AMBITION • E-FREE TRANSLATION.COM • Definition of Ambition

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/æmbˈɪʃən/ Listen

noun

Ambition n.

The act of going about to solicit or obtain an office, or any other object of desire; canvassing. (Obs.) "(I) used no ambition to commend my deeds."

An eager, and sometimes an inordinate, desire for preferment, honor, superiority, power, or the attainment of something. "Cromwell, I charge thee, fling a way ambition: By that sin fell the angels." "The pitiful ambition of possessing five or six thousand more acres."

verb

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

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Etymology of 'Ambition'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Ambition" Quotes from Famous Books

... people. He had been willing to make to them, of his own mere motion, concessions such as scarcely any other sovereign has ever made except under duress. He had paid the penalty of faults not his own, of the haughtiness and ambition of some of his predecessors, of the dissoluteness and baseness of others. He had been vanquished, taken captive, led in triumph, put in ward. He had escaped; he had been caught; he had been dragged back like a runaway galley-slave to the oar. He was still ...

— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... construed and hawked at and torn, till, if its framers could rise from their graves, they could not at all recognize it. All the powers of earth seem rapidly combining against him. Mammon is after him, ambition follows, philosophy follows, and the theology of the day fast joining the cry. They have him in his prison house; they have searched his person, and left no prying instrument with him. One after another they have closed the heavy iron doors ...

— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln

... know you. I understand the feelings with which you have sought a union between us. O God! why, why was I thus cursed with riches—why made a thing of barter and merchandise, and avarice, and low ambition? Take my wealth, take it, Mr. Maltravers, since that is what you prize. Heaven knows I can cast it willingly away; but leave the wretch whom you long deceived, and who now, wretch though she be, renounces and ...

— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... successes. Charles Niehaus, whose work is always direct and convincing, has made us feel the Spanish conqueror's own sense of victory. We know that now Mexico, the Tlascalans and the Emperor Montezuma have been vanquished, that the victor's ruthless ambition is already dreaming of the conquest of New Spain and the navigation of the Pacific. There are infused into the work a brilliancy and dash that fill the imagination with the glamor of that picturesque period of history. ...

— The Sculpture and Mural Decorations of the Exposition • Stella G. S. Perry

... lesson for us all in this beautiful story of how Columbus realized his ambition to ...

— A Parody Outline of History • Donald Ogden Stewart

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