What is "purposeful"

Usage examples of "purposeful".

By meeting the attack of the dog in a purposeful and attentive manner, we cause the otherwise damming-up nervous energy to continue flowing into ordinary channels, and in this way prevent both the feeling of fear and also the flow of the energy into the motor centres associated with the particular emotion.

Then she stepped on to the sidewalk, crossing it with purposeful stride and thrust open the batwing doors.

In the wake of the groundbreaking prose fiction written by members of the Natural school, literary realists in mid-nineteenth-century Russia were able to use food imagery and fictional meals in their works in less Rabelaisian and more mimetically purposeful ways: that is, as metonyms or synecdoches through which to describe contemporary social reality.

Like an outclassed warrior seeking only to hold his foe at bay as long as he could, he withstood or beat aside wizardry that would have devastated a stronger but less purposeful magician.

A long clerestory of a hundred purple and brown panes admitted a warm umbrous light which enhanced the quality of posts, beams and panels, enriched the dark red cloth which covered the tables, and as if by purposeful chiaroscuro dramatized the features of the other persons in the room.

His sideways progress was purposeful, undelayed by any consideration but the safest place for his hands and feet.

Now Bel and Ria merged into Bel Ria, a composed purposeful little figure who was often to be seen on the back roads between Devonport and The Cedars, trotting along in his uneven but fast gait, looking neither to left nor to right, undiverted by other dogs, even interesting smells, intent only on reaching his alternative world.

He gave Adar a little bow of politeness between not-quite equals with the blandly purposeful expression that caused his opponents to seriously underestimate his intelligence.

It was good to be back in that calm, purposeful, well-ordered world, where an atmosphere of assured competence prevailed and questions of life and death were discussed in cool, measured undertones.

From sharp, backswept horns, to wide, slitted eyes, to fanged mouths, their heads were alien and as purposeful as the pack of beasts that had chased the Heralds across the Plains.

As she stumbled over rocks and slipped on the muddy earth, her anger mounted with every step she took, an anger that grew into a grim, purposeful determination to settle the score, barehanded if need be, just as soon as they could reach Eucher Butte.

Bob came back tall, lanky, grinny, and rather dumb, and he found John undersized, wiry, masterful, and rather mooney, but strong and purposeful, for a boy.

It is as if, for Meursault, such random elements in his surroundings are no different from the seemingly purposeful acts he performs.

Drummond could see the oilskinned figures grouping around her triple-mounted torpedo tubes, the purposeful way they were even now turning athwartships.

After that we cast off all allegiance to immediate, tangible, and time-touched things, and entered a fantastic world of hushed unreality in which the narrow, ribbon-like road rose and fell and curved with an almost sentient and purposeful caprice amidst the tenantless green peaks and half-deserted valleys.