"Ambition" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... his country! This enemy triumphant, seizing honours and employments for himself and friends, which he had @ avowedly disclaimed; other friends, whom he had neglected, pursuing him for gratifying his ambition-accomplishing his ruin, and prostituting themselves even more than he had done! all of them blowing up a rebellion, by every art that could blacken the King in the eyes of the nation, and some of them promoting the trials and sitting in judgment on the wretches whom they had misled ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... the work themselves about a home, they are sadly deficient. It is not the soft, palefaced, painted, fashionable lady we want, for the world would be better without her; but the woman capable of knowing how, and willing to take a place in the home affairs of life. It is an ambition of mine to establish a Preparatory College in Topeka, Kansas, where girls may be taught, as women should be, that they in turn may teach others, how to wash, cook, scrub, dress and talk, to counteract the idea that ...
— The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation • Carry A. Nation
... sweet beginning Omen'd their future bright condition. Offer all Asia to Septimius— Add Britain—put in competition With Acme—wretchedly abstemious They'd call him of your gifts, Ambition. The only province worth his winning Is Acme: Acme's faithful bosom Knows nought on earth but her Septimius. Ripe was the fruit, as fair the blossom Of this their mutual love, and glowing; And all admired its freshness growing. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various
... to whose sister, the Countess Dowager of Pembroke, he paid his addresses, and was married, with the consent of her brother. For the favour thus shown him by his sovereign, he, however, proved ungrateful: his inordinate ambition, cloaked by a pretended zeal for reform, was the cause of those rebellions which, in the reign of Henry III., kept the kingdom in such a continued turmoil. The different oppressions and successes of the confederate barons, who at length got possession ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 345, December 6, 1828 • Various
... relative the "great northern," though perhaps in a less degree, the loggerhead is commonly at an extreme, either loquacious or dumb; as if he could not let his moderation be known unto any man. Sometimes I fancied him possessed with an insane ambition to match the mocking-bird in song as well as in personal appearance. If so, it is not surprising that he should be subject to fits of discouragement and silence. Aiming at the sun, though a good and virtuous exercise, ...
— A Florida Sketch-Book • Bradford Torrey
... is at the root of the Rebellion, or at least its sine qua non. The ambition of politicians may have instigated them to act; they would have been impotent without Slavery as their instrument. I will also concede that Emancipation would help us in Europe, and convince them ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... generally took with her the work of a twelvemonths' industry, which found a readier sale at Bruxelles than at Malines. Lucille and St. Amand were already betrothed; their wedding was shortly to take place; and the custom of the country leading parents, however poor, to nourish the honourable ambition of giving some dowry with their daughters, Lucille found it easy to hide the object of her departure, under the pretence of taking the lace to Bruxelles, which had been the year's labour of her mother and herself,—it would sell for sufficient, ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... equality of opportunity for those whose main ambition is not to be provided with some task-work performable by their own hand, but to achieve some position which will enable them to prescribe tasks to others, and thus do justice to their real or supposed talents by the construction of great machines, or the organisation of great enterprises—in ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock
... impulses of ambition to get on in the world, he engaged himself to go down the Mississippi in a flatboat, receiving ten dollars a month for his wages, and afterwards he made the trip once more. At twenty-one he drove his father's cattle, as the family migrated to ...
— Memorial Address on the Life and Character of Abraham Lincoln - Delivered at the request of both Houses of Congress of America • George Bancroft
... fabulous adventures by him accomplished in the far regions of the Rue de la Paix and the Boulevard Poissonniere. Such recitals were, for us less favored mortals, like tales of Bacchus conquering in the East; they excited our ambition, but not our jealousy; for the superiority of Harmodius was acknowledged by us all, and we never thought of a rivalry with him. No man ever cantered a hack through the Champs Elysees with such elegant assurance; no ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... latter would have entered into this alliance, and that thus, the whole political system of Europe would have taken a new form. What has prevented this court from coming into it, we know not. The unmeasurable ambition of the Emperor, and his total want of moral principle and honor, are suspected. A great share of Turkey, the recovery of Silesia, the consolidation of his dominions by the Bavarian exchange, the liberties of the Germanic ...
— The Writings of Thomas Jefferson - Library Edition - Vol. 6 (of 20) • Thomas Jefferson
... perfectly pipeclayed: how could he tolerate false spelling, and commas shaken as out of a pepper-box over his page? It is probable he cared little about Literature, after all; cared, at least, only about the essentials of it; had practically no ambition for himself, or none considerable, in that kind;—and so might reckon exact obedience and punctuality, in a soldier, more important than good spelling to an amateur literary man: He never minded snuff upon his own chin, not even upon his waistcoat and breeches: A merely superficial thing, not worth ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume IV. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Friedrich's Apprenticeship, First Stage—1713-1728 • Thomas Carlyle
... been brought up each with his one faint, polite little hunger, his one ambition, his one pale downy desire in life, looking forward day by day, year by year, to the fine frenzy, to the fierce joy of Never Making ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... accepted for centuries, have been set aside, and others of a widely different character pronounced. Julius Caesar, who was wont to stand as the model usurper, and was regarded as having wantonly destroyed Roman liberty in order to gratify his towering ambition, is now regarded as a political reformer of the very highest and best class,—as the man who alone thoroughly understood his age and his country, and who was Heaven's own instrument to rescue unnumbered millions from the misrule of an oligarchy whose members looked upon mankind ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... earnest endeavors in this direction. Moreover, after having themselves fully realized that the Lutheran Confessions contain nothing but God's eternal truth over against the manifest errors of the Roman and other churches, it was, as shown above, the ambition and prayer of the Henkels to lead the American Lutheran synods out of the mire of sectarian aberrations back to the unadulterated Lutheranism of Luther and the Lutheran Symbols. When, in 1824, some members of the North Carolina Synod made proposals for a union of the two ...
— American Lutheranism - Volume 1: Early History of American Lutheranism and The Tennessee Synod • Friedrich Bente
... interest of a certain class of men in every State to resist all changes which may hazard a diminution of the power, emolument, and consequence of the offices they hold under the State establishments; and the perverted ambition of another class of men, who will either hope to aggrandize themselves by the confusions of their country, or will flatter themselves with fairer prospects of elevation from the subdivision of the empire into several partial ...
— The Federalist Papers
... all those passions and affections which attend vulgar minds, and was guilty of no other ambition than of knowledge, and to be reputed a lover of all good men; and that made him too much a contemner of those arts, which must be indulged in the transactions of ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... impression of being exquisitely lovely, was she remarkable, but rather for that receptive attitude that made her an inspired listener. In me, who had known her for but a little while, she awakened my deepest and drowsiest ambition, the desire to express in pictures the light and the shade of the London I knew. With her I could feel the power, and the glory, and the fear, and the terror of the city as I never did at other times. It was not alone that ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... had branded lines into his face which it was doubtful if he would ever lose. To be Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs to the greatest power which the world had as yet known must certainly seem, on paper, to be as brilliant a post as a man's ambition could covet. Many years ago it had seemed so to Bransome himself. It was a post which he had deliberately coveted, worked for, and strived for. And now, when in sight of the end, with two years of office only to run, he was ...
— The Illustrious Prince • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... love, was, to her mind, a vain crunching of ashes between the teeth. Not to have ill things said of her and of hers, not to be disgraced, not to be rendered incapable of some human effort, not to have actually to starve,—such was the extent of her ambition in this world. And for the next,—she felt so assured of the goodness of God that she could not bring herself to doubt of happiness in a world that was to be eternal. Her doubt was this, whether it was really the next world which would be eternal. Of eternity she did not doubt;—but might there ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... and consequently into pecuniary difficulties, and the prostitute No-matter-who was now on the lookout for a dinner, and would have been only too happy to get it at some table-d'hote at Montmarte. Machin had had a return of ambition with regard to his poetry and his dramas, but then, his verses of former days had lost their freshness, and his youthful dramas appeared to him to be childish. He would have to write others, and, by Jove! he felt himself capably of doing it, for he had plenty of ideas and plans in his head, ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... though in a manner which rather resembled stepping up behind a carriage than getting into one. The Antiquary was indeed uncommonly delighted; for, like many other men who spend their lives in obscure literary research, he had a secret ambition to appear in print, which was checked by cold fits of diffidence, fear of criticism, and habits of indolence and procrastination. "But," thought he, "I may, like a second Teucer, discharge my shafts from behind the shield ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... thought of Cathay, and what his ambition and Earth's ultimate deceit and cowardice would mean to ...
— Victory • Lester del Rey
... bigger neighbors, there has grown up a decidedly incorporating spirit. Notwithstanding the natural disinclination of the ruling factions of that country, the general mass of the people are by no means averse to become members of a vast central European empire, the unswerving ambition of the ...
— The Secrets of the German War Office • Dr. Armgaard Karl Graves
... But his towering ambition remained unsated. He realized that he lived in a progressive age, and his superior talents enabled him to take a stand far ahead of his fellows. By diligent application to his noble profession, he was now a member of that exalted Institution, "The Prize ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., No. 35, November 26, 1870 • Various
... severity, and their good actions they knew would never pass unrewarded. Frederic employed much of his time in working in a little garden that his father had given him: Elizabeth assisted in the management of the flowers, and their highest ambition was to present their mamma with a nosegay of roses, before any were blown ...
— A Week of Instruction and Amusement, • Mrs. Harley
... the many mere points of resemblance which must have existed between them; it hardly takes into account the great fund of humanity common to them both. The politics of Cicero, it is true, would be unintelligible to one unversed in the constitution and history of Rome; but the ambition of Cicero, the embarrassment of the politician, the meditated treachery, the boasted independence, the doubt, the fear, the hesitation,—all this will be better studied in a living House of Commons, than in all the manuscripts of the Vatican. Sacrifice nothing ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... negotiation has been brought to light by Henry Adams in his History of the Administration of Jefferson. The check in San Domingo had dampened the colonial ardor of Napoleon; war was about to break out again with England; Napoleon's ambition turned toward an European empire; and he lightly offered the province which had come to him so cheaply. Neither Livingston, Monroe, nor Jefferson had thought it possible to acquire New Orleans; with 880,000 square ...
— Formation of the Union • Albert Bushnell Hart
... but in effect; that is, by enriching them with lands, castles, and treasures, that may gain them power among the rest, and bring in the rest to dependence upon themselves, to the end that, they maintaining their ambition by the prince, the prince may maintain his power ...
— The Commonwealth of Oceana • James Harrington
... incipient malady; and every return to Edinburgh proved more and more conclusively that he could not live in Scotch mists. He had made the acquaintance of a number of literary men, and he was consumed with a burning ambition to become a writer. Like Ibsen's Master-Builder, there was a troll in his blood, which drew him away to the continent on inland voyages with a canoe and lonely tramps with a donkey; these gave him material ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... cause. We are approaching the end of one great era in American history and we are preparing, as best we may, for a new era. The consciousness of the magnitude of the change has come to us rather suddenly. One big job which has absorbed the energies and stimulated the ambition of Americans for three hundred years is practically finished. Some work still remains to be done on it, but it no longer demands the highest ability. The ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... particular ambition that way," said the trooper, rising, and bowing good night to the ladies, "and, therefore, have been providing materials necessary to ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... foolish Egyptian, what have I to do with resentment? Do I resent the wind when it chills me, or the night when it makes me stumble in the darkness? Shall I resent youth when it turns from age, and ambition when it turns from servitude? To tell me such a story as this is but to tell me that the ...
— Caesar and Cleopatra • George Bernard Shaw
... when the knight went to him, 'I have been too easy with this knight, Sir Lancelot. He hath slain eleven knights of the Round Table and my messenger. The pride and ambition of that man shall have a check. His great fame for valiant deeds hath made him mad, until it would seem that nothing but this realm will content him. Now, therefore, as justice demands, and Sir Mador requires, do ye lead the queen to the fire. She shall have the law as is right. Afterwards we ...
— King Arthur's Knights - The Tales Re-told for Boys & Girls • Henry Gilbert
... lost the election; for cotton was very high, and Alexander urged that it was in consequence of the Tariff. Two years passed away, which Crockett spent in the wildest adventures of hunting. He was a true man of the woods with no ambition for any better home than the log cabin he occupied. There was no excitement so dear to him as the pursuit and capture of a grizzly bear. There is nothing on record, in the way of hunting, which surpasses the exploits ...
— David Crockett: His Life and Adventures • John S. C. Abbott
... have their seat, Arontes led them, whom no warlike praise Ennobled, but high birth and titles great, His helm ne'er made him sweat in toilsome frays, Nor was his sleep e'er broke with trumpet's threat, But from soft ease to try the toil of fight His fond ambition brought this carpet knight. ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso
... other. I felt she belonged to me; determined she should belong to me. From that instant when I became convinced that she was of white blood—that no hideous barrier of race, no stain of dishonor, held us apart—she had become my one ambition. I not only knew that I loved her; but I believed almost as strongly that she loved me. Every glance of her eyes, each word she had spoken, remained indelibly in my memory. And beyond doubt she thought me dead. Kirby ...
— The Devil's Own - A Romance of the Black Hawk War • Randall Parrish
... You must know everything, have tried everything, have had all your personal wishes and desires satisfied, all obstacles removed from your path, and pass your way through life with the firm conviction that there remains nothing to interest or arouse your ambition in order to be a victim of ennui. The greatest sufferers from this disagreeable sensation are, as I have just remarked, the royal and imperial personages of Europe, and although the emperors of Germany and Austria have the greater portion of their time taken up by the business of ...
— The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2) • Mme. La Marquise de Fontenoy
... bigger one. There they were trudging along, leaving their home (p. 070) behind with its happy memories, to go forth as penniless refugees, compelled to live on the charity of others. It was through no fault of their own, but only through the monstrous greed and ambition of a despot crazed with feudal dreams of a by-gone age. As I looked at that little procession, and at many other similar ones, the words of the Gospel kept ringing in my ears, "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these ...
— The Great War As I Saw It • Frederick George Scott
... turned to the chief spoils, kettle, cap and worm. Stone and his men took the copper worm from the cooling barrel, removed the cap, drew the fire from the furnace, and finally pulled down the kettle. In the varied excitement of the night, the marshal had almost forgotten his second great ambition, in the accomplishment of his first. Almost, not quite. Now, the memory of it jumped within him. He thrust the cap where the glow of the fire would light it clearly, dropped to his knees, and peered closely. His stern face relaxed abruptly ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... had an enormous ambition for Miss Adams, and that ambition now took form in what was perhaps his most remarkable effort in connection with her. It was the production of "Joan of Arc" at the Harvard Stadium. It started in ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... eclipsed fame of your ancestors, as your great-grandfather, the great elector, once avenged, at Fehrbellin, the defeats of his father against the Swedes. Let not the degeneracy of the age carry you away, my sons; become men and heroes. Should you lack this ambition, you would be unworthy of the name of princes and grandsons of Frederick the Great. But if, in spite of all efforts, you should fail in restoring the former grandeur of the state, then seek death as Prince ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... my lips parted to give utterance to the ejaculation, "Oh!" as I felt I was grasping the reason of my messmate's conduct. Could it be ambition? ...
— Sail Ho! - A Boy at Sea • George Manville Fenn
... Arlington, to the lessening of the Duke of York, whom they cannot suffer to be great, for fear of my Lord Chancellor's return, which therefore they make the King violent against. That he believes it is impossible these two great men can hold together long; or, at least, that the ambition of the former is so great that he will endeavour to master all, and bring into play as many as he can. That Anglesy will not lose his place easily, but will contend in law with whoever comes to execute it. That the Duke of York, in all things but in his amours, is led by the ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys
... advantages to the detriment of others. In modern times the opportunities for building up large monopolies have greatly increased and have been turned to the most profitable account by designing men. Great and even unbearable abuses have always followed where the greed and ambition of such men have not been checked by governmental agencies. In this respect the people of the United States have had about the same experience as the rest of mankind. Ever since the introduction of railroads into this country there has been a well-marked ...
— The Railroad Question - A historical and practical treatise on railroads, and - remedies for their abuses • William Larrabee
... in thus striving to keep aloof the ravenous wolf Ambition from my guileless flock, that I was giving cause for many to think me an enemy to the king and government, and a perverter of Christianity, to suit levelling doctrines. But so it was. Many of the heritors ...
— The Annals of the Parish • John Galt
... sacrificed in sentiment was worth as much as what he has gained in substance; but the superadded bitterness of seeing his very recantation nullified. He had been sorry for all this long ago; but his attempts to replace ambition by love had been as fully foiled as his ambition itself. His wronged wife had foiled them by a fraud so grandly simple as to be almost a virtue. It was an odd sequence that out of all this tampering with social law ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... naturally amiable disposition enjoy what may seem a high degree of happiness, through their sympathy with each other in worldliness and ambition; but such happiness is not of a kind that can endure the clouds and tempests of life. It is nourished only by the good things of this world, and, if it cannot obtain them, is converted into the greater wretchedness because the being who is dearest in life shares this wretchedness. ...
— The Elements of Character • Mary G. Chandler
... the next week witnessed the sallying forth of Harvey What's-His-Name, moved to energy by a long dormant and mournfully acquired ambition. The delay had ...
— What's-His-Name • George Barr McCutcheon
... virus of rabies. The sporting-fever is the veritable malady of St. Vitus, holding its victim forever on the go, as game-seasons come, and so long as back and legs, eye and ear, can wrestle with Time's infirmities. It breeds ambition, boasting, and "yarns" to a proverbial extent, with a general disbelief in the possible veracity of a brother sportsman, and an irresistible; desire to talk of new and privately discovered sporting-heavens. The gold-seeker ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, August, 1885 • Various
... rather than diminished. The beautiful niece of Physcon, who, at the time of her compulsory marriage with him, evinced such an aversion to the monster, had become, at the period of her husband's death, as great a monster of ambition, selfishness, and cruelty as he. She had two sons, Lathyrus and Alexander. Physcon, when he died, left the kingdom of Egypt to her by will, authorizing her to associate with her in the government whichever of these two sons she might choose. The oldest was best entitled ...
— Cleopatra • Jacob Abbott
... and manners; but even more than this, to be ever fascinated with the idea of surroundings more elegant and pleasing than those which have been customary. And you praised me, and praise is life to me. It was alone my sensations at these things which prompted my reply. Ambition and vanity they would be called; perhaps they ...
— Under the Greenwood Tree • Thomas Hardy
... The state of society has so long been disturbed, the sense of moral and religious obligations so much weakened, public faith and national honor have been so impaired, respect to treaties has been so diminished, and the law of nations has lost so much of its force, while pride, ambition, avarice, and violence have been so long unrestrained, there remains no reasonable ground on which to raise an expectation that a commerce without protection or ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 4) of Volume 1: John Adams • Edited by James D. Richardson
... meaningless silence on his entrance which so plainly indicated either that he had been the subject of conversation or that it was not for his ears. It was a dismal reminder of his boyhood at Sidon and Tasajara. But he was too full of hope and ambition to heed it to-night, and later, when Mr. Fletcher had taken his departure, his pent-up enthusiasm burst out before his youthful partner. Had she realized that their struggles were over now, that their future was secure? They need no longer fear ever ...
— A First Family of Tasajara • Bret Harte
... His ambition is to see the road connecting his district with Podgorica finished, which would bring the two towns within a six hours' drive of each other, instead of the present two days' very hard riding. The benefit to Kolasin is obvious. At present the ...
— The Land of the Black Mountain - The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro • Reginald Wyon
... which you are right. You have confidence in yourself, which is a valuable, if not an indispensable, quality. You are ambitious, which, within reasonable bounds, does good rather than harm; but I think that during General Burnside's command of the army you have taken counsel of your ambition, and thwarted him as much as you could, in which you did a great wrong to the country and to a most meritorious and honorable brother officer. I have heard, in such way as to believe it, of your recently ...
— Captains of the Civil War - A Chronicle of the Blue and the Gray, Volume 31, The - Chronicles Of America Series • William Wood
... listless woman on the lounge, who knows her mother's ambition has been sorely crossed ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... a year before Ragtown had sprung up overnight, both had been ordinarily respectable American citizens. Lucy's crowning fault had been the lust for wealth. Added to this now was the fierce determination to realize her ambition, coupled with the complete breakdown of the moral fabric of her soul. She had been flirtatious and pleasure-loving in San Francisco, but perhaps not ...
— The She Boss - A Western Story • Arthur Preston Hankins
... declaration of hostilities without some plausible pretext, some ostensible ground of quarrel. Where was it? There was none in sight. Of course the danger of a homicidal crisis in the insanity of armaments was always there. And of course the ambition of Germany for "a place in the sun" was as coldly fierce as ever. The Pan-Germanists were impatient. But they could hardly proclaim war without saying what place and whose place they wanted. Nor was there any particular grievance on which they could ...
— Fighting For Peace • Henry Van Dyke
... thought! Oh, once my very soul Was filled and thrilled with dreaming of that role. Life seemed so wonderful; it held for me No purpose, no ambition, but to be Loving and loved. My highest thought of fame Was some day bearing my dear lover's name. Alone, I ofttimes uttered it aloud, Or wrote it down, half timid, and all proud To see myself lost utterly in him: As some small star might joy in growing dim When sinking in the sun; or as the dew, ...
— Poems of Progress • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... a man of undoubted talents, but of unappeasable ambition, had at an early period of his life, while Secretary of War, and still a young man, aspired to the office of President. By his ability and patriotic course during the war of 1812, and subsequently by a brilliant career as a member of Mr. Monroe's Cabinet, ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... but too much to gain," said Kenric. "Had he been left to carry out his base plot to the end, you and I, Alpin, must surely have fallen as our father has fallen — victims to Earl Roderic's ambition to make ...
— The Thirsty Sword • Robert Leighton
... tempted by ambition E'er to leave my humble cot, May I learn from thee submission To be happy with ...
— The Forest of Dean - An Historical and Descriptive Account • H. G. Nicholls
... the Second, than whom no wiser, or, generally speaking, more fortunate monarch ever sat upon the throne of England; yet whose life is a striking illustration, how family dissensions can tarnish the most brilliant lot to which Heaven permits humanity to aspire; and how little gratified ambition, extended power, and the highest reputation in war and in peace, can do towards curing ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... been amazed if he could have known what a figure of pathetic fineness he seemed to her. And then her thoughts turned to Jimmy, and she was aware of a glow of kindliness towards him. His father had succeeded in his life's ambition. He had produced a gentleman! How easily and simply, without a trace of snobbish shame, the young man had introduced his father. There was the right stuff in him. He was not ashamed of the humble man who had given him his chance in life. She found ...
— Piccadilly Jim • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... 75 cents net A comedy of American Society, wherein love and the young folks go their way in spite of their elders and ambition. ...
— The Faith Healer - A Play in Three Acts • William Vaughn Moody
... a fine example of the old school statesman-lawyer of the Henry Clay type. He belonged to that small class of public men who are independent of all coteries, whose only ambition is to serve their country well, who know no other duty than that dictated by their oath and conscience. A brilliant and forceful orator, there was no office in the gift of the nation that might not have been his for the asking, but he had no taste for politics. After ...
— The Third Degree - A Narrative of Metropolitan Life • Charles Klein and Arthur Hornblow
... England and the United States, and that he had now two sons completing their education in those countries. I afterwards met with many enterprising persons of Mr. Danin's order, both Brazilians and Portuguese; their great ambition is to make a voyage to Europe or North America, and to send their sons to be educated there. The land on which his establishment is built, he told us, was an artificial embankment on the swamp; the end of the house was built on a projecting point overlooking the ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... of navigation that irritated a new young officer on the bridge, who felt that the Bismarckian policy, though perhaps sure, was not speedy enough for his vaulting ambition. ...
— The Sequel - What the Great War will mean to Australia • George A. Taylor
... under this great charter, set out upon the career of a nation, properly aspiring to become of the first among the powers of the earth, and succeeding in the higher sense in this ambition, it yet remains to be told how near our Republic came, in time, to the brink of that engulfing chasm which in past ages has swallowed up other nations for their wicked oppression and enslavement ...
— Slavery and Four Years of War, Vol. 1-2 • Joseph Warren Keifer
... with the wish, or ambition to be a head-hunter in the Dyak sense, but on this one occasion I did wish that it had been possible, without violating any law, or doing anything to a fellow-creature which I should not like done to myself, to have obtained possession of this man's head, with its set of ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... dangers; but he, who, as a king, had shown as little fear of death as the meanest soldier of the vanguard, could not bear the apprehension of living without a crown. Behold him then, in the midst of the commanders, whom his brother had placed under his direction, accusing that brother's ambition, which he had shared, in order to free himself from the responsibility which its ...
— History of the Expedition to Russia - Undertaken by the Emperor Napoleon in the Year 1812 • Count Philip de Segur
... gratitude by the noble procedure of a Mouse, and resolving not to be outdone in generosity by any wild beast whatsoever, desired his little deliverer to name his own terms, for that he might depend upon his complying with any proposal he should make. The Mouse, fired with ambition at this gracious offer, did not so much consider what was proper for him to ask, as what was in the powers of his prince to grant; and so demanded his princely daughter, the young lioness, in marriage. The Lion consented; but, when he would have given the royal virgin into his possession, she, like ...
— Aesop's Fables - A New Revised Version From Original Sources • Aesop
... lot of determination and perseverance I finally did succeed in getting my thesis accepted, and triumphed over my doctoral committee. And I graduated with a dual Ph.D. in both counseling psychology and gerontology. My ambition was to establish the orthomolecular approach on the west coast. At that time I knew of only two clinics in the world actively using nutritional therapy. One was in New York and the other, was a Russian experimental fasting program for schizophrenics. Doctors Hoffer and Osmond had ...
— How and When to Be Your Own Doctor • Dr. Isabelle A. Moser with Steve Solomon
... told. But before we commence it, we must say a few more words as to the Doctor and his family. Of his wife I have already spoken. She was probably as happy a woman as you shall be likely to meet on a summer's day. She had good health, easy temper, pleasant friends, abundant means, and no ambition. She went nowhere without the Doctor, and whenever he went she enjoyed her share of the respect which was always shown to him. She had little or nothing to do with the school, the Doctor having many years ago resolved that though it became him ...
— Dr. Wortle's School • Anthony Trollope
... works be thrust on her in particular? There were saints enough who liked such things; and people could get to heaven without,—if not with a very abundant entrance, still in a modest way,—and Elsie's ambition for position and treasure in the spiritual world was of a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... 'He was rich; he made a big business in Manchester'; 'He was famous, he wrote books'; 'He was happy and fortunate'; or, 'He turned many to righteousness'? This man flung away his literary tastes, his home joys, and his personal ambition, and chose as that for which he would live, and by which he would fain be remembered, that he should bring dark hearts to the light in which he and ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... moats, came into being. With Francis I came a more sympathetic, a more subtle era of architectural display, a softening of outlines and an interpolation of flowering gables. It was thus that was born that noble monument known as the New Louvre, which combined all the arts and graces of a fastidious ambition. ...
— Royal Palaces and Parks of France • Milburg Francisco Mansfield
... promise of his mother's sympathy for Grace it would be something. He understood,—no one better than he,—the tendency of all his family to an uprising in the world, which tendency was almost as strong in his mother as in his father. And he had been by no means without a similar ambition himself, though with him the ambition had been only fitful, not enduring. He had a brother, a clergyman, a busy, stirring, eloquent London preacher, who got churches built, and was heard of far and wide as a rising man, who had married a certain Lady Anne, the daughter ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope
... rum-selling had always been urged, and always resulted in dead failures; therefore the whole method of legal restraint in crime can be dismissed with irony. The overcrowding in the East was crushing our ethical and practical ambition. That is why the trains going westward were so crowded that there was hardly room enough to stand in them. We were restoring ourselves in Kansas and Missouri. After lecturing, in the spring of 1887, in fifteen ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... of grapes are passed to the pressing machine, where four of them are deftly transferred to a twenty pound box. The two highest grades of raisins are the Dehesa and the London layers. It has always been the ambition of California's raisin makers to produce the Dehesa brand. They know that their best raisins are equal in size and quality to the best Spanish raisins, but heretofore they have found the cost of preparing the top layer in the Spanish style very ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 829, November 21, 1891 • Various
... he walked over to his own camp, but soon returned, mounted on a beautiful horse, with a handsome saddle, bridle and lariat. I thought he was a magnificent looking man. I envied his appearance, and my ambition just then was to become as skillful a horseman as he was. He had rigged himself out in his best style in order to make a good impression on his uncle at Weston, whither father and ...
— The Life of Hon. William F. Cody - Known as Buffalo Bill The Famous Hunter, Scout and Guide • William F. Cody
... heart was in his City shop. But there was something in him greater than his heart, his ambition, which was colossal. He meant, he always had meant, to be the founder of a great House, which should make the name of Rickman live after him. He aimed at nothing less than supremacy. He proposed to spread his nets ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... friendship," which Mavis suspected might mean a good deal more some day, if Morland stopped merely drifting and put his shoulder in dead earnest to the wheel of life. Lorraine was much the stronger character of the two, and could generally wind up Morland's ambition while he was with her, though it often came down again with a run as soon as her influence was removed. Whether or no her feelings went deeper than she would at present allow, she was a loyal chum to him, and almost the only person who could really persuade him to work. ...
— Monitress Merle • Angela Brazil
... having undertaken so much for a girl, whose passion was but a feeble reflection of his own, and who perhaps would not appreciate all the sacrifices he had made for her—bending the firm character of his mind to the compliances of a courtier, condemning it to the intrigues and sufferings of ambition, abandoning it to profound combinations, to criminal meditations, to the gloomy labors ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... explanation of the Trinity and the Atonement. In every age it has been the priestly spirit, acting on ritual considerations, that has deepened the foundations, enlarged the borders, and apportioned the victims, of hell. The perversions and excesses of the doctrine have grown out of cruel ambition and cunning on one side, and been received by docile ignorance and superstition on the other, and been mutually fed by traditions and fables between. The excessive vanity and theocratic pride of the Jews led them to exclude all the Gentiles, whom they ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... realize her hope. If she had ever anticipated the time when her first-born, as his beard began to grow, would lavish upon her all the tenderness which a mother has a right to claim, I felt that I could amply reward her desire, and realize her ambition. ...
— Desk and Debit - or, The Catastrophes of a Clerk • Oliver Optic
... its rise commemorated the triumphant establishment of Christianity as the religion of Rome, so in its progress it reflected every change wrought in the spirit of the new worship by the ambition, the prodigality, or the frivolity of the priests. At first it stood awful and imposing, beautiful in all its parts as the religion for whose glory it was built. Vast porphyry colonnades decorated its approaches, and surrounded a fountain whose waters issued from the representation ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... myself. There is no doubt that it is our duty to take these two maidens prisoners, but my heart aches at the thought that they might pass years of their lives in a prison. They are not responsible for their father's misdeeds and ambition, and it may be that, if they are restored, Glendower may be induced to treat those who fall into his hands mercifully. None but ourselves know of this, and no one need ...
— Both Sides the Border - A Tale of Hotspur and Glendower • G. A. Henty
... climbed upon the rocks and looked down upon the sea, I had wondered to myself whether, if the knowledge were put out before me, I could compose a story of Spanish treasure and pirates. For I am a prey to such giddy ambition. A foul street—if the buildings slant and topple—will set me thinking delightfully of murders. A wharf-end with water lapping underneath and bits of rope about will set me itching for a deep-sea plot. Or if I go on broader range and see in my fancy a broken castle on a hill, I'll ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks
... indirect means or circuitous routes, but unfurl your banner, take your position and give fair warning of the course you intend to pursue. You are not naturally fond of combat, but when once fairly enlisted in a cause that has the sanction of your conscience and intellect, your firmness and ambition are such, combined with thoroughness and efficiency of disposition, that all you are in energy and talent is enlisted and concentrated in the one end ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... judges were to state their reasons for giving it, but had no vote. This scheme was adhered to with little modification until 1846. What made it tolerable was that many of those elected Senators were naturally lawyers, and that to be in the Senate soon became the ambition of a lawyer with any desire to know how it would feel to be a judge. Able and learned opinions were pronounced by such men in exercising their judicial functions, and some of them in the New York reports are still frequently ...
— The American Judiciary • Simeon E. Baldwin, LLD
... the hills and realized that with the coming of the crowd it would soon scatter, never to return; he thought about the girl up there, his companion in adversity, his fellow sufferer from mutual wrong, the one thing which he had had to love, the shining prize which it had been his sole ambition to possess for life; he thought of her and then about the man, who (product of the same advantages which made these men before him clever with their blue-prints and their puffling monsters) had come there searching profit from the land which he had never loved or lived on, and, seeing Madge, ...
— In Old Kentucky • Edward Marshall and Charles T. Dazey
... 1748. He appears to have then gone to London in 1750 to "keep terms," as it was called, at the Middle Temple, with the view of being admitted to the bar, in obedience to his father's desire and ambition. But the desultory habit of mind, the preference for literature and philosophical speculation to connected study, which had marked his career in college, followed him and prevented any serious application ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... tellement des objets de meditation plutot que d'interet ou de curiosite relativement a leurs actes, que, tandis que nous lisons l'un de ses grands caracteres criminels,—Macbeth, Richard, Iago meme,—nous ne songeons pas tant aux crimes qu'ils commettent, qu'a l'ambition, a l'esprit d'aspiration, a l'activite intellectuelle qui les poussent a franchir ces barrieres morales. Les actions nous affectent si peu, que, tandis que les impulsions, l'esprit interieur en toute sa perverse grandeur, paraissent seuls reels et ...
— Pelleas and Melisande • Maurice Maeterlinck
... made his task so difficult. Decadence. A race on an ages-long decline from vast heights of philosophical and scientific learning. Their last external enemy had been defeated millennia in the past; and through easy forgetfulness and lack of strife, ambition had died. Adventure had ...
— The Black Star Passes • John W Campbell
... "Ah! It is this ambition of greatness that hurries them all on! Why can they not be satisfied with being respectable subjects of so great a country as England, that they must destroy each other for this phantom of liberty? Will it make them wiser, or happier, or ...
— Wyandotte • James Fenimore Cooper
... and Dolly, who began life with an idea that Sapps Court was the Universe, became curious about what was going on outside. They grew less contented with the dustbin, and ambition dictated to Dave an enthronement on an iron post at the entrance, under the archway. The delight of sitting on this post was so great that Dave willingly faced the fact that he could not get down, and whenever he could persuade anyone to put him up ran a risk of remaining there sine die. ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... in a double spirit of mediaeval self-sacrifice. Looking toward the ministry, he surrendered his love as some of the old monks sacrificed love, ambition, and all other things to conscience. Looking at her happiness, he sacrificed his hopes in a more than knightly devotion to her welfare. The knights sometimes gave their lives. He ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston
... imprisonment which my enemies themselves admitted to be unjust, I should in future experience more liberal treatment at their hands than that which they had hitherto adopted towards me. The sole object of my ambition at this time was to procure toleration for the sale of the Gospel in this unhappy and distracted kingdom, and to have attained this end I would not only have consented to twenty such imprisonments in succession, as that which I had undergone, but would gladly have sacrificed life ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... 1903. Furthermore, a number of sentences may be virtually unintelligible to the English reader due to the architecture of relative clauses, prepositions, and verbs as carried over from the original German. It is the preparer's ambition for a second Gutenberg edition of the History of Rome to reconstruct and clarify the most ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... of the earth. He was not pained at seeing such eagerness in behalf of trifles that he had invented. He liked to fill his courtiers with raptures or with despair, by a smile or a frown. He thought his sisters' ambition childish, but it amused him; and if they had to cry a little at first, he finally granted them ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... inclinations who remained Lincoln's junior partner until Lincoln's death and became his biographer. But they were very poor. The struggle was hard, and Lincoln and his bride were of necessity very frugal. In 1841 he might have had the nomination for Governor, but he declined it; having given up his ambition to become the "DeWitt Clinton of Illinois." It will be remembered that the internal improvement theories had not worked so well in practice. The panic of 1837 had convinced both him and his supporters of the unwisdom of attempting such improvements on ...
— Life of Abraham Lincoln - Little Blue Book Ten Cent Pocket Series No. 324 • John Hugh Bowers
... moralists and sages, the epigrams of cynics, the sermons of priests, the good-humoured warnings of sensible men, all crying out that nothing is really worth the winning, that fame brings weariness and anxiety, that love is a fitful fever, that wealth is a heavy burden, that ambition is a hectic dream; to all of which ejaculations youth does not listen and cannot listen, but just goes on its eager way, trying its own experiments, believing in the delight of triumph and success, determined, at all events, to ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... so earnest in the demonstration of its nature, as to be pretty certain to "begin at home," and to end where it begins. Even the art of mendacity has been aroused by the great progress which is making by all around it, and many manifest the strength of their ambition by telling ten lies where their fathers would have been satisfied with telling only one. This art has made an extraordinary progress within the last quarter of a century, aspiring to an ascendency that was formerly conceded only to truth, until he who gains his daily bread by it has some such contempt ...
— Jack Tier or The Florida Reef • James Fenimore Cooper |
