What is "abnegation"

Usage examples of "abnegation".

Its principle was the abnegation of selfishness by strictly limiting the expenditure of every member to the amount really necessary to his comfort, dedicating the rest to humanity.

In many of his contemporaries also much the same fluctuation of mood was occurring, and to them as to Paul it seemed that the issue lay between the old faith, however modernized, and the complete abnegation of human dignity.

Even those who, like Van Helmont, wished to defend the church and to reconcile the Tridentine decrees with philosophy, found that their labors brought them under suspicion and that what the church demanded was not harmony of thought but abnegation of it.

After leaving the army, and when the glittering wings of butterflies and their surroundings wearied him, he would leave the gay cities, and travel much in foreign lands, in cold bleak northern latitudes, or sunny climes, studying human nature, and giving some thought to its many phases, with the different creeds men hold at times on seeing the self sacrificing lives of the sisters of charity, on witnessing noble deeds which should be written in characters of gold, but which they did in the most humble self abnegation.

Truly the gravity of his demeanour exceeded that which is attained by Sheiks and Dervishes after much drinking of the waters of wisdom, and fasting, and abnegation of the pleasures that betray us to folly in this world!

But I was the only one to measure how much bitter fermentation there is at the bottom of all sweetness, or what degree of despair is hidden under abnegation, what hatred is mingled with love.

He prayed without coherent words, for all those caught between right and expedient, between duty and conscience, between the affections of earth and the abnegations of heaven: for Jovetta de Montors, for her son, murdered quite practically and coldly to clear the way for a coup, for Robert Bossu and all those labouring for peace through repeated waves of disillusion and despair, for the young who had no clear guidance where to go, and the old, who had tried and discarded everything: for Olivier and Yves and their like, who in their scornful and ruthless purity despised the manipulations of subtler souls: for Cadfael, once a brother of the Benedictine house of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, at Shrewsbury, who had done what he had to do, and now waited to pay for it.

And yet here, in the rain forest, the natural architecture of sun, and shade, and growth, seems a vital celebration of life and its glory, not a consequence of aberrations and the madness of abnegations, not an invention of dismal men who have foresworn women, even slaves, and certain vegetables, and live by parasitically feeding and exploiting the superstitions of the lower castes.

But even if Miss Bart, after her renewed taste of the amenities of life, could have returned to the barrenness of a New York August, mitigated only by poor Gerty's presence, her worldly wisdom would have counselled her against such an act of abnegation.

Bad times those general sir, there were no secrets of state that were not in the public domain, there was no order that was carried out with complete certainty ever since the exquisite corpse of General Rodrigo de Aguilar had been served up at the banquet table, but he didn't care, he didn't care about the stumbling of power during the bitter months in which his mother was rotting away in a slow fire in the bedroom next to his after the doctors most adept in Asiatic scourges decreed that her illness was not the plague, or scabies, or yaws, or any other Oriental pestilence, but some Indian curse that could only be cured by the one who had cast it, and he understood that it was death and he shut himself up to care for his mother with the abnegation of a mother, he stayed to rot with her so that no one would see her cooking in her stew of maggots, he ordered them to bring her hens .