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Ambition   /æmbˈɪʃən/   Listen
noun
Ambition  n.  
1.
The act of going about to solicit or obtain an office, or any other object of desire; canvassing. (Obs.) "(I) used no ambition to commend my deeds."
2.
An eager, and sometimes an inordinate, desire for preferment, honor, superiority, power, or the attainment of something. "Cromwell, I charge thee, fling a way ambition: By that sin fell the angels." "The pitiful ambition of possessing five or six thousand more acres."



verb
Ambition  v. t.  To seek after ambitiously or eagerly; to covet. (R.) "Pausanias, ambitioning the sovereignty of Greece, bargains with Xerxes for his daughter in marriage."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Ambition" Quotes from Famous Books



... respectable origin, and he inherited his military tastes from his father, who became a general in the English army. He had few advantages of education in his youth, though in later life he became studious, and had much love for mathematics. A soldier's life was his ambition, and fame was his dominating impulse. His indomitable spirit governed his physical weakness. The natural kindness of his nature rose superior to the irritability sometimes caused by his ill-health, and made ...
— Canada • J. G. Bourinot

... hit the rail a sudden blow, viciously, as though she could be made to feel pain. And yet he could not do without er; he needed her; he must hang on to her tooth and nail to keep his head above water till the expected flood of fortune came sweeping up and landed him safely on the high shore of his ambition. ...
— End of the Tether • Joseph Conrad

... resolve; yet it was there, in my heart and upon my lips. I had come upon the field late, come in the wrong uniform, but I was sufficiently in earnest now. The girl liked me, served me, and she interested me as no other ever had. Her very moods, piquant, reserved, aroused my ambition, stimulated my purpose, and Le Gaire—the very thought of him was a thorn in the flesh. I have wondered since if I really loved her then; I do not know, but I dreamed of her, idealized her, my heart throbbing at every unusual sound without, hoping she might come again. I could hear ...
— Love Under Fire • Randall Parrish

... and honor in life, and after death brave funeral and a splendid mausoleum:—this world, where, since its making, war has never ceased, nor man paused in the sad task of torturing and murdering his brother; and of which ambition, avarice, envy, hatred, lust, and the rest of Ahriman's and Typhon's army make a Pandemonium: this world, sunk in sin, reeking with baseness, clamorous with sorrow and misery. If any see in it also a type of the sorrow of the Craft for the ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike

... exquisite pleasure, to lash us with scorpion-like whips. The love of Bernard Maddison had thrilled through heart and soul—it had become not a thing of his life, but his whole life. Every impulse and passion of his being had yielded itself up to it. Ambition, intellectual visions, imaginative fancies, all these had been not indeed driven out by this passion, but more fatal still, they had opened their arms to receive it, they had bidden it welcome, and heart and brain and imagination had glowed with a new significance ...
— The New Tenant • E. Phillips Oppenheim


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