"Aspiration" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... warning, and like a bolt from the blue, disgrace and disaster fell upon and morally destroyed him; and almost in a moment the once favoured child of good fortune found himself an outcast from home and society; disowned by those nearest and dearest to him; with every hope and aspiration blasted; branded as a felon; and his whole life ruined, as it seemed to him, irretrievably. In his father's house, and while enjoying a short period of well-earned leave, he was arrested upon a charge of forgery and embezzlement; and, ...
— Dick Leslie's Luck - A Story of Shipwreck and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... Montreal are not without their significance. They show that it is not only among statesmen and politicians abroad that Canada is valued and respected; but that throughout all classes, and wherever intellect, culture, and scientific attainment are revered, her position is acknowledged, and her aspiration to take her place among the nations is seen ...
— Memories of Canada and Scotland - Speeches and Verses • John Douglas Sutherland Campbell
... the new yacht, as they were to be after the change in the model which his father had explained to him. He recalled a suggestion of a small increase in the size of the mainsail, which had occurred to him when he sailed the Sea Foam. His first aspiration was only to build a yacht; his second was to build one that would beat anything of her inches in the fleet. If he could realize this last ambition, he would have all the business ...
— The Yacht Club - or The Young Boat-Builder • Oliver Optic
... come in contact with larger conceptions, fuller ideas, deeper sympathies, higher aspirations than is possible where you follow the ordinary routine of the ordinary, mediocre, self-contented man. Thank God for the spark of discontent, of ambition, of aspiration, of desire to see beyond, to know more, to climb higher, to solve the mysteries, to ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... increased activity in Omdurman itself. In these circumstances the British Government determined to assist Italy by making a demonstration on the Wady Halfa frontier. They turned to Egypt. It had always been recognised that the recovery of the lost provinces was a natural and legitimate aspiration. 'The doubtful point was to decide the time when the military and financial resources of the country were sufficiently developed to justify an assumption of the offensive.' [LORD CROMER'S REPORTS: EGYPT, No. 2, 1896.] From a ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... jacket which corresponded with her dress. She had not any great opinion of her own good looks, but she hoped that she was "lady-like," notwithstanding the simplicity of her costume. This was her only aspiration. In her heart she admired the tall straight angular kind of beauty possessed by her cousins, and did not think much of her own roundness and softness, which seemed to Ursula a very inferior "style;" but yet if she looked lady-like ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... amidst the gibes of his contemporaries, he likened himself, he wanted everything; and those with this aspiration must necessarily be heedless of their neighbours' smaller ambitions. "Without genius, I am undone!" he cried in despair; but when it was proved beyond dispute that this gift of debatable beneficence was his, he ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... not mistaken. Examining the society around her, men and women: everywhere was feverish excitement, dissipation, and nullity. You might rummage through their brains without finding one practical idea; in all their hearts, there was not one lofty aspiration. These people, in their daily life were like squirrels in a cage, and because they moved, they thought they were progressing. In them scepticism had killed belief; religion, family, country, were, as they phrased it, all humbug. They had only one aim, one passion—to enjoy themselves. ...
— Serge Panine, Complete • Georges Ohnet
... of holiday delight to Clorinda. The highest aspiration of her spinster soul was soon to be gratified—she would have a husband! No long engagement for her; she made up her mind to that on the moment. With that yellow bird once in the cage, she was not going to lose time in ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... had so often wagged in camp or senate still spread upon the royal bosom; and in busts and pictures, some similitude of the great and beautiful of former days is handed down. In this way, public curiosity may be gratified, but hardly any private aspiration after fame. It is not likely that posterity will fall in love with us, but not impossible that it may respect or sympathise; and so a man would rather leave behind him the portrait of his spirit than a portrait ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... walls. First one side and then another of the Tower of Jewels is bathed in white light, until the Tower stands out in ghostly radiance. Two slender shafts of light shoot upward on either side of the globe atop the Tower and stand there, symbols of pure aspiration reaching to the heavens. Behind it all the huge and many-colored fan of the Scintillator opens in gorgeous ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... in certain eyes, his historian is bound to confess that his anxiety for Sibyll did not entirely distract his attention from interest or ambition. To become the head of his class, to rise to the first honours of his beloved city of London, had become to Nicholas Alwyn a hope and aspiration which made as much a part of his being as glory to a warrior, power to a king, a Eureka to a scholar; and, though more mechanically than with any sordid calculation or self-seeking, Nicholas Alwyn repaired to his ware in the Chepe. The streets, when he landed, ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... enhanced my pleasure! I sunned myself in the beams, which penetrated my barred window; and tasting the early freshness with a keen and insatiable appetite, I experienced to the full that peculiar aspiration after goodness which Providence allows such moments to awaken in us in youth; but rarely when time and the camp have blunted ...
— A Gentleman of France • Stanley Weyman
... not so much an accomplishment as a state or condition of the mind in which it seeks earnestly for the highest and purest truth.... If we often blunder and fail for want of perfect wisdom and clear light, have we not the inward assurance that our aspiration has not been all in vain, that it has brought us a little nearer to the Supreme Intellect whose effulgence draws us while it ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... ignorant selfishness. It is himself that he sees dead; those are his virtues that are forgotten; his is the vague epitaph. Pity him but the more, if pity be your cue; for where a man is all pride, vanity, and personal aspiration, he goes through fire unshielded. In every part and corner of our life, to lose oneself is to be gainer; to forget oneself is to be happy; and this poor, laughable, and tragic fool has not yet learned the rudiments; himself, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... democracy. And no Wagnerian crashes of orchestration mitigate the tragedy of the scene as our eyes are opened to the twilight of our new gods. For what other social methods are there left to us? In the struggle against nature's barriers upon human aspiration for perfect satisfactions, it looks as though every other ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... life...In these presentiments and hopes was something akin to those emotions which the accustomed gamester experiences when counting his ready money before starting out for his club. Besides that, despite their asexuality, they still had not lost the chiefest instinctive aspiration of women—to please. ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... fellowship and friendship. Happiest is he who has the noblest companion. God alone fills the deep craving of the heart for a congenial and helpful presence, and Enoch "walked with God." The words imply regular, unbroken, well-sustained communion with Him. With a sublime and lofty aspiration Enoch had risen above shadows, idols, and pretences, and with simple, manly faith had grasped the unseen substance and reality, the personal God, the Father ...
— Men of the Bible; Some Lesser-Known Characters • George Milligan, J. G. Greenhough, Alfred Rowland, Walter F.
... the man of yearning thought And aspiration, to do nought Is in itself almost an act,— Being chasm-fire and cataract Of the soul's utter depths unseal'd. Yet woe to thee if once thou yield Unto the act ...
— The Forgotten Threshold • Arthur Middleton
... tells us, 'I am content that my claims should be decided and my station determined as a lyric poet in the higher sense of the term; a craftsman in the most ambitious line of his art that ever aroused or can arouse the emulous aspiration of ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... this impulse, and on entering life at once place their necks under the first yoke that offers itself and honestly labour under it for the rest of their lives. But Olenin was too strongly conscious of the presence of that all-powerful God of Youth—of that capacity to be entirely transformed into an aspiration or idea—the capacity to wish and to do—to throw oneself headlong into a bottomless abyss without knowing why or wherefore. He bore this consciousness within himself, was proud of it and, without knowing it, was happy in that consciousness. Up to that time he had loved only ...
— The Cossacks • Leo Tolstoy
... mines, giving pictures of ragged, emaciated children who spent their lives underground, breathing foul air and becoming dwarfed in body and soul. He flung the book from him and dropped his head upon his arms. Life seemed a great, inexorable machine, setting at naught human aspiration, human endeavor. What was the good of fighting it? What was the sense in believing in a divine order, in ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice
... and this was enacted in terms which disclosed the bigoted feelings of the nation. Sicily wanted to be independent of Naples, but it had not the same wish to be separated from the despotic principle. An independent nation, without a free people, was the highest aspiration of revolted Sicily. England and France left her to her fate, except so far as Lord Minto's meddling complicated her condition. The temporarily vanquished Neapolitans returned to the contest, and the ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... might satisfy Spencer and those whom we may call Hegelian evolutionists, could not be accepted as adequate by the more whole-hearted votaries of change. An ideal to which the world continuously approaches is, to these minds, too dead and static to be inspiring. Not only the aspiration, but the ideal too, must change and develop with the course of evolution: there must be no fixed goal, but a continual fashioning of fresh needs by the impulse which is life and which alone gives unity ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... arouse him from what seemed an unusually long slumber, she found a volume of Fenelon spread open upon his knee, and turning it, her eye ran over passages full of lofty and devout aspiration. These, probably expressed the latest thoughts and desires of the good chevalier, for as she looked from the pages to his face, turned upward toward the ceiling, a smile of assent and satisfaction was still lingering there, ...
— Adele Dubois - A Story of the Lovely Miramichi Valley in New Brunswick • Mrs. William T. Savage
... the struggling, earth-bound condition of useful labor through the world without joining in the beautiful aspiration of ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... legistic and the Mullah or schoolmaster. By thus abolishing the priesthood Mohammed reconciled ancient with modern wisdom. "Scito dominum," said Cato, "pro tota familia rem divinam facere": "No priest at a birth, no priest at a marriage, no priest at a death," is the aspiration of the present ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... symbol of the convincing powers of oratory and Pericles as the crystallization of Grecian life in its totality of beauty, learning and social and civic life. Greece is a type, is an attitude, is a protest against oppression, is an aspiration towards beauty, is an inspiration and a guide for men who live in the higher planes of feeling and thought. But Greece is not all that as a people; Greece is all that through men converted ...
— Simon Bolivar, the Liberator • Guillermo A. Sherwell
... intellectual ladder and the moral ladder." These ladders constitute, in fact, a series of precepts, warnings, and exhortations; some easily comprehensible, others demanding profound thought, and the whole calculated to educate an absorbing aspiration for the "transcendental virtues," to possess which is to attain to perfect Buddhahood. Unquestionably the offspring of a great mind, this Shingon system, with its mysterious possibilities and its lofty morality, appealed ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... can not be unconscious of the fact that a new race of women is born into the world who, while they lack no womanly attribute, are the peers of any man in intellect and aspiration. It will be impossible long to deny to such women that equality before the law granted to the lowest creature that crawls, if he happen to be a man; denied to the highest creature that asks it, if she ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... between his hands, strove to still the giddy whirl in his brain. And as his folly and its bitterness found him out, the poor fool rocked himself, and cursed the day when he was born. If any one yet doubt that Mr. Moggridge was an inspired singer, let him turn to that sublime aspiration in Sophronia: ...
— The Astonishing History of Troy Town • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... wishing to reflect on the musical sincerity of those good Sisters, who sing quite suitably but humanly, as women, it may be asserted that they have neither such knowledge, nor such soul-felt aspiration, nor such voices. As a monk remarked, 'when you have heard the Sisters of Solesmes, those ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... for this reason, that the greater part of gymnastic exercises are performed "in the sweat of the brow," while equestrian exercise is performed with pleasure. Indeed, there is no accomplishment which so nearly realises the aspiration of a man to have the wings of a bird than this of horsemanship. (7) But further, to a victory obtained in war attaches a far greater weight of glory than belongs to the noblest contest of the arena. (8) ...
— The Cavalry General • Xenophon
... the mother said. "We didn't feel justified in standing in her way. She wanted to be christened; it seemed to mean something real to her—" she broke off. "What were we to do?" she repeated. "It would be a dreadful thing to check a child's aspiration toward God! Of course she is only a little girl, and she wanted to be like the others. Her father and I thought of that, naturally. But—" Again she stopped. "One can never tell," she went on, "what is in the mind of a child, nor what may be happening to its spirit. Samuel was a very little child ...
— The American Child • Elizabeth McCracken
... asked is granted. Turn off this spirit from his fountain-head; To trap him, let thy snares be planted, And him, with thee, be downward led; Then stand abashed, when thou art forced to say: A good man, through obscurest aspiration, Has still an instinct ...
— Faust • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... strong friendship for some boys. It was soon after I began collecting stones, i.e., when 9 or 10, that I distinctly recollect the desire I had of being able to know something about every pebble in front of the hall door—it was my earliest and only geological aspiration at that time. I was in those days a very great story-teller—for the pure pleasure of exciting attention and surprise. I stole fruit and hid it for these same motives, and injured trees by barking them for similar ends. I scarcely ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... author of "The Holy Cross" and "The Little Yaller Baby." Those of this number who were closest to the full-hearted singer know that beneath and within all his exquisite wit and ludicrous raillery—so often directed against the shallow formalist, or the unctuous hypocrite—there were an aspiration toward the divine, and a desire for what is often slightingly called "religious conversation," as sincere as it was resistless within him. My own first remembrance of him brings back a conversation which ended in a prayer, and the ...
— Songs and Other Verse • Eugene Field
... belie the noble Signora de' Franchi. Thou canst not be blind to the divine aspiration that lay behind ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... profound touch that was of Themistocles," said Kennedy, "who rejected the offer of a Memoria Technicha, with the aspiration that some one could teach him to forget. Lethe is the grandest of rivers ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... see its incomparable excellence in this respect merely shows his own deficiency in the appreciation of all that is noblest in man. True or not true, the entire Story of the Cross, from its commencement in prophetic aspiration to its culmination in the Gospel, is by far the most magnificent [presentation] in literature. And surely the fact of its having all been lived does not detract from its poetic value. Nor does the ...
— Thoughts on Religion • George John Romanes
... Bible, because that concerned a by-gone day, or even to hear a clergyman preach of it, this belonged to his office; but when this old man, with his white beard, talked to her and her husband just as David had talked in some of his psalms, she was afraid, and found his aspiration worse to her than any amount of ...
— Fated to Be Free • Jean Ingelow
... it as he can with the Spirit of God. He is not content that men should be as sheep, and look downward to earth for all the food they need. He bids them to a Banquet of another kind, whose dishes are of knowledge for the mind and heavenward aspiration for the soul. ...
— The Banquet (Il Convito) • Dante Alighieri
... humanity knows not how to render continued life desirable. At the same time, a higher culture has made it manifest that the frailest body may be the seat of the loftiest mental activity, moral excellence, and spiritual aspiration, and that in such a body there is often only a surer and more finished education for a higher state of being. Filial piety and parental love, therefore, do all in their power to prolong the flickering existence ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... labour in the open air. Probably at first the monks did their farm-work as well; but as they grew richer, they employed labourers, and themselves fell back on simpler and easier garden-work. Perhaps some few were truly devotional spirits, with a fire of prayer and aspiration burning in their hearts; but the majority would be quiet men, full of little gossip about possible promotions, about lands and crops, about wayfarers and ecclesiastics who passed that way and were entertained. Very few, except certain ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... rights in presence and despight of the Creator. Sahib the Sufi declares that the secret of man's soul (i.e. its emanation) was first revealed when Pharaoh declared himself god; and Al-Ghazali sees in his claim the most noble aspiration to the divine, innate in the human ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... storms, and to Duncan the grey dreariness seemed in keeping with his feelings. For Donald had gone back to the city that day, and when he had bidden the boy farewell the old man had also parted with his great aspiration. Donald had come to him the week before, and with his usual frankness made known the fact that he could never entertain any further thought of entering the ministry, and had therefore abandoned all idea of returning to college. The ...
— Duncan Polite - The Watchman of Glenoro • Marian Keith
... literary; it is historic also. They were the original version of those great gatherings in the Champ de Mars and strange suppers of fraternity during the progress of the Revolution in Paris, which have amused the cynical ever since, but which pointed to a not unworthy aspiration. The fine gentlemen whom Rousseau did so well to despise had then all fled, and the common people under Rousseauite leaders were doing the best they could to realise on the banks of the Seine the imaginary joymaking and simple fellowship ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... were these young things, with their rhodomontade and exuberant animation and spirits, from him in whom all the sparkle and aspiration of ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... doctrine and the interpretation of Aristotle's works. It was a period of revived Greek metaphysics, adapted to prevailing religious presuppositions. Into this fettered world Bacon, Galileo, Descartes, and others brought a new aspiration to promote investigation and honest, ...
— The Mind in the Making - The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform • James Harvey Robinson
... mystery is perhaps only another name for that "strangeness added to beauty" which Pater takes to be the distinguishing feature of romantic art. Later in the same article, Dr. Hedge asserts that "the essence of romanticism is aspiration." Much might be said in defense of this position. It has often been pointed out, e.g., that a Gothic cathedral expresses aspiration, and a Greek temple satisfied completeness. Indeed if we agree that, ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... forth pieces with great levity and haste, even when he had full leisure to think of posterity. If he occasionally subjected himself to stricter rules, we owe it more to his ambition, and his desire to be numbered among the classical writers of the golden age, than to any internal and growing aspiration after ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... be cross," she pleaded. "I 'm not mad, and I 'm not sly. But I 'm free and independent. What's the good of being free and independent," she largely argued, "if you can't do the things you want to? I 'm going to Craford to realise the aspiration of a lifetime. I 'm going to find out my cousin, and make his acquaintance, and see what he 's like. And then—well, if he 's nice, who knows what may happen? I planned it ever so long ago," she proclaimed, with an ingenuousness that was almost brazen, "and made all my preparations. Then I sat ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... Oh, we are all crooked in our values, Paine. The best that a man can give a woman is his courage, his hope, his aspiration. That's enough. I learned it too late. I don't know why I am saying ...
— The Trumpeter Swan • Temple Bailey
... business details of their work at such a distance from publishers and editors, brought the industrious couple back to London in the spring of 1843. 'On our return to England,' writes Mary, 'I was full of energy and hope. Glowing with aspiration, and in enjoyment of great domestic happiness, I was anticipating a busy, perhaps overburdened, but, nevertheless, congenial life. It was to be one of darkness, perplexity, discouragement.' The Howitts had scarcely entered ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... to be free, not under the compulsion of any need for unification, or tortured by unsatisfied desire. Desire and aspiration should find their object without all this torture, as now, in a world of plenty of water, simple thirst is inconsiderable, satisfied almost unconsciously. And he wanted to be with Ursula as free as with himself, single and clear and cool, yet balanced, polarised with her. The merging, the clutching, ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... ear at every moment, that sounded strangely enough to me. They spoke of Fraternity—of that brotherhood which linked man to man in close affection; of Equality—that made all sharers in this world's goods; of Liberty—that gave freedom to every noble aspiration and generous thought; and, for an instant, carried away by the glorious illusion, I even forgot my solitary condition, and felt proud of my heritage as a youth of France I looked around me, however, and what faces met ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... torn off, and the wages of godliness appear too openly. Capacity is a secondary matter in a midwife, temper in a servant, affection in a daughter, and the repetition of a shibboleth fulfils the law. Common decency is at times forgot in the same page with the most sanctified advice and aspiration. Thus I am introduced to a correspondent who appears to have been at the time the housekeeper at Invermay, and who writes to condole with my grandmother in a season of distress. For nearly half a sheet she keeps to the point with an excellent discretion in language; then suddenly ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... mother. She signs this pamphlet as Adeline D. T. Whitney. I have read it twice, and read it to pure and gentle and intellectual women. I shall not read it today for my strength does not suffice.[59] ... There is not one impure, unintellectual aspiration or thought throughout the whole of it. Would to God that I knew her, that I could thank her on behalf of the society and politics of the United States for this production. She says to her own sex: "After all, men work for women; ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... nothing to be done in life but to 'pay attention,' as they say, to some young lady, and then to go to church with her, and then to start on a bridal tour, and then to run through a round of visits, and then, I suppose, to be 'having a family.' Oh, que le diable emporte!" He broke off the aspiration into which he was launching with a certain energy, and added, more calmly, "I believe women talk and think only of these things, and they naturally fancy men's ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... form of the princess, springing buoyant and elastic, on angel wings, a smile of triumph and aspiration lighting up her countenance. Her drapery floats behind her as she rises. Two angels, one carrying her infant child and the other with clasped hands of exultant joy, are rising with her, in ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... "H is only an aspiration, or breathing; and sometimes, at the beginning of a word, it is not sounded at all."—Lowth cor. "Man was made for society, and he ought to extend his good will to all men."—Id. "There is, and must be, a Supreme Being, of infinite goodness, power, and wisdom, who created, and who ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... of Nature's gentlemen, in short, who are to be found, not numerously perhaps, but certainly, in almost every land, with unusual strength of intellect, and breadth of thought, and power of frame, and force of will, and nobility of aspiration. Such men in free countries, become leaders of the good and brave. In despotic lands they become either the deliverers of their country or the pests of society—the terror of rulers, the fomentors of national discord. ...
— In the Track of the Troops • R.M. Ballantyne
... face of the whole world that the aspiration of my whole life, the final object of all my efforts and strength is nothing else but your independence, for I am firmly convinced that that constitutes your constant desire and that independence signifies for us redemption from slavery and tyranny, regaining our ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... The democratic aspiration is no mere recent phase in human history. It is human history. It permeated the ancient life of early peoples. It blazed anew in the middle ages. It was ...
— United States Presidents' Inaugural Speeches - From Washington to George W. Bush • Various
... spirit, if not to the ear itself. To the spirit of Eldred Lenox these outward symbols of the eternal verities, fit emblems of the stern faith in which he had been reared, spoke with no uncertain voice; and their message was a message of aspiration, of conquest, of the iron self-mastery and self-restraint indispensable to both. They reminded him, also, that life held many good gifts in atonement for the one gift denied; that a man might do worse than live and work unhindered by the volcanic ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... natural and proper in an intelligent being, appears as the ground of it. There is a view in which all the love of our neighbor, the impulses toward action, help, and beneficence, the desire for removing human error, clearing human confusion, and diminishing human misery, the noble aspiration to leave the world better and happier than we found it,—motives eminently such as are called social,—come in as part of the grounds of culture, and the main and pre-eminent part. Culture is then properly described not as having its origin in curiosity, but as having its origin in the love ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... is the grand purpose of the Platonic philosophy. Its ultimate object is "the purification of the soul," and its pervading spirit is the aspiration after perfection. The whole system of Plato has therefore an eminently ethical character. It is a speculative philosophy directed to ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... Nothing could be more right and true than the bubbling merriment and the good faith and the impatient aspiration with which the young life of the earlier chapters of the book comes surging upon the scene of its elders. A current of newness and freshness is set flowing in the atmosphere of the generation that is still in possession. The talk of a ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... its door of being the wickedest city in the world. Side by side with the development of mechanical science lifting men to the power and position of angels, there was a moral degeneration degrading them to the level of beasts. With an apparent aspiration after social and humanitarian reform, there was a corruption of the public conscience and a hardening of the public heart. London was the living picture of this startling contrast. Impiety, iniquity, impurity, and injustice were at their height here, and either England ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... of young American writers turned with alacrity to the subjects that lay nearest to them and which were intimately connected with the life of the country. A national literature was never altogether absent from their thoughts, however the fear of English censure or ridicule may have checked the aspiration. John Webbe, in his prospectus to the first American magazine, said that the new venture would be "an attempt to erect on neutral principles a publick theatre in the centre of the British Empire in America" (Amer. Weekly Mercury, ...
— The Philadelphia Magazines and their Contributors 1741-1850 • Albert Smyth
... upon his ear like a spirit of consolation, speaking of peace, of love which needs no reward save its own sweetness, of aspiration which looks forever beyond the thing of the hour to find attainment in that which is eternal. So insidiously did it whisper these things, so delicately did the simple and perfect melodies creep upon the spirit—that Boyce felt no resentment, but from the first listened ...
— The Shape of Fear • Elia W. Peattie
... her. Here, in the full light, her face looked sadly white and he noticed that her lips trembled. He said with all the kindliness of his nature, for from the first moment he had seen her he had taken to her, her purity and earnestness and sweetness appealing to some aspiration within him: ...
— The Man • Bram Stoker
... all, without "the angel in him." He had a good deal of the susceptibility to poetic feeling, the power of vague and dreamy aspiration, the longing after the good and beautiful, which is God's witness in the soul. A noble sentiment in poetry, a fine scene in nature, had power to bring tears in his great dark eyes, and he had, under the influence of such things, brief inspired moments in which he vaguely ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... for a moment on the outside. The spire points upward and teaches its lesson of aspiration. "Lift up your hearts," it seems to say, and holds up the Cross as that by which alone we are to be "exalted unto everlasting life." Whenever we {19} lift up our eyes to it, it ought to repeat for us that lesson—rebuke ...
— The Worship of the Church - and The Beauty of Holiness • Jacob A. Regester
... sleep under the greensward of St. Peter's Church. To many of us it is the one spot in Bournemouth most worth visiting. Climbing the wooded hill we stand by the Shelley grave, and think of how much intellect, aspiration, and achievement lies there entombed, and of the pathetic cenotaph to the memory of the greatest of all the Shelleys in the fine old Priory ...
— Bournemouth, Poole & Christchurch • Sidney Heath
... and His friendship. You know, I suppose, No. 565, "In the Secret of His Presence," in the 750 edition of Sankey. No. 328, "O Christ, in Thee my soul hath found," is one I like too, as being the expression of partly experience and partly aspiration. He is truly the true source of true satisfaction. May we be led to trust Him more largely in all the things of our lives! I am sure, too it will be the things where we have trusted Him most and been most consecrated in His ...
— James Gilmour of Mongolia - His diaries, letters, and reports • James Gilmour
... had seen the world already, had enjoyed adventures and hair-breadth escapes, and was now at home for the first time in four years; Charity Cora, whose eager, dark eyes told their own story of patient aspiration; and little Fandy. Mr. Danby was proud of all his children, though perhaps proudest of Baby Jamie because there was no knowing what the child might come to; but Mrs. Danby looked with absolute reverence upon her eldest—Amanda Arabella. ...
— Donald and Dorothy • Mary Mapes Dodge
... sensuous activity drives us to the ideal, it throws us still more into the world of ideas by the terrible. Our highest aspiration is to be in good relations with physical nature, without violating morality. But it is not always convenient to serve two masters; and though duty and the appetites should never be at strife, physical necessity is peremptory, and nothing can save men from evil destiny. Happy ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... The old ambition and aspiration to be and to do something really worth doing was still uppermost with him. In a letter to Mary Agnew he says: "Sometimes I feel as if there were a Providence watching over me, and as if an unseen and uncontrollable hand guided my actions. I have often ...
— Four Famous American Writers: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, • Sherwin Cody
... future,—never reached but always coming. She, however, had not looked for happiness to love and loveliness, and need not therefore be disappointed on that score. She had never really determined what it was that might make her happy,—having some hazy aspiration after social distinction and literary fame, in which was ever commingled solicitude respecting money. But at the present moment her great fears and her great hopes were centred on her son. She would not care how grey might be her hair, or how savage might ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... the canvas and yet not reach the end of that fathomless azure tint; I had studied the warm hues of Titian; I had felt ready to float away in the air with the marvellous 'Angel of the Annunciation'—and with all these thoughts in me, how could I content myself with the ordinary aspiration of modern artists? I grew absorbed in one subject—Colour. I noted how lifeless and pale the colouring of to-day appeared beside that of the old masters, and I meditated deeply on the problem thus presented to me. What was the ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli
... ideals, allegories; they are symbols of something beyond themselves. They are Gods of half-rejected tradition, of unconscious make-believe, of aspiration. They are gods to whom doubtful philosophers can pray, with all a philosopher's due caution, as to so many radiant and heart-searching hypotheses. They are not gods in whom any one believes as a hard fact. Does this condemn them? Or is it just the other way? Is it perhaps that one ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray
... varied moods of passion and sentiment. Other pianoforte composers have given us more warm and vivid color, richer sensual effects of tone, more wild and bizarre combination, perhaps even greater sweetness in melody; but we look in vain elsewhere for the spiritual passion and poetry, the aspiration and longing, the lofty humanity, which make the Beethoven sonatas the suspiria de pro-fundis of the composer's inner life. In addition to his symphonies and sonatas, he wrote the great opera of "Fidelio," and in the field of oratorio asserted ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... Theological Seminary. I heard at once of the new and beautiful building; I think I was the first college graduate who walked on the floor of the present Academy Hall. It was said to be the best school edifice in Essex County or even the state of Massachusetts. Thus it began its existence with an aspiration in fine architecture. The style of this edifice is not so classical now as it was fifty-six years ago. When the academy received its new telescope it was too poor to provide it a suitable place. Therefore a dome was erected on the roof, which disturbed the symmetry of the Grecian architecture. ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, February, 1886. - The Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 2, February, 1886. • Various
... is better to begin with a definite instance of the working of an ideal, lest it may seem that we are speaking only of an empty aspiration. We may take as an example the reforms connected with medicine and sanitation, and those only in so far as they have been officially established by the joint action of states. This is a very restricted embodiment of a ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... fervent and prayerful, is impure, and therefore insincere, what must be the comment upon him? If he had reached the loftiness of his prayer, there would be no occasion for such comment. If we feel the aspiration, humility, gratitude, and love which our words express—this God accepts; and it is wise not to try to deceive ourselves or others, for "there is nothing covered that shall not be revealed." Professions and audible prayers are like charity in ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... sole delight consisted in perplexing the human race, and calling up those harmless terrors that constantly hover round the minds of the timid." "The English and Scottish terms, 'Puck,' 'Bogle', are the same as the German 'Spuk' and the Danish 'Spogelse,' without the sibilant aspiration. These words are general names for any kind of spirit, and correspond to the 'pouk' of Piers Ploughman. In Danish 'spog' means a joke, trick, or prank, and hence the character of Robin Goodfellow. In Iceland Puki is regarded as an evil sprite; ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... Foscolo in an otherwise rather valueless Memoir of Bewick the Painter. I tell you of all this Wordsworth, because you have, I think, a more religious regard for him than we on this side the water: he is not so much honoured in his own Country, I mean, his Poetry. I, for one, feel all his lofty aspiration, and occasional Inspiration, but I cannot say that, on the whole, he makes much of it; his little pastoral pieces seem to me his best: less than a Quarter of him. But I may ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... feeling; do not attribute to the circumstance of my youth alone the warmth of the attachment I profess,—for I swear to you, by every hope that I have, that in my heart of hearts my love to you is the source and spring of every action in my life, of every aspiration in my heart; and when I cease to love you, I shall ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... composer who should strike off her chains and renew the youth of her national art; while Germany, among the crowds of imitators who clung to the skirts of Mozart's mantle, could not produce one worthy to follow in his steps. Yet though French opera embodied the finest thought and aspiration of the day, it is only just to observe that the impetus which impelled her composers upon new paths of progress came largely from external sources. It is curious to note how large a share foreigners have had in building up the fabric of ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... whole world, in all men, because we all hate work more or less, as it may be more or less hard, more or less unproductive. The dolce far niente of the Italian, the rascarse la barriga of the Spaniard, the supreme aspiration of the bourgeois to live on his income in peace ...
— The Indolence of the Filipino • Jose Rizal
... opportunity of obtaining all the support I might, perhaps, have had on the present occasion, from a very scrupulous delicacy, which I think became and was incumbent upon me, but which I by no means conceive to have been a fit rule for others, I cannot repent it. While the slightest aspiration of breath passed those lips, now closed for ever,—while one drop of life's blood beat in that heart, now cold for ever,—I could not, I ought not, to have acted otherwise than I did.—I now come with a very ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... When we hear that there is, animating the whole universe, an Elan vital, or general impulse toward some unknown but single ideal, the terms used are no less uncertain, mythical, and vague, but the suggestion conveyed is false—false, I mean, to the organic source of life and aspiration, to the simple naturalness of nature: whereas the suggestion conveyed by Freud's speculations is true. In what sense can myths and metaphors be true or false? In the sense that, in terms drawn from moral predicaments or from literary psychology, they ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... gave Louise a dull glance, which she let a sudden recognition burn through for a moment and then quenched. But in that moment the two women sealed a dislike that had been merely potential before. Their look said for each that the other was by nature, tradition, and aspiration whatever was most detestable in ...
— The Story of a Play - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... the purblind folk, who, knowing nothing of spiritual law, try to insist upon making conditions, and getting tests which are so outside of the law that even the Creator could not meet their demands. For those who have no aspiration toward the spiritual life, the only way is to plunge back into matter through another incarnation in the flesh. There are no new souls created and relegated to this planet. Their number is fixed. They pass and pass, and come ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield
... noon, the dews of the evening, may endanger the life of her, for whom only I value mine. O Jack! when delicate and feeling souls are separated, there is not a feature in the sky, not a movement of the elements, not an aspiration of the breeze, but hints some cause for a ...
— The Rivals - A Comedy • Richard Brinsley Sheridan
... girdles the Equator with an emerald zone. Lured onward by the scented breeze in that eternal search for perfection destined to remain unsatisfied where every step marks a higher ideal than the one already attained, the pilgrim pursues his endless quest, for human aspiration has never yet touched the goal of desires and dreams. The cocoanut woods of Ceylon and her equatorial vegetation lead fancy further afield, for the glassy straits of Malacca beckon the wanderer down their watery highways to ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... exploits of those who may fairly be considered its first conquerors, and by whose peaceful triumphs an empire had been added to the parent state. I cannot close this brief address without indulging in an aspiration for the safety and success of one now engaged in an enterprise similar to that from which you hate earned so much honour. I allude to Sir T. Mitchell. To enter upon any eulogium of the character or abilities of that distinguished officer on the present ...
— Journal of an Overland Expedition in Australia • Ludwig Leichhardt
... in matter no integral and permanent reality she cannot be content with material victories; her poets are subtle in what a French writer styles the innuendoes by which the soul makes its enormous claims. The formula of her aspiration has been admirably rendered by the ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... The cherished aspiration for national unity which for ages has inspired the many millions of people speaking the same language, inhabiting a contiguous and compact territory, but unnaturally separated and divided by dynastic jealousies ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Ulysses S. Grant • James D. Richardson
... describe the productions of my female correspondents in detail. Suffice it to say, that most of them contain a smaller proportion of useless information, and a larger proportion of sentiment, vague aspiration, and would-be-picturesque description, than those of the men who pay postage on my behalf. They are longer, and sometimes crossed; it is therefore a greater ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... ill-will of the common people. The more thoughtful Frenchmen of the eighteenth century, all of them at least who have come to be known by the name of Philosophers, set before themselves two great ideals. These were equality and liberty. The aspiration after these was accompanied in their minds by contempt for the past and its lessons, misunderstanding of the benefits which former ages had bequeathed to them, and hatred of the wrongs and abuses which had come down from earlier times. Among them the word gothic ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... they have it at all, it has been diluted by tradition and so-called culture into a mere sensation. Agnes's passion is an arrested one, so that what there is of it is easily diverted into an expression of religious aspiration. ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... am ardent, impetuous, fond of excitement, reckless at times,—as prone, I fear, to be tempted to vice as to be inspired by virtue. If you withhold your consent to my union with the only woman I can love,—if you drive me to despair,—I am lost! Every pure and lofty aspiration within my nature will be crushed out, and in its place the opposite inclination will spring. I warned you before, when you thwarted the noblest resolution I ever formed. There is yet time to save me from the evil effects of that disappointment, and to spare me the worst results of this. ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... bought or bribed, at any rate in this generation, to forfeit her national ideals and barter the aspiration that six centuries of contact with England have failed to kill; but the 350,000,000 of Indian mankind can never be, or bought, or bribed ...
— The Crime Against Europe - A Possible Outcome of the War of 1914 • Roger Casement
... said the King, staring gloomily at the table, "the admirable clearness of your reason produces in my mind a sentiment which I trust I shall not offend you by describing as an aspiration to punch your head. You irritate me sublimely. What can it be in me? Is it the relic ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... bound the arm of a patient after bleeding, and added surgery to his hair-cutting and his beard-shaving. John Flynn had the courage of utter conviction as to his own ability to master all undertakings at which he chose to tilt. An aspiration once conceived, he never parted with, but held to it as a part of his life. Non-realization made not the slightest difference. His sense of time as a portion of eternity never left him, and therefore his patience ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... "Shack" and Loring during the years at college show his aspiration to become a poet. He reports from time to time his progress in verse making and comments more or less favorably on his "effusions." This writing of pottery—as it pleased him to call it—continued with more serious interest after his graduation, so that in 1840 ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... bed, feeling that the charm of our Arcadian life was over.... In the first revulsion of feeling, I was perhaps unjust to my associates. I see now, more clearly, the causes of those vagaries, which originated in a genuine aspiration, and failed from an ignorance of the true nature of Man, quite as much as from the egotism of the individuals. Other attempts at reorganizing Society were made about the same time by men of culture and ...
— Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature • Various
... great superiority? But that relative superiority which he felt in himself left him perfectly modest, or he knew it was subject to other relations that showed it to him in extreme littleness: that is to say, the relation of the finite with the aspiration toward the infinite. It was the appreciation of the immense distance existing between what we know and what we ignore, between what we are and what we would be; the consciousness, in fact, of the limits imposed by God on man, and which neither study ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... other symbols generally in use are the ship, the emblem of the church; the fish, the emblem of Christ, the palm, the symbol of martyrdom. The anchor represented hope in immortality; the dove, peace; the stag reminded the faithful of the pious aspiration of the Psalmist; the horse was the emblem of strength in the faith; the hunted hare, of persecution; the peacock and the phoenix stood for signs of the resurrection. Christ, as the good pastor, was also introduced ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... anybody who abuses either. Their conjoint blood has produced a Nation, the like of which no man living before our day had ever fancied. Nearly three centuries of intermingling and intermarrying, has made the traditions and the hopes of either the heritage and aspiration of us all. Common sufferings, common triumphs, common pride, make the whole glorious history the property of every American citizen, and it is provincial folly to glorify either faction at the ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... PHOEBE'S aspiration to become like her teacher did not lessen as the days went on. Her profound admiration for Miss Lee developed into intense devotion, a devotion whose depth she ...
— Patchwork - A Story of 'The Plain People' • Anna Balmer Myers
... thoughts, his most impressive views, and even foreshadowed those intimate convictions which he never expressed, but which he desired to record in such a manner that those that can read between the lines might find them there; and certainly there we find them. His aspiration has been to present to the world a picture of the physical world from which he would exclude everything that relates to the turmoil of human society, and to the ambitions of individual men. A life ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... beautiful in detail because it had the Greeks to imagine the things it so hideously grouped, ecclesiastical Rome may be unbeautiful in detail because it had not the Goths to realize the beauty of its religious aspiration—that is, if it was the Goths who invented Gothic architecture; I do not suppose it was. Anyway, there is said to be but one Gothic church in Rome, and this I did not visit, perhaps because I felt that ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... dreamy aspiration the occasion for a compliment,' exclaimed Lesbia, lightly. 'What I said was so silly that I don't wonder you thought it right to say something just a little sillier. But moonlight and running water have a curious effect upon ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... jacket, the cigar, and the frequenting of public-houses were unpleasant outward signs; but far more deplorable was the cynic tone. These were and are the sad excrescences of an otherwise laudable aspiration; but it may be hoped that in course of time the excrescences will disappear. The sooner the better, else the best friends of the progressive tendency among womankind will turn away from it in sorrow and ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... both in the northern republics and in the Cape, there had entered the conception of a single Dutch commonwealth, extending from Cape Town to the Zambesi, in which flag, speech, and law should all be Dutch. It is in this aspiration that many shrewd and well-informed judges see the true inner meaning of this persistent arming, of the constant hostility, of the forming of ties between the two republics (one of whom had been reconstituted and made a sovereign independent State ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the ranks are thronged with incompetent aspirants, without seriousness of aim, without the faculties demanded by their work. They are led to waste powers which in other directions might have done honest service, because they have failed to discriminate between aspiration and inspiration, between the desire for greatness and the consciousness of power. Still lower in the ranks are those who follow Literature simply because they see no other opening for their incompetence; just as forlorn widows and ignorant old maids thrown suddenly on ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... Sea, until He knows all passions of the senses; all The great emotions of the heart; and each Exalted aspiration of the soul. Then may he sit beside the sea and say: 'I, too, have flung myself against the rocks, And kissed their flinty brows with no return; And fallen spent upon unfeeling sands. I, too, have gone forth yearning, to far shores, Seeking that something which would bring content; ...
— The Englishman and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... all my poetisation and aspiration to compose and collect into unity what is fragment and riddle and ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... total of our passions and pursuits, of that which we desire and that which we dread, is brought before us by contrast; the action and reaction are equal; the keenness of immediate suffering only gives us a more intense aspiration after, and a more intimate participation with the antagonist world of good: makes us drink deeper of the cup of human life: tugs at the heart-strings: loosens the pressure about them, and calls the springs of thought and feeling into play ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... and society have waged a relentless and bloody battle for ages, each striving for supremacy, because each was blind to the value and importance of the other. The individual and social instincts,—the one a most potent factor for individual endeavor, for growth, aspiration, self-realization; the other an equally potent factor for mutual helpfulness ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... powerful country would eventually reward him with increased pay and promotion. Were the single dollar which lay alone in his trowsers pocket, and the light mist which arose off there beyond the Apostles' Battery, opposite Port Royal Harbor, an evidence of one or a sign of the last aspiration? We hope ...
— Captain Brand of the "Centipede" • H. A. (Henry Augustus) Wise
... Sign of the Spider" had been their cry! And these were "The People of the Spider!" What magic, what mystery was this? Lilith's last gift, Lilith's image; even her very name! It had indeed acted as a talisman, as a "charm" to stand between him and the most deadly of peril, as her aspiration had worded it. Verily, again had Lilith's love availed to stand between himself and a swift, sure, and bloody death! A marvel, and a ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... And if the chain You help'd to rivet round me did contract Since guiltless infancy from guilt in act; Of what in aspiration or in thought Guilty, but in resentment of the wrong That wreaks revenge on wrong I never wrought By excommunication from the free Inheritance that all created life, Beside myself, is born to—from the ...
— Life Is A Dream • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... always before me. How could it be possible to forget an engraving of Duerer's, even though seen but once? I can see her proud and noble head resting thoughtfully upon one hand, her long hair falling in disheveled tresses upon her shoulders; her folded wings emblematic of that impotent aspiration which directs her gaze towards heaven; a book, closed and useless as her wings, resting upon her knee. Nothing can be more gloomy, more penetrating, than the expression of this figure. From the peculiar folds of her dress, one would suppose she was enveloped ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... the army; but finding that the idea gave pain to his mother, he immediately abandoned the notion, and appears from thenceforth to have looked upon the clerical office as his destined part in life. Strange transition, from the aspiration to carry forth death and destruction to that of being the bearer of the glad tidings of "peace on earth, and good-will toward men." The change, however, is one which we believe to be not unfrequent. The same desire for fame urges ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... was long written with ch prefixed, thus chugam, &c. The translators of the Scriptures, observing that ch neither corresponded to the pronunciation, nor made part of the radical Preposition, exchanged it for th, and wrote thugam. The th, being no more than a simple aspiration, corresponds indeed to the common mode of pronouncing the word. Yet it may well be questioned whether the t, even though aspirated, ought to have a place, if g be the only radical consonant belonging to the Preposition. The component parts of the word might ...
— Elements of Gaelic Grammar • Alexander Stewart
... nothing so monstrous but we can believe it of ourselves. About ourselves, about our aspirations and delinquencies, we have dwelt by choice in a delicious vagueness from our boyhood up. No one will have forgotten Tom Sawyer's aspiration: "Ah, if he could only die TEMPORARILY!" Or, perhaps, better still, the inward resolution of the two pirates, that "so long as they remained in that business, their piracies should not again be sullied with the crime of stealing." Here we recognise the thoughts of our boyhood; ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... day marked with the fullness and vigor of youth, in the pledge of their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to the cause of freedom and of mankind; and on the last, extended on the bed of death, with but sense and sensibility left to breathe a last aspiration to Heaven of blessing upon their country, may we not humbly hope that to them too it was a pledge of transition from gloom to glory, and that while their mortal vestments were sinking into the clod of the valley their emancipated spirits were ascending ...
— A Compilation of Messages and Letters of the Presidents - 2nd section (of 3) of Volume 2: John Quincy Adams • Editor: James D. Richardson
... observed in a manner worthy a cause to which our judgment would give deliberately its sanction; in which our feelings would safely and with satisfaction rest on the firmness of our faith; from joining in which a truly pious mind would have no ground for inward misgiving, nor for the aspiration, Would ...
— Primitive Christian Worship • James Endell Tyler
... memory some words of his which may seem to refute me. In reference to the song of the angels at the end of the poem he wrote as follows: 'These verses contain the key of Faust's salvation: namely, in Faust himself an ever higher and purer aspiration, and from above eternal love coming to his help; and they are in harmony with our religious conceptions, according to which we cannot attain to heaven by our own strength unless it is helped by ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill
... water for themselves and send them to friends and kindred in foreign lands. No river in all the world is so worshiped, and to die upon its sacred banks and to have one's body burned and his ashes borne away into oblivion upon its tawny current is the highest aspiration of hundreds of millions ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... on Goosey Gander, bandaged to the knees and hocks. Albert followed him on Make-Way-There, a pretty bay, with a white star. The lad's lips were turned in, and his face was stiff with aspiration and desire. That morning he hoped to have his chance, and he purposed to make the most of it. Jerry, the economist with the corrugated brow, followed him on a snake-necked chestnut. He sat up aloft, his shoulders square, his little legs clipping his mount, a Napoleon of the saddle, pondering ...
— Boy Woodburn - A Story of the Sussex Downs • Alfred Ollivant
... this light alliterative style, which delights the literary reader, do we find the truth? To me it seems like a slur on the pilgrims, evidently due to Mr. Lowell's idea that a genuine religious feeling must be gloomy and solemn. Joy may seem to him incompatible with heartfelt religion and aspiration. That these pilgrims lack the religious aspiration characteristic of highly developed Christians of the West, is, of course, true; but that they have a certain type of religious aspiration is equally indisputable. They have definite and strong ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... altar, in the restful gloom of Calvary, she could look up with untired eyes to the calm glow of the celestial life, unchanging, orderly, beautiful with its satisfied aspiration, and rich in perfect love and holy companionship. Such a longing came over her to walk into this perfect peace that moment! Mona well knew this mood, and Louis in triumph signalled his sister to look. Her eyes, turned to the rocky shore of Valcour, saw far beyond. On her perfect face lay a ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... to conquer the world. Its aspects of "world-denial and world-renewal" render Christianity the very religion we need. "It is the religion of religions," but a statement of this fact does not mean the realisation of the fact. The same energy and aspiration are needful to-day as in the days of yore. Christianity, whenever it has lived on its highest levels, has struggled for two tremendous facts at least: the insufficiency of the world and the regeneration ...
— An Interpretation of Rudolf Eucken's Philosophy • W. Tudor Jones
... virtually means. Thus one may struggle for years to secure a college education. This definite end has been adopted for the sake of a somewhat more indefinite end of self-advancement, and from it there issues a whole series of minor ends, which form a hierarchy of steps ascending to the highest goal of aspiration. Now upon the face of things we live very unsystematic lives, and yet were we to examine ourselves in this fashion, we should all find our lives to be marvels of organization. Their growth, as we have seen, began before we were conscious of it; and we are commonly so absorbed ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... coral reef attains continental proportions—that is, by the infinitesimal contributions of countless unselfish individualities. They are desirous that man should some day know the truth. Is there any unselfishness in the aspiration? ...
— The Golden Censer - The duties of to-day, the hopes of the future • John McGovern
... the clearly discernible laws of life is that we can both check and contract habits; and when we begin our day, we can begin it if we will by prayer and aspiration and resolution, as much as we can begin it with bath and toilet. We can say, "I will live resolutely to-day in joy and good-humour and energy and kindliness." Those powers and possibilities are all there; and even if we are overshadowed by disappointment ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... people of to-day are made of exactly the same stuff as the young people of any other day. They have the same sort of instincts and the same underlying aspiration to get the most and the best out of life. Owing to altered conditions, for reasons which we have outlined, they are being left to go about it very largely in their own way, with less coercion from without, ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)
... arms and cried, "See, the Colonel comes!" We listened with rapt attention to his superior eloquence, and no man was more deeply rooted in the affections of his people. We esteemed him too high to be low, too lofty in thought and aspiration to do a mean thing. Republican aspirants to Congress in those days were easily turned down by the Colonel who represented that district for three or more terms at the National Capitol. But there came a time when the Colonel's influence began to wane; whisperings were current ...
— Hanover; Or The Persecution of the Lowly - A Story of the Wilmington Massacre. • David Bryant Fulton
... expression, the meaning of which is of still more general acceptation. The idea, in fact, has doubtless flitted across the minds of most of us, though few, let us hope, would help to realize it; for, notwithstanding its agreeable form, it is not a benevolent aspiration. The reception of the individual in question into the realms of bliss has less interest with us than his removal from the earth's surface, and, consequently, from our path upon it. We may be very civil toward this person, and we often ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn
... there may have been a trace of aspiration. Otherwise the whole affair was a hodge-podge of petty people and ignoble motives—of Una and Wilkins and S. Herbert Ross and Bessie Kraker, who married a mattress-renovator, and Bessie's successor; of fifteen dollars a week, and everybody trying to deceive everybody else; ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... of pardon, and to teach him to aim at the recovery of the moral image in which he was at first created. If the passions, and prejudices, and divisions of professing Christians themselves are a distressing hindrance to the attainment of this noble and dutiful aspiration, we have much in the condition of the world around us to warn and rouse us to a vigorous and united effort to arrest the increasing tide of sin and crime. The developments of a grossly evil spirit at the present day fill us ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... aspiration and disquietude; diagonal lines, action. In wall paper designs and rug patterns the diagonal line is not always excellent. Diagonal lines are sometimes effective in rugs; but the feeling of energetic movement they produce in wall papers or drop patterns is objectionable. ...
— Prepare and Serve a Meal and Interior Decoration • Lillian B. Lansdown
... intellect, spirit, aspiration, with an appreciation of all that was best in art, music and the world of thought. As to the Baron, he had drunk life's wine to the lees and pronounced the draft bitter. He was a heavy dragoon with a soul for foxhounds. Later, when gout got to twinging him, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... than four centuries, and had created the power of Rome—that was his political creed. That Consuls, Censors, and Senators might go on to the end of time with no diminution of their dignity, but with great increase of justice and honor and truth among them—that was his political aspiration. They had made Rome what it was, and he knew and could imagine nothing better; and, odious as an oligarchy is seen to be under the strong light of experience to which prolonged ages has subjected it, the aspiration on his part was noble. He has been wrongly accused ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope
... man received punishment for a self-inflicted wrong it was John Yule. A punishment as subtle as the sin; for in the children growing up about him every relinquished hope, neglected gift, lost aspiration, seemed to live again; yet on each and all was set the direful stamp of imperfection, which made them visible illustrations of the great law ...
— Moods • Louisa May Alcott
... out of a crisis in sexual conditions, has liberated energies that are themselves the motors of any reform. In England and America voting has become the symbol of an aspiration as yet half-conscious and undefined. What women want is surely something a great deal deeper than the privilege of taking part in elections. They are looking for a readjustment of their relations to the home, to work, to children, to men, to the interests of civilized life. The ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... top of wretches as miserable as myself. Now I was rolling back, and they pouring on to the top of me. The one thought in my mind was—which way are we going next? and mixed up with it occasionally came the aspiration—would it were to the bottom! Above it all was the incessant thunder of the waves on the decks above and the wild wheezing of the engines as they met the ...
— Boycotted - And Other Stories • Talbot Baines Reed
... to the conclusion that I wanted to reform, I emerged from my reflections with this solemn formula: "Fetchke, let us be good." And my generosity in including my sister in my plans for salvation was equalled by her magnanimity in assuming part of my degradation. She always replied, in aspiration as eager as mine, "Yes, Mashke, let ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... on this is that Britain is derived from the Greek word Prytania, which, according to Suidas, "doth," with a circumflexed aspiration, "signifie metalles, fayres, and markets." "Calling the place by that which came out of it, as one would say, hee went to market, when he goeth to Antwarpe," &c. Has this ...
— Notes & Queries 1850.01.12 • Various
... combined with other qualities and the earnestness and other expressive effects of aspiration may be spread over a whole sentence or it may be restricted ...
— The Canadian Elocutionist • Anna Kelsey Howard
... wastes, fertile valleys, gentle slopes, and giddy precipices—heights and hollows of hope and despair, barren wastes of mis-spent time, fertile valleys of intellectual accomplishment, gentle slopes of aspiration undefined, and giddy precipices of passionate impulse and desperate revolt. Genius is sympathetic insight made perfect; and it must have this diversity if it is ever to be effectual—must touch on every human experience, must suffer, ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... the mother. How different it was! Yet in it, too, there was the beating of the pulse of life. But there was no regret, no looking back into the past, no sombre exhibition of force seeking—as a thing groping, desperately in a gulf—an object on which to exercise itself. Instead there was aspiration, there was expectation, there was the wonder of bright eyes lifted to the sun. And there was a reverence that for a moment recalled to Artois the reverence of the dead man from whose loins this child had sprung. But Vere's was the reverence of understanding, not of a dim amazement—more beautiful ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... aspiration was for this proposed improvement upon our species, I cordially responded thereto; for every vertebra in my spine was articulating ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... your position is, as you said at the beginning, that Good is simply what Nature wants. So that, instead of looking within to find our criterion, we ought really to look without, to discover, if we can, the tendency of Nature and to acquiesce in that as the goal of our aspiration." ...
— The Meaning of Good—A Dialogue • G. Lowes Dickinson
... he is indebted for the patronage of The Christian Advocate. I shall only indulge the reader with the following beautiful description of the Established Church:—"It is a bloated, unsightly mass of formalities, hypocrisy, bigotry, and selfishness, without a single charitable impulse or pious aspiration." After this touching display of genuine American feeling, he draws the picture of a clergyman in language so opposite, that one is reminded of a certain mysterious personage, usually represented with cloven feet, and who is said to be very apt at ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... marvellous that mere stone could translate so delicately the highest groping of men's hearts toward God, their most unutterable longing. And the broken stones of the Gothic ruin, in the freshness and rawness of their ruin, seemed to be bleeding out human aspiration, spilling it footlessly upon the dead earth. And of course all about these ecclesiastical ruins were the ruins of homes, and shops and stores—places just as pitifully appealing in their appalling ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White
... amusement. She was certainly an 'original,' and he hardly knew what to make of her. There was something 'uncanny' and goblin-like in her appearance, and yet her sallow face had a certain charm when the smile illumined it, and the light of aspiration burned up in the large wild eyes. In any case, she had persuaded him in a moment, as it were, and almost involuntarily, to take tea at the Manor that afternoon. Why he had consented to do what he had hitherto refused, he could not imagine. Cicely's remark that Miss Vancourt ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... From it came national security and the triumph of right over wrong. No one would belittle the worth of the sacrifice. But in the narrower sense of production, of bread winning, there came nothing; or nothing except a new power of organization, a new technical skill and a new aspiration towards better things. But the burden of peace finance directed towards social efforts will bring a direct return. Every cent that is spent upon the betterment of the population will come back, ...
— The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice • Stephen Leacock |
