"Ambitious" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Her ambitious vision was disturbed by the crowd rushing forward; the gates were thronged with people of every age and sex, and Wallace himself appeared on his white charger, with his helmet off, bowing and smiling upon ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... first of these two charges respects a supposed pedantry, or too ambitious a display of erudition. It is surprising to us that such an objection should have occurred to any man; both because, after all, the quantity of learning cannot be great for which any poem can find an opening; ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... of a certain eminent poet and artist, once the poet of love and dreamland, "the idle singer of an empty day," now seer and prophet, the herald of an age to come, in which none shall possess, though all shall enjoy. The brothers, more ambitious, attacked her through the reason, brought her popular translations and selections from Marx and Lassalle, together with each Venturist pamphlet and essay as it appeared; they flattered her with technical talk; they were ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... names of any military persons who, according to custom, frequently made offers of their services to the heir apparent, and of causing them to take a solemn oath to keep their engagements. No other indications of warlike talent, however, have been preserved concerning him. "He was crafty, ambitious, cruel, violent," says the envoy Suriano, "a hater of buffoons, a lover of soldiers." His natural cruelty seems to have been remarkable from his boyhood. After his return from the chase, he was in the habit of cutting the throats of hares ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... has always been a dream of ambitious English statesmen, but the policy of the British Government has always been ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 42, August 26, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... applications and endeavours of the Hoste will tend always to correspond to the tastes and desires of their customers which will require without doubt to him into that town the reputation whome, he is ambitious.'' ...
— Literary Blunders • Henry B. Wheatley
... get ambitious. He gave all his money to his mother. When he earned fourteen shillings a week, she gave him back two for himself, and, as he never drank, he felt himself rich. He went about with the bourgeois of Bestwood. The townlet contained ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... reality. While the Monks were busied in rooting out his virtues and narrowing his sentiments, they allowed every vice which had fallen to his share to arrive at full perfection. He was suffered to be proud, vain, ambitious, and disdainful: He was jealous of his Equals, and despised all merit but his own: He was implacable when offended, and cruel in his revenge. Still in spite of the pains taken to pervert them, his natural good qualities would occasionally break through the ...
— The Monk; a romance • M. G. Lewis
... this ambitious proposition, Mrs. Cannon threw Cy James, by main strength, through the window of her bar, into her kitchen, and he bawled like a baby, yet came out of his grief muttering, "Ploughin', ploughin'! I'll make her into batter and fry ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... 'Beautiful! magnificent! lovely! exquisite! name your price;' and they buy it. Here the public look and look. 'Not bad,' they say, 'but the color is from Veronese, and that attitude is surely Raphael's. What a mine that man's genius has been to ambitious but less gifted artists!' and so they go on. I wish they would let the dead rest in peace. Are you acquainted with Mr. B—— of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... consoler of hearts—turns to a raging wild-beast when it stoops to become religious partisanship. If you would really understand Christianity you must look neither down to the deluded masses, and those ambitious worldlings who only use it as a means to an end by inflaming their baser passions, nor up to the throne, where power translates the impulse of a disastrous moment into sinister deeds. If you want to know what true and pure Christianity is, look into our homes, look at the family ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... her ambitious soul, Andrea too readily flung away all his brilliant prospects to return, and willingly take again the yoke of the burden of his wife and her family. He made promises that he would bring her back to Paris with him, and the king in all faith allowed him to depart, confiding to him large sums of money ...
— Fra Bartolommeo • Leader Scott (Re-Edited By Horace Shipp And Flora Kendrick)
... was seventy-six years old,—and had at that time produced 114 volumes, of which the first was not written till she was fifty. Her career offers great encouragement to those who have not begun early in life, but are still ambitious to do something before ...
— Autobiography of Anthony Trollope • Anthony Trollope
... the air, and look into it, filled to the brim with beauty as I knew it was. But I had not long to wait, for speedily it became too full, and ran over into the outside world. On the eighth day one ambitious youngster stepped upon the branch beside the nest and shook himself out, and on the ninth came the plunge into the wide, wide world. While I was at breakfast he made his first effort, and on my return I saw him on a branch about a foot below the nest, the last step on papa's winding ...
— A Bird-Lover in the West • Olive Thorne Miller
... wife. We have lived together eight years. In the country he was very good to me, but his mother died last year and left him seventeen hundred francs. He would come to Paris, and since then I don't know what to make of him. He's ambitious and a spendthrift, and at the end of two months we came ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VIII • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... was the ambitious citizen's legal domicile. His establishment consisted of a woman-cook and a valet; he hired two extra men, and had a dinner sent in by Chevet, whenever he gave a banquet to his political friends, to men he wanted to dazzle or ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... 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 ...
— Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata - Part I: Concerning God • Benedict de Spinoza
... I have only my wife's verdict, and I have found that, as is the way with many good women, her judgments of her own sex are rather merciless. A tall, handsome girl, very dark, my wife has characterized her as cold, calculating and ambitious. She has said frequently, too, that Elinor Wells was a disappointed woman, that her marriage, while giving her social identity, had disappointed her in a monetary way. Whether that is true or not, there was no doubt, by the time they had lived in our neighborhood for a year, that a complication ...
— Sight Unseen • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... there are many branches of a tribal family, some found as far west as British Burma and all more or less scattered and disorganized as the result of this silent oppression going on through the years, who still are ambitious of preserving their independent isolation, particularly in sparsely-populated spheres far removed from political activity. So remote are the districts in which these principalities are found, that the Chinese themselves are entirely ignorant of the characteristics of these tribes. They say of one ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... stick at nothing, and with you as my right hand I should feel myself free to undertake deeds that I have only dared to dream of thus far, while, with our views brought into accord, we should be as brothers to each other. I am ambitious, Dugdale, and I tell you that if you will join me we can and will revive the glories of the old buccaneering days and make ourselves feared and reverenced all over the globe; we will be sea-kings, you and I. What need is there ...
— The Pirate Slaver - A Story of the West African Coast • Harry Collingwood
... superfluous things, when it were more honour for us if we could contemn necessary. What need hath Nature of silver dishes, multitudes of waiters, delicate pages, perfumed napkins? She requires meat only, and hunger is not ambitious. Can we think no wealth enough but such a state for which a man may be brought into a praemunire, begged, proscribed, or poisoned? O! if a man could restrain the fury of his gullet and groin, and think how many fires, how many kitchens, cooks, pastures, and ploughed lands; ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... [Footnote: It would be easy, but invidious, to produce passages from Park's work more or less marked with some of the characteristics of Mr. Edwards's style, and, in particular, with that tendency to ambitious ornament, which is so conspicuous in many parts of the History of the West Indies.—The following extract from Park's chapter on the state of Slavery in Africa, may be sufficient. "In a country divided into a thousand petty states, mostly independent, and ...
— The Journal Of A Mission To The Interior Of Africa, In The Year 1805 • Mungo Park
... the Eighty-eighth Year of American Independence, we may well ask ourselves what right we have to indulge in public rejoicings. If the war in which we are engaged is an accidental one, which might have been avoided but for our fault; if it is for any ambitious or unworthy purpose on our part; if it is hopeless, and we are madly persisting in it; if it is our duty and in our power to make a safe and honorable peace, and we refuse to do it; if our free institutions are in danger of becoming subverted, and giving place to ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... before any attempt was made to reduce theory to practise. Then an eccentric English country gentleman, Henry Winstanley, who dabbled in mechanical engineering upon unorthodox lines, came forward and offered to build a lighthouse upon the terrible rocks. Those who knew this ambitious amateur were dubious of his success, and wondered what manifestation his eccentricity would assume on this occasion. Nor was their scepticism entirely misplaced. Winstanley raised the most fantastic lighthouse which has ever been known, and which would have been more at ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors - Vol. II Great Britain And Ireland, Part Two • Francis W. Halsey
... offers earnest prayers for the golden shower. The voluptuary gratifies every craving sense, rejoices in the midnight revel, renders himself vile, and yet tells you he is in the chase of happiness. The ambitious man, conceiving that the great desideratum blossoms on the sceptre, and hangs in rich clusters from the throne, consumes one half of his life, and embitters the other half, in climbing the giddy elevation of royalty. ...
— Golden Steps to Respectability, Usefulness and Happiness • John Mather Austin
... the true era of the Laureateship. Charles, in 1630, became ambitious to signalize his reign by some fitting tribute to literature. A petition from Ben Jonson pointed out the way. The Laureate office was made a patentable one, in the gift of the Lord Chamberlain, as purveyor of the royal amusements. Ben was ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... success; indeed, so highly was she regarded that nothing she chose to write, however poor, could fail. And she certainly did write a good deal of poor stuff: it was all in a sense poor, but books and books, poor soul, she had to write. It was in a sense poor because it was mostly ambitious stuff, and, as the proverb says, "You cannot fly like an eagle with the wings of a wren." She was driven to fly, and gave her little wings too much to do, and her flights were apt to be mere little weak flutterings over the surface ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... our craft had reached a proper position,—her stern alongside and almost in contact with the jutting peak,—to answer the ambitious purpose of the Frenchman. Raising the flag of the Republic in his hand, he requested us all to do it proper honor,—to salute it with a "three times three,"—as he should succeed in securing it in its place. Cautiously extending the staff, he brought it in contact with the snow, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... Azerbaijan over the ethnic Armenian-dominated region of 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 1995-2000. 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 been largely offset by the energy ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... of 'Publishing Truth.' If Edward Burrough was still 'young and brisk' when Ellwood first came across him, he must have been yet younger and brisker on that summer's day, five years earlier, when he left his home in Westmorland in order to 'conquer London.' This was an ambitious undertaking truly for any man, however brisk and ...
— A Book of Quaker Saints • Lucy Violet Hodgkin
... all ambitious projects and her thirst for that knowledge which should ever be hidden from mortals, she overturned the offerings of the Genii, and having execrated the hour she was begotten and the womb that had borne her, glanced off in a whirl that ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... replied the priest. "As you know, Cynegius is here and the fate of the Bishop and of our cause hangs on the next few days. Give up your ambitious desires I beseech you, daughter, for even if Theophilus were to admit you I firmly believe, nay—do not be angry—I can but hope that he would never ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... tongues. When the disheartened fair should weary of the phantom pursuit, then might the man of patience have his little day. Peter winced at the picture. To the world he knew that his long waiting on the brink of the bog, while his ambitious lady floundered after false lights, was, in truth, no more impressive a spectacle than the anguished squawking of a hen who watches a brood of ducklings, of her own hatching, try ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... blockin' right hooks and body jabs that was bein' shot at me by a husky young uptown minister who's a headliner at his job, I understand, but who's developin' a good, useful punch on the side. I was just landin' a cross wallop to the ribs, by way of keepin' him from bein' too ambitious with his left, when out of the tail of my eye I notices Swifty Joe edgin' in with a ...
— Shorty McCabe on the Job • Sewell Ford
... Scotch surgeon's-assistant, having adopted certain aristocratic notions, required a democratical lecture on heads, which was duly administered to him. He pretended that he was, by birth and education (at Edinburgh), entitled to be at the head of our mess. This I resisted, and soon taught the ambitious son of Esculapius that the science of defence was as important as the art of healing; and that if he was skilful in this latter, I would give him an opportunity of employing it on his own person: whereupon I implanted on his cinciput, occiput, os frontis, os nasi, ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat
... off his coat, and tossed a ball for a while to an ambitious youngster, and then went into the clubhouse, where Huling introduced him to several of his players. After a good rubdown, Wayne thanked Huling for his courtesy, and started out, intending to ...
— The Redheaded Outfield and Other Baseball Stories • Zane Grey
... for the pupils entering at ages 18, 19, or 20, which tends to account at least partly for the rise in the percentage of the non-failing for these years. It is safe to believe that for the most part only the more able, ambitious, and purposeful individuals are likely to display the energy required or to discern the need of their entering high school when they have reached the age of 18 or later. The appeal of school athletics will in this case seem very inadequate to explain their entrance so late, since the ...
— The High School Failures - A Study of the School Records of Pupils Failing in Academic or - Commercial High School Subjects • Francis P. Obrien
... despair with staring eyes and bleeding feet and crying soul along this road strewn with thorns and stones. I know what it is to lie awake all night and cry like a baby, with none to know and none to tell me what to do. I know what it is to be tremendously ambitious. Ambition! Ambition! Ah, God of Heaven! How a poor soul suffers who beyond everything else, craves to be able to do something big in this world because he knows he should, yet is held down by this dreadful thing, "nerves!" And how little, how unspeakably little, do physicians, even the ...
— How to Eat - A Cure for "Nerves" • Thomas Clark Hinkle
... could be further from the thoughts of Euthymia than the prospect of an ambitious worldly alliance. The ideals of young women cost them many and great disappointments, but they save them very often from those lifelong companionships which accident is constantly trying to force upon them, ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... the most ambitious trouble-hunter I ever saw," he said, returning to his habitual humorous drawl, with the twinkle in his eyes that went with it. "Just the same, we'll not go back to the mine just yet. Till the dust settles, we're both better off down here with Don Andres Picardo. ...
— The Gringos • B. M. Bower
... being had been disappointed in him. He could not get over it. He reckoned the one judgment worth all the others. Those whose direct or indirect flatteries had been poured at his feet, were the proud, the worldly, the ambitious, the interested, the corrupted; their praise was given to what they esteemed, and that, his candour said, was the least estimable part of him. Beneath all that, this truth-loving, truth-discerning little spirit had found enough to weep for. She was right, and they ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell
... jardin"—especially if the term garden may be taken broadly and applied to the stony and weed-grown ground within my skull, as well as to a few perches of more promising chalk down outside it. In addition to these effectual bars to any of the ambitious pretensions ascribed to me, there is another: of all possible positions that of master of a school, or leader of a sect, or chief of a party, appears to me to be the most undesirable; in fact, the average British matron cannot look upon followers with ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... considerations that there is no sphere of literature which is so often the refuge of wealthy scholars, idle men of taste, baffled politicians of independent means, ambitious and well-read but not specially gifted citizens who have inherited comfortable estates. It is so dignified an employment, that it gratifies pride,—so possible without trenchant opinions, that it does not alarm the conservative,—so thoroughly respectable, safe, and capable of being made illustrious, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... have no reason to thank you for your kind intentions. The appointment you are about to bestow on them can scarce be called a promotion. I don't know how it may be with birds, but I do know that there are not many men ambitious of exchanging from the military to the ...
— The Cliff Climbers - A Sequel to "The Plant Hunters" • Captain Mayne Reid
... tragical aspect, that strong terms accumulated to exhibit even what surpasses in its plain reality all the powers of language, offend them as declamatory exaggeration. Let it then be just observed, without one ambitious epithet, that since that period when ancient history, strictly so named, left off describing the state of mankind, more than a myriad of millions of our race have been on earth, and quitted it without one ray of the knowledge the most important to spirits ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... some folks are odd because they cannot help it. True, there are a great many who are odd, just for the sake of being odd. They are ambitious to be known as singular people. We will let them pass. They certainly work hard to earn the name they love to be known by; and perhaps we ought not to try to rob them of it, or to say any thing very severe about their taste. We will ...
— Mike Marble - His Crotchets and Oddities. • Uncle Frank
... that Mahdajee Sindia gained by it an empire of a magnitude dangerous to our very existence in India; that this chief was permitted to exterminate all the many little gallant nations that stood between us and the Mahrattas, and whose policy led them to guard against the ambitious designs of that government. Almost all these lesser powers, from Central India, quite up to the mountains that divide India from Tartary, almost all these, I say, were exterminated by him, or were brought under a cruel subjection. The peace he made with Mr. Hastings was for the very purpose ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XII. (of XII.) • Edmund Burke
... very ambitious," the governess replied: "and her son has a fortune of his own. She may wish him to marry a lady of high rank. But—no—she is always in need of money. In some way, money may ...
— Heart and Science - A Story of the Present Time • Wilkie Collins
... seizing the means of transportation of a mighty realm for his own individual profit; upon Gordon as an unscrupulous adventurer; and upon the Copper Trust as a greedy corporation reaching out to strangle competition and absorb the riches of the northland. But she had found O'Neil an honorably ambitious man, busied, like others, in the struggle for success, and backing his judgment with his last dollar. She had learned, moreover, to sympathize with his aims, and his splendid determination awoke her admiration. Her idea of the Trust had changed, likewise, for it seemed to be a fair and dignified ...
— The Iron Trail • Rex Beach
... Prodigal, the Ambitious, the Voluptuous, the Bully, the Vain, the Hypocrite, the Flatterer, the Slanderer, call aloud for the Champion's Vengeance." —The ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... remarkable in her, of a certain kind of high resolution. She made one apprehend that she meant to do something for herself. She was long-necked and near-sighted and striking, and I thought I had never seen sweet seventeen in a form so hard and high and dry. She was cold and affected and ambitious, and she carried an eyeglass with a long handle, which she put up whenever she wanted not to see. She had come out, as the phrase is, immensely; and yet I felt as if she were surrounded with a spiked iron railing. What she meant to do for herself ...
— Greville Fane • Henry James
... of mind in John Nicolls, who, in 1577 left England, made a recantation of his heresy, and was "received into the holy Catholic Church." Returning to England he recanted his Roman Catholic opinions, and even wrote "His Pilgrimage, wherein is displayed the lives of the proud Popes, ambitious Cardinals, leacherous Bishops, fat bellied Monks, and hypocritical Jesuits" (1581). Notwithstanding which, he went beyond the seas again (to turn Mohometan, his enemies said), and under threats and imprisonment at Rouen, recanted all that he had formerly uttered against the Romanists.—Athenae ...
— English Travellers of the Renaissance • Clare Howard
... Mrs. Hanway-Harley burst in upon Senator Hanway. That ambitious gentleman was employed in abstruse calculations as to tariff schedules, and how far they might be expected to bear upon his chances in the coming National Convention. Senator Hanway was somewhat impressed by Mrs. Hanway-Harley's visit; his study had never been that lady's ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... him, at Chattanooga, his achievement in bringing his command around the point of Lookout Mountain and into Chattanooga Valley was brilliant. I nevertheless regarded him as a dangerous man. He was not subordinate to his superiors. He was ambitious to the extent of caring nothing for the rights of others. His disposition was, when engaged in battle, to get detached from the main body of the army and exercise a separate command, gathering to his standard all he could ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... have decent homes." Yet the present wage-rate makes decent homes impossible; and though Brooklyn and Boston have a few model tenement-houses, New York has none, the experiment of making over in part a few old ones hardly counting save in intention. Into these homes respectable, ambitious, hard-working girls and women are compelled to go. That they live decent lives speaks worlds for the intrinsic goodness and purity of nature which in the midst of conditions intolerable to every sense still preserves these characteristics. That they must live in such surroundings ...
— Women Wage-Earners - Their Past, Their Present, and Their Future • Helen Campbell
... princes equally 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 ...
— The Secret of the Island • W.H.G. Kingston (translation from Jules Verne)
... the enchanter's communication, was confounded by the unembarrassed freedom of her manner; but it was far from displeasing to him. "You are ambitious," said he, smiling; "but there is nothing to which beauty may not pretend. Tell me only how I can have the happiness of serving you, and you shall see that ...
— The Fairy Book - The Best Popular Stories Selected and Rendered Anew • Dinah Maria Mulock (AKA Miss Mulock)
... impression of intellectual power. Obvious truths and well-worn truisms are uttered in high-sounding words, but in no department of thought can it be said that Bolingbroke breaks new ground. Much that he wrote was for the day and died with it, and if his more ambitious efforts, written with an eye to posterity, cannot justly be described as unreadable, they contain comparatively little which makes them worthy to ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... moments than those in which he rendered Letty's verses into German, with both the Dellwigs drinking in his words. The proud and exclusive Dellwigs! A month ago such a thing would have been too wild a flight of fancy for the most ambitious dream. In the very room in which he had been thrust aside at parties, forgotten in corners, left behind when the others went in to supper, he was now sitting the centre of interest, with his former supercilious hosts hanging on his words. When ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... friends, the Irish at Salamanca, I bore a letter of introduction to the rector of the latter. I found this college an old gloomy edifice, situated in a retired street. The rector was dressed in the habiliments of a Spanish ecclesiastic, a character which he was evidently ambitious of assuming. There was something dry and cold in his manner, and nothing of that generous warmth and eager hospitality which had so captivated me in the fine Irish rector of Salamanca; he was, however, civil and polite, and offered to show me the curiosities ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... generally with success; for this was one of the claims of social convention against which he steadily rebelled—the more determinedly that in none of his mother's friends could he take the smallest interest; for she was essentially a commonplace because ambitious woman, without a spark of aspiration, and her friends were of the same sort, without regard for anything but what was—or, at least, they supposed to be—the fashion. Indeed, it was hard to understand how Hector came ever to be born of such a woman, although ...
— Far Above Rubies • George MacDonald
... picturesque of the sufferers was Blennerhassett, who was one of the most innocent. Burr had found other Ohio people too plodding, as he said, but the Blennerhassetts took him seriously, and when Burr in his repeated visits tempted the husband, and flattered the wife, who was ambitious only for her husband, he easily beguiled them into a ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells
... gallant and single-minded patriot, Robert Blake. Of this fine old English worthy, republican as he was, the Tory Hume freely affirms, that never man, so zealous for a faction, was so much respected and even esteemed by his opponents. 'Disinterested, generous, liberal; ambitious only of true glory, dreadful only to his avowed enemies; he forms one of the most perfect characters of the age, and the least stained with those errors and vices which were then so predominant.'[3] Yet ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 439 - Volume 17, New Series, May 29, 1852 • Various
... oppressive, it was possible to say of him that he was no worse than his class. Close-fisted, at Father O'Hara's instance he could open his hand. Hard, at the Father's prayer he would at times remit a rent or extend a bond. Ambitious, he gave up, for his soul's sake and the sake of the Faith that had been his fathers', the office which endowed him with ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman
... and in fate. Each succeeds to the heritage of a great name that had contrived to unite autocracy with the popular cause; each subdued all rival competitors, and inaugurated despotic rule in the name of freedom; each mingled enough of sternness with ambitious will to stain with bloodshed the commencement of his power,—but it would be an absurd injustice to fix the same degree of condemnation on the coup d'etat as humanity fixes on the earlier cruelties of Augustus; each, once firm in his seat, became mild and clement,—Augustus ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Schaub's mould; the Comte de Caraman, nephew of Madame de Mirepoix, a Monsieur de Clausonnette, and General Schouallow,(845) the favourite of the late Czarina; absolute favourite for a dozen years, without making an enemy. In truth, he is very amiable, humble, and modest. Had he been ambitious, he might have mounted the throne: as he was not, you may imagine they have plucked his plumes a good deal. There is a little air of melancholy about him, and, if I am not mistaken, Some secret wishes for the fall of the present Empress; which, if it were ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... five and twenty years. It was when he first came to the island, weary of Apia, with its heavy drinking, its gambling and coarse sensuality, a sick man, trying to resign himself to the loss of the career which had fired his imagination with ambitious thoughts. He set behind him resolutely all his hopes of making a great name for himself and strove to content himself with the few poor months of careful life which was all that he could count on. He was boarding with a half-caste trader who had a store a couple of miles ...
— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham
... India Director was a forlorn sight near the unoccupied end of the table, in a state of solitude; and the Major was a military sight, relating stories of the Duke of York to six of the seven mild men (the ambitious one was utterly quenched); and the Bank Director was a lowly sight, making a plan of his little attempt at a pinery, with dessert-knives, for a group of admirers; and Cousin Feenix was a thoughtful sight, as he smoothed his long wristbands and stealthily adjusted his wig. But ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... the misnomer of "cottages." Happily, it did not tower up into the air as many of the so-called cottages do, but spread itself comfortably over the greensward, the central building being the only one ambitious enough to attain to two stories and a sharply peaked roof, in which were set several dormer windows from which a most entrancing view of the valley and distant mountain ranges ...
— A Dixie School Girl • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... upon the record that any of these men—of either the restless and ambitious, or of the better class—were literally sent away. But such has been the politic practice of this church for many ages; and we may safely believe, that when she was engaged in an unscrupulous and desperate contest for the recovery, by fair means or foul, of her ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... be the future of such an energetic and ambitious young man was easily predicted by his friends and acquaintances, and the predictions have been verified. It was believed that he would succeed in life, become a very useful member of society, and "make his mark in the world," as the saying goes. These ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 4 • Various
... watched by one even more able and ambitious than himself. For the last half-century England had been drawing nearer to the Norman land which fronted it across the Channel. As we pass nowadays through Normandy, it is English history which is round about us. The name of hamlet after ...
— History of the English People, Volume I (of 8) - Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216 • John Richard Green
... the first in date of the great battles of the world, we beheld Athens struggling for self-preservation against the invading armies of the East. At Syracuse she appears as the ambitious and oppressive invader of others. In her, as in other republics of old and of modern times, the same energy that had inspired the most heroic efforts in defence of the national independence soon learned to employ ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... Ger. Ambitious pride may tremble at the storm, but true love, uncle, never can be wrecked; its constancy is strengthened, not impaired by trials, and when adversity divorces us from common friendships, the chosen partners of each other's hearts a second time are ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... you come from?" he said, pulling his coat closer to hide the ragged waistcoat underneath, and adjusting his worn and dirty hat—in his youth he had been vain and ambitious, and good-looking also. ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... fitting crew, and place on board The sacred hecatomb; then last embark The fair Chryseis; and in chief command Let some one of our councillors be plac'd, Ajax, Ulysses, or Idomeneus, Or thou, the most ambitious of them all, That so our rites ...
— The Iliad • Homer
... commissioned by the State for the audience chamber of the Council, on which, as we know from documents, Giorgione was engaged in 1507 and 1508. It was never finished, and the altogether exceptional character of the work places it outside the regular course of the artist's development. It was an ambitious venture in an unwonted direction, and is naturally marked and marred by unsatisfactory features. Giorgione's real powers are shown by the "Pastoral Symphony" (in the Louvre), and the "Portrait of the Young Man" (at Buda-Pesth), productions dating from the later years 1508-10. The "Three Ages" ...
— Giorgione • Herbert Cook
... bribery of the servants of the people. I felt pretty sure, moreover, that I could play a card that would more than offset the dollars of "Standard Oil." Nathan Matthews was on the high-road to the governor's chair, but I happened to know that, however ambitious he might be for political preferment, his temperament rendered him more avid for distinction in business. Addicks had within his gift the richest plum in all the Boston commercial world. As controller ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... in the same room, is larger and more ambitious. It represents a carpenter's workshop, with a mechanic at each end of the long bench; one of these, a half-starved, hideous wretch, with hardly a trace of the human anatomy in his composition; and the other, a respectable ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 432 - Volume 17, New Series, April 10, 1852 • Various
... is the tale that is told of an almost universally respected Minister, Who, being fully aware of the views of Continental Potentates, and their plans ambitious and sinister, For the better defence of his native land, and to free her from continual warlike alarms, Determined that he would popularize the conception (and a very good one too) of a Nation in Arms! Now this is the way he ...
— The Casual Ward - academic and other oddments • A. D. Godley
... those cold-hearted men who, though continually occupied in the study of the material world, and ambitious of the distinction which a successful examination of it confers, are yet insensible to the goodness and greatness of the Being who made and sustains it. His mind was cast in a better mould. The magnificence and harmony ...
— The Martyrs of Science, or, The lives of Galileo, Tycho Brahe, and Kepler • David Brewster
... employed. In the course of time our native soldiers were more and more trusted; important places were garrisoned by them, military stores were entrusted to them; and nothing was more natural than that in the more ambitious of their number the thought should spring up that the time had arrived for expelling the stranger, and seizing the power within their grasp. In thus acting they could make themselves sure of the sympathy of ...
— Life and Work in Benares and Kumaon, 1839-1877 • James Kennedy
... really delightful place. She was quite ambitious for reception evenings. Mrs. Osgood was holding them for a literary circle. Of course she could not aim at anything as elegant as that; but newspaper men, young and old, were in the habit of dropping in upon Mr. Whitney quite informally. ...
— A Little Girl of Long Ago • Amanda Millie Douglas
... the repeal of the Missouri Compromise. A younger adherent of Douglas was John A. Logan, serving in his second term. He remained however but a short time in the Thirty-seventh Congress. His ardent patriotism and ambitious temperament carried him into the war, where his brilliant career is known and ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... Dona Bernarda's ambitious dreams were on the point of realization, and she could not give herself a moment's rest. Her son's cool indifference was something she could not understand for the life of her! The District was his all right, but was that a reason for falling asleep on the job? Who could tell what the "enemies of ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... in United States history, 1; birth and ancestry, 2; adopted by Mlle. Pictet, 2; his schooling and home training, 2, 3; benefits from cosmopolitan society of Geneva, 4; academic friendships, 4, 5; restless, although not ambitious, 5; discontented with political conditions, 6; visits Voltaire, 7, 8; refuses offer of commission in Hessian service, 8; quarrels with grandmother, 8; plans to find freedom in America, 9, 10; leaves Geneva secretly, 9; plans ...
— Albert Gallatin - American Statesmen Series, Vol. XIII • John Austin Stevens
... it is that from henceforth you wil allow me to call you Master, and that really I may be your Scholer, for you are such a companion, and have so quickly caught, and so excellently cook'd this fish, as makes me ambitious ...
— The Compleat Angler - Facsimile of the First Edition • Izaak Walton
... accustomed to see adventurers play for kingdoms, and Theodore became the common talk of Europe. He had served in the French armies; and having afterwards been noticed both by Ripperda and Alberoni, their example, perhaps, inflamed a spirit as ambitious and as unprincipled as their own. He employed the whole of his means in raising money and procuring arms; then wrote to the leaders of the Corsican patriots, to offer them considerable assistance, if they would erect Corsica into an independent ...
— The Life of Horatio Lord Nelson • Robert Southey
... her little pointed chin between her little brown palms and pondered, and out of the pondering grew a plan so ambitious and so daring that Rebecca Mary gasped in the throes of it. But she held her ground and entertained it intrepidly. She even grew on friendly terms with it in the end. Here was a way to surprise Aunt 'Livia; Rebecca ...
— Rebecca Mary • Annie Hamilton Donnell
... raptures stab me through And wake my pining love anew.(622) Now through the air no wild bird flies, Each lily shuts her weary eyes; And blooms of opening jasmin show The parting sun has ceased to glow. No captain now for conquest burns, But homeward with his host returns; For roads and kings' ambitious dreams Have vanished neath descending streams. This is the watery month(623) wherein The Samar's(624) sacred chants begin. Ashadha(625) past, now Kosal's lord(626) The harvest of the spring has stored,(627) And dwells within his palace freed From every care of pressing need. Full is the moon, and ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... three days after receiving it, and within twelve days later had it chained up.[1] Many gifts of books were received, some from the highest in the land: from King Henry the Fourth and his warlike and ambitious sons—Henry V, Clarence, Bedford, and Gloucester; from Edmund, Earl of March; from prelates—Archbishop Arundel, Repyngton of Lincoln, Courtney of Norwich, and Molyneux of Chichester; from great Abbot Whethamstede of St. Albans; from wealthy Archdeacon Browne or Cordone; from rich citizens ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... saw one too ambitious of court favor, 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 much for ...
— The Elson Readers, Book 5 • William H. Elson and Christine M. Keck
... daughter. Mr. Hamilton was right when he associated the resigned widow with his old flame, Luella Blackburn, whom be had never seriously thought of marrying, though by way of pastime he had frequently teased, tormented, and flattered her. Luella was ambitious, artful, and designing. Wealth and position was the goal at which she aimed. Both of these she knew Ernest Hamilton possessed, and she had felt greatly pleased at his evident preference. When, therefore, at the end of his college course he left her with ...
— Homestead on the Hillside • Mary Jane Holmes
... we forget that Trade Unions, like other communities, whatever their legal constitutions may be, are apt practically to fall into the hands of a small minority of active spirits, or even into those of a single astute and ambitious man. ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... necessarily a discreditable one. Most lives are failures, if appraised by human estimate. Take for example the life of a young wife who marries a man with disease in his blood. She begins her wedded life with certain commendable ideals. She is young, enthusiastic, ambitious, strong, and she inherently possesses the right to aspire to become an efficient home-maker and a good mother. She gives birth to a child, conceived in love, and during her travail she beseeches her Creator to help ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume I. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague, M.D.
... had devoted herself, that touched upon the humble destinies of the vulgar, the child of Odin [23] haughtily disdained. Her reveries were upon the fate of kings and kingdoms; she aspired to save or to rear the dynasties which should rule the races yet unborn. In youth proud and ambitious,—common faults with her countrywomen,—on her entrance into the darker world, she carried with her the prejudices and passions that she had known in that ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... tobacco. Moldova must import almost all of its energy supplies from Russia. Energy shortages contributed to sharp production declines after the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991. As part of an ambitious reform effort, Moldova introduced a convertible currency, freed prices, stopped issuing preferential credits to state enterprises, backed steady land privatization, removed export controls, and freed interest ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... bond. We are essentially and intrinsically one; one by nature; one by mutual sympathies, by blood relations, by dearest ties; one in all that constitutes the unity of a family relation; one in heart, one in aim, one in mind, purpose, education, and will. None can make us two. Lines may be drawn by ambitious schemers, divisions discussed, but these do not constitute separation or alienation. The heart of the people beats in profound and resolute unison. What God hath joined together let not ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... was married, I was not the poor man that you now know me to be. My father gave me as my share of his property two thousand dollars, which I had increased to three, and my wife received as her wedding portion one thousand dollars. We were both strong and willing to work, and ambitious to succeed in the world, and we bought a good farm, running in debt a few hundred dollars. For several years we were greatly prospered. We had good health, and the seasons were favorable, so that we grew heavy crops and ...
— Choice Readings for the Home Circle • Anonymous
... I write of was not one of her more ambitious efforts. It was a small and (with the exception of one guest) what she called "a purely local affair." That is to say, the people who were to grace the feast were culled from the big villas on the Hill, ...
— Penny Plain • Anna Buchan (writing as O. Douglas)
... mistook his frankness for impudence. He was recklessly generous: he would have given the coat off his back to a beggar at the instigation of a sudden impulse, provided he could have got into a cab before any of his friends saw him. He had rare abilities, and at times wildly ambitious dreams, not of his own glorification, but of what he would do to celebrate the beauty and the graces of the princess whom he fancied he had married. It may seem hard of belief that this man, judging him by his actions at this time, could have had anything of thorough self-forgetfulness and manliness ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various
... their simplicity of life, their respect for law, their loyalty to priests and rulers. Hence there was permanence to their institutions, for rapine, violence, and revolution were rare. They were not warlike, although often engaged in war by the command of ambitious kings. Generally the policy of their government was conservative and pacific. Military ambition and thirst for foreign conquest were not the peculiar sins of Egyptian kings; they sought rather to develop national ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... Now, mine did not sustain this condition: all that my life had of promise was connected with the memory of her who never could share my fortunes; of her for whom I had earned praise and honor; becoming ambitious as the road to her affection, only to learn after, that my hopes were but a dream, and ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... call, "Come and Get It" was sounded the more ambitious of the recruits folded their blankets and tidied up their cots. When mess call was sounded but few had to be called the ...
— The Delta of the Triple Elevens - The History of Battery D, 311th Field Artillery US Army, - American Expeditionary Forces • William Elmer Bachman |
