velleity

Will is devoid of intellect, as intellect is deprived of velleity.

From The Sceptics of the Old Testament: Job - Koheleth - Agur by Emile Joseph Dillon

Skill, endurance, and perseverance may almost be called muscular virtues; and fatigue, velleity, caprice, ennui, restlessness, lack of control and poise, muscular faults.

From Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene by G. Stanley Hall

I would, if I could: liberet si liceret; and in the case of a velleity, we do not will, properly speaking, to will, but to be able.

From Theodicy Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil by E.M. Huggard

And the warrior king, who, like single-minded fathers in general, was ever in the idea that his son had a velleity for deriding and otherwise vexing him, began a severe course of reproof.

From Vikram and the Vampire; Classic Hindu Tales of Adventure, Magic, and Romance by Lady Isabel Burton

A velleity we might say is the will directed to an end which is either relatively or absolutely impossible; will is that which becomes effective.

From The Reform of Education by Giovanni Gentile

Educators who opposed the velleities of the President's report were slow to speak up; they were afraid they might be misunderstood.

From Time Magazine Archive

But acting thus, I would be indulging in what I have called velleities.

From The Reform of Education by Giovanni Gentile

And our being results not from velleities but from the real will.

From The Reform of Education by Giovanni Gentile

Not in practice, doubtless; but here was a question of feeling, a scrutiny of the soul's hidden velleities.

From Demos by George Gissing

It is a world of rejections and velleities; in spite of outward similarities, a strangely different world from that of half a dozen years ago.

From Aspects of Literature by J. Middleton Murry