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

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)

The duty of virtue is essentially distinguished from the duty of justice in this respect; that it is morally possible to be externally compelled to the latter, whereas the former rests on free self-constraint only.

From The Metaphysical Elements of Ethics by Abbott, Thomas Kingsmill

"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