"Velleity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... craving, will, aspiration, hankering, appetency, cupidity, impulse; request, petition, quest, entreaty; velleity; pruriency. Antonyms: apathy, antipathy, aversion, inappetency. Associated ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... room for no harsher feeling than pity. Rousseau showed through life a singular proneness for being convinced by his own eloquence; he was always his own first convert; and this reconciles his power as a writer with his weakness as a man. He and all like him mistake emotion for conviction, velleity for resolve, the brief eddy of sentiment for the midcurrent of ever-gathering faith in duty that draws to itself all the affluents of conscience and will, and gives continuity of purpose to life. They are like men who love the stimulus of being under conviction, ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... been a good novelist, he "were" a novelist "in his hart." Beside his polissonneries, his frequent dulness, his singular gropings and failures at anything like good novelist faire, one constantly finds what might be pedantically and barbarously called a "novelistic velleity." His much too ambitiously titled Melanges Litteraires turn to stories, though stories touched with the polisson brush. His Nouvelles testify at least to his ambition and his industry in the craft of fiction. "Je ne suis pas Voltaire," he says somewhere, in reference, I think, to his plays, ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury |
