What is "wilful"

Usage examples of "wilful".

Kaiku had always been stubborn and wilful, but to be an Aberrant was surely indefensible?

The lad could almost see the face of the child, its humorous anger, its wilful triumph, and also the enraged look of the Bailly as he raked the stream with his long stick, tied with a sort of tassel of office.

For my own part I can think of no crime, unless it is reckless begetting or the wilful transmission of contagious disease, for which the bleak terrors, the solitudes and ignominies of the modern prison do not seem outrageously cruel.

Secondly, this doctrinal system seems to us equally irreconcilable with history and with ethics: it seems to trample on the surest convictions of reason and conscience, and spurn the clearest principles of nature and religion, to blacken and load the heart and doom of man with a mountain of gratuitous horror, and shroud the face and throne of God in a pall of wilful barbarity.

There is always a battle between the vigorous, wilful child and the grown-up who demands submission from him, and many of these splendidly equipped children are destroyed in the process of educating them.

That waywardness which was a legitimate inheritance from generations of wilful forebears, impatient of all those restraints which a fixed environment imposes upon the individual, an impatience which had always been hers though it slumbered in unsuspected latency, asserted itself of a sudden, possessed her wholly, and warmed, her being like forbidden wine.

In case of pressing necessity, could he exercise any authority over the capricious movements of the wilful Laureate, whose egotism was so absolute, whose imperious ways were so charming, whose commands were never questioned?

In a prosecution for wilful failure of a person to produce records within her custody and control pursuant to a lawful subpoena issued by a committee of the House of Representatives, the Supreme Court ruled that the presence of a quorum of the committee at the time of the return of the subpoena was not an essential element of the offense.

To Zaac Tepal was she vowed--Zaac Tepal, whom yonder usurper had, by lying words, enticed into her service, but who was guiltless of wilful outrage upon the Acan sanctities.

There is cause to arraign the bankrupt on a charge of wilful bankruptcy.

Hugh, totally overset by the unexpected accident, and conscience-struck at his own wilful share in risking it, was utterly helpless, and could only answer, that he wished young Mr.

Do I see thee in very truth, thou damsel of disobedience, dear dame of discord, sweet, witching, wilful lady--is it thou in very truth, most loved daughter, or wraith conjured of thy magic and my perfervid imaginations--speak!

All this indulgence did not render Owen unamiable, but it made him wilful, and not a happy child.

Wilful was engaged to marry a young gentleman named Sir Trevor Ashurst, and Colonel Warrender was very happy that his daughter had chosen such a fine young man.

The moral law of God has been heard as distinctly by them as by the upper, but they have not that discriminating judgment that enables them in every instance to distinguish between the morally wrong and the morally right, and yet there has been awakened in them a consciousness of certain things due to their fellowman and to their God that has kept them in a way that they could not be charged with wilful moral wrong, and their conservatism has placed them in a manner nearer to the morally right than to the morally wrong.