How to Use abnegation in a Sentence

abnegation

noun
  • Faye’s absence reads like the self-abnegation of a soul trying to atone for something.
    Josephine Livingstone, The New Republic, 15 June 2018
  • In his telling, Klara’s self-abnegation feels both ennobling and tragic.
    Washington Post, 2 Mar. 2021
  • Chris Ware has a deadpan self-abnegation that is, by all accounts, genuine.
    Jason Lutes, The New York Review of Books, 7 Mar. 2019
  • In Austen’s work, romantic union is seen not as the pragmatic abnegation of the self, but rather as the hopeful realization of it.
    Megan Garber, The Atlantic, 17 July 2017
  • Those works stand at the extreme of a consecrated self-abnegation that governs all her art.
    Peter Schjeldahl, The New Yorker, 27 Feb. 2017
  • For others, a drink is a way to rebel against a culture in which good parenting is synonymous with self-abnegation.
    Elissa Strauss, CNN, 1 Nov. 2017
  • The recent debt-ceiling crisis was a complete abnegation of fact.
    Pete Brook, WIRED, 2 Sep. 2011
  • In an unusual act of self-abnegation, politicians ceded power to the technocrats as the only way to stop themselves from printing money.
    Gerard Baker, WSJ, 12 July 2019
  • Her thinking is already programmed for self-sacrifice; the self-abnegation of religion is only a quick step behind.
    Helen Shaw, Vulture, 6 Mar. 2021
  • Greatness, in the context of the administration’s economic ideology, is built on a ground laid thick with self-abnegation.
    Ginia Bellafante, New York Times, 25 May 2017
  • It’s what music and media corporations and academicians fought for: black and female self-abnegation.
    Armond White, National Review, 14 Aug. 2020
  • Rather than forge a signature style, Goya practiced a temperamental abnegation of anything usual.
    Peter Schjeldahl, The New Yorker, 14 Sep. 2020
  • The imitation of moral precepts—as opposed to Chinese-style imitation of technology—required a degree of self-abnegation.
    The Economist, 9 Jan. 2020
  • Congressional self-abnegation fits hand-in-glove with the rise of presidential governance, or the misapprehension by the public that the president, rather than the Congress, is the centerpiece of republican government.
    Jay Cost, National Review, 11 Sep. 2017
  • The individual photographs tell us virtually nothing, just as journalistic pictures are often empty of independent meaning, but the succession of images, page-by-page, is a steady beat of abnegation and self-abuse in the name of art.
    Charles Desmarais, San Francisco Chronicle, 2 May 2018
  • The systematic vilification of facts and expertise, the violent abnegation of diverse thought, the constant blasts of paranoia-stoking crime reports and patriotic soundbites on an inescapable news network—could this be more now?
    Sophie Gilbert, The Atlantic, 19 May 2018
  • To belong to one tribe, people accept an outsize and sometimes irrational portion of responsibility for their own safety and that of others through self-abnegation and personal fastidiousness.
    Amanda Mull, The Atlantic, 26 Oct. 2020
  • That abnegation is an illness that has reached pandemic-level proportions under the panopticon of white-supremacist patriarchy, which seeds division among women through social pressure.
    Washington Post, 28 Mar. 2021
  • In the 20th century, aristocratic restraint became middle-class self-abnegation.
    Nikil Saval, New York Times, 10 May 2017
  • The trend manages to cram a tremendous number of tedious affectations into tight quarters: design fetishism, ostentatious minimalism, costly self-abnegation.
    Willy Staley, New York Times, 23 Jan. 2018

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'abnegation.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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