velleity
Example Sentences
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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
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
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
This theory and the subtleties derived from it, far from characterizing art, represent its contrary: the impotent velleity for art, which cannot slay abstractions and come in contact with life.
From Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic by Benedetto Croce
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
If I did so, I should be indulging in vain velleities, in which my personality, far from realising itself, would on the contrary be disintegrated and scattered.
From The Reform of Education by Giovanni Gentile
It started up in corrupt or sordid hearts, and swept all their blind velleities into its purifying flame of passion— "Love is incompatible With falsehood,—purifies, assimilates All other passions to itself."
From Robert Browning by C. H. (Charles Harold) Herford
These venerable ladies had admitted that in marrying, even opulently, out of the family, Emma had once more shown velleities of self-sacrifice.
From The Collectors by Frank Jewett Mather
And our being results not from velleities but from the real will.
From The Reform of Education by Giovanni Gentile
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