"Ambition" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... people. He had been willing to make to them, of his own mere motion, concessions such as scarcely any other sovereign has ever made except under duress. He had paid the penalty of faults not his own, of the haughtiness and ambition of some of his predecessors, of the dissoluteness and baseness of others. He had been vanquished, taken captive, led in triumph, put in ward. He had escaped; he had been caught; he had been dragged back like a runaway galley-slave to the oar. He was still ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... construed and hawked at and torn, till, if its framers could rise from their graves, they could not at all recognize it. All the powers of earth seem rapidly combining against him. Mammon is after him, ambition follows, philosophy follows, and the theology of the day fast joining the cry. They have him in his prison house; they have searched his person, and left no prying instrument with him. One after another they have closed the heavy iron doors ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... know you. I understand the feelings with which you have sought a union between us. O God! why, why was I thus cursed with riches—why made a thing of barter and merchandise, and avarice, and low ambition? Take my wealth, take it, Mr. Maltravers, since that is what you prize. Heaven knows I can cast it willingly away; but leave the wretch whom you long deceived, and who now, wretch though she be, renounces and ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... successes. Charles Niehaus, whose work is always direct and convincing, has made us feel the Spanish conqueror's own sense of victory. We know that now Mexico, the Tlascalans and the Emperor Montezuma have been vanquished, that the victor's ruthless ambition is already dreaming of the conquest of New Spain and the navigation of the Pacific. There are infused into the work a brilliancy and dash that fill the imagination with the glamor of that picturesque period of history. ...
— The Sculpture and Mural Decorations of the Exposition • Stella G. S. Perry
... lesson for us all in this beautiful story of how Columbus realized his ambition to ...
— A Parody Outline of History • Donald Ogden Stewart
... behind the lounge and sneered at this speech of his. Of course, I said to myself, he would be ready to do anything to please the Foreign Secretary, since all the big plums his ambition craved were in the gift of ...
— The Powers and Maxine • Charles Norris Williamson
... ambition at that time to make any kind of mark for himself on the world. His one desire—which had grown into a sort of passion—was to find Letta's mother. Nearly all his thoughts were concentrated on that point, and so great was ...
— The Battery and the Boiler - Adventures in Laying of Submarine Electric Cables • R.M. Ballantyne
... his wild, yet not altogether chimerical ambition, a quick light step was heard amidst the long herbage, and, looking up, Montreal perceived the figure of a tall female descending from that part of the hill then covered by many convents, towards the base of the Aventine. She supported her steps with a long staff, and moved with such ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... Jesus. We have only to recall the story of his three years with his disciples. They gave him at the best a very feeble return for his great love for them. They were inconstant, weak, foolish, untrustful. They showed personal ambition, striving for first places, even at the Last Supper. They displayed jealousy, envy, narrowness, ingratitude, unbelief, cowardice. As these unlovely things appeared in the men Jesus had chosen, his friendship did not slacken or unloose its hold. He had taken them as his ...
— Personal Friendships of Jesus • J. R. Miller
... work he had yet produced, was given to the world in 1799. Wallenstein is the model of a high-souled, great, accomplished man, whose ruling passion is ambition. A shade of horror, of fateful dreariness, hangs over the hero's death, and except in Macbeth or Othello we know not where to match it. This tragedy is the greatest ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... villains for no purpose but to teach honesty, and martyrs with no prospect of honor or advantage; or that they, as false witnesses, should have been able, in the course of a few years, to have spread this religion over the most of the known world, in opposition to the interests, ambition and prejudices of mankind; that they triumphed over the power of princes, the intrigues of states, the forces of custom, the blindness of zeal, the influence of priests, the arguments of orators, and the philosophy ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 8, August, 1880 • Various
... to no office, Mr. Blair. I'm fifty-four years of age. I am on the hilltop of life. The way leads down a gentle slope, I trust, to a valley of peace, love and happiness. Ambition does not lure me; I have lived. I have played my part as well as I know how. I am content. I love my Country, North and South, East and West. I am a ...
— The Man in Gray • Thomas Dixon
... that I must thus speak of my father, but I must not disguise the truth. Still, I must say, there was much in extenuation of his conduct. He had always a dislike to the profession of the church: his ambition, as a young man, had been to enter the army, for which service he was much better qualified; but, as it has been the custom for centuries to entail all the property of the aristocracy upon the eldest son, and leave the other brothers to be supported by the state, or rather by ...
— Peter Simple and The Three Cutters, Vol. 1-2 • Frederick Marryat
... here. Our very experiments in larger places, even if they were unsuccessful, ought to have helped us to make North Dormer a larger place... and you young men who are preparing even now to follow the call of ambition, and turn your back on the old homes—well, let me say this to you, that if ever you do come back to them it's worth while to come back to them for their good.... And to do that, you must keep on ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton
... Government that the Infanta Louisa should not marry a French prince until her sister, the actual Queen, "should be married and have children." The possible union of the crowns of France and Spain was known for a dream of French ambition, and was equally well known to be an object of dislike and dread to other European Powers. The engagement which the French King had now given seemed therefore well calculated to disarm suspicion and promote peace; but the one was reawakened and the other endangered ...
— Great Britain and Her Queen • Anne E. Keeling
... such a chamber, quietest place, Where that Love waits for thee. What is it, say, That will not let thee enter? Is it care For the provision of the unborn day, As if thou wert a God that must foresee? Is it poor hunger for the praise of men? Is it ambition to outstrip thy fellow In this world's race? Or is it love of self— That greed which still to have must still destroy?— Go mad for some lost love; some voice of old, Which first thou madest sing, and after sob; Some heart thou foundest rich, and leftest bare, Choking its well ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald
... decision forced on the convictions of his fellow-men. Our scales are not wisely balanced in this world—we cannot weigh motives against acts, thought against deeds, with atom-like precision, nor measure the tempted with the temptation grain by grain, hair by hair. Ambition was the fault of the seraphim in the commencement—be well assured that some of the old angelic leaven lingers still about all ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... in the shade that none of the boys could get up ambition enough to go on until they had taken a nap. Then they went up a hill slowly, carrying their coats ...
— Out with Gun and Camera • Ralph Bonehill
... devotion and lovely thought, I hear the mingled mournful tone of such as have cut off a right hand and plucked out a right eye, which had not caused them to offend? This is tenfold better than to have spared offending members; but the true Christian ambition is to fill the divine scheme of humanity—abridging nothing, ignoring nothing, denying nothing, calling nothing unclean, but burning everything a thank-offering in the flame of life upon the altar of absolute devotion to the Father ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... delight in her coming to settle at home at last, his warm attachment to the place, and his desire to cultivate the neighbouring borough with a view to representing it in Parliament, since Allen seemed to be devoid of ambition, and so much to hate the mud and dust of public life, that he was not likely to plunge into it, unless Elvira should wish for distinction. Then Bobus expatiated on the awkward connection the Goulds would be for Allen, stigmatising the amiable Lisette, who of course by this time had ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... lower animals, and also in the sense that they belong to mankind at large, and not to any particular race or time. It means, particularly, sympathy and the innumerable sentiments into which sympathy enters, such as love, resentment, ambition, vanity, hero-worship, and the feeling of social right ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... would prove fortunate in retracing its course. Not only Leif, but his father Eirek, now an old man, was fired with the hope of new discoveries. The aged Viking had given Greenland, to the world; it was a natural ambition to desire to add to his fame as a discoverer. But on his way to the vessel his horse stumbled. Superstitious, as all men were in that day, he looked on this as ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... Cardinal Granvelle, secretly left the city, and took refuge in Brussels. No man in authority was more hated at that time in the Netherlands than was Cardinal Granvelle. When Philip went to Spain, he had been left behind in Flanders. His ambition had procured for him a cardinal's hat, and, by his insolent and imperious bearing, he soon incurred such deep hatred, that the first noblemen of the country conspired against him, and vowed ...
— The Golden Grasshopper - A story of the days of Sir Thomas Gresham • W.H.G. Kingston
... assimilate, bespoke her possession of a brain the powers of which being concentrated on large affairs might have accomplished almost startling results. There was, however, nothing startling in her intentions, and ambition did not touch her. Yet, as she went with Hutchinson from one country to another, more than one man of affairs had it borne in upon him that her young slimness and her silence represented an unanticipated ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... the fabric of the Indian Empire. Hastings was not a great conqueror or annexer of territory; the only important acquisition made during his regime was effected, in defiance of his protests, by the hostile majority which for a time overrode him in his own council, and which condemned him for ambition. His work was to make the British rule mean security and justice in place of tyranny; and it was because it had come to mean this that it grew, after ...
— The Expansion of Europe - The Culmination of Modern History • Ramsay Muir
... only in its nature, and is not a virtue but by accident: good-nature makes friendship, but effeminacy love. Shakspeare had an universal mind, which comprehended all characters and passions; Fletcher, a more confined and limited: for though he treated love in perfection, yet honour, ambition, revenge, and generally all the stronger passions, he either touched not, or not masterly. To conclude all he ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... for rectitude in his private life, and for his unselfish discharge of public duties. He was chosen to fill many responsible offices of State, and reached the goal of personal ambition as ambassador to Venice, in 1336. His youngest son, Averardo III., acquired the sobriquet of "Bicci"—the exact meaning of which is problematical—it may mean a "worthless fellow" or "one who lives in a castle!" Nothing indeed is related ...
— The Tragedies of the Medici • Edgcumbe Staley
... Socialists; we differ widely as to ways and means; but we are all practically agreed about one thing—that the art of politics is the art of making the world happier. Each politician who has any aspirations beyond mere ambition desires to leave the world a little better than he found it. This is a commonplace of to-day. It was not a commonplace of Cowper's day. Even the great- hearted, lovable Dr. Johnson was only concerned with the passing act of kindliness to his fellows; patriotism he declared to be the ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter
... but a fact, Which, by experience back'd, Proves that a single penny, At present held, and certain, Is worth five times as many, Of Hope's, beyond the curtain; That one should be content with his condition, And shut his ears to counsels of ambition, More faithless than the wreck-strown sea, and which Doth thousands beggar where it makes one rich,— Inspires the hope of wealth, in glorious forms, And blasts the same with ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... pacing up and down the armed sentries Ramon had set. They heard still an occasional distant cheer for the new leader. Given time, they might have organized an opposition. But Culvera drove them to instant decision. They faced the imperious will of a man who would stick at nothing to satisfy his ambition. ...
— Steve Yeager • William MacLeod Raine
... all these evils was the love of power originating in avarice and ambition, and the party-spirit which is engendered by them when men are fairly embarked in a contest. For the leaders on either side used specious names, the one party professing to uphold the constitutional equality of the many, the other ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... was a man who hoarded his passions and concentrated them upon a very few objects. His work came first, and his intense ambition, and after his work, his wife. She was the right sort of wife for a man who put worldly success first, and through the years of their marriage had helped him a great deal more than he ever admitted. Clarice Wilder was beautiful, and had a surface cleverness combined with a natural gift ...
— The Pointing Man - A Burmese Mystery • Marjorie Douie
... that he was my superior in observation and deduction. If the art of the detective began and ended in reasoning from an arm-chair, my brother would be the greatest criminal agent that ever lived. But he has no ambition and no energy. He will not even go out of his way to verify his own solutions, and would rather be considered wrong than take the trouble to prove himself right. Again and again I have taken a problem to him, and have received an explanation which has afterwards proved to be the correct one. ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... doubt and fear; I know the truth, and for that truth I live. Considered from certain aspects such knowledge, I admit, is not altogether desirable. Thus it has deprived me of my interest in earthly things. Ambition has left me altogether; for years I have had no wish to succeed in the profession which I adopted in my youth, or in any other. Indeed I doubt whether the elements of worldly success still remain in me; ...
— The Mahatma and the Hare • H. Rider Haggard
... who is spotted. When such a spot occurs in the center of the forehead the Buddhists regard the beast as sacred, from the fact that the god, Buddha, is always depicted as wearing a jewel in that position and it is looked upon as his special mark of protection. It is the ambition of every Indian Rajah to possess one, for then he is billed as 'The Lord of the Sacred White Elephant,' a title which seems to fill a long-felt want in the heart of ...
— Side Show Studies • Francis Metcalfe
... farmers and mechanics, here, Much like the little brook appear; Reared 'midst fair Franklin's hills and dells, Where proud ambition seldom dwells; They view their hands for labor made, And think that God should be obeyed; Then grasp the plough and till the soil— It yields rich fruit, and corn, and oil, By which the multitude are fed. And blessings o'er the land are spread. Mechanics next should take a stand Beside ...
— The Snow-Drop • Sarah S. Mower
... grown hopeless and careless, too. Ambition seemed to have fled the Polktown Days completely, and Janice could scarcely realize that they were her father's relatives. Marty had been both a lazy and a saucy boy, associating with idle companions in the evenings and hating ...
— The Mission of Janice Day • Helen Beecher Long
... Robin Ross-Ellison vainly endeavoured to induce Mr. Augustus Clarence Percy Marmaduke Grobble to lend his countenance, as well as the rest of his person, to the European Company of the Gungapur Fusilier Volunteer Corps which it was the earnest ambition of Ross-Ellison to raise and train and consolidate into a real and genuine defence organization, with a maxim-gun, a motor-cycle and car section, and a mounted troop, and with, above all, a living and sturdy esprit-de-corps. Such a Company appeared to him to be the ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren
... nobler ambition could woman have than to be a member of that sweet sisterhood which was founded by the holy Marie de l'Incarnation and the sainted Jeanne le Ber at Montreal? It was but the other day that I had an ...
— The Refugees • Arthur Conan Doyle
... with the marks of toil, heavy and unremitting, upon them, hard-handed, stoop-shouldered, dull-eyed and awkward. These were the daughters of rich farmers. Good girls they were, too, conscientious, careful, unselfish, thinking it a virtue to stifle every ambition, smother every craving ...
— Sowing Seeds in Danny • Nellie L. McClung
... tending to our spiritual downfall. There are the voices of nature, in sky, and sea, and storm; the voices of childhood and of early youth; the voices of playfellows and companions,—voices long stilled, it may be, in death; the voices of lover and beloved; the voices of ambition, of sorrow, of aspiration, ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... pitiable case of a born naturalist whose ambition was so suppressed, and whose education so neglected in youth, that later when he came to know more about natural history than almost any man of his day, he could not write a grammatical sentence, and could ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... capable of replying. Men who had done things were there: the senator—a great lawyer—several of America's greatest business men, and the women who had helped or spurred or hindered them, but who were all worth working for or helpfully hinderous blast-furnaces to ambition. But one seat away was a man who was one of the greatest mine-owners in America, and controlled railways that were connected and dependent on these mines. Pale and sallow, with sparse hair over his big bulging ...
— Impressions of a War Correspondent • George Lynch
... answered, "are those things that are dear to man? Are they not bubbles? Is not ambition but an endless ladder by which no height is ever climbed till the last unreachable rung is mounted? For height leads on to height, and there is no resting-place upon them, and rung doth grow upon rung, and there is no limit ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... known as a self-made man, as the servant only of the voters. And now that he had fought his way to one of the goals of his ambition, now that he was district attorney of New York City, to have it said that the office was the gift of his brother-in-law was bitter. But he believed the injustice would soon end. In a month he was coming up for re-election, and night and day was conducting a campaign ...
— Somewhere in France • Richard Harding Davis
... time of his canonization (1189), but from that time forward ambition, avarice, and luxury made such inroads upon the solitude of Grammont that its monks became the byword and ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... all this he had seen no hardship. With the unconsciousness of boyhood, he worked hard and cheerfully. As time went on, the goal of his childish ambition was reached—he was sent out to work with the men! And he carried the same spirit with him, always doing his best to oblige those with ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... that brown eyes indicate a gentle and dutiful disposition. Blue eyes show three guilty tendencies—to pick-a-pie, that is, to steal; to lie a-bed, that is, to be idle; and to tell a lie. As for grey eyes, their selfish greediness and ambition could not be contented with less than the whole world. No one but a woman could have composed this scandal on the sex. Sometimes the green lanes are crossed by gates, over which the trees in the hedges ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... interest but without enthusiasm to this suggestion. Probably he remembered that an essential part of OMAR's scheme was that if the Four failed to agree they were to be promptly hanged, and had himself no ambition to take part ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, February 23, 1916 • Various
... certain influence. When he drew a chair towards the table and seated himself, the others sat down unawares, and the lawyer began his story without any further interruption. The explanation of all was, that Mr Wodehouse, like so many men, had an ambition to end his days as a country gentleman. He had set his heart for years on an estate in the neighbourhood of Carlingford, and had just completed his long-contemplated purchase at the moment of his last seizure. Nobody knew, ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... His heart burned within him, not with silly pride, but sincere gratification, on account of what he had just heard. The boy's mind was so wrapped up in the glorious possibilities that an aspiring scout ever has at his finger-tips that commendation like this always pleased him. It was Hugh's ambition to have the Oakvale Troop embrace every lad of suitable age in and around his home town. He would not have a single one refused an opportunity to enjoy those privileges and advantages which membership ...
— The Boy Scouts with the Motion Picture Players • Robert Shaler
... been interrupted in his play. Four large dolls sat solemnly round a dolls' tea-table, and a dolls' tea service was arranged in front of them. In the very centre of the room a fine castle of bricks had been rising, a perfect Tower of Babel in its frustrated ambition. ...
— The Golden Scarecrow • Hugh Walpole
... mother's conduct. She was neglected most certainly, but not neglected for frivolous amusements, or because another form had more captivated his fancy; but, in his desire to instruct others, and I may add, his ambition for renown, he applied himself to his literary pursuits, became abstracted, answered without hearing, and left his wife to amuse herself in any way she might please. A literary husband is, without exception, although always ...
— Mr. Midshipman Easy • Captain Frederick Marryat
... the allegorical web which a cunning priesthood had devised as symbolical of those mysteries of creation that it was beyond their power to comprehend. But Sarmiento happily confines himself to the mere statement of traditional fables, without the chimerical ambition to explain them. ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... whose every ambition is the kitchen, when her first dish is despatched away from ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... but withstood resolutely the arguments I used to urge him to set himself free. He declared, in earnest terms, that he was fully bent on remaining where he was rather than seek to return to his former miserable greatness, as he called it: where the seeds of pride, ambition, avarice, and luxury might revive, take root, and again overwhelm him. "Let me remain, dear sir," he said, in conclusion—"let me remain in this blessed confinement, banished from the crimes of life, rather than purchase a show of freedom at the expense of the ...
— The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe • Daniel Defoe
... for ground and shack fish a few miles off the coast. It was the only scheme which would afford employment for the whole body of dependents; older and more decrepit men and the women and children could dig and shuck clams for the trawl bait. In order to encourage ambition and independence among the abler men of the colony, Mayo suggested that the fishermen be taken on shares, ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... line, you see. Why in h——l don't you pick out somebody more in yer own bunch, like?" Curly was meaning to be only judicial, but he was cruel. Sam collapsed and sat speechless. He had long felt that his ambition ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough
... where a healthy, social intercourse is enjoyed. There a higher standard of excellence in everything is formed. He there learns that what of his own he had been led to believe was the best—whether in flocks or herds, or farm products—may be greatly improved, and his ambition and pride, as well as his interest, are at once excited to make an advance. At the same time the industrious housewife, and the blushing Miss, by an examination of the cloths and flannels—the carpets and quilts—the embroidered skirts ...
— Address delivered by Hon. Henry H. Crapo, Governor of Michigan, before the Central Michigan Agricultural Society, at their Sheep-shearing Exhibition held at the Agricultural College Farm, on Thursday, • Henry Howland Crapo
... their 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 of ...
— Narrative of New Netherland • Various
... gain her purpose. It may be the girl bore for him a better feeling than she had ever known. She wished, if possible, to win him, knowing that her father would not be slow to help him forward. The handsome youth had pleased her eye, and might, also, gratify her ambition. Those days the art of intrigue was the study of a king's daughter; so, straightway, she invented a cunning plan. Knowing the great desire of Vergilius, she bribed the priest Lugar to give him crafty counsel. ...
— Vergilius - A Tale of the Coming of Christ • Irving Bacheller
... down and slept, or seemed to sleep. But the tumultuous and contrary passions which struggled in the heart of the Blackbird—ambition on the one hand, and thirst for vengeance on the other—kept him awake without effort. In about an hour the runner half rose, and pushing back the cloak of skin which he had drawn over his head he perceived the Blackbird still sitting in the ...
— Wood Rangers - The Trappers of Sonora • Mayne Reid
... languages with increased ardor. During the whole of that period I never allowed myself more than four hours' sleep; and still unsatisfied, I very generally spent the whole night, twice a week, in the insane pursuit of those avenues to distinction to which alone my ambition was confined. I took no exercise, and the income allowed me was so small that I could not afford a meat dinner more than once a week, and at the same time set apart the half of that allowance for the purchase of books, which I had determined to do. I smoked incessantly; for I ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... Lou Meng, the author of which took pains, for political reasons, to conceal his identity, is a creation of a very high order. Its plot is intricate and original, and the denouement startlingly tragic. In the course of the story, the chief clue of which is love, woven in with intrigue, ambition, wealth, poverty, and other threads of human life, there occur no fewer than over four hundred characters, each one possessed of a distinctive personality drawn with marvellous skill. It contains incidents which recall the licence ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... commendable, for they rigidly adhered themselves to those laws which they would gladly have forced at the sword's point upon others. It is true that among so many there were some whose piety was a shell for their ambition, and others who practised in secret what they denounced in public, but no cause however good is free from such hypocritical parasites. That the greater part of the saints, as they termed themselves, were men of sober and God-fearing lives, may be shown by the fact that, ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Dick. That is why this section of the globe makes little or no progress toward civilization. Energetic men come here, with the best intention in the world of hustling, as it is termed, but soon their ambition oozes out of them like — well, like molasses out of a barrel lying on a ...
— The Rover Boys in the Jungle • Arthur M. Winfield
... introspection, he was ill at ease, for he could not fail to recognize that his sinister side was gaining ascendency. With a feeling bordering on recklessness he banished compunctions, and yielded himself more completely to the inspiration of ambition and the fascinations of Miss Ainsley. It had become evident that Mara was either engaged to Bodine or soon would be, and the thought imbittered and hardened his nature. He gave the day to business, and in the evening was rarely absent from ...
— The Earth Trembled • E.P. Roe
... cap had been replaced by a soft hat, which she commanded him to put on and then complimented him on his appearance. She did not remember when she had felt so happy. This change in him was her handiwork, and she was proud of it and fired with ambition further ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... of those men who cannot live without a woman's image to worship. Irene Derwent being now veiled from him, he turned to another beautiful face, in whose eyes the familiar light of friendship seemed to be changing, softening. Ambition had misled him; not his to triumph on the heights of glorious passion; for him a humbler happiness a calmer love. Yet he would not have been Piers Otway had this mood contented him. On the second day of ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... a free life; some fighting; but snug walls around for companionship," he continued. "Look at my soldiers now; roistering, love-making! Charles? Francis? Not one of the troop would leave me for emperor or king! Not one but would follow me—where ambition leads!" Holding up the glass, he looked into the depths of the thick burgundy. "Why, a likely fellow like you should carry a gleaming blade, not a wooden sword. I know your duke—a man of lineage—a string of titles long as my arm—an underling of the emperor, while I"—closing his great ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... the conscience of the citizen, the sentiment which induces the individual to lose himself in the mass, to submit himself to the community, to sacrifice himself to its needs,—his interest, his individuality, his egotism, his ambition, his pride, his fortune, his blood, his life, his reputation even, sometimes, to the safety of his country, to the happiness of the People, to the good of humanity, of which he is a member in the sight ...
— Atheism Among the People • Alphonse de Lamartine
... you promise the queen," resumed D'Artagnan, petulantly, "to storm the Tower of London, to kill a hundred thousand soldiers, to fight victoriously against the wishes of the nation and the ambition of a man, and when that man is Cromwell? Do not exaggerate your duty. In Heaven's name, my dear Athos, do not make a useless sacrifice. When I see you merely, you look like a reasonable being; when you speak, I seem to have to do with a madman. Come, Porthos, ...
— Twenty Years After • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... and better indited than her own, and felt herself abashed. She had hitherto paid but a superficial attention to literature. She had read, to gratify the ardour of an inextinguishable thirst of knowledge; but she had not thought of writing as an art. Her ambition to excel was now awakened, and she applied herself with passion and earnestness. Fanny undertook to be her instructor; and, so far as related to accuracy and method, her lessons were given ...
— Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman • William Godwin
... that I ever felt as depressed as I did after that interview with one who had entered a living death to ambition, for while Craig had done all the talking I had absorbed nothing but depression. I vowed that if Gregory or anybody else was responsible I would do my share toward bringing ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... considerable number of bears is to be found within the limits of the settlements. Scarcely a State in which some wild woodlands or mountain fastnesses do not afford shelter to a number of bears, and to kill one of them is a grand object of the hunter's ambition. Along the whole range of the Alleghanies black bears are yet found, and it will be long ere they are finally extirpated from such haunts. In the Western States they are still more common, where they inhabit the gloomy forests along the rivers, and creek bottoms, protected alike ...
— The Hunters' Feast - Conversations Around the Camp Fire • Mayne Reid
... committees and his speeches had made a tremendous hit. Jeff had played him up strong in the world too, so that he was becoming well known over the state. That he had risen to leadership of the progressives in the House during his first term showed his quality. His ambition vaulted. Now that his feet were on the first rungs of the ladder it would be his own fault if he did ...
— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine
... not wish to speak," continued the Secretary, "because the portrait you would paint is unflattering, but I will paint it for you—at least, the one that you have in your mind's eye. You think me sly and intriguing, eaten up by ambition, and caring for nobody in the world but myself. A true portrait, perhaps, so far as the external phases go, and the light in which I often wish to appear to the world, but not true ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... of Ellieslaw had been remarkable for a career of dissipation, which, in advanced life, he had exchanged for the no less destructive career of dark and turbulent ambition. In both cases, he had gratified the predominant passion without respect to the diminution of his private fortune, although, where such inducements were wanting, he was deemed close, avaricious, and grasping. His affairs being much embarrassed by his earlier extravagance, he went to England, where ...
— The Black Dwarf • Sir Walter Scott
... not bearing them with the surly Dignity of a Briton. I could almost hear this fellow grimace; and he was never tired of bemoaning his bygone happy state as a Hairdresser's Journeyman in the Rue St. Honore at Paris. "Why did a Vain Ambition prompt me to journey from Marseilles to Constantinople?" cried he about Fifty times a day. "Why did I rely on the protection of my Wife's Cousin, who gave me recommendations to his brother, Cook-in-Chief to the Ambassador of France at the court of the Antique Byzantium (l'antique Byzance)? ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 3 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... his word suffered somewhat in Harry's estimation; for he waited all day, and all evening, without hearing a word from the firm of Wake & Wade. He had actually begun to doubt whether the accomplished young man had as much influence with the firm as he had led him to suppose. But his ambition would not permit him longer to be satisfied with the humble sphere of a stable boy; and he determined, if he did not hear from Edward, to apply for the ...
— Try Again - or, the Trials and Triumphs of Harry West. A Story for Young Folks • Oliver Optic
... shadow of concealment. In society the graceful hypocrisy of his deportment was beautiful to contemplate, like any other exhibition of the highest art. If benevolence was the fashion, then General Harrington was the perfection of philanthropy. Nay, as it was his ambition to lead, the exemplary gentleman sometimes made a little exertion to render benevolence the rage! His name often lead in committees for charity festivals, and he was particularly interested in seeing that the funds were distributed with the most distinguished elegance, ...
— Mabel's Mistake • Ann S. Stephens
... Pope—it is a squabble worthy a Stuart. Were he, here, as absolute as any Stuart ever wished to be, who knows with all his bigotry but he might favour us with a reformation and the downfall of the mass? The ambition of making a Duke of York vice-chancellor of holy church would be as good a reason for breaking with holy church, as Harry the Eighth's was for quarrelling with it, because it would not excuse him from going to bed to his sister after it ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole
... make his hunting implements himself. Here, indeed, was required patience, perseverance, and resourcefulness, for his only tools were his knife and his ax, and his only material such as the wilderness produced; and to gain Abel's praise, which was his high ambition, he must needs do his work with care and niceness. And thus Bobby was learning to be a man ...
— Bobby of the Labrador • Dillon Wallace
... the last of the innumerable herds of buffalo that Lewis and Clark saw here, at the great fork of the road into the Rockies; and soon the last pelt was baled from the beaver. If you go to the Blackfeet now you find them a thinned and broken people, and the highest ambition of their best men is to dress up in modern beef-hide finery and play circus Indian ...
— The Young Alaskans on the Missouri • Emerson Hough
... no home now; so she resolved to go around and say good-by to her friends and then clear out and see the world—that is to say, she would go chambermaiding on a steamboat, the darling ambition ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the world without ambition, who like to live a quiet, decent, homely life. Every girl can't marry a Geheimer-Ober-Hofbaurath. Ziska, now, is much more likely to marry the ...
— Stories By English Authors: Germany • Various
... appears that 'the Cook,' at the royal and feudal courts, sometimes played an important part during the times of Ku. 'The beautiful wife,' no doubt, was the well-known Sze of Po, raised by king Y from her position as one of his concubines to be his queen, and whose insane folly and ambition led to her husband's death, and great and disastrous changes in ...
— The Shih King • James Legge
... the vapour, for fear I should be steamed, like a potato; the sitz seemed as inadequate as a thwarted ambition; and to turn on the shower without knowing how much it could do, or how soon it could be stopped, appeared a desperate adventure. After all, I thought, it was less worrying with us. Here, whichever thing you chose, you would probably wish you had had the other, ...
— Lady Betty Across the Water • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... I might have been as good a man as the best of you. I might have been a man of genius, if I had had the chance; ay, and have lived with the master-spirits of the land. But everything hads ailed with me. I'd ambition once, and wrote plays, poems, music—nobody would give me a hearing. I never loved a woman, but she laughed at me; and here I am in my old age alone—alone! Don't take this girl from me, Mr. Pendennis, I say again. Leave her with me a little longer. ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... restoration, the Harley of that day displayed a rare modesty. The king offered him a viscounty, but he declined the honor, "lest his zeal and services for the restoration of the ancient government should be reproached as proceeding from ambition, and not conscience;" and so scrupulous was he that his being made a knight of the Bath even was done without his knowledge, he being then at Dunkirk, and Charles inserting with his own hand his name ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. • Various
... county; he was a man of fine presence, but of jealous, ambitious, overbearing temper. He combined with his fondness for Indian and hunter life a strong taste for books, and gradually collected a large library. So keen were the jealousies, bred of ambition, between himself and his cousin William Campbell, they being the two ranking officers of the local forces, that they finally agreed to go alternately on the different military expeditions; and thus it happened that Arthur ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Two - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1777-1783 • Theodore Roosevelt
... million. To make themselves perfectly happy, to be able to devour the finances of the State, to live at the expense of the Treasury like a son of the family, this is what is called their policy. Their ambition has a true ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... ennui shall not drive you, like myself, prematurely from the world so soon as the season for pleasure shall have ended, you should leave the emotions of ambition and of public life for the gratification of your riper age. Do not enter into any engagements with the reigning government, and reserve for yourself to hear its eulogium made by those who will have subverted it. That is ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... that he had the whole twenty books; that was his ambition, his academic dream of wealth; but we are assured that he spent on books all the money he could borrow from his friends, and that he showed his gratitude by busily praying for the souls ...
— Printing and the Renaissance - A paper read before the Fortnightly Club of Rochester, New York • John Rothwell Slater
... all, a stranger to me. His ambition leads him onward and upward. He would tread on my body gladly in mounting to the great monopolist's confidence. It is easy enough to see why Ferris has played both the spy and lickspittle. It has paid him well. Here's a jump to handling ...
— The Midnight Passenger • Richard Henry Savage
... kind who lived through the wall from Mrs. Sandys, but beneath her were the two rooms of Hankey, the postman, and his lodger, the dreariest of middle-aged clerks except when telling wistfully of his ambition, which was to get out of the tea department into the coffee department, where there is an easier way of counting up the figures. Shovel and family were also on this floor, and in the rooms under them was a newly married couple. ...
— Sentimental Tommy - The Story of His Boyhood • J. M. Barrie
... exquisite little dinner Viola sat with a strengthening determination to assert her right to leave her gloomy prison-house on the Drive, a house in which there was neither wholesome conversation nor privacy nor order. An ambition to live humanly and harmoniously in an apartment like this grew each moment in definiteness. She appreciated the delicacy of the centre-piece of maidenhair-fern, veiling with its cloud of green a few flame-like jonquils. She took a woman's joy in ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... fingers were in the newspapers, his heart yearned for the theater. This ambition was heightened by the fact that his brother Daniel, having heeded the lure of Gustave, joined the Callender Minstrels as advance-agent, while Gustave remained back with the show. Slowly but surely the theater was annexing ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... attired like an ordinary civilian, no one would have taken him for one of England's bravest and most efficient sea-captains; he would have passed rather as some thoughtful, well-educated, and refined gentleman, of retired habits, diffident of himself, and a stranger to ambition. He wore an undress rear-admiral's uniform, as a matter of course; but he wore it carelessly, as if from a sense of duty only; or conscious that no arrangement could give him a military air. Still all about his person was faultlessly neat, and perfectly respectable. In a word, no one but ...
— The Two Admirals • J. Fenimore Cooper
... difficulty. But something might be done in that way,- -some time might be gained. And then there was always that never- failing resource and consolation of those who, in the words of Horace, limit their ambition to adapting themselves to circumstances instead of adapting circumstances to them, something might turn up; though, for the present, it was difficult to see what that something could possibly be, unless it were the death of his uncle, a perfectly ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... wet day in the early spring of 1920, and Chicago was doing her best to show her utter indifference to anyone's opinion as to what spring weather ought to be. It was the sort of day when, if you had any ambition left after a dreary winter, you began to plot ...
— Across the Mesa • Jarvis Hall
... John, with Mr. Jervis for his handicap, played against Anthony and Mr. Norris. The very young Norris fielded. All afternoon he had hoped to distinguish himself by catching some ball in full flight as it went "out." It was a pure and high ambition, for he knew he was so young and unimportant that only the eyes of God and of ...
— The Tree of Heaven • May Sinclair
... language. What pictures of beauty dawned on my rapt eyesight, faces sweet as wuz ever dremp on, sad faces, tragic faces, old faces and young faces; children sweet and bonny as wuz ever seen. Youth and love, age and manhood and gratified ambition, princes and paupers, life ...
— Samantha at the St. Louis Exposition • Marietta Holley
... Ludwig Christmann (1780-1835) was a protestant clergyman and teacher of mathematics. For a while he taught under Pestalozzi. Disappointed in his ambition to be professor of mathematics at Tubingen, he became a confirmed misanthrope and is said never to have left his house during the last ten years of his life. He wrote several works: Ein Wort ueber Pestalozzi und Pestalozzismus ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... months hence I shall have to go down in two little boats—even now the dahabiehs keep sticking fast continually. I have promised some neighbours to bring back a little seed corn for them, some of the best English wheat without beard. All the wheat here is bearded and they have an ambition for some of ours. I long to bring them wheelbarrows and spades and pickaxes. The great folks get steamploughs, but the labourers work with their bare hands and a rush basket pour tout potage, and it takes six to do the work of one ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... am one who has witnessed time's mutations on man and on his works, and I have pitied neither; I have seen the fall of empires, and sighed not that high reaching ambition was toppled to the dust. I have seen the grave close over the young and the beautiful—those whom I have doomed by my insatiable thirst for human blood to death, long ere the usual span of life was past, but I ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... too, was seized with educational ambition, and accompanied Will to school. We tried to drive him home, but he followed at a distance, and as we entered the schoolhouse, he emerged from the shrubbery by the roadside and crept under ...
— Last of the Great Scouts - The Life Story of William F. Cody ["Buffalo Bill"] • Helen Cody Wetmore
... our spending money to necessary clothes and food? The truth is, we all of us spend anything we like as long as it goes on our backs, or down our throats; but the moment it comes to supportin' missionaries we think 'em worldly and graspin' if they show any ambition beyond second-hand clothes." ...
— Hepsey Burke • Frank Noyes Westcott
... of his ministry, though from the very commencement of it he enjoyed that sense of the love of God which "keeps the heart and mind." (Phil. 4:7.) This was the true secret of his holy walk, and of his calm humility. But for this, his ambition would have become the only principle of many an action; but now the sweeter love of God constrained him, and the natural ambition of his spirit could be discerned only as suggesting to him the idea of making attempts which others ...
— The Biography of Robert Murray M'Cheyne • Andrew A. Bonar
... she retorted. "Do you think we come into the world to let fate be our master? Why have I royal blood and royal views, wealth, understanding and ambition, while the others have blindness and vague yearnings? ...
— Caves of Terror • Talbot Mundy
... Consider yourselves as the soldiers of the all powerful God, who alone has conducted you to victory; for, with a few, has he not enabled us to subdue a host? Behave as becomes your high destiny; and debase not yourselves by imitating the hirelings of ambition, who receive, as the wages of their valor, the base privilege to ravage and ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... atmosphere of intrigue and mystery, for her detective father had been accustomed to argue his cases and their perplexities with his only child and for hours at a time he would instruct her in all the details of his profession. It was O'Gorman's ambition that his daughter might become a highly proficient ...
— Mary Louise in the Country • L. Frank Baum (AKA Edith Van Dyne)
... power have been staining and darkening all the ages of human administration, and, unfortunately, among professing Christians as well as among pagans and Jews. Intolerance is so rooted in the selfishness and ambition of human nature that it has ever been one of the most difficult of practical problems to curb and regulate it. Those who have most complained of it whilst feeling it, often only needed to have the circumstances reversed in order to fall into similar ...
— Luther and the Reformation: - The Life-Springs of Our Liberties • Joseph A. Seiss
... emboldened to gather a little blossom of the blue jay and hand it to her shyly. He wanted to tell her that the fire-weed was like her cheeks and the blue jay like her eyes, but he could not. He knew Christina's ambition, and he was too proud to play the lover when he was ...
— In Orchard Glen • Marian Keith
... to be fighting for national liberty. As a matter of fact, Paraguayan liberty was not threatened for an instant, and Lopez declared war against both Brazil and the Argentine Republic out of mere ambition to be a second Napoleon. His solitary qualifications for the character were that, like his prototype, he was fat and loved women. The war commenced in 1865 and finished in 1870, and left the country almost a desert. So lonely was it, that I have often in those days seen tigers calmly ...
— A Vanished Arcadia, • R. B. Cunninghame Graham
... the confederate princes, he represented in a set speech the dangers to which they were exposed from the power and ambition of France; and the necessity of acting with vigour and dispatch. He declared he would spare neither his credit, forces, nor person, in concurring with their measures; and that in the spring he would come at the head of his troops to fulfil his engagements. They forthwith ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... as he had been formerly. As he lost ambition he began to find less work to do. His wrath at the usurping Chases increased as he slowly realized his powerlessness to cope with such men. They were promoters, men of big interests and wide influence in the Southwest. The more ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... him his chieftainship of the Galus. He has a large following of the newer Galus, those most recently come up from the Kro-lu, and as this class is usually much more powerful numerically than the older Galus, and as Du-seen's ambition knows no bounds, we have for a long time been expecting him to find some excuse for a break with Jor ...
— The People that Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... (Plausible) and Euelpides (Hopeful), whose names and deeds are perhaps a satire on the unbounded ambition that brought ruin on Athens at Syracuse, journey to Birdland and persuade King Hoopoe to induce the birds to build Nephelococcygia or Cloud-Cuckoo-Burgh in the air between the gods and men, starve out the gods with a "Melian famine," and rule the world themselves. The gods, their supplies ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... been suggested, Walter Neal's ambition was to erect a grist-mill a certain distance up the Pascataqua River, where was great need of one, since land in that portion of the province was being rapidly settled; and, although without capital, he believed it might be possible for ...
— Neal, the Miller - A Son of Liberty • James Otis
... love it. I'm as lazy as a cat," she said, settling with her pantherine grace among the cushions. "Do you know what has been my ambition ever ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... flat foot. Nor is he less distinctly marked by his mental characteristics. Content to repose on the bosom of his mother terra firma, he is not disturbed by dreams of honor, wealth or fame. He does not with the white man possess that towering ambition, that soars aloft in climes ethereal. There is with the African no motive to spur him to action; no incentive to the acquisition of wealth; no aspiration for power; no desire for honor or fame. Self reliance and enterprise, are the peculiar characteristics of the ...
— A Review of Uncle Tom's Cabin - or, An Essay on Slavery • A. Woodward
... high strain. I am sorry I burnt one of his Letters, wherein he assured me he would in the Versailles Antechamber itself speak of me to the King, and that my name had actually been mentioned at the King's Levee. It certainly is not my ambition to choose this illustrious mortal to publish my renown; on the contrary, I should think it soiled by such a mouth, and prostituted if he were the publisher. But enough of the Crochet: the kindest thing we can do for so contemptible an object is ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. IX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... he did not continue to wash shop-windows all his life or why the Western Union's office-boy did not grow up to be a mere clerk or local manager. In the important chapters entitled "The Chances for Success" and "What I Owe to America" they will learn that ambition and industry must be supplemented by other admirable qualities in the loyal American who is eager to serve ...
— A Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward Bok
... remind us of our conversation this morning. If Washington be the meeting-place of all living, it is the grand cemetery of the dead. Look around us here! We see monuments to Senators and Members; graves of foreigners and strangers; names of the great, the rich, the powerful, men of genius and ambition. Strewed along are the poor, the lowly, the unlearned, the infant, ...
— Aunt Phillis's Cabin - Or, Southern Life As It Is • Mary H. Eastman
... keep him engaged when he is in retreat. Such men, if I can get them drilled and trained to the perfection I want, will be invaluable. You see, I have plenty of schemes," he added, with a laugh. "All ambition, I suppose. No, not all," he continued, earnestly; "for I want my nation to be great, and my people prosperous and well governed. It is not from the greed of conquest, Gil, nor the love of blood. I hope it is something better; ...
— Gil the Gunner - The Youngest Officer in the East • George Manville Fenn
... his comrade's point of view. In the first place, this would probably make Vane only more determined or would ruffle his temper; and, in the second place, Carroll was neither a covetous man nor an ambitious one, which, perhaps, was fortunate for him. Ambition, the mother of steadfast industry and heroic effort, has also a less ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss
... of savage cruelty, it can no longer boast of the noble and generous principles which dignify a soldier. No longer sympathize with the dignity of the royal banner, nor feel the pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war that makes ambition virtue. What makes ambition virtue? the sense of honour. But is this sense of honour consistent with the spirit of plunder, or the practice of murder? Can it flow from mercenary motives? or can it ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 2 (of 5) • John Marshall
... whose talents, had not been recognized at headquarters, I possessed an ambition which, fortunately for my standing with the lieutenant of the precinct, had not yet been expressed in words. Though I had small reason for expecting great things of myself, I had always cherished the hope that if a big case came my ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... does more to make him than anything else. It hardens his muscles, strengthens his body, quickens his blood, sharpens his mind, corrects his judgment, wakes up his inventive genius, puts his wits to work, starts him on the race of life, arouses his ambition, makes him feel that he is a man and must fill a man's shoes, do a man's work, bear a man's part in life, and show himself a man in that part. No man feels himself a man who is not doing a man's business. A man without employment is not a man. He does not prove by his works ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... sixty of his companions, pilots, sailors and passengers certified upon oath that the southern coast of Cuba was a part of the continent of India. The description of the treasures of Cathay and Cipango, of the celestial town of Quinsay and the province of Mango, which had fired the admiral's ambition in early life, pursued him like phantoms in his declining days. In his fourth and last voyage, on approaching the coast of Cariay (Poyais or Mosquito Coast), Veragua and the Isthmus, he believed himself to be near the mouth ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V3 • Alexander von Humboldt
... weasel, curled up on his divan in the elm, was thinking over the extraordinary good fortune that had befallen him. Yet such was his sagacity that even when thus about to attain almost the topmost pinnacle of his ambition, he did not forget the instability of affairs, but sought to confirm his position, or even to advance it. He reflected that Kapchack was not only cunning beyond everything ever known, but he was just now a prey to anxieties, and consumed with jealousy, which upset the tenor of ...
— Wood Magic - A Fable • Richard Jefferies
... month—practically my whole time has been given up to it, with a little fishing thrown in in the spring. As I want to make the most of myself, I will add that I am supposed to be among the six best shots in England, and that my ambition—yes, great Heavens! my ambition—was to become better than the other five. By that sin fell the poor man who speaks to you. I was supposed to have abilities, but I neglected them all to pursue this form of idleness. I entered no profession, ...
— Benita, An African Romance • H. Rider Haggard
... is more complex than the mind of man? And as, in all machinery, there are wheels and springs of action not apparent without close examination of the interior, so pride, ambition, avarice, love, play alternately or conjointly upon the human mind, which, under their influence, is whirled round like the weathercock in the hurricane, only pointing for a short time in one direction, ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... something that precedes all persons, all particular beings. It was there before heaven was; all things are from it and return to it at last. It is the principle at the root and the beginning of all things, by which they move, without haste or struggle, ambition or confusion. Existing first absolute and undeveloped, it has now been expressed; men can know it, and the secret of all goodness, all success both for the individual and for the state, is to know Tao and live in it. This makes a man superior ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... perceiving the whip threw down his master. He adopted on his arms the device, "Cur non?"—"Why not?" Before landing in America in 1777 he wrote to his wife: "I but offer my services to that interesting republic from motives of the purest kind, unmixed with ambition or private views: her happiness and my glory are my only incentives to the task. I hope that, for my sake, you will be a good American, for that feeling is worthy of every noble heart. The happiness of America is intimately connected with the happiness of all mankind; she will become ...
— The Spirit of Lafayette • James Mott Hallowell
... a vain ambition, In his feeble, reckless hand, The sword of Eternal Justice Became but ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various
... a man in judgment and character. This precipitate development of the intellectual life in him, produced naturally enough an appreciable enlargement of the ego. The young eagle had abruptly awakened to the knowledge that he possessed wings; and wings were for use—to soar with. Ambition, the desire to mount aloft, touched and fired the boy's mind. As he read, studied, and observed, while his hands were busy with his work, there was a constant fluttering going on in the eyrie of his thoughts. By an instinct analogous to that which ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... have a mathematical head," rejoined Mr. Clare; "say he shall possess industry, ambition, and firmness of purpose. Pooh! pooh! you don't look at him with my impartial eyes. I say, No mathematics, no industry, no ambition, no firmness of purpose. Frank is a compound of negatives—and ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... had much to think of and yet was bereft of the power of thought. There was, for example, that question of the Dobrutscha and the navigation of the mouths of the Danube which was ripe for settlement. The Russian Chancellor had sent a masterly statement upon the subject, and it was the pet ambition of our Minister to answer it in a worthy fashion. Then there was the blockade of Crete, and the British fleet lying off Cape Matapan, waiting for instructions which might change the course of European history. And there were those ...
— Round the Red Lamp - Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life • Arthur Conan Doyle
... an opportunity of coming before the public, though in a manner which rather resembled stepping up behind a carriage than getting into one. The Antiquary was indeed uncommonly delighted; for, like many other men who spend their lives in obscure literary research, he had a secret ambition to appear in print, which was checked by cold fits of diffidence, fear of criticism, and habits of indolence and procrastination. "But," thought he, "I may, like a second Teucer, discharge my shafts from behind the shield of my ally; and, admit that he should not prove to be a first-rate poet, I ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... and virtue were as natural as her prejudices; she believed that marriage was the close of female ambition, and marrying her children was the only innovation to be permitted. Certain accomplishments she thought due to woman, but none of them must become masculine in prosecution; a professional woman she shrank from as from an infidel ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... eyes chilled and repelled me and from the moment when I had approached him, and seen him fold his hands behind him, and recoil a step as he inquired with suppressed sternness, "What do you want?" there had fallen away from me all further ambition to learn the nature of the songs ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... perfectly the weariness of all things mortal and the sweet delight of rest. I find I must practice breathing more deeply, if I wish to render the voluptuous, sinuous lines. Don't you think this is a great ambition, to read Swinburne well? I am so glad to find something to do, something I love to do. Perhaps I may ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... quite agreed with my brothers and wanted impetuously to start afresh in pursuit of the career in Wall Street he had forsworn, willing and eager—the darling!—to throw away ambition, change his inherited tastes, abandon his cultivated talents, and forget the five years he had "squandered in riotous learning," as he ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... moreover, any great value to the enlargement of Bavaria, Saxony, and Russia. Only the aggrandizement of France by the extension of our frontiers to the boundaries of Turkey was to be the object of our ambition. Having attained this, we will yield as to the cession of other territories, and be satisfied with less, provided that Austria accept unreservedly and fully the two other conditions ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... and to consider their gain as its own loss. Commerce, which ought naturally to be, among nations as among individuals, a bond of union and friendship, has become the most fertile source of discord and animosity. The capricious ambition of kings and ministers has not, during the present and the preceding century, been more fatal to the repose of Europe, than the impertinent jealousy of merchants and manufacturers. The violence and injustice of the rulers of mankind is an ancient evil, for which, I am afraid, the nature ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... Prince, whose company and virtues were such as made me to propose to him a method how he might obtain his liberty. My dear friend, said he, as I am here happily free from my miserable greatness with all its attendants of pride, ambition, avarice, and luxury, if I should escape from this place, those pernicious seeds may again revive, to my lasting disquietude; therefore let me remain in a blessed confinement, for I am but flesh, a mere man, with passions and affections as such; O be not my friend and tempter ...
— The Life and Most Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of - York, Mariner (1801) • Daniel Defoe
... other's society, this feeling gradually ripened into love. Honorable and high-minded in all things, young Montgomery did not conceal his fondness for Lizzie, and it was generally known that he was her lover. But her father, a man of great wealth and ambition, did not approve of what he chose to call her childish fancy, and, being desirous that his daughters should form brilliant marriages, frowned scornfully on the suit of one who had only his irreproachable ...
— 'Three Score Years and Ten' - Life-Long Memories of Fort Snelling, Minnesota, and Other - Parts of the West • Charlotte Ouisconsin Van Cleve
... a cat—by proxy of my oxygen I should be raging and fuming in some other creatures—a rat, perhaps; I should be smiling and hoping in still another child of Nature—heir to my hydrogen—a weed, or a cabbage, or something; my carbonic acid (ambition) would be dreaming dreams in some lowly wood-violet that was longing for a showy career; thus my details would be doing as much feeling as ever, but I should not be aware of it, it would all be going on for the benefit ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... 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
... Sardis in form, receives a "bolt from the blue" in the shape of a letter "From the unhappy Mandane to the faithless"—himself! She has learnt, she tells him, that his feelings towards her are changed, requests that she may no longer serve as a pretext for his ambition, and—rather straining the prerogatives assumed even by her nearest ancestresses in literature, the Polisardas and Miraguardas of the Amadis group, but scarcely dreamt of by the heroines of ancient Greek Romance—desires ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... acutely and poignantly as I could—what it is we are really fighting for; what is the character of the enemy we are up against; what are the sufferings, outrages, and devastations which have been inflicted on France, in particular, by the wanton cruelty and ambition of Germany; for which she herself must be made to suffer and pay, if civilisation and freedom are ...
— Towards The Goal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... a lump of clay is lifted to the wheel by the potter's hand, and under gentle pressure takes on the lines of a beautiful cup or vase, so man sets forth a mere mass of mind; soon, under the gentle touch of love, hope, ambition, he stands forth in the aspect of a Cromwell, ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... that would give them a chance of making it not only a monetary success, but one that would give Spanish autocracy another shattering blow. These ancient mariners never trifled with life, and no sombre views or fatal shadows disturbed their spirited ambition or caused them to shrink from their strenuous and stupendous work. They went forth in their cockleshell fleet as full of hope and confidence as those who are accustomed to sail and man a transatlantic liner of the present day. Some of ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman |
