Word Finder - ambition

definition

Eager or inordinate desire for some object that confers distinction, as preferment, honor, superiority, political power, or literary fame; desire to distinguish one's self from other people.

example

My son, John, wants to be a firefighter very much. He has a lot of ambition.

definition

An object of an ardent desire.

example

My ambition is to own a helicopter.

definition

A desire, as in (sense 1), for another person to achieve these things.

definition

A personal quality similar to motivation, not necessarily tied to a single goal.

definition

The act of going about to solicit or obtain an office, or any other object of desire; canvassing.

definition

To seek after ambitiously or eagerly; to covet.

example

Pausanias, ambitioning the sovereignty of Greece, bargains with Xerxes for his daughter in marriage. — Trumbull.

My ambition is far different than yours.

It is a tale of ambition and then of guilt.

Anyone else with have a grain of ambition would see them as a tool.

The Roman nobility, resting wholly on sufferance, was overthrown by the ambition of one of its own members.

He suspected Sirian was Memon's spy and couldn't help but wonder if Memon understood how deep ambition ran in a man like Sirian.

But his ambition was by no means satisfied, and he even aspired to the crown of the East Roman empire.

Lavater was fired with the ambition to convert his friend to Christianity.

They shared much more than ambition and similar mind magic.

Considering his comment about ambition, he probably didn't consider the education wasted.

One is lured by women, another by honors, a third by ambition or money, and they go over to that camp.

She had nothing to offer him to curb whatever ambition he had.

Its enterprising ambition was encouraged by taking fresh country north and south.

Their ambition is to rank as a civilized state, and the flattery lavished on them by their teachers has spoiled them.

Do you think everything they have done has been with the single ambition of getting third-party information out of you?

As recently as the early twentieth century, relatively few careers existed in which young men of drive and ambition could distinguish themselves and leave a mark on the world.

It was his ambition to create a duchy for his family; and with this object he Pont!!!

In lathing I was pleased to be able to send home each nail with a single blow of the hammer, and it was my ambition to transfer the plaster from the board to the wall neatly and rapidly.

His principal aim was no doubt the maintenance and increase of his own influence and party, but his ambition corresponded with definite political views.

Charles's ambition aimed at wider fields, and when Margaret, countess of Flanders, asked help of the French court against the German king William of Holland, by whom she had been defeated, he gladly accepted her offer of the county of; Hainaut in exchange for his assistance (1253); this arrangement was, however, rescinded by Louis of France, who returned from captivity in 1254, and Charles gave up Hainaut for an immense sum of money.

This ambition distinguishes his foreign policy from that of Henry VII., to which it has been likened.

His rivals saw how his intense personal ambition and egoism led him always to assume the chief place, and to use his parliamentary position to establish himself as leader of the nation.

Nearly all wars during this period were undertaken either to check the growing power of Venice or to further th ambition of the papacy.

Austria also concluded offensive and defensive alliancqs with Sardinia Tuscany and Naples; and Metternichs ambition was to make Austrian predominance over Italy still more absolute, by placing an Austrian archduke on the Sardinian throne.

In Piedmont itself it was at first less successful; and Cavour, although he aspired ultimately to a united Italy with Rome as the capital,1 openly professed no ambition beyond the expulsion of Austria and the formation of a North Italian kingdom.

Furthermore, he was a man of great ambition, persuasive eloquence and wide generosity; qualities which especially appealed at that time to the classes from whom he was to draw his support.

His great ambition was to write a history of England.

His ambition had nothing in common with the vulgar eagerness for place and pay and social standing.

Hubert's ambition of founding a great family was not realized.

He had nothing but ambition.

In June 1805 there came a last and intolerable affront to the emperors of Austria and Russia, who at that very time were seeking to put bounds to Napoleons ambition and to redress the balance of power.

On the triumph of the reactionaries and the fall of the national party, he secretly placed in the king's hands his adhesion to the triumphant Confederation of Targowica, a false step, much blamed at the time, but due not to personal ambition but to a desire to save something from the wrqck of the constitution.

When peace was finally concluded, he had obtained that predominant position in European politics which had been the object of his ambition since the commencement of his reign, and he now believed firmly that he had been chosen by Providence to secure the happiness of the world in general and of the European nations in particular.

They feared his ability and ambition; while he credited them with the design of poisoning him.

The victory to be won by man is the triumph over fear, ambition, passion, luxury.

During the absence of Alexander, with whom she regularly corresponded on public as well as domestic affairs, she had great influence, and by her arrogance and ambition caused such trouble to the regent Antipater that on Alexander's death (323) she found it prudent to withdraw into Epirus.

He ridicules the ambition of German writers to be classic, as Lessing had ridiculed their eagerness to be French.

Mr Hawtrey, afterwards headmaster, commended a copy of his Latin verses, and " sent him up for good "; and this experience first led the young student to associate intellectual work with the ideas of ambition and success.

But his position as tutor to the heir to the throne excited his ambition.

When Ferdinand was released in 1814 he came back to Madrid in the hope that his ambition would now be satisfied, but the king was tired of him, and was moreover resolved never to be subjected by any favourite.

It is written with the force and fervour of extreme youth and with the literary ambition of a race as yet new to the discipline of intellectual culture, and is characterized by rhetorical rather than poetical imagination.

Catius Silius Italicus (25-101) is a proof of the industry and literary ambition of members of the rich official class.

For sixteen years the pursuit of his kingdom was the chief object of John's ambition.

After an unsuccessful invasion of Italy in 307 he elevated his friend Licinius to the rank of Augustus, and, moderating his ambition, devoted the few remaining years of his life "to the enjoyment of pleasure and to the execution of some works of public utility."

Success only stimulated his insatiable ambition.

Two main barriers still obstructed the realization of his ambition,which now embraced Greece arid Thessaly, as well as Albania, and the establishment in the Mediterranean of a sea-power which should rival that of the dey of Algiers.

On the other hand, the Odense Recess of the 10th of August 1527, which put both confessions on a footing of equality, remained unrepealed; and so long as it remained in force, the spiritual jurisdiction of the bishops, and, consequently, their authority over the " free preachers " (whose ambition convulsed all the important towns of Denmark and aimed at forcibly expelling the Catholic priests from their churches) remained valid, to the great vexation of the reformers.

But Griffenfeldt's difficulties, always serious, were increased by the instability of the European situation, depending as it did on the ambition of Louis XIV.

Projects for the assertion of this claim by force of arms had been formed by more than one of Frederick's predecessors, and the extinction of the male line of the house of Habsburg may well have seemed to him a unique opportunity for realizing an ambition traditional in his family.

He habitually wrote and spoke French, and had a strong ambition to rank as a distinguished French author.

The young emperor was frank and cordial; Frederick was more cautious, for he detected under the respectful manner of Joseph a keen ambition that might one day become dangerous to Prussia.