Hold back by force

Usage examples of constrain.

He was a big man, fatter even than Acta, and he wore strangely constraining clothes: a tightly sewn jacket and trousers, heavy leather shoes, a hat stuffed with straw.

But at their wildest, the Bacchic rituals were a temporary, constrained release from the real world.

Also if the chords and bass line are constructed in such a way as to create their own separate melodies, then this will constrain the notes not to be moved from their location within those melodies.

Even as it is not the specialist in biology that still maintains the Darwinian theory of Natural Selection, but the non-professional and the amateur, even so the specialist acquainted with the original sources, and the explorer, possessing first hand knowledge, asserts a decline, through history, from purer to less spiritual faiths, while the bias of the evolutionist, who has no first hand knowledge of the sources constrains him to begin his scheme of religion with animism and fetish-worship.

The mayor, constraining himself to keep awake a little longer, gave Domini away, while Suzanne dropped tears into a pocket-handkerchief edged with rose-coloured frilling, the gift of Monsieur Helmuth.

Instead of securing his fidelity, these favors served only to inflame the ambition of the Thracian peasant, who deemed his fortune inadequate to his merit, as long as he was constrained to acknowledge a superior.

We are constrained to confess it to be true, that men, in this Age of Iron, worship gods of wood and iron and brass, the work of their own hands.

Only the upper-class women were constrained by their status into ladylike homebound activities.

We are in effect dealing with a species full of fanaticsand fanatics, by definition, are not to be constrained by threats of force which would deter more rational individuals.

Alexandre moved constantly in small jerks, the restlessness of his body at once caused and constrained by the pain of his wound.

He was constrained to drive out visiting with my Lady Lowestoft, and went, smothering a yawn.

Platonic dialogue to attack philosophers, parallels the satyric release from constraining social conventions.

By merging with the flow of life, by tuning into the patterns of our destiny and the rhythms of nature, we are able to rise above the constraining forces of our logical intellect.

Incomparably the most valuable acquisition which the American Catholic Church has received has been the company of devoted and gifted young men, deeply imbued with the principles and sentiments of the High-church party in the Episcopal Church, who have felt constrained in conscience and in logic to take the step, which seems so short, from the highest level in the Anglican Church into the Roman, and who, organized into the Order of the Paulist Fathers, have exemplified in the Roman Church so many of the highest qualities of Protestant preaching.

The Executive approval was given by me to the resolution mentioned, and it is now by a closer attention and a fuller knowledge of facts that I feel constrained to recommend a reconsideration of the subject.