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More "Unambitious" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... were exemplary members of the church, and brought up their children with a great deal of care. They were in every respect dissimilar. He was tall, thin, and dark-complexioned; she was almost short, very fair, and portly in appearance. Mr. Meeker was a kind-hearted, generous, unambitious man, who loved his home and his children, and rejoiced when he could see every body happy around him. He was neither close nor calculating. With a full share of natural ability, he did not turn his talents to accumulation, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862 - Devoted To Literature and National Policy • Various
... intimate, M. Licinius, played an excellent Maecenas to his Augustus. In his efforts to win the affections of Roman society, Trajan was excellently aided by his wife Plotina, who was as simple as her husband, benevolent, pure in character, and entirely unambitious. The hold which Trajan acquired over the people was no less firm than that which he maintained upon the army and the Senate. His largesses, his distributions of food, his public works, and his spectacles were all on a generous scale. The exhibitions in ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various
... about the poor Irish of the co. Longford and the squires and squirees, that it would not have occurred to me to give a literary form to my impressions about the classes parallel to them in Russia. My brother used, in pointing out the beauties of her unambitious works, to call attention to their extreme simplicity and to the distinction with which she treated the simple ones ...
— A Book of Sibyls - Miss Barbauld, Miss Edgeworth, Mrs Opie, Miss Austen • Anne Thackeray (Mrs. Richmond Ritchie)
... a beautiful spot—so rural, so retired, so far from the public road, so removed from noise and dust. It had such a serene, religious aspect, the traveler looking up the long avenue of trees, with a gradually ascending glance, to the unambitious, gray-walled mansion, situated at its termination, thought it must be one of the sweetest havens of rest that God ever provided for ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... we fancy, in passing a quiet village hidden among its orchards, that this at least must be the abode of peace, and unambitious contentment! But alas! when we enter the cottages, what do we find? there, as everywhere else, distress and need, passion and unsatisfied longing, fear and remorse, pain and misery; and by the side of these, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... of my readers, that they have not forgotten "Rambles Beyond Railways," and that the continued demand for the book is such as to justify the appearance of the present edition. I have, as I believe, to thank the unambitious purpose with which I originally wrote, for thus keeping me in remembrance. All that my book attempts is frankly to record a series of personal impressions; and, as a necessary consequence—though my title is obsolete, and my pedestrian adventures ...
— Rambles Beyond Railways; - or, Notes in Cornwall taken A-foot • Wilkie Collins
... clanship or vassalage, he was fortunate in the alliance and protection of Vich Ian Vohr and other bold and enterprising Chieftains, who protected him in the quiet unambitious life he loved. It is true, the youth born on his grounds were often enticed to leave him for the service of his more active friends; but a few old servants and tenants used to shake their grey locks ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... fill. To the deliverer of an injured land He gives a tongue to enlarge upon, a heart To feel, and courage to redress her wrongs; To monarchs dignity, to judges sense; To artists ingenuity and skill; To me an unambitious mind, content In the low vale of life, that early felt A wish for ease and leisure, and ere long Found here that leisure ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... marvellous—but—He had already become the proprietor of several acres of scorched, discredited property near Hickleybrow, at a price of nearly 90 an acre, and at times he was disposed to think this as serious a consequence of speculative chemistry as any unambitious man, could wish. Of course he was Famous—terribly Famous. More than satisfying, altogether more than satisfying, was the ...
— The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth • H.G. Wells
... not the most retiring and unambitious of all living musicians, he would before this time have been celebrated as the inventor of a new style, or school, of pianoforte composition. During his short visit to the metropolis last season, but few had the high gratification ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... passages of such elegiac beauty as in the former, of such exalted eloquence as in the latter of these plays; there is an even sweetness, a simple equality of grace in thought and language which keeps the whole poem in tune, written as it is in a subdued key of unambitious harmony. In perfect unity and keeping the composition of this beautiful sketch may perhaps be said to mark a stage of advance, a new point of work attained, a faint but sensible change of manner, signalised ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... it should by rights have lain, in a ministerial office in Dublin, all would have been well. As it was, the deliberate and extreme seclusion of his life in Ireland weakened his influence. He was far too shrewd not to know this, and far too unambitious to care. Work he never shrank from. But the daily solicitations of people with personal grievances to lay before him, personal interests which they desired him to promote, made a form of trouble which in his periods of rest from ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn
... Leaving the watch and chain—unambitious to add a charge of larceny to his other troubles, should Fate arrest him before the return of Rochester, he came down the corridor to a landing giving upon a flight of stairs, up which, save for the gradient, a coach and ...
— The Man Who Lost Himself • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... few minutes out of her hand. I must confess that, looking on that labour-crooked group, I felt a dislike, strong and definite, to that system which takes away even the hope of improvement, crushing down the principle of self-esteem in the man, until it reaches the passive and unambitious existence of the oxen which he drives. And looking on those women, negroes though they were, so unnaturally masculine, so completely unsexed, so far removed from all those attributes with which the name of woman is associated, I felt that no reason based on an asserted right, no fiction ...
— From Slave to College President - Being the Life Story of Booker T. Washington • Godfrey Holden Pike
... indignantly how the House of Lords could expect the Commons to give their concurrence to a measure "by which they and their posterities are to be excluded from the Peerage." The commoner who, after this way of putting the matter, assented to the Bill, must either have been an unambitious bachelor, or have been blessed in a singularly unambitious wife. Steele, who, as we have seen, had fought gallantly against the Bill with his pen, now made a very effective speech against it. He showed that the {177} measure would, alter the whole constitutional position ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... alley, every plot and border, would be covered with runners and roots, with boughs and suckers. We want no poets or logicians or metaphysicians to govern us: we want practical men, honest men, continent men, unambitious men, fearful to solicit a trust, slow to accept, and resolute never to betray one. Experimentalists may be the best philosophers: they are always the worst politicians. Teach people their duties, and they will know their interests. Change as little ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... alliances, institutes, and so on, which must now be counted by the ten thousand in Europe alone, and each of which represents an immense amount of voluntary, unambitious, and unpaid or underpaid work— what are they but so many manifestations, under an infinite variety of aspects, of the same ever-living tendency of man towards mutual aid and support? For nearly three centuries men were prevented from joining hands even for literary, artistic, and educational ...
— Mutual Aid • P. Kropotkin
... were still under the paternal roof were contrasts. Caroline was a constant invalid, gentle, sincere, unambitious, devoted to her mother, whose death nearly killed her. Amelia affected popularity, and assumed the esprit fort—was fond of meddling in politics, and after the death of her mother, joined the Bedford faction, in opposition to her father. But both ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... petty officer. He saw much service in various parts of the world. Wherever work was to be done he was foremost in doing it. Had he been younger, he would probably have been placed on the quarterdeck: but he was unambitious, and contented with his lot, though he, at last, was made a warrant officer, and ultimately became boatswain of a dashing frigate, under as gallant a captain as ever took ...
— Ronald Morton, or the Fire Ships - A Story of the Last Naval War • W.H.G. Kingston
... great man arose. The dismayed emperor cast his eyes over the whole extent of his dominions to find a deliverer. And he found the needed hero living quietly and in modest retirement on a farm in Spain. This man was Theodosius the Great, a young man then,—as modest as David amid the pastures, as unambitious as Cincinnatus at the plough. "The vulgar," says Gibbon, "gazed with admiration on the manly beauty of his face and the graceful majesty of his person, while in the qualities of his mind and heart intelligent ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord
... gathering of men upon whose decision hung such momentous issues, the Council which met that evening at Westminster seemed alike unambitious in tone and uninspired in appearance. Some short time was spent in one of the anterooms, where Julian was introduced to many of the delegates. The disclosure of his identity, although it aroused immense interest, was scarcely an unmixed joy ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... to be a quiet meeting-place for memories and hopes. So that, naturally enough, since succeeding to the agricultural calling, and up to his present age of thirty-two, he had neither advanced nor receded as a capitalist—a stationary result which did not agitate one of his unambitious, unstrategic nature, since he had all that he desired. The motive of his expedition to-night showed the same absence of anxious regard ...
— Wessex Tales • Thomas Hardy
... greatest song-writer—as surely as Shakespeare is the greatest dramatist—ever born of English race. The apparent or external variety of his versification is, I should suppose, incomparable; but by some happy tact or instinct he was too naturally unambitious to attempt, like Jonson, a flight in the wake of Pindar. He knew what he could not do: a rare and invaluable gift. Born a blackbird or a thrush, he did not take himself (or try) to ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... distant from the splendid court, frequented the lonely mountains, and the unambitious fields; nor went but rarely among the throngs of Ilium. Yet, not having a breast either churlish, or impregnable to love, he espies Hesperie, the daughter of Cebrenus,[61] on the banks of her sire, who has been often sought by him throughout all ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... nerve. I should be more inclined to question the desire," Lord Redford said. "For a man in his position he has always seemed to me singularly unambitious. I don't think that the prospect of being Prime Minister would dazzle him in the least. It is part of the genius of the politician too, to know exactly when and how to seize an opportunity. I can imagine him watching it come, examining it through his eyeglass, and standing ...
— A Lost Leader • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... town of Meissen, in the district of Cur Saxony, lived an honest and worthy man, Christian Gottfried Hahnemann, an intelligent, patriotic and highly esteemed, though unassuming and unambitious member of that community, by trade a painter upon porcelain, known ...
— Allopathy and Homoeopathy Before the Judgement of Common Sense! • Frederick Hiller
... volumes upon the patience of the public. I am tired, however, of writing volumes; they do not afford exactly the relief I require; there is too much preparation, arrangement, and parade, in this set form of coming before the public. I am growing too indolent and unambitious for any thing that requires labor or display. I have thought, therefore, of securing to myself a snug corner in some periodical work where I might, as it were, loll at my ease in my elbow-chair, and chat sociably with the public, as with an old friend, on any ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving
... developed state, however, is not such as would tempt us to emulation. As a machine it works; as an ideal it lacks any presentation of the thing we call beauty. The apotheosis of intelligence in the concrete example leaves us unambitious in that direction. ...
— H. G. Wells • J. D. Beresford
... temptation to waste one's evenings and it takes a stout ambition and a firm resolution to separate oneself from a jolly, fun-loving, and congenial family circle, or happy-hearted youthful callers, in order to try to rise above the common herd of unambitious persons who are content to slide along, totally ignorant of everything but the requirements of ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... that I look proud of my love. Ah, me! ah, me! would that I knew how to tell you! Give me your love; you shall never repent it. I will make home heaven for you. Men say that I have beauty and talent. Ah, me! I would use every gift I have for you; help you to win high honors that cold, unambitious natures never dream of. Ah, love me; love me, cousin! You will find no one else ...
— Coralie • Charlotte M. Braeme
... quiet, unambitious, but well-brought-up and industrious young man was Hamilton Morris, and he had not the least idea of the good in store for him for several months after Mrs. Kinzer decided to marry him to her daughter Miranda; but all was ...
— Dab Kinzer - A Story of a Growing Boy • William O. Stoddard
... out his cloak, he threw all into the river. This excited very bitter resentment among the Macedonians, who felt themselves to be not governed, but insulted. They called to mind what some of them had seen, and others had heard related of King Philip's unambitious and open, accessible manners. One day when an old woman had assailed him several times in the road and importuned him to hear her, after he had told her he had no time, "If so," cried she, "you have no time to be a king." And this reprimand so stung the king ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... follow, in the path of shame, 15 Their brethren, and her triumphs be in the end Great, universal, irresistible. This intuition led me to confound One victory with another, higher far,— Triumphs of unambitious peace at home, 20 And noiseless fortitude. Beholding still Resistance strong as heretofore, I thought That what was in degree the same was likewise The same in quality,—that, as the worse Of the two spirits then at strife remained 25 Untired, the better, ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... speaks of it as a "tarn", but we cannot believe he would have it so stagnant a thing as that name implies. Surely, the United is something greater than a superficial fraternal order composed of mediocre and unambitious dabblers. Progress leads toward the outside world of letters, and to cavil at work such as Mrs. Renshaw's is to set obstacles in the path of progress. Professional literary success on the part of amateur journalists can never react unfavorably on the United, and it seems far from ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... I did groan To think that a most unambitious slave, Like thou, shouldst dance and revel on the grave Of Liberty. Thou mightst have built thy throne Where it had stood even now: thou didst prefer 5 A frail and bloody pomp which Time has swept In fragments towards Oblivion. Massacre, For this I prayed, would on thy sleep have crept, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... appear superficially such; but in which he seems the most deeply instructed; and to which, no doubt, he has so much ow'd that happy Preservation of his Characters, for which he is justly celebrated. Great Genius's, like his, naturally unambitious, are satisfy'd to conceal their Art in these Points. 'Tis the Foible of your worser Poets to make a Parade and Ostentation of that little Science they have; and to throw it out in the most ambitious Colours. And whenever a Writer of this Class shall attempt to copy these artful Concealments of ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... so likewise was the army; and the new Protector had neither the courage nor the ability to put down strife with a strong hand. Richard Cromwell was a man of peaceful disposition, gentle manners and unambitious mind, whom fate had forced into a position for which he was in no way fitted. By one of those strange contradictions which nature sometimes produces, he differed in all things from his father; for not ...
— Royalty Restored - or, London under Charles II. • J. Fitzgerald Molloy
... sweating for a rhyme, Thou unambitious fool, at this late time? A fool at forty is a ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... children is a sorrow to them, but has served to centre their affections strongly on each other. The husband is a very tranquil and unaffected man. There is no sort of pose about his life. He just lives as he likes best. He is unambitious, and he has no sense of a duty owed to others. But this is not coupled with any sense of contempt or aloofness—he is invariably kind and gentle. He is an intellectual man, highly trained and clear-minded. ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... been, a man of pleasure; but he had seen men and cities, and his remarks were shrewd, and selfish, and worldly-wise enough. It was rarely that his talk ever strayed to matters of business, so that Solomon was perforce a listener; but that unambitious part he played ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn
... story and the story of adventure embrace a considerable though unambitious part of fiction. The love story deals with courtship and marriage. As a rule, after encountering more or less opposition or difficulty, the lovers are at last happily united. A thread of love usually runs through all the more ambitious types of fiction, for it is a source of universal interest ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... became a regular government. It was also an army devoted to military exercises, but organized with a view to self-defence and not to conquest. It was not quick to move or easily excited; but stolid, cautious, unambitious, procrastinating. For many centuries it retained the same character which was impressed upon it by the hand of the legislator. This singular fabric was partly the result of circumstances, partly the invention ...
— Laws • Plato
... the occult meaning of the folklore of Poictesme this book at least is in no wise concerned: its unambitious aim has been merely to familiarize English readers with the Jurgen epos for the tale's sake. And this tale of old years is one which, by rare fortune, can be given to English readers almost unabridged, ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... rich domain, That far beneath him on the plain, Waves its wide harvests and its olive groves; More dear to him his hut, with plantain thatch'd, Where long his unambitious heart attach'd, Finds all he ...
— Translations of German Poetry in American Magazines 1741-1810 • Edward Ziegler Davis
... length her favourite mansion and her throne 360 She fix'd in woman's form; what pleasing ties To virtue bind her; what effectual aid They lend each other's power; and how divine Their union, should some unambitious maid, To all the enchantment of the Idalian queen, Add sanctity and wisdom; while my tongue Prolongs the tale, Melissa, thou may'st feign To wonder whence my rapture is inspired; But soon the smile which dawns upon ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside
... upwards, has been filled with a profound conviction that the easiest way of life is the best. Hence, though I belong to a profession proverbially energetic and nervous, even to turbulence, at times, yet nothing of that sort have I ever suffered to invade my peace. I am one of those unambitious lawyers who never addresses a jury, or in any way draws down public applause; but, in the cool tranquillity of a snug retreat, do a snug business among rich men's bonds, and mortgages, and title-deeds. All who know me, consider me an eminently safe man. The late John Jacob Astor, a ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... deserts as a naturalist, the merits of Alexander Wilson as a poet have been somewhat overlooked. His poetry, it may be remarked, though unambitious of ornament, is bold and vigorous in style, and, when devoted to satire, is keen and vehement. The ballad of "Watty and Meg," though exception may be taken to the moral, is an admirable picture of human nature, and one of the most graphic ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel , Volume I. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... for in the very same year an attempt was made to involve him in a charge of treason as one of the friends of C. Calpurnius Piso, an illustrious nobleman whose wealth and ability made him an object of jealousy and suspicion, though he was naturally unambitious and devoid of energy. The attempt failed at the time, and Seneca was able triumphantly to refute the charge of any treasonable design. But the fact of such a charge being made showed how insecure was the position of any man of eminence ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... a whiner; no dirty children to offend the eye, or squalling ones to wound the ear; with admitted claims to the gratitude, confidence, and affection of her hostess: might not these suffice to make a lowly, unambitious ...
— Jane Talbot • Charles Brockden Brown
... by all his German ministers and playfellows, male and female. Baron Goertz was the most considerable among them both for birth and fortune. He had managed the King's treasury, for thirty years, with the utmost fidelity and economy; and had the true German honesty, being a plain, sincere and unambitious man. Bernstorff, the Secretary, was of a different turn. He was avaricious, artful, and designing, and had got his share in the King's councils by bribing his women. Robethon was employed in these ...
— Lady Mary Wortley Montague - Her Life and Letters (1689-1762) • Lewis Melville
... spot,—undistinguished, unadorned,—nay, almost mean. It stands alone, as it were, in a mighty city, close to the densest throng of men, but partaking neither of the noise nor the crowd; a small secluded, dreary spot, tenanted, one would say, by quite unambitious people at the easiest rents. "Is this Mount Olympus?" asks the unbelieving stranger. "Is it from these small, dark, dingy buildings that those infallible laws proceed which cabinets are called upon to obey; by which bishops are to be guided, lords ...
— The Warden • Anthony Trollope
... serve afore the mast—or how'd we git sailors?" observed the old fellow, with all the philosophy of the unambitious man. "Others get into the afterguard with one, two, three, and a jump!" His trembling fingers knotted the twine dexterously. "Now, ...
— Cap'n Abe, Storekeeper • James A. Cooper
... complete and heroic self-sacrifice for great religious ends, complete abandonment of the world, painful and continuous self-discipline, purified and exalted religious affections, beside which English piety and goodness at its best, in such examples as George Herbert and Ken and Bishop Wilson, seemed unambitious and pale and tame, of a different order from the Roman, and less closely resembling what we read of in the first ages and in the New Testament. Whether such views were right or wrong, exaggerated or unbalanced, ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... retire from London to my rural solitudes, and taste once more, as always, those pure delights of Nature which the Poets celebrate—walks in the unambitious meadows, and the ever-satisfying companionship of vegetables and flowers—I am nevertheless haunted now and then (but tell it not to Shelley's Skylark, nor whisper to Wordsworth's Daffodils, the disconcerting secret)—I am incongruously beset by longings of which the ...
— More Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... besides politics, their private affairs to attend to, and our ordinary citizens, though occupied with the pursuits of industry, are still fair judges of public matters; for, unlike any other nation, regarding him who takes no part in these duties not as unambitious but as useless, we Athenians are able to judge at all events if we cannot originate, and, instead of looking on discussion as a stumbling-block in the way of action, we think it an indispensable preliminary to any wise action at ...
— The History of the Peloponnesian War • Thucydides
... of the most perfect. The evolution from the small monogram, generally in white on a black ground, to an elaborate picture occupying from a quarter to a whole page, was much less gradual than is generally supposed. The unambitious marks of the first printers were clearly adopted in consonance with the traders' or merchants' marks which began to be so generally employed during the latter part of ...
— Printers' Marks - A Chapter in the History of Typography • William Roberts
... finding performers who would consent to assume the lower characters of the drama. For the first parts there were candidates more than enough; but most of these were greatly too high-spirited to play the fool, except they were permitted to top the part. Then amongst the few unambitious underlings, who could be coaxed or cajoled to undertake subordinate characters, there were so many bad memories, and short memories, and treacherous memories, that at length the plan ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... sentiment the writer's individual nature was plainly stamped; flagging inevitably over characterless books, however clever and meritorious: perceiving well that, as far as my own mind was concerned, God had limited its powers and, its action—thankful, I trust, for the gift bestowed, but unambitious of higher endowments, not restlessly eager after ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... father nor mother living, it appeared both a discreet and seemly arrangement that the marriage should take place from her uncle's house. There was no reason either why the engagement should be prolonged. They were past their first youth; they had means sufficient for their unambitious wants; the living of Hartshead is rated in the Clergy List at 202l. per annum, and she was in the receipt of a small annuity (50l. I have been told) by the will of her father. So, at the end of September, the lovers began to talk about taking a house, ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... desired an office, possibly in the Cabinet, he despatched South to get himself elected to Congress, for he must have powerful friends in that body to support the great measures he had in contemplation; and that not unambitious statesman, after a hot fight with Patrick Henry, was obliged to content himself with a seat in the House. Before he went to Virginia he and Hamilton had talked for long and pleasant hours over the Federal leader's future ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... their country, and with more tenacity as their dangers and calamities increased. To find, therefore, that expectations so gratifying were to be worse than disappointed; that they were to end in the diffusion of a mild unambitious religion, which, instead of victories and triumphs, instead of exalting their nation and institution above the rest of the world, was to advance those whom they despised to an equality with themselves, in those very ...
— Evidences of Christianity • William Paley
... lapse of a few months, he and Miss Jane Malcolm thought—although no other person thought—that they might venture to enter into the holy bands of wedlock, and, with frugality and mutual love in their household, look forward to happiness in their humble and unambitious sphere of life. This thought ended in ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume VI • Various
... he himself might have stood as the representative was not without its effect upon him. His ideal man is but a variation of himself. As Dean Church puts it: 'The ideal man with Wordsworth is the hard-headed, frugal, unambitious dalesman of his own hills, with his strong affections, his simple tastes, and his quiet and beautiful home; and this dalesman, built up by communion with nature and by meditation into the poet-philosopher, with his serious faith ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson
... became "a suitor for love." I am to be married (sequitur) on Thursday week.... The lady who is to take me, as the Irish say, "in a present," is some six years younger than myself, gentle, religious, relying, and unambitious. She has never been whirled through the gay society of London, so is not giddy or vain. She has never swum in a gondola, or written a sonnet, so has a proper respect for those who have. She is called pretty, but is more than that in my eyes; sings as if her heart were hid in her lips, and ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... decline to dispute—falling back thankfully upon the blessed stronghold of unambitious story-tellers—namely, that my vocation is to describe what IS—not make fancy-sketches of millennial days, when rectitude shall be the best, because most remunerative policy; when sincerity shall be wisdom—proven and indisputable, and consistency the rule of human faith and practice the world ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... those now published for the first time.... The introductory remarks and notes have been added by the present Editor, at the expense of some time and labour. It is needless to observe, that both have been expended upon a humble and unambitious, though not, it is hoped, an useless task. The object of the introductions was to present such a short and summary view of the circumstances under which the Historical and Controversial Tracts were respectively written, as to prevent the necessity of referring to other works. ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... unambitious people. They came as the friend, not the hereditary enemy, of the savage. They tendered the calumet—a symbol well understood by every Indian—and were received as allies and brethren. They had no national prejudices to overcome: the copper color of ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... or meeting of Representatives in the Assembly, simply because no fairer and fuller expression of the party's preference would be tolerated. And if, passing over the mob of Generals and of Politicians by trade, the choice should fall on some modest and unambitious citizen, who has earned a character by quiet probity and his bread by honest labor, I shall hope to see his name at the head of the poll in spite of the unconstitutional overthrow of Universal Suffrage. After this, though the plurality should fall short of a majority and the ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... author may hold among poets, just as we behold a "lily of the field" without comparing it with other flowers, but satisfied with its own pure and simple loveliness; or each separate poem may be likened, in its unostentatious—unambitious—unconscious beauty—to ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... sentences run smoothly enough; they are for the most part grammatical; the tone throughout is sedate, if not dignified; and the general spirit unambitious and moderate. But the doctrine, in our estimation, is, on the most essential point, atrocious, and the objects which are sought to be compassed are unworthy of the man, the office, the country, and the age. We ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... a citizen whose views were unambitious, who preferred the shade and tranquillity of private life to the splendor and solicitude of elevated stations, and whom the voice of duty and his country could alone have drawn from his chosen retreat, no reward for his public services ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 1 (of 4) of Volume 1: George Washington • James D. Richardson
... "Mansfield Park" and "Clarissa." Then there were Mrs. Susannah Rawson's tales, Miss Catherine Sedgwick's, and "The Coquette." She had further privately endeavored to read the "Nouvelle Heloise" in French; but this bored her, and—one regrets to say—the unambitious though immoral heroine impressed her as an idiot. As a more up-to-date romance, she had acquired from a corner bookstore a lavishly pictured novel in octavo, entitled "The Ballet Girl's Revenge." She could not sew, nor wash, nor cook, nor keep house or even accounts. ...
— Pirate Gold • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... which arouses their ambitions is the call of a great opportunity or responsibility. Note the change in General Grant's life with the outbreak of the Civil War. The unambitious tanner becomes the untiring, rigid, unconquerable soldier. Striking illustrations of this fact are many men, whose character, as well as conduct after they have been called to positions of political or judicial trust, ...
— The Making of a Nation - The Beginnings of Israel's History • Charles Foster Kent and Jeremiah Whipple Jenks
... the Southern groups were the poorer farmers, who lived on the semi-sterile lands which the planters refused to occupy or in the pine barrens of the eastern Carolinas, and the landless class which hung on to the skirts of slavery. Unambitious, ignorant, and improvident, frequently the "ne'er-do-wells" of the old families, ignored by the wealthy and spurned by the slaves, who gave them the name of "poor white trash," their lot was hard, indeed. They earned a few dollars a year ...
— Expansion and Conflict • William E. Dodd
... could have been guilty. But the deeps of folly were sounded when northern "persecution" of the South was mentioned, or Lincoln's election as threat of such. This was simply the election as President, in a perfectly constitutional way, of a citizen, honest and unambitious, who was pledged against touching slavery in States. Having become President, he was unable to procure minister, law, treaty, or even adequate guard for his own person save by the consent of the party hitherto in power. Lincoln had failed ...
— History of the United States, Volume 3 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... him to the East, where it was hoped he would develop into a lawyer or a preacher. The mother hoped the latter. His brother and sister had grown up, married and were settled on farms in the neighborhood, taking on the same existence of their parents; living honest, peaceful and unambitious lives. ...
— Sustained honor - The Age of Liberty Established • John R. Musick,
... steep sides of the ever-winding gorge of the Dordogne for many leagues, only broken where the rocks are so nearly vertical that no soil has ever formed upon them, except in the little crevices and upon the ledges, where the hellebore, the sedum, the broom, and other unambitious plants which love sterility flourish where the foot of man ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... spirits. He entered upon his professional career at a period when the bar of our State was thronged with men of extensive learning and the highest order of abilities. His success was not long a matter of doubt or speculation. Unambitious of distinction, in the commonly received sense, and unwilling to leave, even for a time, the comparatively humble field of his habitual labors, yet when summoned away to some new or larger theatre, (in the meridian of his ...
— Discourse of the Life and Character of the Hon. Littleton Waller Tazewell • Hugh Blair Grigsby
... appreciative and sympathetic disposition towards those who differed from him, even on points of importance, when he believed their convictions to be sincere and their conduct upright, or the rare dignity and magnanimity with which, after 1866, he retired from a great position, of which he was neither unambitious nor unworthy, under no pressure from without, and before age or infirmity had made it necessary for him to ...
— Lord John Russell • Stuart J. Reid
... expression of thoughtful, preoccupied aloofness. His crisp dark hair is graying at the temples. EDWARD BIGELOW is a large, handsome man of thirty-nine. His face shows culture and tolerance, a sense of humor, a lazy unambitious contentment. CURTIS is reading an article in some scientific periodical, seated by the table. MARTHA and BIGELOW are sitting nearby, laughing ...
— The First Man • Eugene O'Neill
... hero and heroine proved their faith by their works. By hard, honest toil and economy, they had laid up a competence which was regularly invested each year, and of which the children were not allowed to know anything, lest it might make them lazy and unambitious. ...
— Through Forest and Fire - Wild-Woods Series No. 1 • Edward Ellis
... know, or receive, or in any manner aid, in the concealment of the Lord Viscount's daughter—which is at present in charge of an honourable lady in the north—I charge you, refuse them; they may bring ruin on an unambitious and humble household, and in no case can do good. We must fear God ever, and honour the king while he is intrusted with the sword of power; and family arrangements we must leave to the strong hands and able head of ...
— Tales from Blackwood, Volume 7 • Various
... was "one of those rare exceptions who seem created by nature to be the benevolent spectators of human events, without taking any part in them beyond that of observation and interest for the actors." He had talents equal to the greatest achievements, but was indolent and unambitious. ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... and handsome a dish in a large family, or one where many visitors are received, that it is well worth while to learn the art of boning birds in order to achieve them. Nor, if the amateur cook is satisfied with the unambitious mode of boning hereafter to be described, need the achievement ...
— Choice Cookery • Catherine Owen
... have been judged a disaster. From the point of view of art, such novels as those of Victor Hugo and the early works of George Sand were a retrogression from those of the eighteenth century. Manon Lescaut, tiny, limited, unambitious as it is, stands on a far higher level of artistic achievement than the unreal and incoherent Les Miserables. The scale of the novel had indeed been infinitely enlarged, but the apparatus for dealing adequately with the vast masses of new material was wanting. It is pathetic to watch ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... powers of the unambitious pen we wield, to convey to the reader a just idea of the mixed emotions that struggled for mastery in the countenance of Ruth. The innate and never-dying sentiment of maternal joy was opposed by all those feelings of pride, that prejudice could not fail to implant even in the bosom of ...
— The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish • James Fenimore Cooper
... all but reached the limits of my appointed space, without apparently having gone one step nearer to the fulfilment of the task on which I set out. I can only ask you to take the will for the deed in the meantime. And after all, if this unambitious actor had only been what I imagined him to be, I could not have produced an apter example. But he had the impertinence to live his life in his own way, and that did not happen to accord with the theories I had been led to form about it. Shall I never be able to come to the point? I have ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 15, 1893 • Various
... ambition. The desire to rise seems to me wholly unalluring: I scorn and contemn it as a weakness. But what matters it? so much the happier for me if, as you predict, my life be short. But how, if so unambitious and so quiet of habit, how can I imagine that my death will be violent as well ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... reflect the very spirit of the ancients, and, especially, the antique style of Roman expression":—"Epistolae tuae, quae veterum sane, et antiquum illum eloquentiae Romanae morem, prae ceteris, mea sententia exprimunt" (at the end of Lusus ad Vencrem, p. 47). The style is simpler, more unambitious, and more flowing and smooth than is usually found in the Annals; but, (as in the descriptive passages in that work), free play is given to the fancy which works unclogged by verboseness; and judgment marks the circumstances in a description which ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... long admired thy great wisdom, and retired way of living. I shall now shew thee the entire confidence which I place in thee. I have only two sons remaining, who are as yet but infants. It is my design that thou take them home with thee, and educate them as thy own. Train them up in the humble unambitious pursuits of knowledge. By this means shall the line of Caliphs be preserved, and my children succeed after me, without aspiring to my throne ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... were no great matter; he was diffident, placable, passive, unambitious, unenterprising; life did not much attract him; he watched it like a curious and dull exhibition, not much amused, and not tempted in the least to take a part. He beheld his father ponderously grinding sand, his mother fierily breaking butterflies, ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... climate had brought them up, so that the team was a serviceable one in good condition. The story is not one of brilliant success, but to me it is much more hopeful for the country than the other tales I heard of sudden wealth or lucky speculation. It is the founding in an unambitious way of a comfortable home. The boys of the family will branch out, get fields, orchards, vineyards of their own, and add to the solid producing industry of the country. This orderly, contented industry, increasing its gains day by day, little by ...
— Our Italy • Charles Dudley Warner
... long remain unconscious. When you go into their haunts they do not appear so much frightened as offended. "Why do you intrude?" they seem to say; "these are our woods;" and they bow you out with all ceremony. Their songs are in keeping with this character; leisurely, unambitious, and brief, but in beauty of voice and in high musical quality excelling all other music of the woods. However, I would not exaggerate, and I have not found even these thrushes perfect. The hermit, who is my favorite of the four, has a habit of slowly raising and depressing his tail when his ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... county of the west, the creatures of the woods, except the fox, had never been systematically hunted. The vicissitudes of history had directly affected the welfare of wild animals. The old professional hunting and fighting classes had become unambitious tenant farmers; and, partly through the operations of an old Welsh law regarding the equal division of property, the land beyond the feudal tracts of the Norman Marches were, in many instances, broken up into small freeholds owned by descendants of the ...
— Creatures of the Night - A Book of Wild Life in Western Britain • Alfred W. Rees
... 1845, a duodecimo volume of poetry, entitled, "The Sailor's Dream, and other Poems," a work which was well received. His death took place at Greenock on the 6th of July 1850, in his thirty-eighth year. Of modest and retiring dispositions, Malone was unambitious of distinction as a poet. His style is bold and animated, and some of his pieces ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume IV. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... and to the early baldness which gave him the Shakespearian brow he had so little use for. She laughed his memory to scorn, and employed the episode as best she could in quelling her mother's simple trust of passing strangers. They worked along together, in the easy, unambitious village fashion, and kept themselves in the average comfort, while the time went by and Cornelia had grown from a long, lean child to a tall and stately young girl, who carried herself with so much native grace and pride that she had very little attention ...
— The Coast of Bohemia • William Dean Howells
... be wholly unlike the other nations, utterly unambitious politically, neither exciting war upon themselves by others nor ever making war upon others. Their great mission was to be a teacher-nation to all the earth, teaching the great spiritual truths; and, better yet, embodying these truths in their ...
— Quiet Talks with World Winners • S. D. Gordon
... some of those homes there reigned such beauty of spirit, such contentment with the condition in life, such kindliness and sympathy, such cheerfulness and patience, that it was a joy to cross the threshold and commune with the members of the plain and unambitious families. The memories of those visits are among the most delightful of my ...
— The Wedding Day - The Service—The Marriage Certificate—Words of Counsel • John Fletcher Hurst
... sceptre of Valentinian in the West, in this alarming crisis, cast his eyes upon an exile, whose father had unjustly suffered death under his own sanction three years before. This man was Theodosius, then living in modest retirement on his farm in Spain, near Valladolid, as unambitious as David among his sheep, as contented as Cincinnatus at the plough. Great deliverers are frequently selected from the most humble positions; but no world hero, in ancient or modern times, is more illustrious than Theodosius for modesty and magnanimity united with great abilities. ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... crowd? He raised the humble but to bend the proud. He had hoped quiet in his sullen lair, But Man and Destiny beset him there: 900 Inured to hunters, he was found at bay; And they must kill, they cannot snare the prey. Stern, unambitious, silent, he had been Henceforth a calm spectator of Life's scene; But dragged again upon the arena, stood A leader not unequal to the feud; In voice—mien—gesture—savage nature spoke, And from his eye ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... prone to leave those ideals unconnected with the consent of their fellow-men. The president of the company thought out within his own mind a beautiful town. He had power with which to build this town, but he did not appeal to nor obtain the consent of the men who were living in it. The most unambitious reform, recognizing the necessity for this consent, makes for slow but sane and strenuous progress, while the most ambitious of social plans and experiments, ignoring this, is ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... propriety and good conduct. This family, though not in actual possession of excessive affluence and honours, was, nevertheless, in their district, conceded to be a clan of well-to-do standing. As this Chen Shih-yin was of a contented and unambitious frame of mind, and entertained no hankering after any official distinction, but day after day of his life took delight in gazing at flowers, planting bamboos, sipping his wine and conning poetical works, he was ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... resents the time and trouble that fashionable dressing demands. No matter how much money this type has he will not be inclined to extremes in dress. Musculars are not really interested in clothes for clothes' sake. It is not that this type is unambitious. He is extremely so, but he is so concentrated on "getting things done" that he is likely to forget how he looks ...
— How to Analyze People on Sight - Through the Science of Human Analysis: The Five Human Types • Elsie Lincoln Benedict and Ralph Paine Benedict
... book for which I can hardly find adequate words of praise. Most admirable of all, perhaps, is a strange faculty she has shown for making one satisfied that her people should remain perennially rather poor and unambitious and dull, and should even grow old without occasioning us regret. With the deep under-drift of the writer's philosophy one may not be completely in accord, but certainly it will worry nobody, while the unity and beauty ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Dec. 12, 1917 • Various
... erring and a willful boy, and perhaps I was; but if I was, it had been a hardhearted world, and hard times that had made me so. I had learned to think much and bitterly before my time; all my young mounting dreams of glory had left me; and at that early age, I was as unambitious ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... on the grounds of wealthy people with cheap and inferior material. The result will be a sham that will deceive no one, and you will soon tire of it, and the sooner the better. Be honest. If you have only cheap material to work with, be satisfied with unambitious undertakings. Let them be in keeping with what you have to work with—simple, unpretentious, and without any attempt in the way of deception. The humblest home can be made attractive by holding fast to ...
— Amateur Gardencraft - A Book for the Home-Maker and Garden Lover • Eben E. Rexford
... with great anxiety the singular and portentous situation of the principal powers of Europe. It were devoutly to be wished that the United States, remote from this seat of war and discord, unambitious of conquests, respecting the rights of other nations, and desirous merely to avail themselves of their natural resources, might be permitted to behold the scenes which desolate that quarter of the globe with only those sympathetic emotions which are natural to the lovers ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 4) of Volume 1: John Adams • Edited by James D. Richardson
... a youth to fortune and to fame unknown. But one day a voice within him said, 'Tarbox'—George W.,—namesake of the man who never told a lie,—'do you want to succeed in life? Then leave the production of tobacco and cider to unambitious age, and find that business wherein you can always give a man ten times as much for his dollar as his dollar is worth.' The meaning was plain, and from that time forth young Tarbox aspired to become a book-agent. 'Twas not ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... possessed the house which had been built at the public expense for the son of King Antiochus, and to have died at Naples, where he was honoured with a public funeral, in the forty-sixth year of his age. His position, at once independent and unambitious (for he could not hold office in Rome), gave him the best possible chance of observing social and political life, and of this chance he made the fullest use. He lived behind the scenes: he saw the corruption prevalent ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... made was that goodnatured unambitious men are cowards when they have no religion. They are dominated and exploited not only by greedy and often half-witted and half-alive weaklings who will do anything for cigars, champagne, motor cars, and the more childish and selfish uses of ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... the remainder of my life." "No such thing, Doctor, I assure you," said William. He then plainly intimated that, whenever Sancroft should cease to fill the highest ecclesiastical station, Tillotson would succeed to it. Tillotson stood aghast; for his nature was quiet and unambitious: he was beginning to feel the infirmities of old age: he cared little for money: of worldly advantages those which he most valued were an honest fame and the general good will of mankind: those advantages he already ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... in the sunshine with the patient content of the Mexican peon. He could eat frijoles and tortillas week in and week out, offering no complaint at the monotony of his diet. He was as lazy, as hopeful, and as unambitious as several thousand other riders of the Legion. Nobody paid the least attention to him except to require of him the not very arduous duties of camp service. Presently Pasquale would move south and renew the campaign. Meanwhile his troopers had an ...
— Steve Yeager • William MacLeod Raine
... gets pretty well paid in falling a victim to the eloquence which her obstinacy stirs up. Nor is it altogether certain whether her conduct springs from a pride that will not listen where her fancy is not taken, or from an unambitious modesty that prefers not to "match above her degree." Her "beauty truly blent, whose red and white Nature's own sweet and cunning hand laid on," saves the credit of the fancy-smitten Duke in such an urgency of suit as might else breed some question of his manliness; ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... your congregation to hear; it is the better fitted to accomplish the end of all worthy preaching, which, as you know, is not at all to get your hearers to think how clever a man you are. The simple, unambitious instruction into which you have thrown the teachings of your own little experience, and which you give forth from your own heart, will do a hundred times more good than any amount of ingenuity, brilliancy, or even piety, which you may preach at second-hand, with the feeling ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... grange. His cornfields, his dairy and his cider press, his greyhounds, his fishing rod and his gun, his ale and his tobacco, occupied almost all his thoughts. With his neighbours, in spite of his religion, he was generally on good terms. They knew him to be unambitious and inoffensive. He was almost always of a good old family. He was always a Cavalier. His peculiar notions were not obtruded, and caused no annoyance. He did not, like a Puritan, torment himself and others with scruples about everything that was pleasant. On the contrary, ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... of a democratic aristocracy. Now, if Emmet had the philosophical attitude of mind, he would n't have the strength to struggle which he undoubtedly does have. He needs that stimulus of personal animosity to get somewhere; if he were philosophical, he would be unambitious. When he has arrived, as they say, he will come to see that an aristocracy in the usual worldly sense of the term must have money to maintain its existence. The old aristocracy must have accessions of vulgar blood and vulgar money ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... to get a tolerably even surface. Many other improvements followed; and although it was a poor place still, it would at the time of Dr. Johnson's visit to the highlands have been counted a good house, not to be despised by unambitious knight or poor baronet. Nor was the time yet over, when ladies and gentlemen, of all courtesy and good breeding, might be found in ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... any of them from being absorbed into a foreign state, and becoming a source of additional aggressive strength to some rival power, either more despotic or closer at hand, which might not always be so unambitious or so pacific as Great Britain. It at least keeps the markets of the different countries open to one another, and prevents that mutual exclusion by hostile tariffs which none of the great communities of mankind except England have yet outgrown. And in the case ...
— Considerations on Representative Government • John Stuart Mill
... the pomp which waits on greatness, Ill suits my humble, unambitious soul;— Then leave me here, to tread the safer path Of private life; here, where my peaceful course Shall be as silent as the shades around me; Nor shall one vagrant wish be e'er allow'd To stray beyond ...
— Percy - A Tragedy • Hannah More
... regards of our senses, and the degrading injustice of our anxious everyday life, and, appealing to the imagination, which dwells apart, reveals Nature in some degree as she really is, and as she represents herself to the eye of the child, whose every-day life, fearless and unambitious, meets the true import of the wonder-teeming world around him, and rejoices therein without questioning? That skeleton, now—I almost fear it, standing there so still, with eyes only for the unseen, like a watch-tower looking across all the waste of this busy world into the quiet ...
— Phantastes - A Faerie Romance for Men and Women • George MacDonald
... which I have alluded was foisted upon our community as a veritable document, I found myself a secular dignitary in the church militant. Previously I had been only a pew-holder, and an unambitious attendant upon the Sabbath ministrations of the Rev. Mr——. But a new field suddenly opened before me; I was a man of weight and influence, and must be used for what I was worth. It is no joke, I can assure the reader, when I tell them that the way my pocket suffered was truly ...
— Friends and Neighbors - or Two Ways of Living in the World • Anonymous
... the author is to show how the "essential beauty, naive simplicity, unaffected expression and unforced idealism," of Longfellow's "Hiawatha" stirred the artist and set him composing an unambitious cantata which resulted in "Hiawatha's Wedding Feast," and the "Song of Hiawatha." The expressions of enthusiasm and the euologies which crowned the musician as one of the greatest artists that Great Britain ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Vol. I. Jan. 1916 • Various
... stood breathless with delight. The painfully rigid contraction of Balder's features was softening away; he was coming into harmony with the sensuous beauty of the scene, or its refined voluptuousness—serene, unambitious, content with time and careless of ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... unboastful exercise of some enviable and unattainable attribute. Even the friendly pig, who (did but parents permit) should eat of his bread and drink of his cup, and be unto him as a brother, — which among all these unhappy bifurcations, so cheery, so unambitious, so purely contented, so apt to be the guide, philosopher, and friend of boyhood as he? What wonder that at times, when the neophyte in life begins to realise that all these desirable accomplishments ...
— Pagan Papers • Kenneth Grahame
... they outrage ethical tradition, as they do in the lyric narrative called "A Wife and Another." The stanzas "To an Unborn Pauper Child" sum up what is sinister and what is genial in Mr. Hardy's attitude to the unambitious forms of life ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... one dreary late afternoon of April when she felt immensely languid and unambitious: "You're going to succeed—unless you marry some dub. But there's one rule for success—mind you, I don't follow it myself, I can't, but it's a grand old hunch: 'If you want to get on, always be ready ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... her parents in all their happy rambling and unambitious home-life, was their joy and pride. If she frolicked in the grass while her father played his airs, she lost not a strain of the music. She hearkened also to his deep discourse, and gave good heed, when he illustrated ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... with a humble theme, Have poured my stream of panegyric down The vale of Nature, where it creeps and winds Among her lovely works, with a secure And unambitious course, reflecting clear If not the virtues, yet the worth, of brutes. And I am recompensed, and deem the toils Of poetry not lost, if verse of mine May stand between an animal and woe, And teach one tyrant pity ...
— Voices for the Speechless • Abraham Firth
... leaving was sadder. No exile ever turned towards foreign parts with heavier sorrow. Her diadem was a crown of thorns. Her mother's grief augmented her own. Without her children, Josephine, naturally unambitious, found no consolation in the thought that her son was a Viceroy, her daughter a Queen. Before she left Paris Hortense, in terror before the thought that the Emperor would no longer be near to defend her, told her all her domestic ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... accomplishments of the age, as if desiring that he should make some personal effort to recover the victory which was passing into the hands of the Templar and his associates. But, though both stout of heart, and strong of person, Athelstane had a disposition too inert and unambitious to make the exertions which Cedric ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... superficially such; but in which he seems the most deeply instructed; and to which, no doubt, he has so much ow'd that happy Preservation of his Characters, for which he is justly celebrated. Great Genius's, like his, naturally unambitious, are satisfy'd to conceal their Art in these Points. 'Tis the Foible of your worser Poets to make a Parade and Ostentation of that little Science they have; and to throw it out in the most ambitious Colours. And whenever a Writer of this Class ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... unobtrusive unit in the army. He could lie for hours and bask in the sunshine with the patient content of the Mexican peon. He could eat frijoles and tortillas week in and week out, offering no complaint at the monotony of his diet. He was as lazy, as hopeful, and as unambitious as several thousand other riders of the Legion. Nobody paid the least attention to him except to require of him the not very arduous duties of camp service. Presently Pasquale would move south and renew ...
— Steve Yeager • William MacLeod Raine
... how unambitious Lord Byron was as a child, and with what facility he allowed his comrades to surpass him in intellectual exercises, reserving for his sole ambition the wish of excelling them in boyish ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... with the Senate. His intimate, M. Licinius, played an excellent Maecenas to his Augustus. In his efforts to win the affections of Roman society, Trajan was excellently aided by his wife Plotina, who was as simple as her husband, benevolent, pure in character, and entirely unambitious. The hold which Trajan acquired over the people was no less firm than that which he maintained upon the army and the Senate. His largesses, his distributions of food, his public works, and his spectacles were all on ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various
... retired way of living. I shall now shew thee the entire confidence which I place in thee. I have only two sons remaining, who are as yet but infants. It is my design that thou take them home with thee, and educate them as thy own. Train them up in the humble unambitious pursuits of knowledge. By this means shall the line of Caliphs be preserved, and my children succeed after me, without aspiring to my throne whilst ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... different modes of life, is struck with the rude and uncomfortable appearance of every thing about this people,—the rudeness of their habitations, the carelessness of their agriculture, the unsightly coarseness of all their implements and furniture, the unambitious homeliness of all their goods and chattels, except the axe, the rifle, and the horse—these being invariably the best and handsomest which their means enable them to procure. But he is mistaken in ...
— A New Guide for Emigrants to the West • J. M. Peck
... rights of clanship or vassalage, he was fortunate in the alliance and protection of Vich Ian Vohr and other bold and enterprising Chieftains, who protected him in the quiet unambitious life he loved. It is true, the youth born on his grounds were often enticed to leave him for the service of his more active friends; but a few old servants and tenants used to shake their grey locks when they heard their master ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... forest which covers the steep sides of the ever-winding gorge of the Dordogne for many leagues, only broken where the rocks are so nearly vertical that no soil has ever formed upon them, except in the little crevices and upon the ledges, where the hellebore, the sedum, the broom, and other unambitious plants which love sterility flourish where the foot ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... celebrant of boredom. I was convinced, from some obscure meditation, that Stevenson's conversational method had joined him to my elders and to the indifferent world, as though it were right for old men, and unambitious men and all women, to be content with charm and humour. It was the prerogative of youth to take sides and when Wilde said: 'Mr. Bernard Shaw has no enemies but is intensely disliked by all his friends,' I knew it ...
— Four Years • William Butler Yeats
... own doors—nay, should forsake their own kith and kin who are suffering under it—the mother who bore them, the sisters who love them with all a sister's tender and solicitous love, and run off to emancipate the fattest, sleekest, most contented and unambitious race under heaven." ...
— The Sable Cloud - A Southern Tale With Northern Comments (1861) • Nehemiah Adams
... tender nature, a deep and lasting joy. I think that if he had married an adoring and sympathetic wife, he might almost have grown exacting—perhaps even selfish, because he is the sort of man that requires to have the best part of him evoked. He is unambitious and in a way indolent; and if everything had been done for him—his wishes anticipated, sympathy lavished upon him—he would have had no region in which to exercise that self-restraint which is now a necessity of the case. We are very liable to try and arrange ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Large pewter pots were brought into it daily at one o'clock, giving it an air that was not aristocratic. The senior of the room, one Mr Love, who was presumed to have it under his immediate dominion, was a clerk of the ancient stamp, dull, heavy, unambitious, living out on the farther side of Islington, and unknown beyond the limits of his office to any of his younger brethren. He was generally regarded as having given a bad tone to the room. And then the clerks in this room would not unfrequently ...
— The Small House at Allington • Anthony Trollope
... raised the humble but to bend the proud. He had hoped quiet in his sullen lair, But Man and Destiny beset him there: 900 Inured to hunters, he was found at bay; And they must kill, they cannot snare the prey. Stern, unambitious, silent, he had been Henceforth a calm spectator of Life's scene; But dragged again upon the arena, stood A leader not unequal to the feud; In voice—mien—gesture—savage nature spoke, And from his eye ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... attained. I may be answered that this labor can be had from the black as a freeman as well as in the condition of a slave. To this I will simply say, experience has proved this to be an error. Such is the indolence and unambitious character of the negro that he will not labor, unless compelled by the apprehension of immediate punishment, to anything approaching his capacity for labor. His wants are few, they are easily supplied, and when they ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... insight into its fellows and melts all humanity into one cordial heart of hearts. Domestic life, if it may still be termed domestic, will seek its separate corners, and never gather itself into groups. The easy gossip; the merry yet unambitious Jest; the life-like, practical discussion of real matters in a casual way; the soul of truth which is so often incarnated in a simple fireside word,—will disappear from earth. Conversation will contract the air of debate, and all mortal intercourse be chilled with ...
— Fire Worship (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... office, possibly in the Cabinet, he despatched South to get himself elected to Congress, for he must have powerful friends in that body to support the great measures he had in contemplation; and that not unambitious statesman, after a hot fight with Patrick Henry, was obliged to content himself with a seat in the House. Before he went to Virginia he and Hamilton had talked for long and pleasant hours over the Federal leader's future schemes. In all things he was in accord with ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... our travels in Sussex with the best, then Midhurst is the starting point, for no other spot has so much to offer: a quiet country town, gabled and venerable, unmodernised and unambitious, with a river, a Tudor ruin, a park of deer, heather commons, immense woods, and the Downs only three miles distant. Moreover, Midhurst is also the centre of a very useful little railway system, which, having ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... afternoons. Weak-minded though it was, Professor Valeyon loved to listen to it. It suited him better than the full-toned rush and splash of a heavier water-power; there was about it a human uncertainty and imperfection which brought it nearer to his heart. Moreover, weak and unambitious though it was, the fountain must have been possessed of considerable tenacity of purpose, to say the least, otherwise, doing so little, it would not have been persistent enough to keep on doing it at all. It was really ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... [Chopin] not the most retiring and unambitious of all living musicians, he would before this time have been celebrated as the inventor of a new style, or school, of pianoforte composition. During his short visit to the metropolis last season, but few had the high gratification ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... also some of the most perfect. The evolution from the small monogram, generally in white on a black ground, to an elaborate picture occupying from a quarter to a whole page, was much less gradual than is generally supposed. The unambitious marks of the first printers were clearly adopted in consonance with the traders' or merchants' marks which began to be so generally employed during the latter part ...
— Printers' Marks - A Chapter in the History of Typography • William Roberts
... education much money has been expended, and who, when candidates for clerkships, have, in the simple matters of reading, writing, arithmetic, composition and spelling, shown up very poorly compared to what almost any boy from "old Jessie's" unambitious establishment would have done. But, plain and substantial as my schooling was, I have ever felt that I was defrauded of the better part of education—the classics, languages, literature and modern science, which furnish the mind and extend ...
— Fifty Years of Railway Life in England, Scotland and Ireland • Joseph Tatlow
... neither alarming nor unfamiliar. The master at once recognized it as Ben Dabney, otherwise known as "Uncle Ben," a good-humored but not over-bright miner, who occupied a small cabin on an unambitious claim in the outskirts of Indian Spring. His avuncular title was evidently only an ironical tribute to his amiable incompetency and heavy good-nature, for he was still a young man with no family ties, and by ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... essence home Where it would be. Yet is there left behind A transcript that we cherish, and a chasm We have no power to fill. Almost it seems That we beheld him still, with quiet step Moving among us, saintly and serene, Clear-sighted, upright, held in high regard, Yet meekly unambitious, seeking nought Of windy honor from the mouth of men But with the Gospel's perfect code content, Breathing good-will to all. Freely his wealth Wrought blessed channels mid the sons of need, Lending Philanthropy and Piety A stronger ...
— Man of Uz, and Other Poems • Lydia Howard Sigourney
... gentility on the part of one household. The widow was sometimes sorry to find with what readiness Anne caught up some dialect-word or accent from the miller and his friends; but he was so good and true-hearted a man, and she so easy-minded, unambitious a woman, that she would not make life a solitude for fastidious reasons. More than all, she had good ground for thinking that the miller secretly admired her, and this added ...
— The Trumpet-Major • Thomas Hardy
... and chain—unambitious to add a charge of larceny to his other troubles, should Fate arrest him before the return of Rochester, he came down the corridor to a landing giving upon a flight of stairs, up which, save for the gradient, a coach and horses ...
— The Man Who Lost Himself • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... consultation took place, which ended in the leading senators saying, "There is only one man who can deliver us. We must make Lucius Quinctius Master of the People." Master of the People meant in Rome what we now mean by Dictator,—that is, a man above the law, an autocrat supreme. What service this unambitious tiller of the ground had previously done for Rome to make him worthy of this distinction we are not told, but it is evident that he was looked upon as the man of highest wisdom and soldiership ...
— Historic Tales, Volume 11 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... is enshrouded in mystery, the restless ghost groaning for the vindication of rights, the historical background, the archaic spelling of the challenge, are all ineffective fumblings towards the romantic. The Old English Baron is an unambitious work, but it has a certain hold upon our attention because of its limpidity of style. It can be read without discomfort and even with a mild degree of interest simply as a story, while The Castle of Otranto is only tolerable as ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... of men upon whose decision hung such momentous issues, the Council which met that evening at Westminster seemed alike unambitious in tone and uninspired in appearance. Some short time was spent in one of the anterooms, where Julian was introduced to many of the delegates. The disclosure of his identity, although it aroused immense interest, ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... spent part of his student life in Europe, and he looked back to his travel there with a fondness that the Old World inspires less and less in Americans. This, with his derivation from one of the unliterary Boston suburbs, and his unambitious residence in a place like Hatboro', gave her a sense of provinciality in him. On his part, he apparently found it droll that a woman of her acquaintance with a larger life should be willing to live in Hatboro' at all, and he ...
— Annie Kilburn - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... Malcolm thought—although no other person thought—that they might venture to enter into the holy bands of wedlock, and, with frugality and mutual love in their household, look forward to happiness in their humble and unambitious sphere of life. This thought ended in ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume VI • Various
... how to tell you! Give me your love; you shall never repent it. I will make home heaven for you. Men say that I have beauty and talent. Ah, me! I would use every gift I have for you; help you to win high honors that cold, unambitious natures never dream of. Ah, love me; love me, cousin! You will find no one else ...
— Coralie • Charlotte M. Braeme
... are rather at a loss to divine Mr. Macauley's precise notion of amateur journalism. He speaks of it as a "tarn", but we cannot believe he would have it so stagnant a thing as that name implies. Surely, the United is something greater than a superficial fraternal order composed of mediocre and unambitious dabblers. Progress leads toward the outside world of letters, and to cavil at work such as Mrs. Renshaw's is to set obstacles in the path of progress. Professional literary success on the part of amateur journalists can never react unfavorably on the United, and it seems far from kind ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... bell, one of whose tenants is a living baron, having no title to put on his doorplate under that of the baron, must needs dub himself "privatier;" and he insists upon prefixing the name of this unambitious writer with the ennobling von; and at the least he insists, in common with the tradespeople, that I am a "Herr Doctor." The bills of purchases by madame come made out to "Frau——, well-born." At a hotel in Heidelberg, where I had registered my name with that distinctness of penmanship for ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... waste one's evenings and it takes a stout ambition and a firm resolution to separate oneself from a jolly, fun-loving, and congenial family circle, or happy-hearted youthful callers, in order to try to rise above the common herd of unambitious persons who are content to slide along, totally ignorant of everything but the requirements ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... in literary merit, is the better sermon for you to give and for your congregation to hear; it is the better fitted to accomplish the end of all worthy preaching, which, as you know, is not at all to get your hearers to think how clever a man you are. The simple, unambitious instruction into which you have thrown the teachings of your own little experience, and which you give forth from your own heart, will do a hundred times more good than any amount of ingenuity, brilliancy, ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... take Life from the young Republic; that new foes Would only follow, in the path of shame, 15 Their brethren, and her triumphs be in the end Great, universal, irresistible. This intuition led me to confound One victory with another, higher far,— Triumphs of unambitious peace at home, 20 And noiseless fortitude. Beholding still Resistance strong as heretofore, I thought That what was in degree the same was likewise The same in quality,—that, as the worse Of the two spirits then at strife remained 25 Untired, the better, surely, would preserve ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... circumstances, it is not the least of the debts which I owe to the encouraging kindness of my readers, that they have not forgotten "Rambles Beyond Railways," and that the continued demand for the book is such as to justify the appearance of the present edition. I have, as I believe, to thank the unambitious purpose with which I originally wrote, for thus keeping me in remembrance. All that my book attempts is frankly to record a series of personal impressions; and, as a necessary consequence—though my title is obsolete, and my pedestrian adventures ...
— Rambles Beyond Railways; - or, Notes in Cornwall taken A-foot • Wilkie Collins
... confess that, looking on that labour-crooked group, I felt a dislike, strong and definite, to that system which takes away even the hope of improvement, crushing down the principle of self-esteem in the man, until it reaches the passive and unambitious existence of the oxen which he drives. And looking on those women, negroes though they were, so unnaturally masculine, so completely unsexed, so far removed from all those attributes with which the name of woman is associated, I felt that no reason based on an asserted right, no fiction of argument, ...
— From Slave to College President - Being the Life Story of Booker T. Washington • Godfrey Holden Pike
... London to my rural solitudes, and taste once more, as always, those pure delights of Nature which the Poets celebrate—walks in the unambitious meadows, and the ever-satisfying companionship of vegetables and flowers—I am nevertheless haunted now and then (but tell it not to Shelley's Skylark, nor whisper to Wordsworth's Daffodils, the disconcerting secret)—I am incongruously beset by longings of which the Lake Poets ...
— More Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... was not sorry to get out of the government house—palazzo, as some of the simple people of Elba called the unambitious dwelling. He had been well badgered by the persevering erudition of the vice-governatore; and, stored as he was with nautical anecdotes and a tolerable personal acquaintance with sundry seaports, for any expected ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... so useful and handsome a dish in a large family, or one where many visitors are received, that it is well worth while to learn the art of boning birds in order to achieve them. Nor, if the amateur cook is satisfied with the unambitious mode of boning hereafter to be described, need ...
— Choice Cookery • Catherine Owen
... designated by a Legislative Caucus or meeting of Representatives in the Assembly, simply because no fairer and fuller expression of the party's preference would be tolerated. And if, passing over the mob of Generals and of Politicians by trade, the choice should fall on some modest and unambitious citizen, who has earned a character by quiet probity and his bread by honest labor, I shall hope to see his name at the head of the poll in spite of the unconstitutional overthrow of Universal Suffrage. After this, though the plurality should fall short of a majority and the Assembly ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... house-physician—little more than a senior student. And he left five years ago—the date is on the stick. So your grave, middle-aged family practitioner vanishes into thin air, my dear Watson, and there emerges a young fellow under thirty, amiable, unambitious, absent-minded, and the possessor of a favourite dog, which I should describe roughly as being larger than a terrier ...
— Hound of the Baskervilles • Authur Conan Doyle
... rapidly and widely; not only was the Parliament divided against itself, but so likewise was the army; and the new Protector had neither the courage nor the ability to put down strife with a strong hand. Richard Cromwell was a man of peaceful disposition, gentle manners and unambitious mind, whom fate had forced into a position for which he was in no way fitted. By one of those strange contradictions which nature sometimes produces, he differed in all things from his father; for not only was he pleasure-loving, joyous, and humane, but ...
— Royalty Restored - or, London under Charles II. • J. Fitzgerald Molloy
... with Cannae's carnage vies, Morat and Marathon twin names shall stand; They were true Glory's stainless victories, Won by the unambitious heart and hand Of a proud, brotherly, and civic band, All unbought champions in no princely cause Of vice-entailed Corruption; they no land Doomed to bewail the blasphemy of laws Making king's rights divine, by some ...
— Childe Harold's Pilgrimage • Lord Byron
... of her parents in all their happy rambling and unambitious home-life, was their joy and pride. If she frolicked in the grass while her father played his airs, she lost not a strain of the music. She hearkened also to his deep discourse, and gave good heed, when he illustrated the meaning of the tunes he loved to play. And these were rarely ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... listeners and lookers on who had no connection with newspapers, save as readers. The "floor" was held not only by the "members," who made the hall vocal with their greetings and congratulations, but by a great crowd of pages, office-seekers, office-holders, and unambitious citizens, who thronged over the new ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes
... sake, but for my people's welfare. If they expect from this false, fawning Stuart, The younger sovereign, more happy days, I will descend with pleasure from the throne, Again repair to Woodstock's quiet bowers, Where once I spent my unambitious youth; Where far removed from all the vanities Of earthly power, I found within myself True majesty. I am not made to rule— A ruler should be made of sterner stuff: My heart is soft and tender. I ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... mansions and public buildings. . We frequently find the predominance of one species somewhat wearisome. Speaking for myself, there are songsters that are best appreciated when they are limited in numbers and keep their distance, but of the familiar, unambitious strains of swallow, robin, and wren I never tire, nor, during these days, could I have too much of the greenfinch, low as he ranks among British melodists. Tastes differ; that is a point on which we are all agreed, ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... appear'd, Where wisdom's sacred hand her ensign rear'd. Celestial blazonry! by heaven bestow'd, Which, waving high, before the vaward glow'd: Then came the Stagyrite, whose mental ray Pierced through all nature like the shafts of day; And he that, by the unambitious name, Lover of wisdom, chose to bound his fame. Then Socrates and Xenophon were seen; With them a bard of more than earthly mien, Whom every muse of Jove's immortal choir Bless'd with a portion of celestial fire: From ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... position of being at the heel of the hunt may have a charm for the philosophic or unambitious, but so black a continuation of so great a start was a trial quite beyond the endurance of a young gentleman possessed of the artistic temperament. And then the abominable Mangan girl came into play, and joined in the circling performance at the big bank. Always, when Larry felt ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... immediately south of us, a single energetic scion has crept even to the banks of the rapid Missouri, and others are pushing steadily on in determined emulation. But in most cases, we must be content to ride to the westward, only on the back of the laggard and unambitious coach, that tortoise of travel, crawling on through prairie and swamp. And it is still within the recollection of almost the youngest inhabitant, how the daily trains, drawn by horse, mule, or ox, dragged themselves through our streets, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... probably resulted, at some far-back period, in farmers' building their residences on the four corners, so as to be neighborly. Farm hands or others built little dwellings adjoining—not many of them, though—and some unambitious or misdirected merchant erected a big frame "store" and sold groceries, dry goods and other necessities of life not only to the community at the Crossing but to neighboring farmers. Then someone ...
— Mary Louise in the Country • L. Frank Baum (AKA Edith Van Dyne)
... of its prevailing expression of thoughtful, preoccupied aloofness. His crisp dark hair is graying at the temples. EDWARD BIGELOW is a large, handsome man of thirty-nine. His face shows culture and tolerance, a sense of humor, a lazy unambitious contentment. CURTIS is reading an article in some scientific periodical, seated by the table. MARTHA and BIGELOW are sitting nearby, laughing ...
— The First Man • Eugene O'Neill
... stamped; flagging inevitably over characterless books, however clever and meritorious: perceiving well that, as far as my own mind was concerned, God had limited its powers and, its action—thankful, I trust, for the gift bestowed, but unambitious of higher endowments, not ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... functions. The picture of this highly developed state, however, is not such as would tempt us to emulation. As a machine it works; as an ideal it lacks any presentation of the thing we call beauty. The apotheosis of intelligence in the concrete example leaves us unambitious in that direction. ...
— H. G. Wells • J. D. Beresford
... their haunts they do not appear so much frightened as offended. "Why do you intrude?" they seem to say; "these are our woods;" and they bow you out with all ceremony. Their songs are in keeping with this character; leisurely, unambitious, and brief, but in beauty of voice and in high musical quality excelling all other music of the woods. However, I would not exaggerate, and I have not found even these thrushes perfect. The hermit, who is my favorite of the four, has a habit of slowly raising and depressing his ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... the herds are cropping, the strain rises. Two or three long, silver notes of peace and rest, ending in some subdued trills and quavers, constitute each separate song. Often you will catch only one or two of the bars, the breeze having blown the minor part away. Such unambitious, quiet, unconscious melody! It is one of the most characteristic sounds in Nature. The grass, the stones, the stubble, the furrow, the quiet herds, and the warm twilight among the hills are all subtilely expressed in this song; this is what they ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... have said. If golden dreams of commerce and wealth flatter their imaginations, disappointment will follow: the remoteness of situation, productions of the country, and want of connection with other parts of the world, justify me in the assertion. But to men of small property, unambitious of trade, and wishing for retirement, I think the continent of New South Wales not without inducements. One of this description, with letters of recommendation, and a sufficient capital (after having provided for his passage hither) ...
— A Narrative of the Expedition to Botany Bay • Watkin Tench
... describes both men and women as extremely foul of speech; from which he draws inferences unfavorable to their domestic morals, [Footnote: Journal de Franquet, Part II.] which, nevertheless, were commendable. As is usual with a well-fed and unambitious peasantry, they were very prolific, and are said to have doubled their number every sixteen years. In 1748 they counted in the peninsula of Nova Scotia between twelve and thirteen thousand souls. [Footnote: Description de l'Acadie, ...
— A Half-Century of Conflict, Volume II • Francis Parkman
... hard, honest toil and economy, they had laid up a competence which was regularly invested each year, and of which the children were not allowed to know anything, lest it might make them lazy and unambitious. ...
— Through Forest and Fire - Wild-Woods Series No. 1 • Edward Ellis
... details of the approach of the Grand Six-in-One Show had, therefore, been heralded to those work-sodden and unambitious persons who tied themselves to their ...
— The Village Watch-Tower • (AKA Kate Douglas Riggs) Kate Douglas Wiggin
... fairy-land to the eye, so is the hospitality of its homes a delight to the soul. In this population, if nowhere else in America, is seen a contented and happy people—a people whose pursuit is happiness, and not the almighty dollar. Unambitious of that distinction which only wealth bestows, they are content with an abundance for all their comforts, and for the comfort of those who, as friends or neighbors, come to share it with them. Unambitious of political distinction, despising the noisy ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... but who buys them? Now is it not a significant fact, that within a bow-shot of Paris I found tools in use, which would be laughed at in the free states of America? The true reason for this, is to be found in the condition of the French agricultural laborer. He is ignorant and unambitious. Where the laborer is intelligent, he will have light and excellent tools to work with. This is a universal fact. The slaves of the southern states are in a state of brutal ignorance, and their agricultural implements are heavy and large. ...
— Paris: With Pen and Pencil - Its People and Literature, Its Life and Business • David W. Bartlett
... for most part the offerings of interested servility, or the effusions of partial zeal; enumerating the virtues of men in whom no virtues can be found, or predicting greatness to those who afterwards pass their days in unambitious indolence, and die leaving no memorial of their existence, but a dedication, in which all their merit is confessedly future, and which time has turned into ...
— Boswell's Correspondence with the Honourable Andrew Erskine, and His Journal of a Tour to Corsica • James Boswell
... provoke or derange into confusion and disorder the great natural elements which minister to his comfort and happiness—which cause the seed to germinate, the flower to bloom, and the fruit to ripen, regardless of all his passions, and in spite of his ingratitude. The unambitious pursuits of the husbandman may have in them nothing of the pomp and circumstance of glorious war; but they are at least in harmony with the beneficence of God and the permanent interests of man; while they are ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 2, August, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... democratic aristocracy. Now, if Emmet had the philosophical attitude of mind, he would n't have the strength to struggle which he undoubtedly does have. He needs that stimulus of personal animosity to get somewhere; if he were philosophical, he would be unambitious. When he has arrived, as they say, he will come to see that an aristocracy in the usual worldly sense of the term must have money to maintain its existence. The old aristocracy must have accessions of vulgar blood and vulgar money to keep it alive, just as the language must ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... thee, fallen tyrant! I did groan To think that a most unambitious slave, Like thou, shouldst dance and revel on the grave Of Liberty. Thou mightst have built thy throne Where it had stood even now: thou didst prefer 5 A frail and bloody pomp which Time has swept In fragments towards Oblivion. Massacre, For this I prayed, would ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... contented with a humble theme, Have poured my stream of panegyric down The vale of Nature, where it creeps and winds Among her lovely works, with a secure And unambitious course, reflecting clear If not the virtues, yet the worth, of brutes. And I am recompensed, and deem the toils Of poetry not lost, if verse of mine May stand between an animal and woe, And teach one ...
— Voices for the Speechless • Abraham Firth
... home of the children, will not open its gates to the most miserable who would rise above his equal in misery, who looks down on any one more miserable than himself. It is the home of perfect brotherhood. The poor, the beggars in spirit, the humble men of heart, the unambitious, the unselfish; those who never despise men, and never seek their praises; the lowly, who see nothing to admire in themselves, therefore cannot seek to be admired of others; the men who give themselves away—these are the freemen of the kingdom, these are the ...
— Hope of the Gospel • George MacDonald
... such "tired nature's sweet restorer," and to those whose healthy bodies and unambitious natures know no perturbation it is ...
— The World As I Have Found It - Sequel to Incidents in the Life of a Blind Girl • Mary L. Day Arms
... aspiration; of a nature that has made a Moloch of intellect—offered up; in pagan fires, the natural affections—sacrificed the heart to the brain. Do we not all know that true greatness is simple, self-oblivious, prone to unambitious, unselfish attachments? I am certain you feel this truth in ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... orator. He learned to play on both the lyre and flute from the teachings of the best masters, sought the conversation of the learned, but was especially eloquent in speech, and effective, even against the best Athenian opponents. He was modest, unambitious, patriotic, intellectual, contented with poverty, generous, and disinterested. When the Cadmea was taken, he was undistinguished, and his rare merits were only known to Pelopidas and his friends. He was among the first to join the revolutionists, and was placed by Pelopidas among the ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... object of his youthful attachment, [7] had left him only one son, who was called Crispus. By Fausta, the daughter of Maximian, he had three daughters, and three sons known by the kindred names of Constantine, Constantius, and Constans. The unambitious brothers of the great Constantine, Julius Constantius, Dalmatius, and Hannibalianus, [8] were permitted to enjoy the most honorable rank, and the most affluent fortune, that could be consistent with a private station. The youngest of the three lived without a name, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... Jo than the wisest sermons, the saintliest hymns, the most fervent prayers that any voice could utter. For with eyes made clear by many tears, and a heart softened by the tenderest sorrow, she recognized the beauty of her sister's life—uneventful, unambitious, yet full of the genuine virtues which 'smell sweet, and blossom in the dust', the self-forgetfulness that makes the humblest on earth remembered soonest in heaven, the true success which is possible ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... of stories about love's pretty fever; the simple person wants to hear about the trials and crosses of true lovers, the defeat of villains—to enjoy the kindly finish where faith and virtue are rewarded, and where the unambitious imagination may picture the coming of a long life of homely toil and homely pleasure. Perhaps the simple personage has a taste for dukes—I know of one young person aged thirteen who will not write a romance of her own without putting her hero at the very summit ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... suitor for love." I am to be married (sequitur) on Thursday week.... The lady who is to take me, as the Irish say, "in a present," is some six years younger than myself, gentle, religious, relying, and unambitious. She has never been whirled through the gay society of London, so is not giddy or vain. She has never swum in a gondola, or written a sonnet, so has a proper respect for those who have. She is called pretty, but is more than that in my ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... the drenching dribble Courses down my sweltered form, I am basking like a sybil, Lazy, languorous and warm. I am unambitious, flaccid, Well content to drowse and dream: How I hate life's bitter acid— Leave me here to stew and steam. Underneath this jet so torrid I forget the world's sad wrath: O activity is horrid! Leave ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... but that which can only be procured at a price considerably above its real value. In this sense, a hobby is not an expensive thing. It is, as I regard it, one of the safest investments life has to offer. An unambitious man like myself, without a hobby, would necessarily be either an idler or a knave. And I am neither the one nor the other. The truth is, my life was very poorly furnished at the start, and I have been laboring ever since to supply the deficiency. ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... that which arouses their ambitions is the call of a great opportunity or responsibility. Note the change in General Grant's life with the outbreak of the Civil War. The unambitious tanner becomes the untiring, rigid, unconquerable soldier. Striking illustrations of this fact are many men, whose character, as well as conduct after they have been called to positions of political or judicial trust, is in marked contrast to their ...
— The Making of a Nation - The Beginnings of Israel's History • Charles Foster Kent and Jeremiah Whipple Jenks
... conscientious and vigilant supervision of the whole matter here brought together—prefaces, texts, and notes—and the correction of errors on the part of his predecessors, occasioned by a variety of causes. In carrying out even this unambitious programme, there was a fair share of labour and difficulty, and, of course, it has involved the addition of a new crop of notes scattered up and down the series, as well as the occasional displacement of certain illustrative remarks ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Volume I. • R. Dodsley
... everyday life, and, appealing to the imagination, which dwells apart, reveals Nature in some degree as she really is, and as she represents herself to the eye of the child, whose every-day life, fearless and unambitious, meets the true import of the wonder-teeming world around him, and rejoices therein without questioning? That skeleton, now—I almost fear it, standing there so still, with eyes only for the unseen, like a watch-tower looking across all the waste of this busy world into the quiet regions ...
— Phantastes - A Faerie Romance for Men and Women • George MacDonald
... that by this means she might be put in some easy and genteel way of earning money. She was one of a very numerous class in large American towns. Her father was a carpenter, of a rare sort. He was a good workman, sober, industrious, and unambitious. He was contented with his daily work and wage, and would have thanked Heaven if he could have been assured that his children would fare as well as he. He was of English blood, and had never seemed to imbibe into his veins the restless ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay
... military service like that of the great Howard, the general of Queen Elizabeth's navy at sea against the navy of Spain. But what he left will endure; the fame of an English gentleman who was honest, surrounded by intrigue; unambitious of honours and titles, a royalist who had the friendship of kings whom courtiers flattered; a virtuoso of learning hardly equalled in his time, a diarist whose jottings, never meant for printing, are a classic; a pious, honourable, shrewd, ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... floor below Assistant-Secretary Wagstaff held forth; he was in charge of the Western Department, which comprised the states from Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee westward to the coast. Mr. Wagstaff was a competent, careful, unimaginative, unambitious man who did his work from day to day. He enters this story virtually not at all; be it enough to say that he had a red mustache and a bald, bright head and wore shoes with cloth tops. He took good care of his territory, and if he never made much money for the ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... to develop into a pig," he said, with relish,—"a lovable, contented, unambitious porcine, who is alike indifferent to the Tariff, the importance of Equal Suffrage and the market-price of hams, for all that he really cares about is to have his sty as comfortable as may be possible. That is exactly what I am going to develop into,—now, isn't it?" And John Charteris, sitting, ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... I had made was that goodnatured unambitious men are cowards when they have no religion. They are dominated and exploited not only by greedy and often half-witted and half-alive weaklings who will do anything for cigars, champagne, motor cars, and the ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... views were unambitious, who preferred the shade and tranquillity of private life to the splendor and solicitude of elevated stations, and whom the voice of duty and his country could alone have drawn from his chosen retreat, no reward for his public services can be so grateful as ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 1 (of 4) of Volume 1: George Washington • James D. Richardson
... this year it was with a feeling of having been cheated that I left the house for the office, where, in company with other old fogies and girl clerks, I do my unambitious bit towards downing the Hun. The premonitory symptoms had seemed to me unusually acute, but the morning had brought no parcel. My years weighed on my shoulders again, and I am afraid I was more than a little tart ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 20, 1917 • Various
... ever shaming him by their unboastful exercise of some enviable and unattainable attribute. Even the friendly pig, who (did but parents permit) should eat of his bread and drink of his cup, and be unto him as a brother, — which among all these unhappy bifurcations, so cheery, so unambitious, so purely contented, so apt to be the guide, philosopher, and friend of boyhood as he? What wonder that at times, when the neophyte in life begins to realise that all these desirable accomplishments have had to be surrendered one by one in the process of developing a Mind, the course of fitting ...
— Pagan Papers • Kenneth Grahame
... ambition!' . . . Chillon dropped him. He was antipathetic to eccentrics, and his soldierly and social training opposed the profession of heterodox ideas: to have listened seriously to them coming from the mouth of an unambitious bootmaker's son involved him in the absurdity. He considered that there was no harm in the lad, rather a commendable sort of courage and some notion of manners; allowing for his ignorance of the convenable in putting out his hand to take a young lady's, with the plea of thanking her. He hoped ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... grounds of wealthy people with cheap and inferior material. The result will be a sham that will deceive no one, and you will soon tire of it, and the sooner the better. Be honest. If you have only cheap material to work with, be satisfied with unambitious undertakings. Let them be in keeping with what you have to work with—simple, unpretentious, and without any attempt in the way of deception. The humblest home can be made attractive by holding fast to the principle of honesty in everything that is done about ...
— Amateur Gardencraft - A Book for the Home-Maker and Garden Lover • Eben E. Rexford
... Thucydides it was the first which emerged out of confusion and became a regular government. It was also an army devoted to military exercises, but organized with a view to self-defence and not to conquest. It was not quick to move or easily excited; but stolid, cautious, unambitious, procrastinating. For many centuries it retained the same character which was impressed upon it by the hand of the legislator. This singular fabric was partly the result of circumstances, partly the invention of some unknown individual in prehistoric times, whose ideal ...
— Laws • Plato
... and moral obliquities, depend upon threadbare nerves, either inherited or uncovered by friction incident to getting on in the world. I never understood the comforts that follow in the wake of a quiet, unambitious life, until such a life was forced upon me. When you discover these comforts for the first time, you marvel that you have foregone them so long, and are fain to recommend them ...
— The Fat of the Land - The Story of an American Farm • John Williams Streeter
... stared at himself. Gone was the debonair gentleman of a quarter of an hour ago. Instead, there leered back at him a pasty-faced, underfed vagrant, dressed in the tatters of unambitious, satisfied poverty. ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... too much o' wut Buregard calls abandon, For all our Thermopperlies (an' it's a marcy We hain't hed no more) hev ben clean vicy-varsy, 160 An' wut Spartans wuz lef' when the battle wuz done Wuz them thet wuz too unambitious to run. ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... Pauline had married at thirty, only to be made a widow, by a lumber jam, at thirty-two. So it was fortunate that she could cook, for she was a plain woman, and what the country folk call "dumb," meaning dull, and unresponsive, and unambitious. ...
— Martie the Unconquered • Kathleen Norris
... CHRISTINE SILVER'S talent, and Miss EVADNE PRICE faithfully earned the laughter she was expected to make as Sua Se, the opium-den attendant. Leave your critical faculty at home and you will be able to derive considerable entertainment from this unambitious show. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, December 8, 1920 • Various
... to leave those ideals unconnected with the consent of their fellow-men. The president of the company thought out within his own mind a beautiful town. He had power with which to build this town, but he did not appeal to nor obtain the consent of the men who were living in it. The most unambitious reform, recognizing the necessity for this consent, makes for slow but sane and strenuous progress, while the most ambitious of social plans and experiments, ignoring ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... with an array of diamonds, which young girls seldom wore. In a week or so the marriage was discussed with a little wonder. Mrs. Nicoll was one of the old New Yorkers, a Ludlow herself. It was fortunate for Lily's prestige that her plain, unambitious father was dead, and her mother kept well in the background. No one ...
— A Little Girl of Long Ago • Amanda Millie Douglas
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