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More "Ambitious" Quotes from Famous Books



... applications and endeavours of the Hoste will tend always to correspond to the tastes and desires of their customers which will require without doubt to him into that town the reputation whome, he is ambitious.'' ...
— Literary Blunders • Henry B. Wheatley

... get ambitious. He gave all his money to his mother. When he earned fourteen shillings a week, she gave him back two for himself, and, as he never drank, he felt himself rich. He went about with the bourgeois of Bestwood. The townlet contained ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence

... reality. While the Monks were busied in rooting out his virtues and narrowing his sentiments, they allowed every vice which had fallen to his share to arrive at full perfection. He was suffered to be proud, vain, ambitious, and disdainful: He was jealous of his Equals, and despised all merit but his own: He was implacable when offended, and cruel in his revenge. Still in spite of the pains taken to pervert them, his natural good qualities would occasionally break through the ...
— The Monk; a romance • M. G. Lewis

... this ambitious proposition, Mrs. Cannon threw Cy James, by main strength, through the window of her bar, into her kitchen, and he bawled like a baby, yet came out of his grief muttering, "Ploughin', ploughin'! I'll make her into batter and fry ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend

... 'Beautiful! magnificent! lovely! exquisite! name your price;' and they buy it. Here the public look and look. 'Not bad,' they say, 'but the color is from Veronese, and that attitude is surely Raphael's. What a mine that man's genius has been to ambitious but less gifted artists!' and so they go on. I wish they would let the dead rest in peace. Are you acquainted with Mr. B—— of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various

... consoler of hearts—turns to a raging wild-beast when it stoops to become religious partisanship. If you would really understand Christianity you must look neither down to the deluded masses, and those ambitious worldlings who only use it as a means to an end by inflaming their baser passions, nor up to the throne, where power translates the impulse of a disastrous moment into sinister deeds. If you want to know what true and pure Christianity is, look into our homes, look at the family ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... her ambitious soul, Andrea too readily flung away all his brilliant prospects to return, and willingly take again the yoke of the burden of his wife and her family. He made promises that he would bring her back to Paris with him, and the king in all faith allowed him to depart, confiding to him large sums of money ...
— Fra Bartolommeo • Leader Scott (Re-Edited By Horace Shipp And Flora Kendrick)

... was seventy-six years old,—and had at that time produced 114 volumes, of which the first was not written till she was fifty. Her career offers great encouragement to those who have not begun early in life, but are still ambitious to do something before ...
— Autobiography of Anthony Trollope • Anthony Trollope

... the air, and look into it, filled to the brim with beauty as I knew it was. But I had not long to wait, for speedily it became too full, and ran over into the outside world. On the eighth day one ambitious youngster stepped upon the branch beside the nest and shook himself out, and on the ninth came the plunge into the wide, wide world. While I was at breakfast he made his first effort, and on my return I saw him on a branch about a foot below the nest, the last step on papa's winding ...
— A Bird-Lover in the West • Olive Thorne Miller

... wife. We have lived together eight years. In the country he was very good to me, but his mother died last year and left him seventeen hundred francs. He would come to Paris, and since then I don't know what to make of him. He's ambitious and a spendthrift, and at the end of two months we came ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VIII • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.

... was the ambitious citizen's legal domicile. His establishment consisted of a woman-cook and a valet; he hired two extra men, and had a dinner sent in by Chevet, whenever he gave a banquet to his political friends, to men he wanted to dazzle or ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac

... should be pursued, and the means whereby he may attain it. Let him not think of its misuse, and its emptiness, and the fickleness of mankind, and the like, whereof no man thinks except through a morbidness of disposition; with thoughts like these do the most ambitious most torment themselves, when they despair of gaining the distinctions they hanker after, and in thus giving vent to their anger would fain appear wise. Wherefore it is certain that those, who cry out the loudest ...
— Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata - Part I: Concerning God • Benedict de Spinoza

... I have only my wife's verdict, and I have found that, as is the way with many good women, her judgments of her own sex are rather merciless. A tall, handsome girl, very dark, my wife has characterized her as cold, calculating and ambitious. She has said frequently, too, that Elinor Wells was a disappointed woman, that her marriage, while giving her social identity, had disappointed her in a monetary way. Whether that is true or not, there was no doubt, by the time they had lived in our neighborhood for a year, that a complication ...
— Sight Unseen • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... there are many branches of a tribal family, some found as far west as British Burma and all more or less scattered and disorganized as the result of this silent oppression going on through the years, who still are ambitious of preserving their independent isolation, particularly in sparsely-populated spheres far removed from political activity. So remote are the districts in which these principalities are found, that the Chinese themselves are entirely ignorant of the characteristics of these tribes. They say of one ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle

... stick at nothing, and with you as my right hand I should feel myself free to undertake deeds that I have only dared to dream of thus far, while, with our views brought into accord, we should be as brothers to each other. I am ambitious, Dugdale, and I tell you that if you will join me we can and will revive the glories of the old buccaneering days and make ourselves feared and reverenced all over the globe; we will be sea-kings, you and I. What need is there ...
— The Pirate Slaver - A Story of the West African Coast • Harry Collingwood

... superfluous things, when it were more honour for us if we could contemn necessary. What need hath Nature of silver dishes, multitudes of waiters, delicate pages, perfumed napkins? She requires meat only, and hunger is not ambitious. Can we think no wealth enough but such a state for which a man may be brought into a praemunire, begged, proscribed, or poisoned? O! if a man could restrain the fury of his gullet and groin, and think how many fires, how many kitchens, cooks, pastures, and ploughed lands; ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie

... [Footnote: It would be easy, but invidious, to produce passages from Park's work more or less marked with some of the characteristics of Mr. Edwards's style, and, in particular, with that tendency to ambitious ornament, which is so conspicuous in many parts of the History of the West Indies.—The following extract from Park's chapter on the state of Slavery in Africa, may be sufficient. "In a country divided into a thousand petty states, mostly independent, and ...
— The Journal Of A Mission To The Interior Of Africa, In The Year 1805 • Mungo Park

... the Eighty-eighth Year of American Independence, we may well ask ourselves what right we have to indulge in public rejoicings. If the war in which we are engaged is an accidental one, which might have been avoided but for our fault; if it is for any ambitious or unworthy purpose on our part; if it is hopeless, and we are madly persisting in it; if it is our duty and in our power to make a safe and honorable peace, and we refuse to do it; if our free institutions are in danger of becoming subverted, and giving place to ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... before any attempt was made to reduce theory to practise. Then an eccentric English country gentleman, Henry Winstanley, who dabbled in mechanical engineering upon unorthodox lines, came forward and offered to build a lighthouse upon the terrible rocks. Those who knew this ambitious amateur were dubious of his success, and wondered what manifestation his eccentricity would assume on this occasion. Nor was their scepticism entirely misplaced. Winstanley raised the most fantastic lighthouse which has ever been known, and which would have been more at ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors - Vol. II Great Britain And Ireland, Part Two • Francis W. Halsey

... offers earnest prayers for the golden shower. The voluptuary gratifies every craving sense, rejoices in the midnight revel, renders himself vile, and yet tells you he is in the chase of happiness. The ambitious man, conceiving that the great desideratum blossoms on the sceptre, and hangs in rich clusters from the throne, consumes one half of his life, and embitters the other half, in climbing the giddy elevation of royalty. ...
— Golden Steps to Respectability, Usefulness and Happiness • John Mather Austin

... the true era of the Laureateship. Charles, in 1630, became ambitious to signalize his reign by some fitting tribute to literature. A petition from Ben Jonson pointed out the way. The Laureate office was made a patentable one, in the gift of the Lord Chamberlain, as purveyor of the royal amusements. Ben was ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various

... success; indeed, so highly was she regarded that nothing she chose to write, however poor, could fail. And she certainly did write a good deal of poor stuff: it was all in a sense poor, but books and books, poor soul, she had to write. It was in a sense poor because it was mostly ambitious stuff, and, as the proverb says, "You cannot fly like an eagle with the wings of a wren." She was driven to fly, and gave her little wings too much to do, and her flights were apt to be mere little weak flutterings over the surface ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson

... our craft had reached a proper position,—her stern alongside and almost in contact with the jutting peak,—to answer the ambitious purpose of the Frenchman. Raising the flag of the Republic in his hand, he requested us all to do it proper honor,—to salute it with a "three times three,"—as he should succeed in securing it in its place. Cautiously extending the staff, he brought it in contact with the snow, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various

... Azerbaijan over the ethnic Armenian-dominated region of Nagorno-Karabakh and the breakup of the centrally directed economic system of the former Soviet Union contributed to a severe economic decline in the early 1990s. By 1994, however, the Armenian Government had launched an ambitious IMF-sponsored economic program that has resulted in positive growth rates in 1995-2000. Armenia also managed to slash inflation and to privatize most small- and medium-sized enterprises. The chronic energy shortages Armenia suffered in recent years have been largely offset by the energy ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... of 'Publishing Truth.' If Edward Burrough was still 'young and brisk' when Ellwood first came across him, he must have been yet younger and brisker on that summer's day, five years earlier, when he left his home in Westmorland in order to 'conquer London.' This was an ambitious undertaking truly for any man, however brisk and ...
— A Book of Quaker Saints • Lucy Violet Hodgkin

... all ambitious projects and her thirst for that knowledge which should ever be hidden from mortals, she overturned the offerings of the Genii, and having execrated the hour she was begotten and the womb that had borne her, glanced off in a whirl that ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner

... replied the priest. "As you know, Cynegius is here and the fate of the Bishop and of our cause hangs on the next few days. Give up your ambitious desires I beseech you, daughter, for even if Theophilus were to admit you I firmly believe, nay—do not be angry—I can but hope that he would never ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... tongues. When the disheartened fair should weary of the phantom pursuit, then might the man of patience have his little day. Peter winced at the picture. To the world he knew that his long waiting on the brink of the bog, while his ambitious lady floundered after false lights, was, in truth, no more impressive a spectacle than the anguished squawking of a hen who watches a brood of ducklings, of her own hatching, try ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning

... blockin' right hooks and body jabs that was bein' shot at me by a husky young uptown minister who's a headliner at his job, I understand, but who's developin' a good, useful punch on the side. I was just landin' a cross wallop to the ribs, by way of keepin' him from bein' too ambitious with his left, when out of the tail of my eye I notices Swifty Joe edgin' in with a ...
— Shorty McCabe on the Job • Sewell Ford

... Scotch surgeon's-assistant, having adopted certain aristocratic notions, required a democratical lecture on heads, which was duly administered to him. He pretended that he was, by birth and education (at Edinburgh), entitled to be at the head of our mess. This I resisted, and soon taught the ambitious son of Esculapius that the science of defence was as important as the art of healing; and that if he was skilful in this latter, I would give him an opportunity of employing it on his own person: whereupon I implanted on his cinciput, occiput, os frontis, os nasi, ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat

... off his coat, and tossed a ball for a while to an ambitious youngster, and then went into the clubhouse, where Huling introduced him to several of his players. After a good rubdown, Wayne thanked Huling for his courtesy, and started out, intending to ...
— The Redheaded Outfield and Other Baseball Stories • Zane Grey

... for the pupils entering at ages 18, 19, or 20, which tends to account at least partly for the rise in the percentage of the non-failing for these years. It is safe to believe that for the most part only the more able, ambitious, and purposeful individuals are likely to display the energy required or to discern the need of their entering high school when they have reached the age of 18 or later. The appeal of school athletics will in this case seem very inadequate to explain their entrance so late, since the ...
— The High School Failures - A Study of the School Records of Pupils Failing in Academic or - Commercial High School Subjects • Francis P. Obrien

... despair with staring eyes and bleeding feet and crying soul along this road strewn with thorns and stones. I know what it is to lie awake all night and cry like a baby, with none to know and none to tell me what to do. I know what it is to be tremendously ambitious. Ambition! Ambition! Ah, God of Heaven! How a poor soul suffers who beyond everything else, craves to be able to do something big in this world because he knows he should, yet is held down by this dreadful thing, "nerves!" And how little, how unspeakably little, do physicians, even the ...
— How to Eat - A Cure for "Nerves" • Thomas Clark Hinkle

... could be further from the thoughts of Euthymia than the prospect of an ambitious worldly alliance. The ideals of young women cost them many and great disappointments, but they save them very often from those lifelong companionships which accident is constantly trying to force upon them, ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... the most ambitious trouble-hunter I ever saw," he said, returning to his habitual humorous drawl, with the twinkle in his eyes that went with it. "Just the same, we'll not go back to the mine just yet. Till the dust settles, we're both better off down here with Don Andres Picardo. ...
— The Gringos • B. M. Bower

... being had been disappointed in him. He could not get over it. He reckoned the one judgment worth all the others. Those whose direct or indirect flatteries had been poured at his feet, were the proud, the worldly, the ambitious, the interested, the corrupted; their praise was given to what they esteemed, and that, his candour said, was the least estimable part of him. Beneath all that, this truth-loving, truth-discerning little spirit had found enough to weep for. She was right, and they ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell

... jardin"—especially if the term garden may be taken broadly and applied to the stony and weed-grown ground within my skull, as well as to a few perches of more promising chalk down outside it. In addition to these effectual bars to any of the ambitious pretensions ascribed to me, there is another: of all possible positions that of master of a school, or leader of a sect, or chief of a party, appears to me to be the most undesirable; in fact, the average British matron cannot look upon followers with ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley

... considerations that there is no sphere of literature which is so often the refuge of wealthy scholars, idle men of taste, baffled politicians of independent means, ambitious and well-read but not specially gifted citizens who have inherited comfortable estates. It is so dignified an employment, that it gratifies pride,—so possible without trenchant opinions, that it does not alarm the conservative,—so thoroughly respectable, safe, and capable of being made illustrious, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various

... have no reason to thank you for your kind intentions. The appointment you are about to bestow on them can scarce be called a promotion. I don't know how it may be with birds, but I do know that there are not many men ambitious of exchanging from the military to the ...
— The Cliff Climbers - A Sequel to "The Plant Hunters" • Captain Mayne Reid

... tragical aspect, that strong terms accumulated to exhibit even what surpasses in its plain reality all the powers of language, offend them as declamatory exaggeration. Let it then be just observed, without one ambitious epithet, that since that period when ancient history, strictly so named, left off describing the state of mankind, more than a myriad of millions of our race have been on earth, and quitted it without one ray of the knowledge the most important to spirits ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster

... some folks are odd because they cannot help it. True, there are a great many who are odd, just for the sake of being odd. They are ambitious to be known as singular people. We will let them pass. They certainly work hard to earn the name they love to be known by; and perhaps we ought not to try to rob them of it, or to say any thing very severe about their taste. We will ...
— Mike Marble - His Crotchets and Oddities. • Uncle Frank

... that Mahdajee Sindia gained by it an empire of a magnitude dangerous to our very existence in India; that this chief was permitted to exterminate all the many little gallant nations that stood between us and the Mahrattas, and whose policy led them to guard against the ambitious designs of that government. Almost all these lesser powers, from Central India, quite up to the mountains that divide India from Tartary, almost all these, I say, were exterminated by him, or were brought under a cruel subjection. The peace he made with Mr. Hastings was for the very purpose ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XII. (of XII.) • Edmund Burke

... very ambitious," the governess replied: "and her son has a fortune of his own. She may wish him to marry a lady of high rank. But—no—she is always in need of money. In some way, money may ...
— Heart and Science - A Story of the Present Time • Wilkie Collins

... seizing the means of transportation of a mighty realm for his own individual profit; upon Gordon as an unscrupulous adventurer; and upon the Copper Trust as a greedy corporation reaching out to strangle competition and absorb the riches of the northland. But she had found O'Neil an honorably ambitious man, busied, like others, in the struggle for success, and backing his judgment with his last dollar. She had learned, moreover, to sympathize with his aims, and his splendid determination awoke her admiration. Her idea of the Trust had changed, likewise, for it seemed to be a fair and dignified ...
— The Iron Trail • Rex Beach

... Prodigal, the Ambitious, the Voluptuous, the Bully, the Vain, the Hypocrite, the Flatterer, the Slanderer, call aloud for the Champion's Vengeance." —The ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden

... remarkable in her, of a certain kind of high resolution. She made one apprehend that she meant to do something for herself. She was long-necked and near-sighted and striking, and I thought I had never seen sweet seventeen in a form so hard and high and dry. She was cold and affected and ambitious, and she carried an eyeglass with a long handle, which she put up whenever she wanted not to see. She had come out, as the phrase is, immensely; and yet I felt as if she were surrounded with a spiked iron railing. What she meant to do for herself ...
— Greville Fane • Henry James

... of mind in John Nicolls, who, in 1577 left England, made a recantation of his heresy, and was "received into the holy Catholic Church." Returning to England he recanted his Roman Catholic opinions, and even wrote "His Pilgrimage, wherein is displayed the lives of the proud Popes, ambitious Cardinals, leacherous Bishops, fat bellied Monks, and hypocritical Jesuits" (1581). Notwithstanding which, he went beyond the seas again (to turn Mohometan, his enemies said), and under threats and imprisonment at Rouen, recanted all that he had formerly uttered against the Romanists.—Athenae ...
— English Travellers of the Renaissance • Clare Howard

... Mrs. Hanway-Harley burst in upon Senator Hanway. That ambitious gentleman was employed in abstruse calculations as to tariff schedules, and how far they might be expected to bear upon his chances in the coming National Convention. Senator Hanway was somewhat impressed by Mrs. Hanway-Harley's visit; his study had never been that lady's ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis

... him, at Chattanooga, his achievement in bringing his command around the point of Lookout Mountain and into Chattanooga Valley was brilliant. I nevertheless regarded him as a dangerous man. He was not subordinate to his superiors. He was ambitious to the extent of caring nothing for the rights of others. His disposition was, when engaged in battle, to get detached from the main body of the army and exercise a separate command, gathering to his standard all he could ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan

... have decent homes." Yet the present wage-rate makes decent homes impossible; and though Brooklyn and Boston have a few model tenement-houses, New York has none, the experiment of making over in part a few old ones hardly counting save in intention. Into these homes respectable, ambitious, hard-working girls and women are compelled to go. That they live decent lives speaks worlds for the intrinsic goodness and purity of nature which in the midst of conditions intolerable to every sense still preserves these characteristics. That they must live in such surroundings ...
— Women Wage-Earners - Their Past, Their Present, and Their Future • Helen Campbell

... princes equally ambitious and less sagacious and more unscrupulous than he was, the people of India were persuaded that they might successfully rise against their English rulers, who had brought them out of a state of anarchy and ...
— The Secret of the Island • W.H.G. Kingston (translation from Jules Verne)

... the enchanter's communication, was confounded by the unembarrassed freedom of her manner; but it was far from displeasing to him. "You are ambitious," said he, smiling; "but there is nothing to which beauty may not pretend. Tell me only how I can have the happiness of serving you, and you shall see that ...
— The Fairy Book - The Best Popular Stories Selected and Rendered Anew • Dinah Maria Mulock (AKA Miss Mulock)

... impression of intellectual power. Obvious truths and well-worn truisms are uttered in high-sounding words, but in no department of thought can it be said that Bolingbroke breaks new ground. Much that he wrote was for the day and died with it, and if his more ambitious efforts, written with an eye to posterity, cannot justly be described as unreadable, they contain comparatively little which makes them worthy to ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis

... moments than those in which he rendered Letty's verses into German, with both the Dellwigs drinking in his words. The proud and exclusive Dellwigs! A month ago such a thing would have been too wild a flight of fancy for the most ambitious dream. In the very room in which he had been thrust aside at parties, forgotten in corners, left behind when the others went in to supper, he was now sitting the centre of interest, with his former supercilious hosts hanging on his words. When ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp

... friends, the Irish at Salamanca, I bore a letter of introduction to the rector of the latter. I found this college an old gloomy edifice, situated in a retired street. The rector was dressed in the habiliments of a Spanish ecclesiastic, a character which he was evidently ambitious of assuming. There was something dry and cold in his manner, and nothing of that generous warmth and eager hospitality which had so captivated me in the fine Irish rector of Salamanca; he was, however, civil and polite, and offered to show me the curiosities ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow

... generally with success; for this was one of the claims of social convention against which he steadily rebelled—the more determinedly that in none of his mother's friends could he take the smallest interest; for she was essentially a commonplace because ambitious woman, without a spark of aspiration, and her friends were of the same sort, without regard for anything but what was—or, at least, they supposed to be—the fashion. Indeed, it was hard to understand how Hector came ever to be born of such a woman, although ...
— Far Above Rubies • George MacDonald

... picturesque of the sufferers was Blennerhassett, who was one of the most innocent. Burr had found other Ohio people too plodding, as he said, but the Blennerhassetts took him seriously, and when Burr in his repeated visits tempted the husband, and flattered the wife, who was ambitious only for her husband, he easily beguiled them into a ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells

... gallant and single-minded patriot, Robert Blake. Of this fine old English worthy, republican as he was, the Tory Hume freely affirms, that never man, so zealous for a faction, was so much respected and even esteemed by his opponents. 'Disinterested, generous, liberal; ambitious only of true glory, dreadful only to his avowed enemies; he forms one of the most perfect characters of the age, and the least stained with those errors and vices which were then so predominant.'[3] Yet ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 439 - Volume 17, New Series, May 29, 1852 • Various

... oppressive, it was possible to say of him that he was no worse than his class. Close-fisted, at Father O'Hara's instance he could open his hand. Hard, at the Father's prayer he would at times remit a rent or extend a bond. Ambitious, he gave up, for his soul's sake and the sake of the Faith that had been his fathers', the office which endowed him with ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman

... and in fate. Each succeeds to the heritage of a great name that had contrived to unite autocracy with the popular cause; each subdued all rival competitors, and inaugurated despotic rule in the name of freedom; each mingled enough of sternness with ambitious will to stain with bloodshed the commencement of his power,—but it would be an absurd injustice to fix the same degree of condemnation on the coup d'etat as humanity fixes on the earlier cruelties of Augustus; each, once firm in his seat, became mild and clement,—Augustus ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... Schaub's mould; the Comte de Caraman, nephew of Madame de Mirepoix, a Monsieur de Clausonnette, and General Schouallow,(845) the favourite of the late Czarina; absolute favourite for a dozen years, without making an enemy. In truth, he is very amiable, humble, and modest. Had he been ambitious, he might have mounted the throne: as he was not, you may imagine they have plucked his plumes a good deal. There is a little air of melancholy about him, and, if I am not mistaken, Some secret wishes for the fall of the present Empress; which, if it were ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole

... five and twenty years. It was when he first came to the island, weary of Apia, with its heavy drinking, its gambling and coarse sensuality, a sick man, trying to resign himself to the loss of the career which had fired his imagination with ambitious thoughts. He set behind him resolutely all his hopes of making a great name for himself and strove to content himself with the few poor months of careful life which was all that he could count on. He was boarding with a half-caste trader who had a store a couple of miles ...
— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham

... India Director was a forlorn sight near the unoccupied end of the table, in a state of solitude; and the Major was a military sight, relating stories of the Duke of York to six of the seven mild men (the ambitious one was utterly quenched); and the Bank Director was a lowly sight, making a plan of his little attempt at a pinery, with dessert-knives, for a group of admirers; and Cousin Feenix was a thoughtful sight, as he smoothed his long wristbands and stealthily adjusted his wig. But ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens

... the misnomer of "cottages." Happily, it did not tower up into the air as many of the so-called cottages do, but spread itself comfortably over the greensward, the central building being the only one ambitious enough to attain to two stories and a sharply peaked roof, in which were set several dormer windows from which a most entrancing view of the valley and distant mountain ranges ...
— A Dixie School Girl • Gabrielle E. Jackson

... upon the record that any of these men—of either the restless and ambitious, or of the better class—were literally sent away. But such has been the politic practice of this church for many ages; and we may safely believe, that when she was engaged in an unscrupulous and desperate contest for the recovery, by fair means or foul, of her ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel

... be the future of such an energetic and ambitious young man was easily predicted by his friends and acquaintances, and the predictions have been verified. It was believed that he would succeed in life, become a very useful member of society, and "make his mark in the world," as the saying goes. These ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 4 • Various

... watched by one even more able and ambitious than himself. For the last half-century England had been drawing nearer to the Norman land which fronted it across the Channel. As we pass nowadays through Normandy, it is English history which is round about us. The name of hamlet after ...
— History of the English People, Volume I (of 8) - Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216 • John Richard Green

... the first in date of the great battles of the world, we beheld Athens struggling for self-preservation against the invading armies of the East. At Syracuse she appears as the ambitious and oppressive invader of others. In her, as in other republics of old and of modern times, the same energy that had inspired the most heroic efforts in defence of the national independence soon learned to employ ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various

... Ger. Ambitious pride may tremble at the storm, but true love, uncle, never can be wrecked; its constancy is strengthened, not impaired by trials, and when adversity divorces us from common friendships, the chosen partners of each other's hearts a second time are ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter

... you come from?" he said, pulling his coat closer to hide the ragged waistcoat underneath, and adjusting his worn and dirty hat—in his youth he had been vain and ambitious, and good-looking also. ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker

... fitting crew, and place on board The sacred hecatomb; then last embark The fair Chryseis; and in chief command Let some one of our councillors be plac'd, Ajax, Ulysses, or Idomeneus, Or thou, the most ambitious of them all, That so our rites ...
— The Iliad • Homer

... commissioned by the State for the audience chamber of the Council, on which, as we know from documents, Giorgione was engaged in 1507 and 1508. It was never finished, and the altogether exceptional character of the work places it outside the regular course of the artist's development. It was an ambitious venture in an unwonted direction, and is naturally marked and marred by unsatisfactory features. Giorgione's real powers are shown by the "Pastoral Symphony" (in the Louvre), and the "Portrait of the Young Man" (at Buda-Pesth), productions dating from the later years 1508-10. The "Three Ages" ...
— Giorgione • Herbert Cook

... bribery of the servants of the people. I felt pretty sure, moreover, that I could play a card that would more than offset the dollars of "Standard Oil." Nathan Matthews was on the high-road to the governor's chair, but I happened to know that, however ambitious he might be for political preferment, his temperament rendered him more avid for distinction in business. Addicks had within his gift the richest plum in all the Boston commercial world. As controller ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson

... in the same room, is larger and more ambitious. It represents a carpenter's workshop, with a mechanic at each end of the long bench; one of these, a half-starved, hideous wretch, with hardly a trace of the human anatomy in his composition; and the other, a respectable ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 432 - Volume 17, New Series, April 10, 1852 • Various

... is the tale that is told of an almost universally respected Minister, Who, being fully aware of the views of Continental Potentates, and their plans ambitious and sinister, For the better defence of his native land, and to free her from continual warlike alarms, Determined that he would popularize the conception (and a very good one too) of a Nation in Arms! Now this is the way he ...
— The Casual Ward - academic and other oddments • A. D. Godley

... those cold-hearted men who, though continually occupied in the study of the material world, and ambitious of the distinction which a successful examination of it confers, are yet insensible to the goodness and greatness of the Being who made and sustains it. His mind was cast in a better mould. The magnificence and harmony ...
— The Martyrs of Science, or, The lives of Galileo, Tycho Brahe, and Kepler • David Brewster

... employed. In the course of time our native soldiers were more and more trusted; important places were garrisoned by them, military stores were entrusted to them; and nothing was more natural than that in the more ambitious of their number the thought should spring up that the time had arrived for expelling the stranger, and seizing the power within their grasp. In thus acting they could make themselves sure of the sympathy of ...
— Life and Work in Benares and Kumaon, 1839-1877 • James Kennedy

... really delightful place. She was quite ambitious for reception evenings. Mrs. Osgood was holding them for a literary circle. Of course she could not aim at anything as elegant as that; but newspaper men, young and old, were in the habit of dropping in upon Mr. Whitney quite informally. ...
— A Little Girl of Long Ago • Amanda Millie Douglas

... the repeal of the Missouri Compromise. A younger adherent of Douglas was John A. Logan, serving in his second term. He remained however but a short time in the Thirty-seventh Congress. His ardent patriotism and ambitious temperament carried him into the war, where his brilliant career is known and ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine

... Dona Bernarda's ambitious dreams were on the point of realization, and she could not give herself a moment's rest. Her son's cool indifference was something she could not understand for the life of her! The District was his all right, but was that a reason for falling asleep on the job? Who could tell what the "enemies of ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... in United States history, 1; birth and ancestry, 2; adopted by Mlle. Pictet, 2; his schooling and home training, 2, 3; benefits from cosmopolitan society of Geneva, 4; academic friendships, 4, 5; restless, although not ambitious, 5; discontented with political conditions, 6; visits Voltaire, 7, 8; refuses offer of commission in Hessian service, 8; quarrels with grandmother, 8; plans to find freedom in America, 9, 10; leaves Geneva secretly, 9; plans ...
— Albert Gallatin - American Statesmen Series, Vol. XIII • John Austin Stevens

... it is that from henceforth you wil allow me to call you Master, and that really I may be your Scholer, for you are such a companion, and have so quickly caught, and so excellently cook'd this fish, as makes me ambitious ...
— The Compleat Angler - Facsimile of the First Edition • Izaak Walton

... accustomed to see adventurers play for kingdoms, and Theodore became the common talk of Europe. He had served in the French armies; and having afterwards been noticed both by Ripperda and Alberoni, their example, perhaps, inflamed a spirit as ambitious and as unprincipled as their own. He employed the whole of his means in raising money and procuring arms; then wrote to the leaders of the Corsican patriots, to offer them considerable assistance, if they would erect Corsica into an independent ...
— The Life of Horatio Lord Nelson • Robert Southey

... her little pointed chin between her little brown palms and pondered, and out of the pondering grew a plan so ambitious and so daring that Rebecca Mary gasped in the throes of it. But she held her ground and entertained it intrepidly. She even grew on friendly terms with it in the end. Here was a way to surprise Aunt 'Livia; Rebecca ...
— Rebecca Mary • Annie Hamilton Donnell

... raptures stab me through And wake my pining love anew.(622) Now through the air no wild bird flies, Each lily shuts her weary eyes; And blooms of opening jasmin show The parting sun has ceased to glow. No captain now for conquest burns, But homeward with his host returns; For roads and kings' ambitious dreams Have vanished neath descending streams. This is the watery month(623) wherein The Samar's(624) sacred chants begin. Ashadha(625) past, now Kosal's lord(626) The harvest of the spring has stored,(627) And dwells within his palace freed From every care of pressing need. Full is the moon, and ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI

... three days after receiving it, and within twelve days later had it chained up.[1] Many gifts of books were received, some from the highest in the land: from King Henry the Fourth and his warlike and ambitious sons—Henry V, Clarence, Bedford, and Gloucester; from Edmund, Earl of March; from prelates—Archbishop Arundel, Repyngton of Lincoln, Courtney of Norwich, and Molyneux of Chichester; from great Abbot Whethamstede of St. Albans; from wealthy Archdeacon Browne or Cordone; from rich citizens ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage

... saw one too ambitious of court favor, sacrificing his time in attendance on levees-his repose, his liberty, his virtue, and perhaps his friends, to attain it-I have said to myself, "This man gives too much for ...
— The Elson Readers, Book 5 • William H. Elson and Christine M. Keck

... daughter. Mr. Hamilton was right when he associated the resigned widow with his old flame, Luella Blackburn, whom be had never seriously thought of marrying, though by way of pastime he had frequently teased, tormented, and flattered her. Luella was ambitious, artful, and designing. Wealth and position was the goal at which she aimed. Both of these she knew Ernest Hamilton possessed, and she had felt greatly pleased at his evident preference. When, therefore, at the end of his college course he left her with ...
— Homestead on the Hillside • Mary Jane Holmes

... we forget that Trade Unions, like other communities, whatever their legal constitutions may be, are apt practically to fall into the hands of a small minority of active spirits, or even into those of a single astute and ambitious man. ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith

... necessarily a discreditable one. Most lives are failures, if appraised by human estimate. Take for example the life of a young wife who marries a man with disease in his blood. She begins her wedded life with certain commendable ideals. She is young, enthusiastic, ambitious, strong, and she inherently possesses the right to aspire to become an efficient home-maker and a good mother. She gives birth to a child, conceived in love, and during her travail she beseeches her Creator to help ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume I. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague, M.D.

... had devoted herself, that touched upon the humble destinies of the vulgar, the child of Odin [23] haughtily disdained. Her reveries were upon the fate of kings and kingdoms; she aspired to save or to rear the dynasties which should rule the races yet unborn. In youth proud and ambitious,—common faults with her countrywomen,—on her entrance into the darker world, she carried with her the prejudices and passions that she had known in that ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... tobacco. Moldova must import almost all of its energy supplies from Russia. Energy shortages contributed to sharp production declines after the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991. As part of an ambitious reform effort, Moldova introduced a convertible currency, freed prices, stopped issuing preferential credits to state enterprises, backed steady land privatization, removed export controls, and freed interest ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency

... bond. We are essentially and intrinsically one; one by nature; one by mutual sympathies, by blood relations, by dearest ties; one in all that constitutes the unity of a family relation; one in heart, one in aim, one in mind, purpose, education, and will. None can make us two. Lines may be drawn by ambitious schemers, divisions discussed, but these do not constitute separation or alienation. The heart of the people beats in profound and resolute unison. What God hath joined together let not ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... was married, I was not the poor man that you now know me to be. My father gave me as my share of his property two thousand dollars, which I had increased to three, and my wife received as her wedding portion one thousand dollars. We were both strong and willing to work, and ambitious to succeed in the world, and we bought a good farm, running in debt a few hundred dollars. For several years we were greatly prospered. We had good health, and the seasons were favorable, so that we grew heavy crops and ...
— Choice Readings for the Home Circle • Anonymous

... I write of was not one of her more ambitious efforts. It was a small and (with the exception of one guest) what she called "a purely local affair." That is to say, the people who were to grace the feast were culled from the big villas on the Hill, ...
— Penny Plain • Anna Buchan (writing as O. Douglas)

... mistook his frankness for impudence. He was recklessly generous: he would have given the coat off his back to a beggar at the instigation of a sudden impulse, provided he could have got into a cab before any of his friends saw him. He had rare abilities, and at times wildly ambitious dreams, not of his own glorification, but of what he would do to celebrate the beauty and the graces of the princess whom he fancied he had married. It may seem hard of belief that this man, judging him by his actions at this time, could have had anything of thorough self-forgetfulness and manliness ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various

... their simplicity of life, their respect for law, their loyalty to priests and rulers. Hence there was permanence to their institutions, for rapine, violence, and revolution were rare. They were not warlike, although often engaged in war by the command of ambitious kings. Generally the policy of their government was conservative and pacific. Military ambition and thirst for foreign conquest were not the peculiar sins of Egyptian kings; they sought rather to develop national ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord

... Now, mine did not sustain this condition: all that my life had of promise was connected with the memory of her who never could share my fortunes; of her for whom I had earned praise and honor; becoming ambitious as the road to her affection, only to learn after, that my hopes were but a dream, and ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever

... call, "Come and Get It" was sounded the more ambitious of the recruits folded their blankets and tidied up their cots. When mess call was sounded but few had to be called the ...
— The Delta of the Triple Elevens - The History of Battery D, 311th Field Artillery US Army, - American Expeditionary Forces • William Elmer Bachman

... pronunciation which is an interpretation of the written form of the words in accordance with the general rules relating to the 'powers' of the letters. This practice is especially common among imperfectly educated people who are ambitious of speaking correctly, and have unfortunately no better standard of 'correctness' than that of conformity with the spelling. I remember hearing a highly-intelligent working-class orator repeatedly pronounce the word suggest as 'sug jest'. Such vagaries as this are not likely ever to ...
— Society for Pure English, Tract 3 (1920) - A Few Practical Suggestions • Society for Pure English

... on deck and saw Newman. I found that he had written to the captain, who had reserved a berth for him, but it was still before the mast. He had the promise, he told me, of a mate's berth should a vacancy occur; but he observed, "I am not ambitious. With what I have I am content." He asked no questions as to what I had been doing. It was not his way. He was certainly free from vulgar curiosity; neither did he volunteer to give me any account of himself. I told him one day what I had done with ...
— Old Jack • W.H.G. Kingston

... under this pseudonym, Mr. Goodrich has produced several works of a more ambitious character, which have been eminently popular. Among them is a series entitled "The Cabinet Library," embracing histories, biographies, and essays in science; "Universal Geography," in an octavo volume of one thousand pages; and a "History of all Nations," in two large ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various

... additional powers which, even the moderate and more rational adversaries of the proposed Constitution admit, ought to reside in the United States. If that plan should not be adopted, and if the necessity of the Union should be able to withstand the ambitious aims of those men who may indulge magnificent schemes of personal aggrandizement from its dissolution, the probability would be, that we should run into the project of conferring supplementary powers upon Congress, as they are now constituted; and either the machine, from the intrinsic feebleness ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison

... brothers. Above all others put no faith in Prince Henry; he hates you with a perfect hatred for the sake of Augustus William, who, he says, died of your contempt and cruelty. Trust him in nothing; he is ambitious, he envies you your throne; he hates me also, and calls me always 'La fee malfaisant.' He shall be justified in this! I will be for him La fee malfaisant. I will revenge myself for this hatred. Without my help, however, he will soon be sufficiently ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach

... Saldannas watering-place, on account of his having lost several of his men there in endeavouring to land. At this time Ruy Lorenzo was parted from him in a storm which drove him to Mozambique, whence he held on his course for Quiloa, where he took some small prizes. Being ambitious to distinguish himself, he went to the island of Zanzibar, twenty leagues short of Mombasa, where he took twenty small vessels. After this he appeared before the town of Mombasa, the king of which place sent out a number of armed almadias ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. II • Robert Kerr

... ancient seams of the Humboldt's decks responded to the glowing sun until pacing the deck was impossible, but sea-sickness was no less so. We lazily steamed into the beautiful harbor, up past Eureka, her streets still occupied by stumps, and on to the ambitious pier stretching nearly two miles from Uniontown ...
— A Backward Glance at Eighty • Charles A. Murdock

... as distinct a being from Richard III as it is possible to imagine, though these two characters in common hands, and indeed in the hands of any other poet, would have been a repetition of the same general idea, more or less exaggerated. For both are tyrants, usurpers, murderers, both aspiring and ambitious, both courageous, cruel, treacherous. But Richard is cruel from nature and constitution. Macbeth becomes so from accidental circumstances. Richard is from his birth deformed in body and mind, and ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt

... lived. She thought of Annie's cosy home which three Visions now made radiant, of John Coulson's love and devotion, and her heart answered the accusation and declared it false. She wondered if other girls were as silently ambitious as she, and why this best of all ambitions must be always locked away in secret, while lesser ones might be proudly ...
— 'Lizbeth of the Dale • Marian Keith

... teares Lest the full clouds, ambitious that their drops Should mix with yours, unteeme their big wombd laps And rayse a suddeine deluge. Gratious madam, The oftner you reherse her losse the more You intimate the gaine I have acquird By your ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. II • Various

... we give on another page): it represents a winged figure of Time helping a naked woman out of what appears to be a cave, with the motto, "Tempore patet occulata veritas"; this Mark follows the introductory matter in the above-named work. Making a leap of over half a century, we come across another ambitious Mark, which in the present instance served the additional purpose of a frontispiece; it was employed by John Allen of the Rising Sun, St. Paul's Churchyard, and is dated 1656; it is rather a fine device of the sun rising behind the hills, with a cathedral ...
— Printers' Marks - A Chapter in the History of Typography • William Roberts

... honest man, the not putting faith in what is said concerning magic, and to laugh at it. His friend, believing himself very virtuous because he was not avaricious—"That is not sufficient," said he: "are you exempt from every other vice and every other fault; not ambitious, not passionate, fearless of death? Do you laugh at all that is told of dreams, magical operations, miracles, sorcerers, ghosts, and Thessalian wonders?"[675]—that is to say, in one word, of all kinds of magic. What is the aim of Lucian, in his ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet

... what happened," Mr. Pitkin explained. "All of the bright ambitious children came back and the loafers stayed away. From that picked crowd nothing but good work could be expected. There was no attendance officer on duty, but the children were regular. Order was so good that on hot days we put up the sashes between rooms, and on the second floor, where four class-rooms ...
— The New Education - A Review of Progressive Educational Movements of the Day (1915) • Scott Nearing

... lines, a realized dream of hideousness—but for the splendid sky, always changing and doing all that was possible in the gleams and shadows and the glowing colors of morning and evening to soften the ambitious work of man; but for the wide horizon, with patches of green shores and verdant flats washed by the kindly tide; but for the Highlands and Staten Island, the gateway to the ocean; but for the great river and the ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... may be put in evidence. Probably this work lost something in incisiveness and brilliancy by being postponed till the writer's old age. But whatever this loss, it is impossible for any biography to be less pretentious in style, or less ambitious in proclamation. The only pretension of matter is in the early chapters, in which a more than doubtful genealogy is elaborated, and in which it is thought necessary to Washington's dignity to give a fictitious importance to his family and his childhood, and to accept the southern estimate of the ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner

... which she published at the commencement of her literary career, as well as those which appeared posthumously, are favourable specimens of that species of composition. As a poet, she attained to no eminence. "The Highlanders," her longest and most ambitious poetical effort, exhibits some glowing descriptions of mountain scenery, and the stern though simple manners of the Gael. Of a few songs which proceed from her pen, that commencing, "Oh, where, tell me where?" written on the occasion of the Marquis of Huntly's departure for Holland ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel , Volume I. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various

... so—if, after all, he had not died, And suddenly that door should know his hand, And with that voice as kind as yours he said: "Come, Margaret, forth into the sun again, Back to the life we fashioned with our hands Out of old sins and follies, fragments scorned Of more ambitious builders, yet by Love, The patient architect, so shaped and fitted That not a crevice let the winter in—" Think you my bones would not arise and walk, This bruised body (as once the bruised soul) Turn from the wonders ...
— Artemis to Actaeon and Other Worlds • Edith Wharton

... food and quarter, the enemy relaxed not their energy. It must not be supposed that our guns were idle all this time. Long Cecil plied pluckily to hit back, and succeeded in frustrating the ambitious efforts of the Boers to draw their guns still nearer. They were rather too close as things were, however, and with the aid of the Maxims we successfully besought the enemy to fling away ambition. ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan

... arrested in the midst of his task by the stronger hand of death; and the unfinished fabric stands a lasting monument both of the power and weakness of man—of his vast desires, his sanguine hopes, his ambitious purposes—and of the unlooked-for conclusion, where all these desires, and hopes, and purposes are so often arrested. There is also at Blois another ancient chateau, to which some historic interest is attached as being the scene of the massacre ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various

... shaped like mushrooms, standing straight up on thick brown stems before the crowded hovels. In each vase reposed sleeping babies, brooding hens, dogs, rabbits, or any other live stock, mixed with such rubbish as the family possessed: and the most ambitious mushrooms ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson

... shackled the free exercise of its prerogatives. The slender portion of independence left him by the growing power of the Estates, was still farther lessened by the encroachments of his relations. Sickly and childless he saw the attention of the world turned to an ambitious heir who was impatiently anticipating his fate; and who, by his interference with the closing administration, was ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller

... the case of the narratives that made up the first volume, I set out again with the same ambitious aim of adhering scrupulously in every instance to actual, recorded facts; and once again I find it desirable at the outset to reveal how far the achievement may have fallen short of the ...
— The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series • Rafael Sabatini

... and the wind blew, and steadily the vessel sailed on; till higher grounds began to rise on either side of her, and hills stood back of hills, ambitious of each other's standing, and threw their deep shadows all along the margin of the river. As the sloop entered between these narrowing and lifting walls of the river channel, the draught of air became gentler, often hindered by ...
— Hills of the Shatemuc • Susan Warner

... carpenter's 'prentice would have owned to such clumsy joinery; but Arthur was flushed with success, because the door could positively shut and the window could open. He even projected tables and chairs in his ambitious imagination, en suite with the bedstead of ironwood poles and platted bass-work bark, which he had already improvised; and which couch of honour would have been awarded by common consent to Mr. Holt, had ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe

... think of Jane Wilson; and I believe I know how far you are mistaken in your opinion: you think she is singularly charming, elegant, sensible, and refined: you are not aware that she is selfish, cold-hearted, ambitious, artful, shallow-minded—' ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte

... oak in the prime of life, and the oak that totters in desolate and crabbed old age. The oak that enjoys in middle age the good things of life, with well-fed and rounded symmetry; and the oak that suggests decrepitude, with rough exterior, and a life-experience of hardship; the sturdy oak, the ambitious oak, the self-contained oak, and so on, through every phase of character. No other tree is so human or so expressive, and no other tree bespeaks such fortitude and endurance. To say that a well-grown oak typifies the reserve ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory

... wise policy of the Admiral that the nation owes the success of these negociations. It is the opinion of Swedish and Russian diplomatists that had Sir James not been employed, the Northern Coalition, which was so fatal to the ambitious views of Buonaparte, never would have taken place; and for such a service no reward which it was in the power of Government to bestow on him would have been too great. There can be no doubt, had the lamented Perceval not met with an untimely ...
— Memoirs and Correspondence of Admiral Lord de Saumarez. Vol II • Sir John Ross

... things I like. I should see plenty of court life and high society, for he will soon be transferred from this legation, and if I take him I shall go to some foreign capital. He is very sharp and ambitious, and I have no doubt that some day he will be looked upon as a distinguished foreigner. Now, as it is the ambition of many American girls to marry distinguished foreigners, this alliance is certainly ...
— The Captain's Toll-Gate • Frank R. Stockton

... he cried, as the man-servant was closing the hall door. He had just brought the King on the scene for the benefit of an ambitious little official, and the word was still on his lips. He fretted and chafed while the door was unbarred; then, swift as a thunderbolt, dashed into the ante-chamber, ...
— The Collection of Antiquities • Honore de Balzac

... unraveled and smoothed themselves out. It was better so—better to live his own life than the one into which he was being ground by the inexorable facts of his environment. He was a young man and ambitious, but his hopes were not selfish. At bottom he was an idealist, though a practical one. He had had to shut his eyes to many things which he deplored, had been driven to compromises which he despised. Essentially clean-handed, ...
— Ridgway of Montana - (Story of To-Day, in Which the Hero Is Also the Villain) • William MacLeod Raine

... bounty you have been pleased to show towards our Society gave me hopes you would not be unwilling to countenance the studies of one of its members. These considerations determined me to lay this treatise at your lordship's feet, and the rather because I was ambitious to have it known that I am with the truest and most profound respect, on account of that learning and virtue which the world so justly admires in your lordship, MY LORD, Your lordship's most humble and ...
— A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge • George Berkeley

... before Madame de Frontignac started for Philadelphia, whither her husband had been summoned as an agent in some of the ambitious ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various

... of this beautiful passage is worthy our careful study and prayerful obedience. Are we ambitious to govern: be it our honour to rule our own spirits and tongues. Are we for war? let it be levied upon our unruly passions. This is laudable ambition. This is honourable war, producing the peace and happiness of man. This is real glory to God and man, the very opposite to ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan

... of full President—which had necessitated not one but three ballots being taken, making most people declare that had there been no bribery or intimidation he would have probably been elected to the supreme office in the land, and ousted the ambitious usurper. In such circumstances his complete elimination was deemed an elementary necessity. To secure that end Yuan Shih-kai suddenly dispatched to Wuchang—where the Vice-President had resided ...
— The Fight For The Republic in China • Bertram Lenox Putnam Weale

... he had failed to win the woman he loved. Love, he reminded himself bitterly, was not the main business of life. This mood of renunciation gave him an almost impersonal appreciation of his successful rival; but the tribute left him heartsick. Like all personally ambitious men who have failed of popular applause, the success of another filled him with momentary self-depreciation. To be sure, this popular triumph of Emmet was fleeting and local, while he himself meant yet to win a permanent, though restricted, fame. Of ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins

... Clair, was now completed. She had kept the writing of it a profound secret, and one morning the young author, full of ambitious dreams, borrowed the cook's market-bonnet and cloak and sallied out to seek her fortune. Before going far she saw over a shop-door "T. Smith, Printer and Bookseller," and ventured in. It was some minutes before T. Smith made his appearance, and when he did ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various

... springs of hope and desire. She began deliberately and with purpose to call back memories of the past: the house in which he had lived, the gardens and orchards in which he once had taken pride, his ambitious projects ...
— An Alabaster Box • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Florence Morse Kingsley

... and by day gentle of manner. Her health was not perfect. She knew this, and so did every one she met. While not an invalid, she in her imagination trembled on the edge of invalidism, and upon this subject she was almost loquacious. She was domestic in her tastes, and ambitious and devoted to her ...
— The Wolf's Long Howl • Stanley Waterloo

... published works, however, he left numerous manuscripts, which he had noted as 'Things I would write out faire and reform if I had leisure,' comprising poems, mathematical papers, religious meditations, and biographies. The most ambitious of his poems is Thyrsander, a Tragy-Comedy, which is probably one of those referred to by Pepys in his Diary for 5th Novr. 1665, when, visiting Evelyn at Sayes Court, he says that 'He read me part of a play or two of his making, very good, but not as he conceits ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn

... Where the coach exercises too limited authority, or when he is too "easy," the team's record is sure to suffer in consequence. Many a High School eleven comes out a tail-ender just because the coach is not strict enough, or cannot be. Many a team composed of naturally husky and ambitious boys fails on account of a light-weight coach. On the other hand, the best coach in the country can't make a winning eleven out of fellows who won't ...
— The High School Left End - Dick & Co. Grilling on the Football Gridiron • H. Irving Hancock

... with great solemnity conducted them across the hall to Jolter, who also heard them in silence and conducted them into the adjoining room to Bobby. Here Jolter stood back and eyed young Mr. Burnit with great interest as his two experienced veterans and his ambitious youngster poured forth their several tales of woe. Bobby, as it became him to be, ...
— The Making of Bobby Burnit - Being a Record of the Adventures of a Live American Young Man • George Randolph Chester

... Phoebe, more humane, graciously allows herself to be seen in her modest grace; she is gentle to the eye, not ambitious, and yet she sometimes eclipses her brother the radiant Apollo, without ever being eclipsed by him. The Mahommedans understood what gratitude they owed to this faithful friend of the earth, and they ruled their months at 29-1/2 days ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne

... were somewhat sensuous. A passing stranger would be immediately attracted by him. Blue eyes, brown hair, and well-formed features, together with a sunny and kind-hearted disposition, had made him a popular man. While very ambitious, he also possessed a happy disposition which made him the best of companions. He was now on his way to visit a distant relative on his father's side, and looked forward with exceeding interest to spending the last weeks of his ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking

... success coming to the notice of the avaricious and ambitious Queen Elizabeth, she, five years later (1567), became the open protector of a new expedition and sharer in the nefarious traffic, thus becoming a promoter, abettor, and participant ...
— Slavery and Four Years of War, Vol. 1-2 • Joseph Warren Keifer

... have fifty children, which, he added, "all Sultans ought to have;" but, for money he did not care, he wished all his children were poor but pious marabouts. His preaching is quite contrary to his practice. A more money-getting ambitious fellow I have not found in The Desert. The report which I heard of the Governor of Ghat being changed whilst at Ghadames, was a sham abdication on his part. From domestic matters he proceeded to talk of politics. His Excellency is always anxious to give ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson

... the ministers of Y mentioned in this stanza. Hwang-f appears to have been the leading minister of the government at the time when the ode was written, and, as appears from the next two stanzas, was very crafty, oppressive, and selfishly ambitious. The mention of 'the chief Cook' among the high ministers appears strange; but we shall find that functionary mentioned in another ode; and from history it appears that 'the Cook,' at the royal and feudal courts, sometimes ...
— The Shih King • James Legge

... physical deterioration that has come to the city dweller. God grant that modern civilization has had teaching enough and learned its lesson well enough. God grant further that we may give over slaughtering our most ambitious and vigorous young men in battle to settle questions which battle can never settle. God grant that we have come to a turning of the ways where the life of men, women and children, no matter how humble their station, shall stand higher in value than the profits ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker

... of both Hal and Noll had found themselves in somewhat better circumstances. Hal and Noll, being ambitious, had both felt dissatisfied, of late, with their surroundings and prospects, and both had received parental permission to better themselves if they could. So our two young friends, after many talks, and ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys in the Ranks - or, Two Recruits in the United States Army • H. Irving Hancock

... to start with caviare? I am," confided Lady Drakmanton, and the Smithly-Dubbs started with caviare. The subsequent dishes were chosen in the same ambitious spirit, and by the time they had arrived at the wild duck course it was beginning to be a ...
— The Toys of Peace • Saki

... originator of two rebellions approached Pasmore, the ragged, wild-eyed, clamorous crowd made way for him. It was ludicrous to note the air of superiority and braggadocio that this inordinately vain and ambitious man adopted. The prisoner was standing surrounded by his now largely augmented guard, who, forgetful of one another's contiguity, had their many wonderfully and fearfully made blunderbusses levelled at him, ready to blow him into little pieces at a moment's notice if ...
— The Rising of the Red Man - A Romance of the Louis Riel Rebellion • John Mackie

... sits on the floor with Annie. They are playing with building blocks, piling up and tearing down various ambitious structures. Rhoda enters from outside, with hat and cloak, carrying a ...
— The Faith Healer - A Play in Three Acts • William Vaughn Moody

... satisfied with you. I believe you to be a brave and skilful soldier, which of course I like. I also believe you do not mix politics with your profession, in 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 ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson

... power and money piling up higher and higher every day and the Church's dominion spreading daily wider and farther, a time could come when the envious and ambitious could start the idea that it would be wise and well to put a watch upon these assets —a watch equipped with properly large authority. By custom, a Board of Trustees. Mrs. Eddy has foreseen that probability—for she is a woman with a long, long ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... at Rambagh, for I had no measured hours. I was ambitious too; eager to master my profession, and in constant dread of exciting derision ...
— Gil the Gunner - The Youngest Officer in the East • George Manville Fenn

... as to think that nobody can like what they do not; also so fatuous as to consider that no one ought to like what they do not; but to jump from this to alleging that the professed admirers of ambitious works are humbugs is outrageous. The butcher boy enjoys Sweeney Todd, the Barber of Fleet Street: why should he disbelieve my statement that others get pleasure from a performance of a Hedda Gabler, which ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"

... advise you to be more contented,' said a Honeysuckle, as she looked down upon the ambitious little Flower from her own elevated position; 'let me tell you it is not always those who are highest up in the world are the happiest; they feel the cold winds quite as keenly, ...
— Parables from Flowers • Gertrude P. Dyer

... successfully with Urien of Strathclyde. But in 592, says Baeda, who lived himself but three-quarters of a century later than the event he describes, "there reigned over the kingdom of the Northumbrians a most brave and ambitious king, AEthelfrith, who, more than all other nobles of the English, wasted the race of the Britons; for no one of our kings, no one of our chieftains, has rendered more of their lands either tributary to or an integral part of the English territories, whether by subjugating or expatriating ...
— Early Britain - Anglo-Saxon Britain • Grant Allen

... and her sisters enjoyed Evelina's tribulations; then Fanny grew ambitious, and encouraged by her brother, thought of publication. When she tremblingly asked her father's consent, he carelessly countenanced the venture and gave it no second thought. After much negotiation, a publisher offered twenty pounds for the manuscript, and in 1778 the ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various

... piece of his own work that could hold its own with Chenier's verse; and with a tolerably fatuous glance at Mme. de Bargeton, he announced "TO HER!" He struck an attitude proudly for the delivery of the ambitious piece, for his author's self-love felt safe and at ease behind Mme. de Bargeton's petticoat. And at the selfsame moment Mme. de Bargeton betrayed her own secret to the women's curious eyes. Although she had always looked down upon this audience from her own loftier intellectual ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac

... air of complacency and importance. He felt little doubt that his own essay on the "Military Genius of Napoleon" would win the prize. He did not so much care for this, except for the credit it would give him. But his father, who was ambitious for him, had promised him twenty-five dollars if he succeeded, and he had already appropriated this sum in imagination. He had determined to invest it in a handsome boat which he had seen for sale in Boston on his last ...
— Frank's Campaign - or the Farm and the Camp • Horatio Alger, Jr.

... Commander-in-Chief and his staff were busy with preparations for a battle, in conjunction with the French, which had ambitious objects. These have never been stated because they were not gained (and it was the habit of our High Command to conceal its objectives and minimize their importance if their hopes were unfulfilled), but beyond doubt the purpose of the battle was to gain possession of Lens ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs

... of Wrath, who was eating Spickgans, a delicacy much sought after in these parts. "Do, my dear Elizabeth," wrote my friend, "take some notice of the poor thing. She is studying art in Dresden, and has nowhere literally to go for Christmas. She is very ambitious and hardworking—" ...
— Elizabeth and her German Garden • "Elizabeth", AKA Marie Annette Beauchamp

... field was performed in so systematic a manner, and by so thorough and wisely divisioned labor, that there were none of the jealousies and enjoyings which exist among those who wish to hoard, and ambitious to excel in style and equipage. And before the fire-water came among them, dissentions of any kind were almost unknown. This has been the fruitful source of all their woes. It was not till Mary became a mother that she gave ...
— Legends, Traditions, and Laws of the Iroquois, or Six Nations, and History of the Tuscarora Indians • Elias Johnson

... cautiously. "Il ne faut pas entrer: Monsieur ne permet personne de voir le chateau." We made involuntarily two steps forward; when lo! the end of a modern house, with a pea-green door and sash windows, and a shrubbery of lilacs interspersed with Lombardy poplars, blasted our sight. No longer ambitious of pursuing the lord of St. Vallier in flank, we hoped at least that a front view of his castle from the road to Avignon might afford some remains of feudal splendour. Off we set accordingly, and emerging from the dirty town ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes

... Importance that the Fidelity of one or the Treachery of another, in the service of the publick, should be made known. A Man of inflexible Republican Virtue cannot but incur both the Dread & the Hatred of those who are—ambitious—desirous of making Fortunes—artful and enterprizing—especially if much of the publick Money has passd, unaccounted for, through their Hands. Mr Dean would have the World believe that Dr Lee ...
— The Original Writings of Samuel Adams, Volume 4 • Samuel Adams

... by seeing generous things performed before our eyes?" Eugenio ended his discourse, by recommending the apt use of a theatre, as the most agreeable and easy method of making a polite and moral gentry, which would end in rendering the rest of the people regular in their behaviour, and ambitious of ...
— The Tatler, Volume 1, 1899 • George A. Aitken

... they had sent no help to Guglielmo dei Pazzi, had demanded aid from Chaumont dumbest, governor of the Milanese, an behalf of Louis XII, not only explaining the danger they themselves were in but also Caesar's ambitious projects, namely that after first overcoming the small principalities and then the states of the second order, he had now, it seemed, reached such a height of pride that he would attack the King of France ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... the trunks of the trees cut down to make way for it. They were fastened with stakes, and against rain and snow helped to hold it in place. The soil, as the path showed, was of a pink stone. It cuts easily, and is the stone from which cathedrals have been built. That suggests that to an ambitious young sapling it offers little nutriment, but the pines, at least, seem to thrive on it. For centuries they have thrived on it. They towered over us to the height of eight stories. The ground beneath was hidden by the most exquisite ...
— With the French in France and Salonika • Richard Harding Davis

... the formation of the Union was answered by the formation of a Catholic League among the states about it under Maximilian, the Duke of Bavaria. Both were ostensibly for defensive purposes: but the peace of Europe was at once shaken. Ambitious schemes woke up in every quarter. Spain saw the chance of securing a road along western Germany which would enable her to bring her whole force to bear on the rebels in the Low Countries. France on the other hand had recovered from the exhaustion of her own religious wars, ...
— History of the English People, Volume V (of 8) - Puritan England, 1603-1660 • John Richard Green

... overview: In January 1994, Senegal undertook a bold and ambitious economic reform program with the support of the international donor community. This reform began with a 50% devaluation of Senegal's currency, the CFA franc, which was linked at a fixed rate to the French franc. ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency

... able to snatch him from his parents," said Biron. "But those parents certainly hate me, and indeed very naturally, as they, it seems, were, next to me, designated as the guardians of their son Ivan. The Duchess Anna Leopoldowna of Brunswick is ambitious." ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach

... Shop, or an exchange store, for every phase of desire that can enter into an unsatisfied heart, or a soul unduly ambitious. This one, into which Mr. World escorted Miss Church-Member, is intended for those who become dissatisfied with the dress of righteousness, or for any who wish a change in any part of their apparel. It proved intensely interesting to Miss Church-Member, with her new-found ...
— Mr. World and Miss Church-Member • W. S. Harris

... of existence is not innate vanity but casual sin; what has misled us is not the will in general but only the false and ignorant direction of a will not recognising its only possible satisfaction. What religion in this case opposes to the world is a special law, a special hope, a life intense, ambitious, and aggressive, but excluding much which to an ingenuous will might seem excellent and tempting. Worldliness, in a word, is ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana

... went on talking volubly. She was evidently both fond and proud of her master. Suddenly she waved her lean arm towards a large, ambitious painting showing a typical family group of French bourgeois sitting in ...
— The End of Her Honeymoon • Marie Belloc Lowndes

... she began, as the carryall, mounting the hill, turned into Monument Avenue, where numbers of new houses had been built of late years, Queen Anne cottages in brick and stone, timber, and concrete, with here and there a more ambitious "villa" of pink granite, all surrounded with lawns and rosaries and vine-hung verandas and tinkling fountains. "In the first place I wish to learn where all these people and houses come from. I was told that you lived in a lodge ...
— In the High Valley - Being the fifth and last volume of the Katy Did series • Susan Coolidge

... the high noon of night: October 15, 1812. Hark to the tread of the Twelve Hours as they pass on the palace clock, and join their comrades that have been! The vast corridors are still; in the shadows lurk two burly minions of ambitious crime, Burkard and Sauerbeck. Is that a white moving shadow which approaches through the gloom? There arises a shriek, a heavy body falls, 'tis a lacquey who has seen and recognised The White Lady of the Grand Ducal House, that walks before the deaths of Princes. Burkard and Sauerbeck spurn ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang

... observes, "His housekeeping is seen much in the different families of dogs and serving-men attendant on their kennels; and the deepness of their throats is the depth of his discourse. A hawk he esteems the true burden of nobility, and is exceedingly ambitious to seem delighted with the sport, and have his fist gloved with his jesses." And Gilpin, in his description of a Mr. Hastings, remarks, "He kept all sorts of hounds that run buck, fox, hare, otter, and badger; and had hawks of all kinds both long and short winged. ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving

... and filled him with ambitious anticipations. He went at once to tell the guides to follow us to Zermatt and bring all ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... it came about that on the first Monday in the following November Jack Dudley and Fred Greenwood were in their respective seats at school, as eager and ambitious to press their studies as they had been to visit Bowman's ranch, in Southwestern Wyoming, in which ranch, by the way, they advised Mr. Dudley to retain ...
— Two Boys in Wyoming - A Tale of Adventure (Northwest Series, No. 3) • Edward S. Ellis

... addition to her democratic pride—which I cannot blame her for—which makes her prefer the company of her equals to that of her superiors, she finds herself a perfect stranger in the midst of people who are all intimate; and this is a sort of dignified desolation which poor Bessy is not at all ambitious of. Vanity gets over all these difficulties; but pride ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett

... ambitious. He gave all his money to his mother. When he earned fourteen shillings a week, she gave him back two for himself, and, as he never drank, he felt himself rich. He went about with the bourgeois of Bestwood. The townlet contained nothing higher than the clergyman. ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence

... economy depends heavily on agriculture, featuring fruits, vegetables, wine, and tobacco. Moldova must import almost all of its energy supplies from Russia. Energy shortages contributed to sharp production declines after the breakup of the Soviet Union in December 1991. As part of an ambitious reform effort after independence, Moldova introduced a convertible currency, freed prices, stopped issuing preferential credits to state enterprises, backed steady land privatization, removed export controls, and freed interest rates. The government ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency

... wailed aloud in his misery and woe, his yelps of distress quite filling the empyrean. But only for the space of a few seconds. Recovering his customary aplomb he made a flying leap for the top of the gate, his yelps now succeeded by ambitious growls—and in self-defense The Laird was forced to spray him again as he clung momentarily on top of the palings. With a sob Jerry dropped back and buried his nose in the dust, while The Laird beat a hurried retreat into the darkness, for he had lost all confidence in ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne

... Hanging Rock denounced them as snobs, for Hanging Rock was virtuously eloquent on the subject of snobbishness—we human creatures being never so effective as when assailing in others the vice or weakness we know from lifelong, intimate, internal association with it. But secretly the successfully ambitious spurners of that suburban society were approved, were envied. And Hanging Rock was most gracious to them whenever it ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips

... of Alexius I. was, however, not alone in her interest in the Chora. Her devotion to the monastery was shared also by her grandson the sebastocrator Isaac. Tall, handsome, brave, but ambitious and wayward, Isaac was gifted with the artistic temperament, as his splendid manuscript of the first eight books of the Old Testament, embellished with miniatures by his own hand, makes clear.[525] If the inscription on the mosaic representing the Deesis found in ...
— Byzantine Churches in Constantinople - Their History and Architecture • Alexander Van Millingen

... churches, to throw images of Christ into the road, and, showing no mercy to old men and women and children, to destroy all and spare none. And why? Ostensibly because one quite commonplace Austrian gentleman had been foully murdered, but really because a vain and ambitious and rapidly increasing nation, living on an arid and insufficient soil, had come to consider themselves the master-spirits of humanity, and therefore entitled to possess the earth, or at least give law to all ...
— The Drama Of Three Hundred & Sixty-Five Days - Scenes In The Great War - 1915 • Hall Caine

... in these disastrous wars; no burning question was settled by the victory of either side; no great principle or national interest was involved. It was little more in reality than the struggle for supremacy and place amongst the overbearing and ambitious nobles; hence the ease and readiness with which they changed sides on every imaginable pretext, and the hopeless character of the struggle, which ruined and exhausted the country without vindicating one ...
— In the Wars of the Roses - A Story for the Young • Evelyn Everett-Green

... thought the old woman was ambitious," Sir Shawn went on, dreamily. "She used to watch Bridyeen while all those fellows were hanging about her and paying her compliments. I have sometimes thought she meant Bridyeen to marry a gentleman. Several were infatuated ...
— Love of Brothers • Katharine Tynan

... itself to one on business matters. I ought to have said that my father was an ambitious man and one of wide plans. I think that even then he foresaw the day when the half-patriarchial life of our State would pass away before one of wider horizons of commercial sort. He was anxious to hand down his family fortune much ...
— The Way of a Man • Emerson Hough

... apparently amiable and good-natured, but certainly neither courtier nor orator; a man of undeniable bravery, capable of supporting almost incredible hardships, humane, and who has always proved himself a sincere lover of what he considered liberty, without ever having been actuated by ambitious or interested motives. ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca

... born in Kaura, a child to whom the name Lij Kassi was given—a lad whose uncle was then governor of that part of Abyssinia. The boy grew to be wilful, self-reliant, and very ambitious; it is even said that he set himself out to be the elect of God, who should raise his country to a glory equal to that of Ethiopia of old. There was a prophecy indeed, "And it shall come to pass that a king shall arise in Ethiopia, of Solomon's lineage, who shall be the greatest on earth, ...
— Our Sailors - Gallant Deeds of the British Navy during Victoria's Reign • W.H.G. Kingston

... be Superintendent before long; and it only required one other big case, such as this, to insure Harborne's succession to an Inspectorship. From thence to the office vacated by Sheffield was an easy step for a competent and ambitious man. ...
— The Sins of Severac Bablon • Sax Rohmer

... brevity was the style of primitive philosophy. Now there was a saying of Pittacus which was privately circulated and received the approbation of the wise, 'Hard is it to be good.' And Simonides, who was ambitious of the fame of wisdom, was aware that if he could overthrow this saying, then, as if he had won a victory over some famous athlete, he would carry off the palm among his contemporaries. And if I am not mistaken, he composed the entire poem with the secret intention ...
— Protagoras • Plato

... me sadly back to my own purpose, which is, despite many wistful longings of a more ambitious nature, to write a plain tale of the adventures of two members—prospective up to this point—of the Escadrille Lafayette. To go back to some of those earlier ones, when we were making our first cross-country flights, I remember ...
— High Adventure - A Narrative of Air Fighting in France • James Norman Hall

... Muster a fitting crew, and place on board The sacred hecatomb; then last embark The fair Chryseis; and in chief command Let some one of our councillors be plac'd, Ajax, Ulysses, or Idomeneus, Or thou, the most ambitious of them all, That so our rites may ...
— The Iliad • Homer

... hated; and of all Edomites not one was more bitterly detested than was Herod the king. He was tyrannical and merciless, sparing neither foe nor friend who came under suspicion of being a possible hindrance to his ambitious designs. He had his wife and several of his sons, as well as others of his blood kindred, cruelly murdered; and he put to death nearly all of the great national council, the Sanhedrin. His reign was one of revolting cruelty and unbridled oppression. Only when ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage

... supposed, with some qualification. But when the same person has ignominiously failed and begins to eat up his words, he should be listened to like an oracle. Most of our pocket wisdom is conceived for the use of mediocre people, to discourage them from ambitious attempts, and generally console them in their mediocrity. And since mediocre people constitute the bulk of humanity, this is no doubt very properly so. But it does not follow that the one sort of proposition is any less true than the other, or that Icarus ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson

... Madame Bayard, having pinned up her skirts, went out with the children and the nurse to pick flowers in a neighboring field, the druggist, who was less ambitious, treated the saloon-keeping cousin to a glass of vermouth, seated at the billiard-table, which was covered with dead flies. They breakfasted under a vineless arbor, which the hot noonday sun riddled with its ...
— Ten Tales • Francois Coppee

... houses—small and very proper-looking. Each house consisted of two stories, with a hall door in the middle and a sitting room on each side. There were three windows overhead, and one or two attics in the roof. The houses were very compact; they were new, and were called by ambitious names. For instance, the house where the Weldons lived went by the ambitious name of Sans Souci. All through the walk Susy chatted for the benefit of her companion. She told Kathleen so much about her life that she was interested in spite of herself! and by the time they arrived ...
— The Rebel of the School • Mrs. L. T. Meade

... But he was ambitious too; he was writing a great book full of holy learning; and he had of late somewhat withdrawn himself from the life of the College; he sate longer at his studies and he was seen less often in other Colleges. Ten years he ...
— Paul the Minstrel and Other Stories - Reprinted from The Hill of Trouble and The Isles of Sunset • Arthur Christopher Benson

... government office—he was not yet thirty years of age—and treated him almost as a son, the young man reciprocating the regard with a really filial devotion. He was ambitious for advancement, and discontented with his slow promotion. In 1797, in company with other choice spirits, he began the publication of The Anti-Jacobin, a weekly periodical which for nearly a year held up to merciless ridicule that section ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy

... to confess, but a man's heart is like an ocean billow; for, from that very moment Porthos ceased to look at Madame Truchen in that touching manner which had so softened her heart. Planchet encouraged these ambitious leanings as best as he could. He talked over, or rather gave exaggerated accounts of all the splendors of the last reign, its battles, sieges, and grand court ceremonies. He spoke of the luxurious display which the English made; the prizes the three brave companions ...
— Louise de la Valliere • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... present public safety, when a Devorant is ambitious, he builds houses, lays by his money, and leaves the Order. There is many a curious thing to tell about the "Compagnons du Devoir" [Companions of the Duty], the rivals of the Devorants, and about the different sects ...
— Ferragus • Honore de Balzac

... was only one of the very many men who have been extremely anxious that I should marry somebody else. Two years later Alfred died of cerebral tumescence—a disease to which the ambitious are peculiarly liable. That cat, Millie Wyandotte, happened to say to Birsch that if I had married his son I should now have ...
— Marge Askinforit • Barry Pain

... question is to eliminate all that is foreign to the inquiry, and to concentrate his attention upon the subject to be dealt with. Here I may remark that I make no attempt in this book to deal with Society as a whole. I leave to others the formulation of ambitious programmes for the reconstruction of our entire social system; not because I may not desire its reconstruction, but because the elaboration of any plans which are more or less visionary and incapable of realisation for many years would stand in the way of the consideration of this Scheme for ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth









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