self-constraint

Example Sentences

Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.

Serial television mostly puts its directors into a box, too—and, like movie-franchise boxes, it involves a defining-down of artistic freedom, whether by executive dictates or by self-constraint in advance.

From The New Yorker • Jun. 9, 2023

And for Buttigieg, who didn’t come out until age 33, that’s a lot of years of unnatural self-constraint.

From Washington Post • Feb. 20, 2020

"Won't you wait and see my mother?" asked Florida, with her awkward self-constraint again upon her.

From A Foregone Conclusion by Howells, William Dean

A stern self-constraint excludes everything exclamatory, all glimpses and disclosures of what merely affects the writer, all advantages from an appeal, disguised and indirect perhaps, to the opinion of his own side.

From Occasional Papers Selected from the Guardian, the Times, and the Saturday Review, 1846-1890 by Church, R. W. (Richard William)

But on his part so rigid a self-constraint underlying it that we are not sure some of the little waves didn't say—not Sally at all, but—Miss Nightingale!

From Somehow Good by De Morgan, William Frend