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Aspiration   /ˌæspərˈeɪʃən/   Listen
Aspiration

noun
1.
A will to succeed.
2.
A cherished desire.  Synonyms: ambition, dream.
3.
A manner of articulation involving an audible release of breath.
4.
The act of inhaling; the drawing in of air (or other gases) as in breathing.  Synonyms: breathing in, inhalation, inspiration, intake.



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"Aspiration" Quotes from Famous Books



... is highly probable that this pious aspiration will not be disappointed, so long, at least, as Mr. and Mrs. ...
— The Talking Horse - And Other Tales • F. Anstey

... the colossal "Israel in Egypt." In 1741 he began "The Messiah," the most sublime of all his oratorios and one of the profoundest works of human genius in music. It still holds its place upon the stage as one of the grandest expressions of human aspiration and divine truth, and no Christmas is complete without its performance. Other works followed it, among them "Samson," "Joseph," "Belshazzar," "Judas Maccabaeus," "Joshua," and "Theodora," which Handel considered his best work; but none of them equalled ...
— The Standard Oratorios - Their Stories, Their Music, And Their Composers • George P. Upton

... what the aspiration is of those who would disturb the healthy slumber of the people, and continually call out to them: 'Keep your eyes open! Be sensible! Be wise!' we know the aim of those who profess to satisfy excessive educational requirements by means of an extraordinary ...
— On the Future of our Educational Institutions • Friedrich Nietzsche

... convincing powers of oratory and Pericles as the crystallization of Grecian life in its totality of beauty, learning and social and civic life. Greece is a type, is an attitude, is a protest against oppression, is an aspiration towards beauty, is an inspiration and a guide for men who live in the higher planes of feeling and thought. But Greece is not all that as a people; Greece is all that through men converted ...
— Simon Bolivar, the Liberator • Guillermo A. Sherwell

... stages of development that a free spirit passes through in order to arrive at that of Super-man. These ideas are purely personal, and are not part of some system of philosophy. The sub-titles of the work are: Von den Hinterweltern ("Of Religious Ideas"), Von der grossen Sehnsucht ("Of Supreme Aspiration"), Von den Freuden und Leidenschaften ("Of Joys and Passions"), Das Grablied ("The Grave Song"), Von der Wissenschaft ("Of Knowledge"), Der Genesende ("The Convalescent"—the soul delivered of its desires), Das Tanzlied ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland

... of history the teachers, thinkers, and prophets of mankind have prayed and labored for the abolition of war. In the process of the centuries, their hope has become the aspiration of the mass of men. Growing slowly, as do all movements for righteousness, the cause of peace first claimed the attention of the world in the year 1899, when Nicholas of Russia called the nations together to discuss ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association

... is not little. Life is not mean. It spreads itself in aspiration, it has possession through its hope. It inhabits all remoteness that the eye can reach; it inherits all sweetness that the ear can prove; always bereaved of the whole, it yet looks for a whole; always ...
— Fated to Be Free • Jean Ingelow

... interrupted. "There's just one aspiration of life to be granted under that roof and to win it you are asked to stifle all the rest. ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... from the habit of candidates for office in Rome going around to solicit votes: hence, aspiration for office, ...
— New Word-Analysis - Or, School Etymology of English Derivative Words • William Swinton

... technique, a thing of careful workmanship. "Innocence," by Rupert Hughes, with "Read It Again" and "The Story I Can't Write" boldly announce his desire to get the most out of the material. "For They Know not What They Do," an aspiration of spirit, is fashioned as firmly as ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various

... only, it is a misadventure," he continued rapidly, with growing excitement. "You came to this miserable hole—this Wallencamp—resolved to view everything in a new light—the light of unselfish devotion to great ends, and exalted aspiration, and ideal perfection, and all that. Well, how has the wretched, giggling, conniving little community shown out in that light? I suppose there's one—that larking Cradlebow—who has stood the test and come out creditably, by reason of an uncommonly artistic shock ...
— Cape Cod Folks • Sarah P. McLean Greene

... palladium of individuality. Bad as is the principle, the selections are worse, including the saccharinity ineffable of Tennyson's Princess (a strange expression of the progressive feminization of the high school and yet satirizing the scholastic aspiration of girls) which the virile boy abhors, books about books which are two removes from life, and ponderous Latinity authors which for the Saxon boy suggest David fighting in Saul's armor, and which warp and pervert the ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall

... human mother if reduced to such limits devotes herself in vain, feels that a higher aspiration has been stifled within her. She is yet the mother ...
— Dr. Montessori's Own Handbook • Maria Montessori

... makes men acquainted with strange bed-fellows. Two men of very different degrees of moral worth may notoriously both preach the same faith and both pursue the same method, and the method of Rousseau is the method of Mr. Carlyle. With each of them thought is an aspiration, and justice a sentiment, and society a retrogression. Each bids us look within our own bosoms for truth and right, postpones reason, to feeling, and refers to introspection and a factitious something styled Nature, questions only to be ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley

... us the rich depths of the human soul: the whole of our existence, the sum total of our passions and pursuits, of that which we desire and that which we dread, is brought before us by contrast; the action and reaction are equal; the keenness of immediate suffering only gives us a more intense aspiration after, and a more intimate participation with the antagonist world of good: makes us drink deeper of the cup of human life: tugs at the heart-strings: loosens the pressure about them, and calls the springs of thought and feeling ...
— English literary criticism • Various

... more than a summation of the past years of struggle and aspiration. It symbolized certain new directions: a deeper concern for the economic problems of the masses, more involvement of white moderates and new demands from the most militant, who implied that only a revolutionary change in American ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.

... And labor forgets where to go, loses its sense of direction. So labor stops thinking about religion, and religion stops thinking about industry. The Church has no principle of economics, and labor has no religious aspiration." ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks

... intellectual and literary thought and expression. I confess I don't attempt that, it seems to me just a joyful and neighbourly business, where one puts the mind in a certain expectant mood, and is lucky if one carries a single thrill or aspiration away." ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson

... la Vie [Footnote: L'Energie spirituelle, p. 27 (Mind-Energy).] Bergson indicates slightly his views on SOCIAL evolution—c'est a la vie sociale que l'evolution aboutit, comme si le besoin s'en etait fait sentir des le debut, ou plutot comme si quelque aspiration originelle et essentielle de la vie ne pouvait trouver que dans la societe sa pleine satisfaction. He seems inclined to turn his attention to the unity of life, not simply as due to an identity of original impulse but to a common ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn

... aims at the centre, whether he hits it or not. Lamb dances round a subject; Hazlitt grapples with it. So far as Hazlitt is concerned, doubtless this is so; his literary method seems to realize the agreeable aspiration of ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell

... into the heads of some of the Dutch leaders, both in the northern republics and in the Cape, there had entered the conception of a single Dutch commonwealth, extending from Cape Town to the Zambesi, in which flag, speech, and law should all be Dutch. It is in this aspiration that many shrewd and well-informed judges see the true inner meaning of this persistent arming, of the constant hostility, of the forming of ties between the two republics (one of whom had been reconstituted and made a sovereign independent State by our own act), and ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle

... other hand, he possess some moderate fortune of his own; and, intent on the glory of an immortal name, yet not blindly ignorant of the state of science in this country, he resolve to make for that aspiration a sacrifice the greater, because he is fully aware of its extent;—if, so circumstanced, he give up a business or a profession on which he might have entered with advantage, with the hope that, when he shall have won a station high in the ranks of ...
— Decline of Science in England • Charles Babbage

... the obscenities of war, the violent dislocations that followed with their menaces of panic and revolution that affected the nerves and the pockets of the entire commonwealth, the irritable reaction against the war itself, knocked romance, optimism, aspiration, idealism, the sane and balanced judgment of life, to smithereens. More cliches. The world was rotten to the core and the human race so filthy the wonder was that any writer would handle it with tongs. But they plunged to their necks. The public, whose urges, inhibitions, ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

... to say at present is that, if we would keep ourselves, by faith, by love, by meditation, by aspiration, by the submission of the will, and by practical obedience, in Jesus Christ, enclosed in Him as it were—then, and then only, should we learn His lesson, and then, and then only, should we hear ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren

... philology pursues only the final end of its own being, which is the fusing together of primarily hostile impulses that have only forcibly been brought together. Let us talk as we will about the unattainability of this goal, and even designate the goal itself as an illogical pretension—the aspiration for it is very real; and I should like to try to make it clear by an example that the most significant steps of classical philology never lead away from the ideal antiquity, but to it; and that, just when people are speaking unwarrantably of the overthrow of sacred shrines, new and ...
— Homer and Classical Philology • Friedrich Nietzsche

... still want to do something for yourselves; if you cannot rest content with Palladio, neither will you with Paxton: all the metal and glass that ever were melted have not so much weight in them as will clog the wings of one human spirit's aspiration. ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin

... Job, the typical creature who upholds his own dignity and rights in presence and despight of the Creator. Sahib the Sufi declares that the secret of man's soul (i.e. its emanation) was first revealed when Pharaoh declared himself god; and Al-Ghazali sees in his claim the most noble aspiration to the divine, innate in the human ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton

... essential spirit of human life in various ages and nations. The religion of a race is the truest expression of its character, and reflects most faithfully its attitude and aims and policy. The religion of an age shows what at that time constituted the object of man's aspiration and endeavour, as older hopes grew pale and new hopes rose on his sight. Thus the study of the religions of the world is the study of the very soul of its history; it is the study of the desires and aspirations ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies

... to the world, the Initiates believed that sacred mysteries should not be revealed to the profane but should remain exclusively in their own keeping, although the desire for initiation might spring from the highest aspiration, the gratification, whether real or imaginary, of this desire often led to spiritual arrogance and abominable tyranny, resulting in the fearful trials, the tortures physical and mental, ending even at times in death, to which the neophyte was ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster

... this reason, that the greater part of gymnastic exercises are performed "in the sweat of the brow," while equestrian exercise is performed with pleasure. Indeed, there is no accomplishment which so nearly realises the aspiration of a man to have the wings of a bird than this of horsemanship. (7) But further, to a victory obtained in war attaches a far greater weight of glory than belongs to the noblest contest of the arena. (8) Of these the state indeed will share her meed of glory, ...
— The Cavalry General • Xenophon

... brief spell—a charm of short duration, and the hallucination is dispelled, only to leave us seared and blasted, almost hating mankind, and wearing the mask of the hypocrite, leading a double life, to hide the sears left by unsuccessful ambition, or disappointed aspiration. What were death itself compared with the misery of finding, when too late, that the hopes and happiness we deemed reality, were but a shadow, not a substance, which lingered for awhile and Left us to curse ...
— The Trials of the Soldier's Wife - A Tale of the Second American Revolution • Alex St. Clair Abrams

... cynic sneeringly pointing out the plague spots of humanity, and showing pleasantly how even the good are tainted with evil. Rather does Dickens delight in finding some touch of goodness, some lingering memory of better things, some hopeful aspiration, some trace of unselfish devotion in characters where all seems soddened and lost. In brief, the laughter is the laughter of one who sees the foibles, and even the vices of his fellow-men, and yet looks on them lovingly ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials

... his noble horsemanship, for one has no firm seat even when mounted on a vicious pony—before he could bring the saddle to a level and gain his equilibrium, was fairly pitched over the side of the road. Mule having now achieved that glorious libertà , the instinctive aspiration of Corsican existence, whether man, mule, or moufflon, started forward alone, my friend following, I have no doubt, in ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester

... own poetry?' I would say to myself. I was always trying to get nearer to what I admired; she never seemed to suspect the least relation between the ideal and life, between thought and action. To have an ideal implied no aspiration after it! She has not a thought of the smallest obligation to carry out one of the fine things she writes of, any more than people that go to church think they have anything to do with what they hear there. Most people's nature seems all in pieces. They ...
— Home Again • George MacDonald

... confidence of her husband and the respect of her daughter. Months ago she had meant by force of some initiative to regularise this idyll which by its stealthiness wounded the self-respect of all concerned. Vain aspiration! And now the fact that Fred Ryley had begun to call at Church Street appeared to indicate between him and Uncle Meshach a closer understanding which could only be detrimental to the interests ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett

... of some obvious popular defects. If the discrepancy should be painful to the reader, let him understand that to the writer it has been more so. But such discrepancies we are called upon to accept at every hour by the conditions of our nature, implying the interval between aspiration and performance, between faith and disillusion, between hope ...
— The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume IV • Elizabeth Barrett Browning

... burdened soul, knowing no earthly refuge from overwhelming troubles, but a mightier Hand than that of man, seeks on bended knee and with penitential tear, a blessing from on high, no word is spoken, no sound uttered save the sob from a contrite heart. The aspiration has gone forth inaudibly to Him who said to all mankind, then and for future ages, "Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy laden and I ...
— Mysticism and its Results - Being an Inquiry into the Uses and Abuses of Secrecy • John Delafield

... leaves with us as its bequest? Is the outlook such that our present civilization, with its benefits, is most likely to be insured by universal disarmament, the clamor for which rises ominously—the word is used advisedly—among our latter-day cries? None shares more heartily than the writer the aspiration for the day when nations shall beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning-hooks; but is European civilization, including America, so situated that it can afford to relax into an artificial peace, ...
— The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future • A. T. Mahan

... newly awakened ideas and thoughts took the form of a definite aspiration on the day I graduated from the grammar school. And what a day that was! The girls in white dresses, with fresh ribbons in their hair; the boys in new suits and creaky shoes; the great crowd of parents and friends; the flowers, the prizes and congratulations, made the day seem to ...
— The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man • James Weldon Johnson

... common than for applicants for the position of librarians or assistant librarians to base their aspiration upon the foolish plea that they are "so fond of reading", or that they "have always been in love with books." So far from this being a qualification, it may become a disqualification. Unless combined with habits of practical, serious, unremitting ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford

... joyously splashing on their wooden toys or the walls of their absurd and charming "shops" will somehow get into the grey fabric of your life; and a certain eager urging undertone of idealism and hope and sturdy aspiration will make you restless as you follow your common round. Perhaps you will go back. Perhaps you will keep it as a rainbow memory, a visualisation of the make-believe country where anything is possible. But in any case ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin

... of the Roman Catholic religion, and this was enacted in terms which disclosed the bigoted feelings of the nation. Sicily wanted to be independent of Naples, but it had not the same wish to be separated from the despotic principle. An independent nation, without a free people, was the highest aspiration of revolted Sicily. England and France left her to her fate, except so far as Lord Minto's meddling complicated her condition. The temporarily vanquished Neapolitans returned to the contest, and the revolution was ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan

... appropriations to Negro education equally as large as those providing for the education of the whites. The ardor of the successors of these early enthusiastic workers in that section, therefore, was dampened, and the results which they obtained fell far short of the aspiration of these pioneers to remake these freedmen that they might live as the citizens ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various

... steps, namely, the intellectual ladder and the moral ladder." These ladders constitute, in fact, a series of precepts, warnings, and exhortations; some easily comprehensible, others demanding profound thought, and the whole calculated to educate an absorbing aspiration for the "transcendental virtues," to possess which is to attain to perfect Buddhahood. Unquestionably the offspring of a great mind, this Shingon system, with its mysterious possibilities and its lofty morality, appealed strongly to the educated and leisured classes in Kyoto during ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi

... think of posterity. If he occasionally subjected himself to stricter rules, we owe it more to his ambition, and his desire to be numbered among the classical writers of the golden age, than to any internal and growing aspiration ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black

... the episode entitled the Napoleon of the people,—the narration of an old soldier of the First Empire,—there is a topical realism that makes one regret the never-achieved Battle. Add to these excellences the writer's having put into his work, for the nonce, a sincere aspiration towards the idea; and, despite flaws, the whole can be ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton

... idealism. They are by Isadore Konti, in richly wrought high relief. The play of color values, the planes of light and shade, are handled with mastery. These four panels indicate that the thought, the dream, the aspiration, the dutiful devotion underlying all the labors of the common day are the source of their progress. One panel shows the higher toils of the mind, as in the arts and statesmanship. In the center of this stands the inventor or ...
— The Sculpture and Mural Decorations of the Exposition • Stella G. S. Perry

... prompts her at another time in the novel to exclaim, in regard to the Ankworks package, "'I wish it was in Jonadge's belly, I do,' appearing to confound the prophet with the whale in that mysterious aspiration,"—by observing at this point, "Rich folks may ride on camels, but it ain't so easy for 'em to see out of a needle's eye. That is my comfort, and I hope I knows it." One whole chapter of "Martin Chuzzlewit," with the exception ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent

... quite as strongly to hinder him from rising above it. The wife is the auxiliary of the common public opinion. A man who is married to a woman his inferior in intelligence, finds her a perpetual dead weight, or, worse than a dead weight, a drag, upon every aspiration of his to be better than public opinion requires him to be. It is hardly possible for one who is in these bonds, to attain exalted virtue. If he differs in his opinion from the mass—if he sees truths which have not yet dawned upon them, or if, feeling in his heart truths which they nominally ...
— The Subjection of Women • John Stuart Mill

... the heated air in which we fight our battles even for goodness, and the still atmosphere which environs these quiet lives: we come back to them from the struggle, and find that while they too are full of all fine aspiration for right, and thrill with a divine indignation against wrong, their aspiration is without restlessness, their indignation has no root of bitterness in it; they are not unduly elated by successes which have turned our heads, nor daunted by failures which have utterly cast us down; their ...
— Beside the Still Waters - A Sermon • Charles Beard

... were these young things, with their rhodomontade and exuberant animation and spirits, from him in whom all the sparkle and aspiration of ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge

... tolerance of man towards man, the absence of petty prejudices, and the large appreciation of individual liberty that belonged to the character of a brave, self population to be manifestations of an absolute freedom; he found the men fired with a passionate aspiration for liberty, just as the masses in England had been five years earlier, and possessed of even more substantial reasons for revolt. The idea of the young republic delighted him; he was already prepared to shed his blood in establishing that glorious ideal. Stories he had heard of ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson

... bring a mist before his eyes. Ah, in those days he had a vision!—a pair of soft eyes stirred him strangely; a little weak hand was laid on his manhood, and it shook and trembled; and then came all the humility, the aspiration, the fear, the hope, the high desire, the troubling of the waters by the depending angel of love,—and a little more and Mr. Smith might have become a man, instead of a banker! He thinks of it now, sometimes, as he looks across the fireplace after dinner and sees ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various

... Mary and kept silence. She was looking up at the bald top of Gedor. The sun touched her upturned face, and filled the violet depths of her eyes, and upon her parted lips trembled an aspiration which could not have been to a mortal. For the moment, all the humanity of her beauty seemed refined away: she was as we fancy they are who sit close by the gate in the transfiguring light of Heaven. The Beth-Dagonite saw ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace

... youngest hearers. Since then twenty experiences of the same kind have followed each other in his intellectual experience, yet none has effaced the deep impression made upon him by these lectures. Coming as they did at a favorable moment, and answering many a positive question and many a vague aspiration of youth, they exercised a decisive influence over his thought; they were to him an important step in that continuous initiation which we call life, they filled him with fresh intuitions, they brought near to him the horizons of his dreams. And, as always happens with a first-rate man, what ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... the design would be beautiful as the subject of a poem— as the aspiration of a great mind to arrive at an ideal perfection, which could not however be realised until evil itself had ceased to exist. That to attempt to move the Mestua Mountain[1] would be a task not less hopeless: that I might as ...
— Another World - Fragments from the Star City of Montalluyah • Benjamin Lumley (AKA Hermes)

... his hands and eyes to heaven. Oh, multifarious Providence! who would have suspected that the infinite diversities of thy creation included such beings as these! With that aspiration, he turned his back on the race-course, ...
— Man and Wife • Wilkie Collins

... art has left to us, a more confidential record than its annals and chronicles, and more accessible to the young, who can often understand feelings before they can take account of facts in their historical importance. In any case the facts are clothed in living forms there where belief and aspiration and feeling have expressed themselves in works of art. If we value for children the whole impression of the centuries, especially in European history, more than the mere record of changes, the history of art will allow them to apprehend ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart

... the mother. How different it was! Yet in it, too, there was the beating of the pulse of life. But there was no regret, no looking back into the past, no sombre exhibition of force seeking—as a thing groping, desperately in a gulf—an object on which to exercise itself. Instead there was aspiration, there was expectation, there was the wonder of bright eyes lifted to the sun. And there was a reverence that for a moment recalled to Artois the reverence of the dead man from whose loins this child had sprung. But Vere's was the reverence of understanding, ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens

... pretensions became ridiculous. One was tempted to ask: "What forlorn hope have you led? What immortal book have you written? What great discovery have you made? What heroic task of any kind have you performed?" There was too much talk about earnestness and too little real work done. Aspiration too frequently got as far as the alpenstock and the brandy flask, but crossed no dangerous crevasse, and scaled no arduous summit. In short, there was a kind of "Transcendentalist" dilettanteism, which betrayed itself ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes

... to the element of individuality in persons and of special character in actions, we are at liberty to resume the general thesis,—that orbital rest of movement furnishes the type of perfect excellence, and suggests accordingly the proper targe of aspiration and culture. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various

... Jacksonianism struck a note all its own. If the farmer and country merchant, who had passed through the abstract stage of political aspiration with the Jeffersonian democratic movement, were now, with Jackson, reaching out for the material advantages which political power might yield, the wage earners, being as yet novices in politics, naturally were more strongly impressed ...
— A History of Trade Unionism in the United States • Selig Perlman

... of it this item of news was interesting, but not especially important; Bob could not see where it made much difference who held the reins three thousand miles away. To others it came as the unhoped-for, dreamed-of culmination of aspiration. ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White

... can do, however, bear witness to the glowing wings of hope, of longing, of aspiration which his singing violin lent to hearts oppressed by commonplace every-day cares, to the moments of courage, of re-awakened endeavor which he inspired in his fellowmen, to the marvellous magnetism of his playing which seemed for the moment to restore to ...
— Told in a French Garden - August, 1914 • Mildred Aldrich

... is a mistake to imagine that they have renounced all aspirations in that direction. Only fanatics of the worst kind would be disposed to attempt, in the present situation, to win those provinces by force, but that has nothing to do with the matter. The aspiration exists and cannot help existing. It has always been shared by patriots of all denominations. An English statesman who called on Pius IX. was somewhat surprised by the Pope saying that Italian unity was very well, but it was a pity it did ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco

... still the giddy whirl in his brain. And as his folly and its bitterness found him out, the poor fool rocked himself, and cursed the day when he was born. If any one yet doubt that Mr. Moggridge was an inspired singer, let him turn to that sublime aspiration ...
— The Astonishing History of Troy Town • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... Dubois went to arouse him from what seemed an unusually long slumber, she found a volume of Fenelon spread open upon his knee, and turning it, her eye ran over passages full of lofty and devout aspiration. These, probably expressed the latest thoughts and desires of the good chevalier, for as she looked from the pages to his face, turned upward toward the ceiling, a smile of assent and satisfaction was still lingering there, although ...
— Adele Dubois - A Story of the Lovely Miramichi Valley in New Brunswick • Mrs. William T. Savage

... animal delight, the restless exactingness of undirected imagination, was never recognised by Rousseau distinctly enough to modify either his conduct or his theory of life. He filled up the void for a short space by that sovereign aspiration, which changed the dead bones of old theology into the living figure of a new faith. "From the surface of the earth I raised my ideas to all the existences in nature, to the universal system of things, to the incomprehensible Being who ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley

... persistent and enduring than it would be without it. At the end "the finished product" will be larger, and more perfect, if there is something to strive for than if hope is destroyed the moment that aspiration is born. I should be willing to rest my faith in immortality upon this one argument. A rational being should be satisfied only with a rational answer to his questions; a moral being should be satisfied only with a moral solution of his problems. This universe is ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford

... on him one calm summer night; And thus in that fair form still heavenward turning Eternal aspiration, endless yearning, Stood now the Thought ...
— Poems • Walter R. Cassels

... propriety; Mrs. Vincy is a fat, kindly soul; Mr. Vincy is a blustering good-natured middle-class man. There is no particular harm among the whole set, yet they contrive to ruin a great man; they lower him from a great career, and convert him into a mere prosperous gout-doctor. Every high aspiration of the man dies away. His wife is essentially a commonplace pretty being, and she cannot understand the great heart and brain that are sacrificed to her; so the genius is forced to break his heart about ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman

... the community of progressive nations, Japan's main aspiration and striving has been to play a leading and a civilizing part in the Far East, and in especial to determine China by advice and organization to move into line with herself, adopt Western methods and apply them to Far-Eastern aims. And this might well seem a legitimate ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon

... business details of their work at such a distance from publishers and editors, brought the industrious couple back to London in the spring of 1843. 'On our return to England,' writes Mary, 'I was full of energy and hope. Glowing with aspiration, and in enjoyment of great domestic happiness, I was anticipating a busy, perhaps overburdened, but, nevertheless, congenial life. It was to be one of darkness, perplexity, discouragement.' The Howitts had scarcely entered into possession of a new house that they ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston

... by Leo Lentelli, is suspended - as is all aspiration - over the main entrance of the ...
— Palaces and Courts of the Exposition • Juliet James

... on this theme, the following fancies wove themselves into verse, in whose aspiration all true patriots of ...
— Neville Trueman the Pioneer Preacher • William Henry Withrow

... went on. "I couldn't ask a woman to come and share with me an income of sixpence a week. Especially as I have grounds for believing that she's in rather affluent circumstances herself. Oh, I wish I were rich!" He repeated this aspiration ...
— My Friend Prospero • Henry Harland

... the perception of logical truths, the satisfaction of the reason; or from passion, the excitement of the heart. The excitement of the soul is strictly and simply the temporary satisfaction of the human aspiration for the Supernal Beauty; and is quite independent of the search for finite truths for the gratification of the intellect; or of that of passion, which is the intoxication of the heart. For in regard to passion of the heart, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various

... opportunity for meeting other workers of her trade, and of attaining with them the dignity of a corporate body. The industrial isolation of the household employee results, as isolation in a trade must always result, in a lack of progress in the methods and products of that trade, and a lack of aspiration and education in the workman. Whether we recognize this isolation as a cause or not, we are all ready to acknowledge that household labor has been in some way belated; that the improvements there have not kept up with the improvement in other occupations. It is said that ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams

... individuality rather than outwards upon the inevitable tragedies of the exterior life common to all. This same atmosphere of passionate contemplativeness enwraps, indeed, all that Giorgione did, and is the cause that he sees the world and himself lyrically, not dramatically; the flame of aspiration burning steadily at the heart's core and leaving the surface not indeed unruffled, but outwardly calm in its glow. Titian's is the more dramatic temperament in outward things, but also the more superficial. It must be remembered, too, that arriving ...
— The Later works of Titian • Claude Phillips

... earth, following the second deluge, when the waters of the Dark Ages had dried up, and once more the green appeared. No wonder that, after so long and deep submersion, the jubilant expectation of the race should, as with Noah's sons, soar into Shinar aspiration. ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville

... the man of yearning thought And aspiration, to do nought Is in itself almost an act,— Being chasm-fire and cataract Of the soul's utter depths unseal'd. Yet woe to thee if once thou yield Unto the ...
— The Forgotten Threshold • Arthur Middleton

... great religious scriptures of India seem to possess merely a retrospective and archaelogical interest; but to us they are of living importance, and we cannot help thinking that they lose their significance when exhibited in labelled cases—mummied specimens of human thought and aspiration, preserved for all time in ...
— Sadhana - The Realisation of Life • Rabindranath Tagore

... cry from the Florentine artisan of centuries ago to this humble worker in calico and worsted, but between the two stretched a cord of sympathy that made them one—the eternal aspiration ...
— Aunt Jane of Kentucky • Eliza Calvert Hall

... this picturesque drama, it would not be strange if someone should ask if this is all that is left of the life. Has it been only a failure and a dream that I have chronicled, or has it resulted in something worthy of the aspiration that preceded it? Has it added strength to the lives of individuals, and has it done something for society? As chronicler, I stand in the shade and let my readers judge; but the few words of comment that follow, from well-known individuals, bear strong testimony to an effect that must ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman

... had some, because Dora stipulated that we were never to be married without her papa's consent. But, in our youthful ecstasy, I don't think that we really looked before us or behind us; or had any aspiration beyond the ignorant present. We were to keep our secret from Mr. Spenlow; but I am sure the idea never entered my head, then, that there was anything dishonourable ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens

... have himself. Oh, we are all crooked in our values, Paine. The best that a man can give a woman is his courage, his hope, his aspiration. That's enough. I learned it too late. I don't know why I am saying all this to ...
— The Trumpeter Swan • Temple Bailey

... the chain You help'd to rivet round me did contract Since guiltless infancy from guilt in act; Of what in aspiration or in thought Guilty, but in resentment of the wrong That wreaks revenge on wrong I never wrought By excommunication from the free Inheritance that all created life, Beside myself, is born to—from the wings That range your own immeasurable ...
— Life Is A Dream • Pedro Calderon de la Barca

... expected to arrive at any point whatsoever for at least another fifteen. From the east of us came apocalyptic figures of nuclear physics; from the west, I heard the strains of Mondrian interwoven with Picasso; south of us, a post mortem on the latest "betrayal" of this or that aspiration of "the people", and to the north, we heard the mysteries of atonality. It was while I was looking around, and letting these things roll over me, that I saw the stranger enter. Jocelyn immediately bounced up from a couch, leaving the crucial problem of atmosphere-poisoning ...
— The Troubadour • Robert Augustine Ward Lowndes

... say, may resumption be perpetual. To wish otherwise is to hope for war, danger, and national peril, calamities to which our nation, like others, may be subject, but against which the earnest aspiration of every patriot will ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman

... society." They had "shown capacity for knowledge, for free industry, for subordination to law and discipline, for soldierly fortitude, for social and family relations, for religious culture and aspiration. These qualities," said the observer, "when stirred, and sustained by the incitements and rewards of a just society, and combining with the currents of our continental civilization, will, under the guidance of a benevolent Providence which forgets neither them nor us, make them ...
— A Century of Negro Migration • Carter G. Woodson

... convictions took root in Miss Anthony's heart. Hers is, indeed, a sincerely religious nature. To be a simple, earnest Quaker was the aspiration of her girlhood; but she shrank from adopting the formal language and plain dress. Dark hours of conflict were spent over all this, and she interpreted her disinclination as evidence of unworthiness. Poor little Susan! ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton

... with opinions to express and doctrines to preach has resulted unhappily. The adults who gather seem always, or almost always, to be, not average, well-disposed citizens, but a more or less incendiary minority who want to change things—and to change them a lot and very quickly. That aspiration is not wholly indefensible, for a good many things would be the better for changing, but real light and leading have not often been found on top at meetings in schoolhouses, and experience has proved that the Teachers' Union has ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto

... venture is now a lucrative business. What was once a martyrdom is now its own reward. What once had saintly unearthliness is now a powerful motor among worldly interests. What was once the fatality of genius is now the aspiration of fools. The people have turned to reading, and have become a more liberal patron than even the Athenian State, monastic order, or noble lord. No longer does the literary class wander about the streets, gingerbread ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various

... came, man came, and opened eyes that were a question and hands that were a demand and began a mind and memory that dies not when men die, but lives and increases for ever, an over-mind, a dominating will, a question and an aspiration that reaches to the stars.... Hunger and fear and this that you make so much of, this sex, are but the elementals of life out of which we have arisen. All these elementals, I grant you, have to be provided for, dealt with, satisfied, ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells

... belonging to the science of a later age. In the course of this contest the more-crude opinions have usually been defended in the name of religion, and the less-crude opinions have invariably won the victory; but religion itself, which is not concerned with opinion, but with the aspiration which leads us to strive after a purer and holier life, has seldom or never been attacked. On the contrary, the scientific men who have conducted the battle on behalf of the less-crude opinions have generally been influenced ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske

... as admitting of rare and slight exceptions. Trajan was the first who, a hundred and thirty years after the accession of Augustus, made light of it and set it at defiance. With him re-awoke the spirit of conquest, the aspiration after universal dominion. But in the meantime there was peace—peace indeed not absolutely unbroken, for border wars occurred, and Rome was tempted sometimes to interfere by arms in the internal quarrels of her ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 6. (of 7): Parthia • George Rawlinson

... from hypotheses not to be tested by any known logical canon familiar to science, whether the hypothesis claims support from intuition, aspiration or general plausibility. And, again, this method turns aside from ideal standards which avow themselves to be lawless, which profess to transcend the field of law. We say, life and conduct shall stand for us wholly on a ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond

... the red fox and the ostrich! for this her dumb lips parted, in their struggle after speech, to ask of earth and air some solace to her solitude! for this, for these, she poured out her dim life in one strong, wilful aspiration! ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various

... in the style of an American oration, as to the perils for young American girlhood lurking in the European jungle. He said that Paris was full of snakes in the grass, of which he had had bitter experience. He concluded, as they always do, poor, dear old things, with the aspiration that all American women should one day be sexless—though that is not the way they ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford

... all succeed in giving this; should it uproot one false impression, to plant a single true one in its place, then has it fully equaled the aspiration of ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon

... grateful to him, I know, for his generous criticism, and glad and proud of in any way approaching such a man's standard of poetical height. And he might be a disappointed man too,—for the players trifled with and teased out his very nature, which has a strange aspiration for the horrible tin-and-lacquer 'crown' they give one from their clouds (of smooth shaven deal done over blue)—and he don't give up the bad business yet, but thinks a 'small' theatre would somehow not be a theatre, and an actor not quite an actor ... I forget in what way, but the upshot is, ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett

... some days after on that pious aspiration of her grandfather's old friend, but the ache and tedium of life did not return upon her. Her sense of duty and natural affection were very strong. She told herself that if it were her lot to watch for many years beside this ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr

... of Rome—that was his political creed. That Consuls, Censors, and Senators might go on to the end of time with no diminution of their dignity, but with great increase of justice and honor and truth among them—that was his political aspiration. They had made Rome what it was, and he knew and could imagine nothing better; and, odious as an oligarchy is seen to be under the strong light of experience to which prolonged ages has subjected it, the aspiration on ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope

... is pervaded by a religious feeling, and an ardent aspiration for the advancement of society,—as may be gathered from our first quotation. These two sentiments impart elevation, faith, and resignation; so that memory, thought, and a chastened tenderness, ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 2, July 8, 1850 • Various

... feels his former glow; The same high spirit which beat back the Moor Through eight long ages of alternate gore Revives—and where? in that avenging clime Where Spain was once synonymous with crime, Where Cortes' and Pizarro's banner flew, The infant world redeems her name of "New." 'Tis the old aspiration breathed afresh, To kindle souls within degraded flesh, Such as repulsed the Persian from the shore 270 Where Greece was—No! she still is Greece once more. One common cause makes myriads of one breast, Slaves of the East, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron

... tyrant's terror lest the cities should some day win their freedom and lay strong hands upon them; the incontinent, as satisfied with momentary license; and the slavish-natured, for the simple reason that they have not themselves the slightest aspiration after ...
— Hiero • Xenophon

... understand the Sea, until He knows all passions of the senses; all The great emotions of the heart; and each Exalted aspiration of the soul. Then may he sit beside the sea and say: 'I, too, have flung myself against the rocks, And kissed their flinty brows with no return; And fallen spent upon unfeeling sands. I, too, have gone forth yearning, to far shores, Seeking that something which would bring content; And ...
— The Englishman and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox

... of majesty, and strength, and dignity. A song of love, of aspiration, a song of achievement. A song of peoples driven by ancient fears across the eons of space, seeking only peace, even peace with those who ...
— The Link • Alan Edward Nourse

... of nature swell, Eternal recompense to human toil. And when the sunset's final shades depart The aspiration to completed birth Is sweet and silent; as the soft tears start, We know how wanton and how little worth Are all the passions of our bleeding heart That vex the ...
— ANTHOLOGY OF MASSACHUSETTS POETS • WILLIAM STANLEY BRAITHWAITE

... a proper national aspiration this will mean the establishment and healthy growth along all our coasts of a distinctive national industry, expanding the field for the profitable employment of labor and capital. It will increase the transportation facilities ...
— Messages and Papers of William McKinley V.2. • William McKinley

... the very opposite of my own sheltered progress from Dorset village to school, from school to University, and thence to my present street-bound routine in London. His views were clearly no less opposite to that vague tumult of resentment, protest, and aspiration which represented my own outlook upon life. Indeed, his speech that day was an epitome of the sentiment and opinions which I had chosen to regard with the ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson

... streaming less from his works than from his life, less from his intellect than from his conscience. The literati bemoan the artist of an epoch prior to 'What is Art?' The whole world pays tribute to the passionate integrity of Tolstoy's moral aspiration. ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson

... growth of the great changes that showed themselves at length more than a century after, and from the poem I have just quoted of a yet wider human interest, to one of another tone, springing from the grief that attends love, and the aspiration born of the grief. It is, nevertheless, wide in its scope as the conflict between Death and Life, although dealing with the individual and not with the race. The former poems named of Pierce Ploughman are the cry of John the ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald

... appearances." Soon you will have more courage. The only difference between the fearless man and the fearful one is in his will, his hope. So if you lack success, believe in it, hope for it, claim it. You can use the same method to brace up your thoughts of desire, aspiration, imagination, expectation, ambition, understanding, ...
— The Power of Concentration • Theron Q. Dumont

... admitted the rank of the Yakkho chiefs who shared in these enterprises. They assigned a suburb of the capital for their residence[2], and on festive occasions they were seated on thrones of equal eminence with that of the king.[3] But every aspiration towards a recovery of their independence was checked by a device less characteristic of ingenuity in the ascendant race, than of simplicity combined with jealousy in the aborigines. The feeling was encouraged and matured into a conviction which prevailed to the latest period of the Singhalese ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent

... wish him good fortune. Graham said, 'If your hand be destined to lay the foundation of a Greek empire on the ruins of the Ottoman, no hand can be more worthy, no work more glorious. Recidiva manu posuissem Pergama was a noble aspiration;[375] with ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley

... ("Voulentiers serais pauvre avec dix mille escus.") But in nearly all his verse, whether joyous as in the "Chant de vin et vie," or gloomy as in the "Ballade des Treize Pendus," there is a curious recurrent aspiration towards a warm fire, a sure and plentiful supper, a clean bed, and a long, long sleep. Whether Jean Francois moped or made merry, and in spite of the fact that he enjoyed his roving career and would not ...
— Orpheus in Mayfair and Other Stories and Sketches • Maurice Baring

... which were the aspiration of the girl who embroidered, or "wrought," the sampler. It is a pleasant commentary upon the tastes and industry of Mistress Barbara Standish that, amid the cares of a large family and farm, she found time for such dainty embroideries as we find in ...
— The Women Who Came in the Mayflower • Annie Russell Marble

... when he uses colloquial phrases—and he introduces them with great effect—never smiles. He is most unlike the French, on the other hand, in his general attitude towards the war. He has no military enthusiasm, no aspiration after gloire. Indeed, the most curious feature of his poetry is that its range is concentrated on the few yards about the trench in which he stands. He seems to have no national view of the purpose of the war, no enthusiasm for the cause, no anger against the enemy. There is but a single mention ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse

... Feuerbach(833) and Ruge(834) developed the philosophical, and destroyed the very idea of religion itself, by showing that the idea of God or of religion is of human construction, the giving objective existence to an idea. The aspiration, instead of guaranteeing the existence of an object toward which it is directed, is represented as creating it. This was the final result of the subjective point of view of the Kantian philosophy, and of the idealism of Hegel. Reason must, it was pretended, ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar

... hardly conscious of what we owe to the Hellenic spirit. But in pictures like this of Botticelli's you have a record of the first impression made by it on minds turned back towards it in almost painful aspiration from a world in which it had been ignored so long; and in the passion, the energy, the industry of realization, with which Botticelli carries out his intention, is the exact measure of the legitimate influence over the human mind of the imaginative system of which this is the ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton

... was, if possible, more perfect in sweetness, purity, and expression than it had been at twenty, and never had the poem, connected with all the crises of their joint lives, come more home to their hearts, filling them with aspiration ...
— The Long Vacation • Charlotte M. Yonge

... indicating a peculiar blending of expressions, now revealing strength, now weakness, again pride and arrogance, and again pure good-nature; she is a young woman, with a far-away look of yearning sadness and dreamy aspiration not only in her eyes but also in her general bearing. Behind them is an elderly lady and a man holding an open sun-shade. At one end of the balcony is a young man blowing a conch-shaped horn, whilst in front of it a richly ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann

... One aspiration of Shakspere clearly shines through his career, in whatever darkness it may otherwise be enveloped—namely, his longing to acquire land near the town he was born in. When he had realised this ambition, he cheerfully seems to have left the splendour of town life, and to have readily renounced ...
— Shakspere And Montaigne • Jacob Feis

... mounting flights passed o'er. Be thou content if on thy weary need There falls a sense of showers and of the spring; A hope that makes it possible to fling Sickness aside, and go and do the deed; For highest aspiration will not lead Unto the calm beyond ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald

... animate and inanimate in the whole broad universe; the God of Justice and Wisdom, Truth and Love; the God seen in the face of every noble woman and honest man, heard in every truth, felt in every holy aspiration. Everyone believing in the existence of such a God—and I doubt if any do not—should be eligible for membership, no matter what their theories regarding his personality, plans and powers. Truth should be sought assiduously, ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann

... dome which had so uplifted my childish spirit. The University, which was celebrating it's fiftieth anniversary, had honored me with a doctor's degree, and in the midst of the academic pomp and the rejoicing, the dome again appeared to me as a fitting symbol of the state's aspiration even in its ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams

... the example of a single individual redeeming by brilliant personal qualities the vice of subalternity, to which his position condemned him; not a single one who has ever evinced any grand national aspiration. Around them in the obscurity of their courts, gather idle or retrograde courtiers, men who call themselves noble, but who have never been able to constitute an aristocracy. An aristocracy is a compact independent ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various

... repeated, with vague aspiration. The aspiration seemed to disengage her from herself, and from this earth, which had nothing more to offer her. Ah! how far away was now the time when she had entered churches, full of happiness and hope, to offer ...
— Jacqueline, Complete • (Mme. Blanc) Th. Bentzon

... germ, it had no effect in practice. As I look back, the relation between what we were taught and what we were to do was neither remote nor indirect. In its own sphere, in both its merits and its faults, the Academy was in aspiration as ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan

... Wergeland. The critics of Norway as persistently overrate his talents as those of Denmark neglect and ridicule his pretensions. The Norwegians still speak of him as himmelstraevende sublim ("sublime in his heavenly aspiration"); the Danes will have it that he was an hysterical poetaster. Neither view commends itself to a foreign reader of ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse

... passions of the moment traversed this grand and gentle spirit occupied with eternal things. Certainly, such a man would have done well not to entertain any political opinions. Let there be no mistake as to our meaning: we are not confounding what is called "political opinions" with the grand aspiration for progress, with the sublime faith, patriotic, democratic, humane, which in our day should be the very foundation of every generous intellect. Without going deeply into questions which are only indirectly connected with the subject of this book, we will simply say this: ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo

... again with Henry's help, went out to look for the North-west passage which Cabot had failed to find. Thorne's ship was called the Dominus Vobiscum, a pious aspiration which, however, secured no success. A London man, a Master Hore, tried next. Master Hore, it is said, was given to cosmography, was a plausible talker at scientific meetings, and so on. He persuaded 'divers young lawyers' (briefless barristers, I suppose) and ...
— English Seamen in the Sixteenth Century - Lectures Delivered at Oxford Easter Terms 1893-4 • James Anthony Froude

... great ship containing the hope and aspiration of the world, when the great ship freighted with mankind goes down in the night of death and disaster, I will go down with the ship. I don't want to paddle off in any orthodox canoe. I will go down with the ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll

... made of her music a voice of sympathy, evolved from the heart of the great German masters; whose satisfying strength and simplicity—so far removed from the restless questioning of our later day—were surely the outcome of a large faith in God; of the certainty that effort, aspiration, and endurance, despite their seeming futility, can never fail to ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver

... motives of expedience urged by Bentham and Paley, utilitarian systems, truly spoken of as 'of the earth, earthy.'[291] But, in any case, even the highest conception of the expedient rests on a lower plane of principle than the humblest aspiration after the right. The expedient and the right are not opposites; they are different in kind.[292] They may be, and ought to be, blended as springs of action. No scheme of morals, and no practical divinity can be wholly satisfactory ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton

... fanaticism is joined to debauchery, superstition to incredulity, cultured intelligence to depravity of heart. This wholly unbalanced character—which stretches evil to its utmost limits while preserving the knowledge of what is good, which mistrusts everybody and yet has at least the aspiration toward friendship and love, if not its experience—is it not the symbol and ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme

... and thus worked out his freedom, acquiring that wondrous ability to express his inmost emotions. Art is the beautiful way of doing things. All art is the expression of sublime emotions; and there seems a strong necessity in every soul to impart the joy and the aspiration that it feels. And further, art is for the artist first, just as work is for the worker—it is all just a matter of self-development. And how blessed is it to think that every soul that works out its own freedom gives freedom to others! Liszt is the inspirer of ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard

... in his first message to the Assembly, he wrote: "It is my aspiration to be worthy of the confidence of the nation, by maintaining the Constitution which I have sworn to execute." On November 12, 1850, in his second annual message to the Assembly, he said: "If the Constitution contains defects and dangers, you are free to make them known ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo

... this aspiration unreasonable let me commend a renowned and life-giving precedent of English history. As early as the days of Queen Elizabeth, a courtier boasted that the air of England was too pure for a slave to breathe, and the Common Law was said to forbid Slavery. ...
— American Eloquence, Volume II. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various

... a result of which Boyer was driven from the country and Charles Herard installed as dictator-president. Duarte redoubled his activities for independence, struggling against the opinion of many who thought such an aspiration hopeless, but his plans were discovered and he and others obliged to flee. His work had been well done, however; his ideas continued to spread, and it was determined to proclaim the independence of Santo Domingo on February 27, 1844. Late that night a large group of ...
— Santo Domingo - A Country With A Future • Otto Schoenrich

... problem which is as old as man from the standpoint of men who have left no other record of themselves. In proportion to the depth of his feeling and the vitality of his imagination he must saturate himself with the rich life of thought, conviction, and emotion, of struggle and aspiration, out of which the greatest of the poems of nature took its rise. He must, in a word, receive into himself the living material upon which the unknown poet worked. In such a process the imagination is evoked ...
— Books and Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie

... alone has the Khilafat brought to India. The great block in the way of Indian aspiration for full freedom was the problem of external defence. How is India, left to herself defend her frontiers against her Mussalman neighbours? None but emasculated nations would accept such difficulties and responsibilities as an answer to the demand for freedom. It is only a people whose mentality ...
— Freedom's Battle - Being a Comprehensive Collection of Writings and Speeches on the Present Situation • Mahatma Gandhi

... involuntary carrying out of unworthy aims that have been cherished in thought and the loss of vigour for real achievement, due to too easy an indulgence in blameless aspiration, are fairly obvious and have ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various

... closed, And thy deep voice had ceased—yet thou thyself Wert still before my eyes, and round us both That happy vision of beloved faces— Scarce conscious, and yet conscious of its close I sate, my being blended in one thought (Thought was it? or aspiration? or resolve?) Absorbed, yet hanging still upon the sound— And when I rose, I found ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons

... he patiently explained, for he knows that it is vain to be angry with people because they are not so clever as—as other people. "It's the direct aspiration of Fate. He wants it, does he? Well, ...
— New Treasure Seekers - or, The Bastable Children in Search of a Fortune • E. (Edith) Nesbit

... little ones in their arms and cried, "See, the Colonel comes!" We listened with rapt attention to his superior eloquence, and no man was more deeply rooted in the affections of his people. We esteemed him too high to be low, too lofty in thought and aspiration to do a mean thing. Republican aspirants to Congress in those days were easily turned down by the Colonel who represented that district for three or more terms at the National Capitol. But there came a time when the Colonel's influence ...
— Hanover; Or The Persecution of the Lowly - A Story of the Wilmington Massacre. • David Bryant Fulton

... ladies, brought up amid the splendors of fortune, who with good reason are classed among the most elevated in society, come every week to pass long hours with the miserable prisoners. Observing in these degraded beings the least aspiration after virtue, the least regret for a past crime, they encourage the better tendencies and repentance; and, by the powerful magic of the words "duty," "honor," "virtue," sometimes they rescue from the depths of degradation one ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue

... victories. We saw the desolation of the sea-wife, the long lonely nights, the ever-present apprehension of loss. We understood the pathos of the scaldino. And swift upon this new interpretation we saw the great dangers of such a life to a woman of imperfect culture, strong passion and yet noble aspiration. We saw, too, another and more particular tragedy possible to her, in being forever debarred from her husband's innermost life. That vague look of distress was pregnant with meaning. She wished to say—how much! Yet in English she had not ...
— Aliens • William McFee

... argue with you; but I implore you to give some time to a careful study of the New Testament and the Fathers. I feel sure that light will be sent you. Pray earnestly for it, if you have not, as I more than half suspect, given up prayer in favour of a vague aspiration. And be sure of this, that I shall not forget you in my own prayers. I shall offer the Holy Sacrifice in your intention; I shall make humble intercession for you, for you seem to me to be so near the truth and yet so far away. ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson

... first lesson of the child and the last aspiration of manhood; for it has been well said that the inquiry of truth, which is the love-making of it, the knowledge of truth, which is the presence of it, and the belief of truth, which is the enjoying of it, is the sovereign good of ...
— Many Thoughts of Many Minds - A Treasury of Quotations from the Literature of Every Land and Every Age • Various

... thoughts surpass in number the flowers in your meadows; they fly more swiftly than your eagles on the wind. I drink the wine of aspiration, and the drug of disillusion. Thus am I ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy



Words linked to "Aspiration" :   nationalism, respiration, puff, emulation, ambitiousness, aspirate, aspire, pant, articulation, pull, breathing, gasp, drag, external respiration, American Dream, desire, breath, ventilation



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