Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Self-denial \Self`-de*ni"al\, n. The denial of one's self; forbearing to gratify one's own desires; self-sacrifice.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
Wiktionary
n. 1 The act of refuse to recognize unpleasant facts even when presented by one's self. 2 Taking action that sacrifices one's own benefit for the good of others.
WordNet
n. the trait of practicing self discipline [syn: self-discipline]
the act of denying yourself; controlling your impulses [syn: self-discipline, self-control]
renunciation of your own interests in favor of the interests of others [syn: abnegation, self-abnegation, denial, self-renunciation]
Wikipedia
Self-denial (also called self-abnegation and self-sacrifice) refers to altruistic abstinence – the willingness to forgo personal pleasures or undergo personal trials in the pursuit of the increased good of another. Various religions and cultures take differing views of self-denial, some considering it a positive trait and others considering it a negative one. According to some Christians, self-denial is considered a superhuman virtue only obtainable through Jesus. Some critics of self-denial suggest that self-denial can lead to self-hatred and claim that the self-denial practiced in Judaism has created self-hating Jews.
Usage examples of "self-denial".
The self-assertion of the recusants has found eulogists in plenty, but who has celebrated the self-denial that was thrown away on this other task, which is farther from fulfilment now than it was when the scholars of the Renaissance gave up their patriotism and the tongue of their childhood in the name of fellow-citizenship with the ancients and the oecumenical authority of letters?
Power of attention, power of industry, promptitude in beginning work, method and accuracy and despatch in doing it, perseverance, courage before difficulties, cheer, self-control and self-denial, they are worth more than Latin and Greek and French and German and music and art and painting and waxflowers and travels in Europe added together.
Venice during Carnevale, after Shyla died, when I had been covering the revelry of Venetians before the long fastings and privations of Lent During the wildest part of that first night, I had marveled that these people who were celebrating the pleasures of the flesh with such open-ended immoderation could turn so quickly to the darker joys of self-denial.
These suspicions were not effaced by the conduct of Ferdinand, who, when examined on the subject, managed his answers in such a manner, as confirmed their conjectures, while he pretended to refute them, and at the same time acquired to himself credit for his extraordinary discretion and self-denial.
In fact, if his late father had once had a hundred concu bines, it was quite possible his people thought having just one was the ultimate in self-denial and restraint on his part.
Padre Concha, counting out his little stock of silver with the care that only comes from the knowledge that each coin represents a self-denial.
And at the moment, weary, heartsick, Drew didn't care about self-denial.
The first principle of our religion, charity, could not be practised -- pity would never be called forth-- benevolence, your great organ, would be useless, and self-denial a blank letter.
Functionalist reason expresses itself in the ironic self-denial of a reason shrunk down to the reduction of complexity'shrunk down' because the metabiological frame of reference does not go beyond the logocentric limitations of metaphysics.
Even Nan did not know all the hard work and stern self-denial that had made it possible for Theodore to put by that money out of his small earnings.
In Pie's self-denials (“I'm nothing and nobody,” it had said at the beginning) he'd heard an echo of the anguish he himself felt.
Therein crawled all the harshness of her life, all the self-denials that she had made.
What sacrifices equal the self-denials which loving men and women make for one another?
Let a man corrupt his values and his view of existence, let him profess that love is not self-enjoyment but self-denial, that virtue consists, not of pride, but of pity or pain or weakness or sacrifice, that the noblest love is born, not of admiration, but of charity, not in response to values, but in response to flaws—and he will have cut himself in two.
After a lifetime of hard work and self-denial, in which pa had few of the things he set store by, he had made one foolish mistake and got hung for it.