What is "pretention"

Usage examples of "pretention".

Essence that pervades them, conferring that unchangeable life upon them, once you perceive the judgement and wisdom and knowledge that are theirs, you can but smile at all the lower nature with its pretention to Reality.

Tower of Babel which has sprung up in Paris has killed that pretention, I think we shall feel and speak more modestly about our stone hyperbole, our materialization of the American love of the superlative.

Theirs had been a harmless enough pretention, one good for the best seats at public games and partners at dances until Crown Princess Lovella had been killed in battle.

Until of late no such an assured position could be rightly claimed by our native herbs, though pretentions in their favour have been widely popular since early English times.

I make no pretentions and, wrong or astray, I place on the paper what heaven sends from my pen.

The roll of tickets was on his desk, so she picked it up closed the door behind her and started back again, a rather small girl with no pretentions to beauty, although her grey eyes were large and clear and her mouth, rather on the large side, curved up at its corners very sweetly.

It is soothing to feel so directly that man, notwithstanding his science and pretentions, his subjugation of steam and electricity, is as nothing compared with his Creator.

I call her Magnet, for a reason she never dreams of, though you may possibly have education enough to guess at it, having some pretentions to understand the compass, I suppose.

Some afternoons he is called from his room twenty times in the course of it, to different persons, besides the hours devoted to the ministers of the different departments, the investigation necessary to be made of those persons who apply for offices or are recommended, the weighing the merits, and pretentions of different candidates for the same office, etc.

I met there a certain Count Cobenzl, who may be alive now--a man of wisdom, generosity, and the vastest learning, and yet without any kind of pretention.

I bad, already, be begun to suspect that manhood was not a mere pretention, as I had been taught, but soomething selected for, as seems reasonable, like the nature of the eagle and the lion, in the long, harsh realities of a brutal evolution, but now, for the first time, I had begun to suspect that my conception of manhood, so advanced I had thought, did little more than begin to hint at the possible glories of a suppressed, thwarted, tortured reality, a reality genetically dispositional in every cell in a man's body, a reality feared and castigated by a counterbiological culture.