velleity
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
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
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
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
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
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
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
All were born late enough to breathe the atmosphere of the new poetry young; all had poetical velleities, and a certain amount, if not of originality, of capacity to write poetry.
From A History of Nineteenth Century Literature (1780-1895) by George Saintsbury
If we were to count up carefully, we should find in the course of our life more velleities than volitions, that is, more evidences of the servitude of our will than of its dominion.
From Theodicy Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil by E.M. Huggard
There will be in this sequence the consciousness of ideas, that of affirmations, that of irresolutions, that of velleities and that of volitions.
From Theodicy Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil by E.M. Huggard
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
