline no pain. What shall I say of our own ambitious pursuits, or desire of honours? What fire have not candidates run through to gain a single vote? Therefore Africanus had always in his hands Xenophon, the pupil of Socrates, being particularly pleased with his saying, that the same labours were not equally ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... horse had fortunately left no evil results; on the contrary it had changed my whole character for the better. From a lazy young man about town, I had become active, energetic, temperate, and above all—oh, above all else—ambitious. There was only one thing which troubled me, I laughed at my own uneasiness, and yet ...
— The King In Yellow • Robert W. Chambers
... the life of this emperor. A brother of the empress was ambitious to attain supreme authority. He approached his sister with the subtle question, Which is dearer to thee, thine elder brother or thy husband? She replied, My elder brother is dearer. Then he said, If I ...
— Japan • David Murray
... another, had become a political personage—a word describing an ambitious man at the first stage of his career. The political personage of 1840 represents, in some degree, the Abbe of the eighteenth century. No drawing-room circle is complete ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... of subjects of more or less related character. The main result to be sought for is the presentation of the greatest amount of the most valuable material in the most available shape, and at the least cost. The possibility of realizing this ambitious purpose remains to be demonstrated. It need only be said that this initial number is put forward as an earnest of the ...
— The Brochure Series of Architectural Illustration, Vol. 1, 1895 • Various
... simplicity and winning unpretentiousness. I liked the ingenuity of the device by which, in the words of the programme, the action of Act II was "not interrupted by musical numbers." The dramatic construction of this act was so consistently clever and right and effective that more ambitious dramatists might study it with advantage. Another point—though the piece was artistically vulgar, it was not vulgar otherwise. It contained no slightest trace of the outrageous salacity and sottishness which disfigure the great majority of successful ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... road, and, showing no mercy to old men and women and children, to destroy all and spare none. And why? Ostensibly because one quite commonplace Austrian gentleman had been foully murdered, but really because a vain and ambitious and rapidly increasing nation, living on an arid and insufficient soil, had come to consider themselves the master-spirits of humanity, and therefore entitled to possess the earth, or at least give law to all ...
— The Drama Of Three Hundred & Sixty-Five Days - Scenes In The Great War - 1915 • Hall Caine
... be seen, Aubanel writes not, like Roumanille, for his own people alone. His Muse is more ambitious, and seeks to interest by appealing to the sentiments in a language polished with all the art of its sister, the French. There are innumerable exquisite passages scattered through the work, which make ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... Rambagh, for I had no measured hours. I was ambitious too; eager to master my profession, and in constant dread of exciting derision by ...
— Gil the Gunner - The Youngest Officer in the East • George Manville Fenn
... conceive no greater absurdity than attempting to make any approach between the English and Italian poetry of the present day. I like the people very much, and their literature very much, but I am not the least ambitious of being the subject of their discussions literary and personal (which appear to be pretty much the same thing, as is the case in most countries); and if you can aid me in impeding this publication, you will add to much kindness already received from ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. IV - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... are you thinking? Are you doing the best for him,—a man in his position, without money, ambitious, sure to succeed if want of money does not stop him,—in wishing him to marry a girl with nothing? Cannot I do more for him ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... Last Fight of the Revenge at Sea of 1591, where the splendid defiance and warning of the Preface are like trumpets blown to the four quarters of the globe. Raleigh stands out as the man who above all others laboured, as he said, "against the ambitious and bloody pretences of the Spaniards, who, seeking to devour all ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... with less anxiety your beating, ambitious heart panted for the admiration of an attentive auditory, when you first ventured to harangue in public! With far less hope and fear (great as yours were) did you first address a crowded court, and thirst for its approbation on your efforts, than Agnes ...
— Nature and Art • Mrs. Inchbald
... The ambitious young men of the older settlements had seen with jealousy a band of strangers, Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, granted a beautiful and fruitful tract, which already blossomed under the industrious work of the newcomers. They ...
— Bay State Monthly, Volume I, No. 2, February, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... the command-in-chief, an officer of a rude force of character, amounting often to brutality, and careless as to those details of military duty which savor more of the accountant's inkstand than of the drum and fife, but ambitious, active, and well acquainted with the character of the service for which he was detailed. He was, at the time, in command in Kansas, subject in a measure to the will of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... was degraded by the baseness of his life and marriage. A title was his sole inheritance; and that inheritance he successively sold to the kings of France and Arragon. [91] During his transient prosperity, Charles the Eighth was ambitious of joining the empire of the East with the kingdom of Naples: in a public festival, he assumed the appellation and the purple of Augustus: the Greeks rejoiced and the Ottoman already trembled, at the approach of the French chivalry. [92] Manuel Palaeologus, the second son, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... got the better of his judgment; and with "The House of Merrilees" it is now an open secret that very much the same point of view was taken in more than one instance. Mr. Marshall's "Peter Binney, Undergraduate," had been and is still decidedly popular, but his new book was more ambitious, possessing such a plot as to require peculiarly delicate handling. Had it been handled in a way that combined a really high literary standard with more stirring qualities? The question requires no answer now, for the triumph which the publisher at once foretold on reading ...
— More Cricket Songs • Norman Gale
... made that the work of preparation for filming the big drama would be undertaken. This was the most ambitious play yet planned by Mr. Pertell, and he was anxious ...
— The Moving Picture Girls - First Appearances in Photo Dramas • Laura Lee Hope
... the son of an intelligent, active, and ambitious man, small partner in a considerable London house. Hopes were conceived of the boy; he was sent to a good school, gained there an Oxford scholarship, and proceeded in course to the Western University. With all his talent and taste (and he had much of both) Robert was deficient in ...
— The Ebb-Tide - A Trio And Quartette • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... insatiable passion and insatiable avarice, was ambitious for renown, and most scornfully bold. By the influence of love she won dominion over the Egyptians, and hoped to attain a similar position over the Romans, but being disappointed of this she destroyed herself ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol. III • Cassius Dio
... associations of the above description may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely in the course of time and things to become potent engines by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people, and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 1 (of 4) of Volume 1: George Washington • James D. Richardson
... by an invading force in these wars have led some speculative persons to hope that there should never be any other kind, since then wars would become more rare, and, conquest being also more difficult, would be less a temptation to ambitious leaders. This reasoning is rather plausible than solid; for, to admit all its consequences, it would be necessary always to be able to induce the people to take up arms, and it would also be necessary for us to be convinced that there would be in the future ...
— The Art of War • Baron Henri de Jomini
... Rhona herself. Dancing was Madame's strong point, but she had been very successful as an actress too, first in Paris and Petersburg, and then in London at the St. James's and Drury Lane. What made her go into management on her own account I don't know. I suppose she was ambitious, and rich enough for ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... have given it in practice the force of precedent and usage; insomuch, that should a President consent to be a candidate for a third election, I trust he would be rejected, on this demonstration of ambitious views. ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... of idealism, with which the League of Nations was at the first impregnated, has, under the influence and intrigue of ambitious statesmen of the Old World, been supplanted by an open recognition that force and selfishness are primary elements in international co-operation. The League has succumbed to this reversion to a cynical materialism. It is no longer a creature of idealism. Its very source and reason have been dried ...
— The Peace Negotiations • Robert Lansing
... whom life is only a conflict of physical and chemical forces, does not despair of one day obtaining artificially organisable matter—protoplasm, as the official jargon has it. If it were in my power I should hasten to satisfy this ambitious gentleman. ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... a matter of self-defence, for if you and Florence are so ambitious as to take violent possession of your neighbors' houses, it seemed to me there would be no end of complaints, and the best way to prevent further housebreaking was to give you a house where you could cook and sweep and exercise your domestic ...
— A Sweet Little Maid • Amy E. Blanchard
... one himself should plume, And on his neighbour's worth presume; But still let Nature's garb prevail— Esop has left this little tale: A Daw, ambitious and absurd, Pick'd up the quills of Juno's bird; And, with the gorgeous spoil adorn'd, All his own sable brethren scorn'd, And join'd the peacocks—who in scoff Stripp'd the bold thief, and drove him off. The Daw, thus roughly handled, went To his own kind in discontent: But they in turn contemn ...
— The Fables of Phdrus - Literally translated into English prose with notes • Phaedrus
... humble home, where at night they rested, and around whose hearth lay all their cares and all their joys. How far, how very far removed from the busy haunts of men, and all the struggles and contentions of the ambitious world; and yet, how short-sighted to suppose that even they had not their griefs and sorrows, and that their humble lot was devoid of the inheritance of those woes, which ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... than that of France. Although Richelieu (1624-1642) had recognized the need for a French navy and had given a great impetus to ship-building, France had become inextricably entangled in European politics, and the navy was half forgotten in the ambitious land wars of Louis XIV. The English, on the other hand, were predisposed to the sea by the very fact of their insularity, and since the days of the great Armada, their most patriotic boast had been ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... Beth had been home a full month on that long four months' vacation that university students are privileged to enjoy. She was very ambitious when she came home that first vacation. She had conceived a fresh ideal of womanhood, a woman not only brilliantly educated and accomplished, but also a gentle queen of the home, one who thoroughly understood the work of ...
— Beth Woodburn • Maud Petitt
... that the Union Government were the delinquents. The Germans, they said, had crossed the border accidentally, for which little relapse they had tendered a suitable apology. Some speakers said that the Ministry's ambitious annexation policy was actuated by a desire for posthumous fame regardless of the blood of Afrikanders, which was more precious than the deserts of German South West Africa. The issue would be decided on the battlefields of Europe, so why the premature ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... of the oratorical efforts of Demosthenes were directed to rouse the Athenians from indolence, and to arm them against the insidious designs and ambitious schemes of Philip, who, in the year 358 B.C., began the attack upon the northern maritime ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... measures. Lying dormant, California slept since Cabrillo saw Cape Mendocino in 1542. After he turned his shattered prows back to Acapulco on June 27, 1543, it was only on November 10, 1602, that ambitious Viscaino raised the Spanish ensign at San Diego. He boldly claimed this golden land for Spain. Since that furtive visit, the lonely coast lay unsettled. It was only used as a haunt by wild pirates, ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... the chores were grinding scythes, feeding the animals, chopping stove-wood, and carrying water up the hill from the spring on the edge of the meadow, etc. Then breakfast, and to the harvest or hay-field. I was foolishly ambitious to be first in mowing and cradling, and by the time I was sixteen led all the hired men. An hour was allowed at noon for dinner and more chores. We stayed in the field until dark, then supper, and still more chores, family worship, and to bed; making altogether ...
— The Story of My Boyhood and Youth • John Muir
... noble deeds, seemed only the fit expression of his nature. Then I came to mingle a reverence with my admiration. We were friends; he talked to me much of his plans in life,—of the future that lay before him. What an ambitious spirit burned within him!—a godlike ambition I thought it then. And how my weak, womanish heart thrilled with sympathy to his! With what pride I listened to his words! with what fervor I joined in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... treacherous Lord Courtown had drank success to Mr. Vivian Grey's maiden speech in a bumper of claret at the political orgies of Chateau Desir. Could he really be the same individual as the daring youth who then organised the crazy councils of those ambitious, imbecile grey-beards? What was he then? What had happened since? What was he now? He turned from the comparison with feelings of sickening disgust, and it was with difficulty that his countenance could ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... who is not inflamed by vain-glory into enthusiasm, can flatter himself that his single, unsupported, desultory, unsystematic endeavours are of power to defeat the subtle designs and united cabals of ambitious citizens. When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied ...
— Notes & Queries 1849.12.15 • Various
... together in sports and in arguments, "rushed" the same girl in turn or simultaneously, and spent their long vacations cruising up and down the Maine coast in a thirty-foot sail-boat. Once they made a more ambitious journey all the way to Yarmouth and the Bay of ...
— The Stolen Singer • Martha Idell Fletcher Bellinger
... come into all this with the red coat of a soldier and the keen, ambitious heart of a Jew, at the very nick of time. He saw at once the enormous possibilities hidden in the near future for a man who took this country at its proper value, handling what he secured with coolness and foresight. He know that he only possessed one thing to risk, namely, his ...
— From One Generation to Another • Henry Seton Merriman
... translated by someone who has preserved in Spanish all the curious inversions of the Guarani, presents as good a picture of the daily life of a mission priest in Paraguay as any that has ever been given to the public by writers much more ambitious than myself or Neenguiru. Nicolas Neenguiru, the writer of the letter, afterwards figured in the war against the Portuguese, and several of his letters are preserved in the archives of Simancas, though none so interesting and simple as that ...
— A Vanished Arcadia, • R. B. Cunninghame Graham
... frequent observation that timidity often voluntarily assumes the role of effrontery, from very despair of successfully accomplishing the task it is ambitious to perform. ...
— Poise: How to Attain It • D. Starke
... be broken; he evinced no purpose of marrying, and the fate which he continually was braving might at length remove him from his usurped inheritance. Alice of Avenel, therefore, judged it wise to check all ambitious thoughts for the present, and remain quiet in the rude, but peaceable retreat, to which ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... most celebrated ancient and modern empires, and shewing that their progress kept pace with their freedom, and that their retrogradation is to be dated only from the epoch when they fell under the dominion of arbitrary and ambitious despots, whose successors gradually completed the work of destruction which they had commenced, I was compelled in candour to admit that the heterogeneous ingredients of which this colony was compounded, did ...
— Statistical, Historical and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales and its Dependent Settlements in Van Diemen's Land • William Charles Wentworth
... known that he was destined to inherit his mother's fortune of fifty thousand pounds more or less. Besides, Providence had decreed a delicate constitution to his elder and only brother Thomas. But Sir Thomas Outram, their father, was reputed to be an ambitious man who looked to see his sons marry well, and this marriage would scarcely have been to Leonard's advantage from the family lawyer point ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard
... ambition, of faction, and of anarchy. Every man the least conversant in Roman story, knows how often that republic was obliged to take refuge in the absolute power of a single man, under the formidable title of Dictator, as well against the intrigues of ambitious individuals who aspired to the tyranny, and the seditions of whole classes of the community whose conduct threatened the existence of all government, as against the invasions of external enemies who menaced the conquest and ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... good. There is nothing that she can do that is useful in the world, for she has never learned. She begins to doubt the Christmas tree. There enters a man—a young electrical engineer, highly trained, highly ambitious, but caught in the wheels of a great corporation where he is merely a cog; wanting to live, wanting to love, wanting to be married, yet condemned to labor for many years more upon a salary which perhaps would little more than pay for her clothes. By ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... Mrs. McGuire, catching at the one word in Susan's remark and paying no attention to the rest. "He's dead to everything he was goin' to do. He was ambitious,—my John was. He was always studyin' and readin' books nights an' Sundays an' holidays, when he didn't have to be in the store. He was takin' a course, ...
— Dawn • Eleanor H. Porter
... is seen to rise high on the hand towards the Mount of Jupiter (4-4, Plate IX.), the subject has more control over himself, and his life is more governed by the ambitious side of his nature. When, however, the Line of Life rises lower down on the palm, more from the Mount of Mars (5-5, Plate IX.), it gives less control over the temper. When this sign is noticed, especially in the ...
— Palmistry for All • Cheiro
... longer Larry's dissertation on the distillery laws would have continued, had not his ideas been interrupted, we cannot guess; but he saw he was coming to a town, and he gathered up the reins, and plied the whip, ambitious to make a figure in the eyes ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. 6 • Maria Edgeworth
... countries, Brazil was the first to be alarmed. She had the most reason, since her frontiers ran to the greatest length side by side with those of the land which held the ambitious Dictator. Ere Francisco Solano Lopez had reigned two years the inevitable had occurred. Arrogance and threats of aggression on the part of the inland State, resentment and profound mistrust on the part of the Brazilian Empire, led to open breach. The pretext lay in the joint interference ...
— South America • W. H. Koebel
... even, to our wives and children while his masters are at war, seemingly to perpetuate his bonds. Such conduct deserves recognition. I would say that a system of rewards should be planned by which a worthy negro, ambitious to become free, could by meritorious conduct achieve his freedom. But this act of Lincoln's is monstrous. It is good for nobody. A race of slaves, suddenly become free, is a race of infants with the physical force of men. What would become of them? Suppose ...
— Who Goes There? • Blackwood Ketcham Benson
... wife next morning, at breakfast, in that half-didactic, half-reproachful way of hers, which is harder to bear than her most energetic assault. Holofernes, too, is with her a pet name for any fell domestic despot. So, whenever, against her most ambitious innovations, those which saw me quite across the grain, I, as in the present instance, stand with however little steadfastness on the defence, she is sure to call me Holofernes, and ten to one takes the first opportunity ...
— I and My Chimney • Herman Melville
... the time was come. I was grateful for the fluke by which I had witnessed on the terrace that evocative scene. I looked forward to reading the MS. of 'The Fan'—to-morrow, at latest. I was not wildly ambitious. I was not inordinately vain. I knew I couldn't ever, with the best will in the world, write like Mr. George Meredith. Those wondrous works of his, seething with wit, with poetry and philosophy and what not, never had beguiled me with ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... time to time been made in the way of building boats and ships with double hulls, the object being to obtain increased stability, and thus reduce to a minimum the rolling and pitching of ordinary vessels. The steamship Castalia was an ambitious attempt in this direction. She was built for the passenger service between England and France. But she did not realise the ...
— Man on the Ocean - A Book about Boats and Ships • R.M. Ballantyne
... yourselves the whole force of Europe collecting its violence, like a troubled sea, and preparing to pour a terrific and destructive inundation over the Holy Land! Behold the strong and the weak, the ambitious and the humble, pursuing the same object! Behold assembled Kings and their People, Soldiers and Priests, the servants of Earth and Heaven rushing, with equal ardour, to rescue the Sepulchre of Christ, and to drown all the innumerable enemies of their Faith in an universal deluge ...
— The Eulogies of Howard • William Hayley
... not true, and what was true was not new.' This appears to me to express the whole sense of the question. I do not see much use in dwelling on a common-place, however fashionable or well established: nor am I very ambitious of starting the most specious novelty, unless I imagine I have reason on my side. Originality implies independence of opinion; but differs as widely from mere singularity as from the tritest truism. It consists in seeing and thinking for one's-self: whereas ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... and patriotic men to "discern the signs of the times". To us the collapse of the Greek city-states seems natural and inevitable. Their constant bickerings and petty jealousies justly drew down upon them the armed might of the ambitious and capable power which destroyed them. Their fate may fill us with pity and our admiration for those who fought in a losing cause may prejudice us against their enslavers. But just as the Norman Conquest in the long run brought more blessing than misery, so the downfall of the ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb
... destroy her. Such a statesman may be too well acquainted with her origin to look upon her with superstitious awe. He may know that she sprang from a compromise huddled up between the eager zeal of reformers and the selfishness of greedy, ambitious, and time-serving politicians. He may find in every page of her annals ample cause for censure. He may feel that he could not, with ease to his conscience, subscribe all her articles. He may regret that all the attempts which have ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... neighbours treated him with scant courtesy, and the very household servants made him feel that he was a person of small importance. He bore contumely with patience, looking forward to the time when Debendra Babu's decease would give him a recognised position. His wife was far more ambitious. She objected strongly to sharing her husband's loss of social standing and frequently reproached him with submitting to ...
— Tales of Bengal • S. B. Banerjea
... went through in the dawn, spectral, artistically perfect, aiming at ambitious, distant objectives, Northamptonshire Yeomanry who had come from France to Italy a year ago and had been kept behind the lines all through the war and were having their first show at last. The next day they suffered many casualties, but they did fine work. Their reconnaissance officer ...
— With British Guns in Italy - A Tribute to Italian Achievement • Hugh Dalton
... than 1-1/4 hours in length. Nothing is more wearisome to the outsider than to listen to amateur performances which stretch out to two and sometimes to three hours' length. If the above plan be adopted, no child will be able to play more than one short piece. A mistress who is ambitious for the success of a few specially gifted pupils will sometimes suggest that a recital shall consist of the performance of two or three of these only, and that each pupil should ...
— Music As A Language - Lectures to Music Students • Ethel Home
... that his Majesty does not use this power," De Froilette went on. "He may be timid, he may lack ambition, we will speak no treachery; but in times past there have been ambitious monarchs, and still little has happened. Why? Because, monsieur, recognizing that this country is one of the chief factors in preserving the peace of Europe, the nations have sent the ablest men they possess as their Ambassadors ...
— Princess Maritza • Percy Brebner
... more important to know about the cast-iron supporting-column of Mr Kipling's forward engine than to know that Maisie had long hair and grey eyes, or to know what happened to any of the people whom it concerned. .007, which is the story of a shining and ambitious young locomotive, is ten times more vital—it calls for ten times more fellow-feeling—than the heart affairs of Private Learoyd or the distresses of the Copleigh girls at Simla. The pain that shoots through .007 ...
— Rudyard Kipling • John Palmer
... causes of despondency which weighed down this forlorn army, there was none more serious than the fact, that not a single man among them had now either authority to command, or obligation to take the initiative. Nor was any ambitious candidate likely to volunteer his pretensions, at a moment when the post promised nothing but the maximum of difficulty as well as of hazard. A new, self-kindled light—and self-originated stimulus—was required, to vivify the embers of suspended hope and action, in a mass paralyzed for the moment, ...
— The Two Great Retreats of History • George Grote
... wish to monopolize all the respectable offices of the government, all the functions of emolument, power, and dignity to themselves? Shall the vital interests of the whole community sink before the ambitious projects of a few designing individuals, who have no object in view, but their own personal aggrandizement, and the maintenance of a self-assumed aristocratic importance? And who would build their own ...
— Statistical, Historical and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales and its Dependent Settlements in Van Diemen's Land • William Charles Wentworth
... three talked much together. Soon I saw that Marina looked with eyes of longing on the great lord, partly because of his beauty rank and might, and partly because she wearied of her captivity in the house of the cacique, and would share Guatemoc's power, for Marina was ambitious. She tried to win his heart in many ways, but he seemed not to notice her, so that at last she spoke more plainly and ...
— Montezuma's Daughter • H. Rider Haggard
... a moment, the poison of some aeons should distil. There was need of savagery to say what she proposed to say. The voice of training, of civilization, of unselfishness, of friendship raised a protest. Wait then for a moment. Wait until the bitterness of an ambitious and unrounded life could formulate this evil impulse. Wait, till Mary Connynge could summon treachery enough to slay her friend. And yet, wait only until the primitive soul of Mary Connynge should become altogether ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough
... Vienna to be a great violinist, suddenly realizes that her money is almost gone. She meets a young ambitious doctor who offers her chivalry and sympathy, and together with world-worn Dr. Anna and Jimmie, the waif, they share their love and ...
— The Film of Fear • Arnold Fredericks
... Portugal and Spanish writers of the East and West Indies, shall commonly finde that they account all other nations for pirats, rovers and theeves, which visite any heathen coast that they have once sayled by or looked on. Howbeit their passionate and ambitious reckoning ought not to bee prejudiciall to other mens chargeable and painefull enterprises and honourable ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VI - Early English Voyages Of Discovery To America • Robert Kerr
... has distinguished us from the beasts and made us a paradise to gain, and for this given us reason, which is a rudder to steer us against tempests and our ambitious desires, and there is a means of easing the imaginations of one's brain by fasting, excessive labours, and other virtues; and instead of frisking and fretting like a child let loose from school, you should pray to the virgin, sleep ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... By MRS. CLARKE JOHNSON. Illustrated by IDA WAUGH. A charming story of an ambitious girl who overcomes in a most original manner many obstacles that stand in the way of securing a college course. While many of her experiences are of a practical nature, and show a brave, self-reliant spirit, some of her escapades and adventures are most exciting, ...
— In Doublet and Hose - A Story for Girls • Lucy Foster Madison
... recollection is that he had committed to memory all the Greek primitives before he left college, yet with all his pre-eminence as a scholar he never seemed to have the remotest consciousness that there was anything remarkable about himself. We had ambitious men in the class and some bitter rivalries, but no one ever thought of questioning his position. In short he was both the pet and pride of the class; his conscientiousness as a boy was that which characterized him as a man. I do not ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... of our day is how to keep bright, thoughtful, sociable, ambitious boys and girls contented on the farm. Every step taken to make the country home more attractive, to make the school and its grounds more enjoyable, to make the way easy to the homes of neighbors, to school, to post-office, and to church, is a step taken toward keeping on the farm the ...
— Agriculture for Beginners - Revised Edition • Charles William Burkett
... capture him and punish him for his duplicity failed, Angus escaping after his defeat to Edinburgh by sea, and Wharton being driven back to Carlisle. Under the regency of Mary of Lorraine his restless and ambitious character and the number of his retainers gave cause for frequent alarms to the government. On the 31st of August 1547 he resigned his earldom, obtaining a regrant sibi et suis haeredibus masculis et suis assignatis quibuscumque. His career was a long ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 2, Part 1, Slice 1 • Various
... thousand trumpets; refreshed himself in the baths of Zeuxippus, and returning to the palace, entertained his nobles with a sumptuous banquet. At the meridian hour he withdrew to his chamber, intoxicated with flattery and wine, and forgetful that his example had made every subject ambitious, and that every ambitious subject was his secret enemy. Some bold conspirators introduced themselves in the disorder of the feast; and the slumbering monarch was surprised, bound, blinded, and ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... Sense, who is jerked from his saddle at the beginning of its wild career. Mine is a good, steady, useful hack, who trots along the high-road of life, keeping on his own side, and only stumbling a little now and then, when I happen to be careless,—ambitious only to arrive safely at the end of his journey, ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... at Malvern some weeks longer than I had intended; the circumstance which had wrought so great a change in my fortune, wrought no less powerfully on my character. I became more thoughtfully and solidly ambitious. Instead of wasting my time in idle regrets at the station I had lost, I rather resolved to carve out for myself one still loftier and more universally acknowledged. I determined to exercise, to their utmost, the little ability ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... causes than you can know. All the council, especially that butcher's son, were urging him on, and Henry himself was anxious that the marriage should be brought about. He thought it would strengthen him for the imperial crown. He wants everything, and is ambitious to be emperor. Emperor! He would cut a pretty figure! I hoped, though, I should be able to induce him not to sacrifice me to his selfish interests, as I have done before, but I knew only too well it would tax my powers to the utmost this time. I knew that if I did anything to anger or to antagonize ...
— When Knighthood Was in Flower • Charles Major
... to Italy: how you all are there: and how your Book progresses. I saw Harvest Home advertised in Fraser: and I have heard from Mrs. Alfred it is so admired that Parker is to print two thousand copies of the Volume. I am glad of this: and I think, little ambitious or vain as you really are, you will insensibly be pleased at gaining your proper Station in public Celebrity. Had I not known what an invidious office it is to meddle with such Poems, and how assuredly people would have said that one had helped to clip away the Best ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... fruit into his pocket also, retired from the presence of the pretty queen, and meeting Lakha, one of the maids of honour, explained to her its wonderful power, and gave it to her as a token of his love. But the maid of honour, being an ambitious girl, determined that the fruit was a fit present to set before the Regent in the absence of the King. Bhartari Raja accepted it, bestowed on her great wealth, and dismissed her with ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... ambitious and less sagacious and more unscrupulous than he was, the people of India were persuaded that they might successfully rise against their English rulers, who had brought them out of a state of anarchy and constant warfare and ...
— The Secret of the Island • W.H.G. Kingston (translation from Jules Verne)
... part of his enemies—Robert Pilgrim, for instance, and Indians whom he had offended—sufficient evidence might be got together to bring him to the gallows. A fitting ending that for the son of the ambitious mother who had stinted herself and planned for his success, and a most appropriate sequel to the example of reckless bravery set by the last two generations of ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson
... is evident, that nothing less than the ambitious and far-reaching pretension to compass these objects of vital concern, is either directly essayed or necessarily implied in the positions attempted in the argument for the ...
— Report of the Decision of the Supreme Court of the United States, and the Opinions of the Judges Thereof, in the Case of Dred Scott versus John F.A. Sandford • Benjamin C. Howard
... themselves with a moderate freedom. M. Guizot has just as little enlightenment to furnish with regard to the connection of the religious movement with the development of middle-class society. Of course, the Republic was likewise the mere work of a number of ambitious, fanatical, and malevolent spirits. That simultaneously efforts were being made to introduce the Republic in Lisbon, Naples, and Messina, as in England, under the influence of the Dutch example, is a fact which is not ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... princesses of the thirteenth century one of the fairest souls is this Flemish maiden, who literally laid down her life in ransom for her father. It was not Prince Edward's fault that Philippine was not Queen of England. It was the fault of the ambitious policy alike of King Edward and the King of France, and perhaps still more of his Navarrese Queen. They did not know that they were sacrificing not only Philippine, but Edward. Would they have cared much about it ...
— A Forgotten Hero - Not for Him • Emily Sarah Holt
... arrival, her 'assofeta', that is to say, her chief 'femme de chambre'; an office more considerable in Spain than with us. Laura had brought her husband with her, a peasant in every way, seen and known by nobody; but Laura had intelligence, shrewdness, cleverness, and ambitious views, in spite of the external vulgarity of her manners, which she had preserved either from habit, or from policy, for make herself less suspected. Like all persons of this extraction, she was thoroughly selfish. She was not unaware ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... he became neither the one nor the other, in pursuance of an idea of his which I have already mentioned—the idea, that in the contempt of ambition lay one of the essential principles of happiness on earth. Is it not, indeed, possible that while a high order of genius is necessarily ambitious, the highest is invariably above that which is termed ambition? And may it not thus happen that many far greater than Milton, have contentedly remained "mute and inglorious?" I believe the world has never yet seen, and that, unless through some series of accidents goading the noblest order of ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... much better this than a limpid flow of words without notable content! Souls in the Making (CHAPMAN AND HALL) is mainly an analysis of two love episodes in the life of a young man, the liberally educated son of an ambitious self-made soapmaker. The first—with Sue, the pretty waitress—is thwarted by a very persistent and unpleasant clerk; the second—with Virginia, a girl of birth and breeding—is threatened by the intrusion of ...
— Punch, or The London Charivari, Vol. 153, November 7, 1917 • Various
... which it should be pursued, and the means whereby he may attain it. Let him not think of its misuse, and its emptiness, and the fickleness of mankind, and the like, whereof no man thinks except through a morbidness of disposition; with thoughts like these do the most ambitious most torment themselves, when they despair of gaining the distinctions they hanker after, and in thus giving vent to their anger would fain appear wise. Wherefore it is certain that those, who cry out the loudest against the misuse of honour and the vanity of the world, ...
— Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata - Part I: Concerning God • Benedict de Spinoza
... called the deputies of the commons to sit for the first time in Parliament, did any of them dream of demanding that an assembly, elected by their constituents, should make and destroy ministries, and dictate to the king in affairs of state? No such thought entered into the imagination of the most ambitious of them. The nobility had already these pretensions; the commons pretended to nothing but to be exempt from arbitrary taxation, and from the gross individual oppression of the king's officers. It is a political law of nature ...
— The Subjection of Women • John Stuart Mill
... the Past! Ah, John, To have grown ambitious in worldly ways!— To have rolled your shirt-sleeves down, to don A broadcloth suit, and, forgetful, gone Out ...
— Riley Songs of Home • James Whitcomb Riley
... still own 97 1/2 per cent. of the entire land area, and wise laws guard them in this precious possession, and aim to protect them from all manner of unjust exploitation. It is much to the credit of the government that the cleanest native villages and the most healthy, ambitious and industrious tribes, are those nearest the white settlements. Contact between the races has resulted in the betterment, not in the ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... warded off many an outburst of passion, and Lulu, like the others, was able each week to carry home a good report of conduct; of lessons also, for she was much interested in her studies, very ambitious to excel, and therefore ...
— The Two Elsies - A Sequel to Elsie at Nantucket, Book 10 • Martha Finley
... wanted but the care: all the sweets of empire, while all that was disagreeable and toilsome, remained with the title alone. He therefore upbraided him with infinite ingratitude, and want of honour; with all the folly of ambitious youth: and left nothing unsaid that might make the Princess sensible it was too late to hide any of his treasons from him, since they were all but too apparent to His Majesty. It was therefore that she urged nothing but his royal mercy, and forgiveness, without ...
— Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister • Aphra Behn
... Nagorno-Karabakh and the breakup of the centrally directed economic system of the former Soviet Union contributed to a severe economic decline in the early 1990s. By 1994, however, the Armenian Government had launched an ambitious IMF-sponsored economic program that has resulted in positive growth rates in 1995-98. Armenia also managed to slash inflation and to privatize most small- and medium-sized enterprises. The chronic energy shortages Armenia suffered in recent years have ...
— The 1999 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... have not acted in the same way with my worthy father? He has trusted them entirely during thirty and some years; he has bowed down before miracles, given abundant offerings to the gods, for this result, that his property and power should pass into the hands of ambitious tricksters! And no one has opened his eyes. For the pharaoh cannot, like me, enter Phoenician temples at night, and absolutely no one ...
— The Pharaoh and the Priest - An Historical Novel of Ancient Egypt • Boleslaw Prus
... first to speak; for being the son of a shabby-genteel father, I had witnessed in my infancy many of those schemes to raise the needful, to which ambitious men with limited incomes are so frequently driven. I therefore bid them be of good heart, for that any pawnbroker in the neighbourhood would readily advance money upon the superfluous wardrobe which we possessed. This remark was received ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, August 28, 1841 • Various
... plant potatoes and corn, and spin and knit. I kept school twenty-one seasons, off and on. I didn't know much, but a little went a great way in those days. I used to teach six days in the week, and make out a full week's spinning or weaving, as well. I was strong and smart then, and ambitious to make a living and more. After a while, my brothers moved out West, and I had to stay at home with father and mother, and pretty soon mother died. I have been on the old place ever since. It is ten years since father died. I've stayed there alone ...
— The Inglises - How the Way Opened • Margaret Murray Robertson
... entertained ambitious views towards the crown; his uncle Richard, it is said, in default of issue to himself, having expressed the intention of declaring Lincoln his successor. The Lord Lovel, too, a bitter enemy of the reigning prince, who had fled to the court of Burgundy ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... letter to Captain Troubridge: his lordship used facetiously to denominate him, the Great Devil who commanded the Christian Army; and, though he did not seriously think him a traitor, he probably considered him as not altogether incorruptible. To an ambitious cardinal, the tiara might have proved ...
— The Life of the Right Honourable Horatio Lord Viscount Nelson, Vol. II (of 2) • James Harrison
... Portland; but on the other hand there was a certain sharpness and lack of sympathy in Huldah which repelled rather than attracted. With Dick Carter she could at least talk intelligently about lessons. He was a very ambitious boy, full of plans for his future, which he discussed quite freely with Rebecca, but when she broached the subject of her future his interest sensibly lessened. Into the world of the ideal Emma Jane, Huldah, and Dick alike never seemed to have peeped, and the consciousness ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... of our preacher," he said, in the questioning affirmative of the deliberate country. "Well, he's quite a go-ahead young fellow; you never get up early enough to find him working in a cold collar. Maybe he's a mite ambitious, ...
— John Wesley, Jr. - The Story of an Experiment • Dan B. Brummitt
... means allow, and so the child was christened after his father. I think that ever since the day she had entered the Stewart family, my aunt had thought me a spectre across her path, for she was an ambitious woman and wished the whole estate for her son,—in which I do not greatly blame her. But she had brooded over her fear until it had become a phantom which haunted her unceasingly, and she had come to deem me a kind of monster, who stood between her boy and his inheritance. Her second ...
— A Soldier of Virginia • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... the Papacy. The Church, as a powerful institution, became ambitious to rule the state and the world. A spiritual despotism appeared, surrounding itself with earthly splendor, grasping the sword of earthly power, and the farthest removed from the humble and gentle spirit of its Master. It would tolerate no opposition to ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... strong and skilfully constructed novel upon a subject of the greatest importance and interest at the present time,—"Trusts" and their consequences. Albion Harding, a successful and immensely ambitious financier, organizes an industrial combination which causes much suffering and disaster, and eventually alienates his only son, who, declining to enter the "Trust," withdraws his capital from his father's business, and buys a small mill and attempts to manage it according to his own ideas. ...
— The Dominant Strain • Anna Chapin Ray
... first success, had received liberal support from the public to enable him to start on a new expedition, which at once was to settle the question of the nature of the interior, the ambitious project being nothing less than to traverse the continent from the eastern to the western shore, on much the same parallel of ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... kept a certain restraining humility in their hearts, so that for every Quaker they hanged, they let a dozen go. Poverty, of course, is no discredit, but at all events, it is a subtle criticism. The man oppressed by material wants is not in the best of moods for the more ambitious forms of moral adventure. He not only lacks the means; he is also deficient in the self-assurance, the sense of superiority, the secure and lofty point of departure. If he is haunted by notions of the sinfulness of his neighbours, he is apt to see some of ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... from one of the chief purposes of this letter. It is to introduce to you Kathleen West, an ambitious and particularly clever young woman, who is a 'star' reporter on this paper. It seems that she and I have changed ambitions. I sigh for journalistic fame, and she sighs for college. She has done more than sigh. She has been saving her money for ever so long, ...
— Grace Harlowe's Third Year at Overton College • Jessie Graham Flower
... the ambitious farmer and the unambitious farmer; the farmer who rides hard, that is, ostensibly hard, and the farmer who is simply content to know where the hounds are, and to follow them at a distance which shall maintain ...
— Hunting Sketches • Anthony Trollope
... while animal appetites. The Shaksperean compositions, on vertebers and frame-work of the primary passions, portray (essentially the same as Homer's,) the spirit and letter of the feudal world, the Norman lord, ambitious and arrogant, taller and nobler than common men—with much underplay and gusts of heat and cold, volcanoes and stormy seas. Burns (and some will say to his credit) attempts none of these themes. He poetizes the humor, riotous blood, sulks, amorous torments, fondness for ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... the men of that day; but to us, to posterity who view the thing that happened in all its magnitude and perceive its plain and terrible meaning, these causes seem insufficient. To us it is incomprehensible that millions of Christian men killed and tortured each other either because Napoleon was ambitious or Alexander was firm, or because England's policy was astute or the Duke of Oldenburg wronged. We cannot grasp what connection such circumstances have with the actual fact of slaughter and violence: why because the Duke was ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... years ago, when the writer first knew her, and continued to live there until a couple of years ago. Nampeo, most famous potter in Hopiland, is an aged Tewa woman still living at Hano, in the first house at the head of the trail. Her ambitious study of the fragments of the pottery of the ancients, in the ruins of old Sikyatki, made her the master craftsman and developed a new standard for pottery-making in ...
— The Unwritten Literature of the Hopi • Hattie Greene Lockett
... watched his beginnings, the good souls said, "He's a jolly fellow who means to get rich." When they saw him enriching the country before he enriched himself, the good souls said, "He is an ambitious man." This seemed all the more probable since the man was religious, and even practised his religion to a certain degree, a thing which was very favorably viewed at that epoch. He went regularly to low mass every Sunday. The local deputy, who nosed out all rivalry everywhere, ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... the eldest prince demanded that he should be inaugurated sultan in the room of the deceased monarch, agreeably to his will; but this was not possible, as each of the other brothers was ambitious of being sovereign. Contention and disputes now arose between them for the government, till at length the elder brother, wishing to avoid civil war, said, "Let us go and submit to the arbitration of one of the tributary ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 4 • Anon.
... boast. Perhaps I ought to have been more ambitious for you. But I hate quarrels, and I shouldn't like to have claimed anything which did not really belong to us. It is ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope
... beauty are enthroned upon the necessity of procuring the means of existence in a co-operative organized manner. The social motives which to-day make man ambitious, hypocritical, stealthy, are ineffective. One need not sell his individuality for a mess of pottage, as ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various
... so exclusive and aristocratic as the Christians of our day, who are ambitious of social position. Socrates never seemed to think about his social position at all, and uniformly acted as if he were well known and prominent. He was listened to because he was eloquent. His conversation is said to have been charming, and even fascinating. ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... of their clients' business were made public property when their tongues were loosened by wine; and this led him to the firm resolution that nothing should go into his mouth which would prevent him from keeping it closed unless he wanted to open it. The time will come when the only opening for the ambitious man of intemperate habits will be in politics. It is rapidly becoming so now. Private employers dare not trust their business to the man who drinks. The great corporations dare not. He is not wanted on the railroads. The steamship lines have long since cast ...
— The Call of the Twentieth Century • David Starr Jordan
... had experienced a similar difficulty with Don John, as several of his officers had strongly urged the inexpediency of engaging so formidable an armament as that of the allies. But Ali, like his rival, was young and ambitious. He had been sent by his master to fight the enemy; and no remonstrances, not even those of Mehemet Siroco, for whom he had great respect, could turn him from ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... and ambitious apartment, now becoming clouded with shades, out of which the white and cadaverous countenances of his studies, casts, and other lumber peered meditatively at him, as if they were saying, 'What are you going to do now, old boy?' They had never looked like that while standing ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... there are many difficulties in the way; as when parents are too ambitious, or when sons are obstinate and self-willed, or when both are antagonistic to each other. If, as is not infrequently the case, a youth has no particular taste for any profession, and shows no very obvious capacity for anything, is ...
— Personal Reminiscences in Book Making - and Some Short Stories • R.M. Ballantyne
... your majesty about this matter is, that some five or six days ago Scheich Ibrahim came to acquaint me, that he had a design to assemble the ministers of his mosque, to assist at a ceremony he was ambitious of performing in honour of your majesty's auspicious reign. I asked him if I could be any way serviceable to him in this affair; upon which he entreated me to get leave of your majesty to perform the ceremony in the pavilion. I sent him away with leave to hold the assembly, telling him I would ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... faltered Walter, "we pass on. I wish we had decided to stay in the Berkshires, but of course the girls must make the White Mountains," and he fell back in his chair as if overwhelmed. "I fancy Bess is ambitious ...
— The Motor Girls Through New England - or, Held by the Gypsies • Margaret Penrose
... upset the balance of power. David Fitz- Gerald, good easy man (vir sua sorte contentus is Gerald's description of him), the king could tolerate, but he could not contemplate without uneasiness the combination of spiritual and political power in South Wales in the hands of two able, ambitious, and energetic kinsmen, such as he knew Gerald and the Lord Rhys to be. Gerald had made no secret of his admiration for the martyred St. Thomas e Becket. He fashioned himself upon him as Becket did on Anselm. The part which Becket played in England he would like to play ...
— The Itinerary of Archibishop Baldwin through Wales • Giraldus Cambrensis
... it. They know from experience that they sometimes err; and the wonder is that they so seldom err as they do, beset, as they continually are, by the wiles of parasites and sycophants; by the snares of the ambitious, the avaricious, the desperate; by the artifices of men who possess their confidence more than they deserve it; and of those who seek to possess rather than to deserve it. When occasions present themselves in which ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al
... fill the larger sphere for which his ambitious nature perhaps had secretly pined, that after four years of arduous service when the Massachusetts quarrel was well adjusted, and Winslow would have returned home, President Steele, whom he had helped to found the Society ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... this, gentlemen. Hard words to use; but not too hard to define the faults which rendered so much of Duerer's great genius abortive, and to this day paralyze, among the details of a lifeless and ambitious precision, the student, no less than the artist, of German blood. For too many an Erasmus, too many a Duerer, among them, the world is all cloak and clasp, instead of face or book; and the first object of their lives is to ...
— Ariadne Florentina - Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving • John Ruskin
... instituted partly because the consuls being often wholly taken up with foreign wars, found the want of some person to administer justice in the city; and partly because the nobility, having lost their appropriation of the consulship, were ambitious of obtaining some new honor in its room. He was attended in the city by two lictors, who went before him with the fasces, and six lictors without the city; he wore also, like the consuls, the toga pretexta, or ...
— Roman Antiquities, and Ancient Mythology - For Classical Schools (2nd ed) • Charles K. Dillaway
... rather florid, face, a firm mouth, and penetrating steel-blue eyes. He was careful of his appearance, too, and from his well-cut clothes and his well-trimmed brown hair, beard, and whiskers, it was easy to see that there was nothing of the slipshod about this ambitious young emissary from the ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... the character which such impertinence will exalt: high must be the character which such impertinence will not degrade. Inexcusable, therefore, must be the practice which has neither reason nor passion to support it. The drunkard has his cups; the satirist his revenge; the ambitious man his preferments; the miser his gold; but the common swearer has nothing; he is a fool at large, sells his soul for naught, and drudges in the service of the devil gratis. Swearing is void of all plea, it is not the native offspring ...
— Frost's Laws and By-Laws of American Society • Sarah Annie Frost
... was a proud, ambitious woman, well-educated, speaking French fluently, and familiar with the ways of the best society in Lexington, Kentucky, where she was born December 13, 1818. She was a pupil of Madame Mantelli, whose celebrated seminary in Lexington ...
— Lincoln's Yarns and Stories • Alexander K. McClure
... too ambitious of court favour, sacrificing his time in attendance on levees, his repose, his liberty, his virtue, and, perhaps, his friends, to attain it, I have said to myself, This man gives too ...
— The Printer Boy. - Or How Benjamin Franklin Made His Mark. An Example for Youth. • William M. Thayer
... resources. But the returns from these must necessarily be gradual and long deferred; and he may be excused for listening with still greater satisfaction to Pizarro's tales of its mineral stores; for his ambitious projects had drained the imperial treasury, and he saw in the golden tide thus unexpectedly poured in upon him the immediate ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... the proud, the ambitious, the self-seeking, should suffer defeat, humiliation, and misfortune; that they should pass through the scorching fires of affliction; for only thus can the wayward soul be brought to reflect upon the enigma ...
— The Way of Peace • James Allen
... wealth weave rugs of fine quality for their own homes. In some districts, besides weaving for the market, girls weave one or two rugs for their dowry; this purpose furnishes them with enough excitement to keep them interested in their work and ambitious to excel. Now that there is a greater demand for rugs, and not enough women to supply the demand, men and boys have come into the business, but generally only in places where there are large factories, and especially ...
— Rugs: Oriental and Occidental, Antique & Modern - A Handbook for Ready Reference • Rosa Belle Holt
... not give him the help he asked for, he would have the power to take the matter altogether out of his hands. His troops have no love for him, for, as his nickname shows, he is as cruel as he is ambitious. ...
— At Aboukir and Acre - A Story of Napoleon's Invasion of Egypt • George Alfred Henty
... and Znaniecki is in a real sense a study of the Polish community in Europe and America. Less ambitious studies have been made of individual immigrant communities. Several religious communities composed of isolated and unassimilated groups, such as the German Mennonites, ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... throne in despair at the sight of his troops being driven backwards; and thus for two days it seemed as easy to force a way through the Spartans as through the rocks themselves. Nay, how could slavish troops, dragged from home to spread the victories of an ambitious king, fight like freemen who felt that their strokes were to defend ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... of their ancestors, as an evidence not only of good sense, but of good taste. The immigrants, arriving from time to time, might have disabused them, but these would naturally fall into the ways and sentiments of the people, and were their tastes ever so ambitious, probably had not the means to gratify them. This is the origin, and thus is to be explained the ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... October, 1818, that Mrs. Hathorne carried her family to Raymond, to occupy the new house, a dwelling so ambitious, gauged by the primitive community thereabouts, that it gained the title of "Manning's Folly." Raymond is in Cumberland County, a little east of Sebago Lake, and the house, which is still standing, mossy and dismantled, ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... occasion gave them a significance which was of the profoundest import to him; and now to hear the maiden refer to them as she did pained him. Was it, then, all a jest to her? Did she regard the picture he had faintly limned as one of those unsubstantial dreams which the young and ambitious are so fond of drawing, and which can never be realized? Did she look upon him merely as a friend—a dear one, perhaps, whom she had known and liked from their early childhood, because they had been schoolmates, and he and her ...
— The Wilderness Fugitives • Edward S. Ellis
... Heaven is. Thou hast moved in such splendor of light, Signora de' Franchi, thou dost not realize thy privilege. But I, who have always walked in darkness, am as a blind man restored to sight. I was ambitious, lustful, torn by doubts and questionings; now I am bathed in the divine peace, all my questions answered, my riotous blood assuaged. Love, love, that is all; the surrender of one's will to the love that moves the sun and all the stars, ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... of Mr. Gladstone had not been in office for much more than a year before a much more ambitious enterprise on this line was undertaken. In March, 1893, Sir Henry (then Mr.) Campbell-Bannerman had pledged the Government to "show themselves to be the best employers of labour in the country": "we have ceased," he said, "to believe in what are known as competition or starvation wages." That ...
— The History of the Fabian Society • Edward R. Pease
... the man who owned it persuade me that he was in earnest if he said he loved me? How could I persuade him that I was worth caring for and not a mere ambitious fool? There would be ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... Metternich to extend the same security to the rest of the peninsula, and by a series of treaties to effect the double end of exterminating constitutional government and of establishing an Austrian Protectorate over the entire country, from the Alps to the Sicilian Straits. The design was so ambitious that Metternich had not dared to disclose it at the Congress of Vienna; it was in fact a direct violation of the Treaty of Paris, and of the resolution of the Congress, that Italy, outside the possessions ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... subsequent decades. With US help, dictator Manuel NORIEGA was deposed in 1989. The entire Panama Canal, the area supporting the Canal, and remaining US military bases were transfered to Panama by the end of 1999. In October 2006, Panamanians approved an ambitious plan to expand the Canal. The project, which is to begin in 2007 and could double the Canal's capacity, is expected to ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... 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; for the ambitious man seeks to be honoured for his virtue and by good judges—thus showing that he too regards virtue as the superior good. Yet neither will virtue satisfy all the conditions. The virtuous man may slumber or pass his life in inactivity, or may experience ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... thirty years she had been the chief support of the Protestants in Germany, France, and the Netherlands. Pope Pius V. had already issued a bull deposing Elizabeth, on the ground of acts of perfidy. Sixtus VI., who succeeded, renewed this bull and encouraged Philip who, ambitious to be considered the guardian of the Church, hastened his preparations for the conquest of ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume VII • Charles Morris
... there is no redress but in a withdrawal from the association, is such withdrawal an insurrection? If so, then of what advantage is a compact of union to States? Within the Union are oppressions and grievances; and the attempt to go out brings war and subjugation. The ambitious and aggressive States obtain possession of the central authority which, having grown strong in the lapse of time, asserts its entire sovereignty over the States. Whichever of them denies it and seeks to retire, is declared to be guilty ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... 1915 an ambitious peace crusade to Europe was initiated by Henry Ford, the automobile manufacturer. Accompanied by 148 pacifists, he sailed on the Scandinavian-American liner, Oscar II, early in December, 1915, with the avowed purpose of ending ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... To crown his ambitious dreams with a vision of happiness, he called up the guileless face of Mademoiselle Angelique Bontems, the companion of his childhood. Until he came to boyhood his father and mother had made no objection to his intimacy with their neighbor's pretty little daughter; ...
— A Second Home • Honore de Balzac
... Soulanges, who, after making his money in Paris, returned there in 1793 to buy wheat for his native town. He was slain as an "accapareur," a monopolist, by the populace, instigated by a mason, the uncle of Godain, with whom he had had some quarrel about the building of his ambitious house. The settlement of his estate, sharply contested by collateral heirs, dragged slowly along until, in 1798, Soudry, who had then returned to Soulanges, was able to buy the wine-merchant's palace for three thousand francs in specie. He then let it, in the first instance, to the government ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... of man, the fall of man, his redemption, his ingratitude, his lapse, and again his restoration. The chief figures are the same, the action is the same, though more varied and complicated, and the general effect is unsatisfactory from the same cause. Prose is less ambitious than poetry. There is an absence of attempts at grand effects. There is no effort after sublimity, and there is consequently a lighter sense of incongruity in the failure to reach it. On the other hand, there is the greater ...
— Bunyan • James Anthony Froude
... were designed rather for operations subsequent to the fall of what was after all but the first line of Ottoman defence. It was only after Sir Ian arrived on the spot that the naval attack actually failed and that military operations on an ambitious scale against the Gallipoli Peninsula took the stage. The fact that when the transports arrived at Mudros they were found not to be packed suitably for effecting an immediate disembarkation on hostile ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... the second phase of the man. It belongs more properly to him. He is ambitious; and the role which he first assumed is one which ambition can only spoil. He has but a weak faith in principles, and flinches and flies off to "Prester John," or somewhere into the clouds, when at last principle and sentiment must either fly off or fairly take the stubborn ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... Laurentian Library), of which an extract is engraved in the atlas of Baldelli-Boni's Polo. I need not describe it, however, because I cannot satisfy myself that it makes much use of Polo's contributions, and its facts have been embodied in a more ambitious work of the next generation, the celebrated Catalan Map of 1375 in the great Library of Paris. This also, but on a larger scale and in a more comprehensive manner, is an honest endeavour to represent the known ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... all. There is no reason why, because our faiths are different, we should be constantly fighting. It is true that the Turks threaten Europe, and are even now preparing to capture Rhodes; but this is no question of religion. The Turks are warlike and ambitious; they have conquered Syria, and war with Egypt and Persia; but the Moorish states are small, they have no thought of conquest, and might live peaceably with Europe were it not for the hatred excited against ...
— A Knight of the White Cross • G.A. Henty |
