Sentence examples for futile ambition from inspiring English sources

It is likely a futile ambition.

A consensus on good taste is a futile ambition, for who knows what it would be, and who cares?

The Illinois assistant Jay Price, who has coached in the Big Ten for 15 years, said that although players from the state of Illinois were loyal, too, trying to pry a player out of Wisconsin can be an especially futile ambition.

Modern chemistry was born out of the futile ambitions of alchemy.

Ballala III (reigned c. 1292 1342), who helped the sultan of Delhi against the Pandyas, brought about the dynasty's downfall by his futile ambitions.

Much of the story takes place on the claustrophobic island, where the cabin, a "hovel made out of sticks" and filled with futile ambitions, becomes a metaphor for Gary and Irene's marriage.

Moreover, he regularly dismisses U.N. sanctions as ineffective and the P5+1′s efforts at reining in Iran's nuclear ambitions as futile.

That ambition is either futile or stupidly small in scale.

In sum, the standard interpretation of Ryle construes him as offering a somewhat weakened form of reductive behaviourism whose reductivist ambitions, however weakened, are nonetheless futile.

Mountains and hills, come, come, and fall on me, And hide me from the heavy wrath of God! Just as in Tamburlaine Marlowe had seen the cruelty and absurdity of his hero as well as his magnificence, so here he can enter into Faustus' grandiose intellectual ambition, simultaneously viewing those ambitions as futile, self-destructive, and absurd.

A futile gesture at least looks motivated by something better than cynical ambition.