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.

But as always in Matisse, you can feel something brewing — a tension, a sense of feeling so heightened that you intuit it will take all of Matisse’s disinterested and self-abnegating intelligence to master.

From Washington Post • Nov. 21, 2021

Most students reacted differently through self-humiliation and self-abnegating subjugation.

From Salon • Sep. 8, 2018

Folksy and eccentric, prone to talking to himself, this self-abnegating old-timer is the eternal sidekick, the hero's reliable right hand and nothing more.

From Los Angeles Times • Dec. 14, 2017

Not for me, the lucky beneficiary of my mother’s quixotic and self-abnegating striving, but for my perpetually impoverished parents.

From The New Yorker • Nov. 27, 2016

Such delicate pathos and tender joy, such pure conception of life's realities, and such loftiness of self-abnegating love!

From Hetty's Strange History by Jackson, Helen Hunt