(a.) Extremely rigid in self-denial and devotions; austere; severe.
(n.) In the early church, one who devoted himself to a solitary and contemplative life, characterized by devotion, extreme self-denial, and self-mortification; a hermit; a recluse; hence, one who practices extreme rigor and self-denial in religious things.
Example Sentences:
(1) Famously ascetic, teetotal and vegetarian, he meditates, practises yoga and shuns the trappings of office.
(2) There are several basic structures upon which anorexia nervosa could develop: hostility between mother and daughter, feministic protest, abandonnism, the ascetic structure, the reluctance against the being-thrown-on-the-world, asw.
(3) As Obama put it himself, decades later, "I was leading an ascetic existence, way too serious for my own good".
(4) Pitt says Malick is nothing like the ascetic monk he's often imagined to be.
(5) But the other point is that unilateral opting out might mean you end up living a somewhat ascetic life.
(6) Now, it's all too easy to portray the average politician as a policy-wonk fed since the age of 14 on position papers on social policy and party outreach, professionally married to the job, ascetically weaned day and night on the company of his or her fellow party workers and political researchers, never seeing daylight, never watching telly, never having any cultural development outside whatever serves their policy purview.
(7) He is described as ascetic, highly disciplined and unfazed by the prospect of violence.
(8) These studies (2, 3, 5, 6) have demonstrated that the high IgE responses induced in low responder mice can be substantially diminished, and even abolished, by passively transfusing serum or ascetic fluid from donor mice previously inoculated with mycobacterial-containing complete Freund's adjuvant (CFA).
(9) (Because obviously, no one minds if you win or lose a game of football – and at the full-time whistle, after meditating for a while, the players pool their wages with the fans, before shyly retiring to their modest homes and ascetic lifestyles.)
(10) They are both people who appeal to better human values.” The Dalai Lama leads an ascetic life, rising before dawn to meditate and spending much of his time reading, thinking and taking long walks before retiring to bed at about 8.30pm.
(11) We’re approaching a point where a significant number of people want to change.” Brand is hardly an ascetic, but he is learning about self-denial.
(12) But Mr Putin has ended that disarray and rehabilitated the KGB as the embodiment of the ascetic, incorruptible public service.
(13) Overshadowed by his father, competent but underwhelming as a minister and shadow minister, high-minded and ascetic in his habits, Benn had seemed set to go through a political life without leaving a great mark.
(14) It is the religious aspects of enigmatic Persia that helped put an 80-year-old exiled ascetic at the head of state 30 years ago, then the charismatic cleric Khatami in office 12 years ago, the honest son of a blacksmith – Ahmedinejad – four years ago, and the same yesterday.
(15) Kafka was slim and underweight throughout his life and showed an ascetic attitude and abjuration of physical enjoyment and pleasure (fasting, vegetarianism, sexual abstinence, emphasis on physical fitness).
(16) Takao is still considered an important religious site, so don't be surprised to find yourself sharing a trail with ascetic Buddhists on their way to pray at Yakuo-in temple or cleanse themselves beneath the freezing waterfalls of Biwa-daki or Hebi-daki.
(17) He likened himself to an ascetic and a house cat and said he rarely left the house, spending most of his days surfing the internet – though visitors have brought him piles of books.
(18) From the 9th century, Sufi ascetics wandered the Islamic world, attracting followers to their gentle form of mystical Islam (the word Sufi is often thought to have come from suuf - wool - from the woollen garments the holy men wore).
(19) In the pre-State era, Israeli society displayed an "ascetic" orientation with emphasis on austerity and egalitarianism.
(20) In the moment of victory Murray dropped his racket and turned, mouth agape, towards the nearest section of the crowd – by happy coincidence also the press box – before crumpling to his knees on Centre Court, overcome at the end point of a gruellingly ascetic, occasionally obsessive journey towards an unassailable career high.
Hedonistic
Definition:
(a.) Same as Hedonic, 2.
Example Sentences:
(1) In a city where liberal 19th-century culture was menaced by anti-semitic populist politics - where Adolf Hitler wandered round bitterly nursing a sense of thwarted genius - the middle class escaped into hedonistic dreams, and invented modern sexuality.
(2) The often hedonistic vibe has prompted criticism of the fair, including accusations that it attracts scenesters with little real interest in contemporary art.
(3) Nutt himself has tried "a bit of cannabis, and speed once or twice", but the only drug he consumes now is alcohol, making him neither, as he keeps pointing out, a prohibitionist nor a hedonist.
(4) But clearly hedonistic consciousness is capable of overcoming our biological programming.
(5) And that is how I became a religious maniac and a total hedonist at the same time.
(6) She said: "Under the carapace of glittering, hedonistic celebrity, the ooze of a very different and more dangerous lifestyle has seeped out for all to see."
(7) His Asylum debut, Warren Zevon (1976), bristled with west coast rock deities - including Glenn Frey and Don Henley, of the Eagles, and Lindsay Buckingham and Stevie Nicks, from Fleetwood Mac - though he seemed hell-bent on sabotaging the hedonistic myth of the golden state.
(8) Moir also called for "the truth" to emerge "about the exact circumstances of his strange and lonely death" and said: "Once again, under the carapace of glittering, hedonistic celebrity, the ooze of a very different and more dangerous lifestyle has seeped out for all to see".
(9) Karl and I would get to keep our little unit intact, and our hedonistic lifestyle, while still having a child: a part-time child.
(10) Bell, appointed chairman of the commission, stressed the problems of a post-industrial economy, modern society's technocratic structure versus its hedonistic culture and the increasingly unrealistic levels of public and private expectations.
(11) Photograph: Alamy Bowie’s relationship with his wife had been disintegrating under the pressures of success and the couple’s hedonistic, promiscuous lifestyle, and they would divorce in 1980.
(12) (Nostalgic songs score equally with the purely hedonistic songs on positive feelings evoked, but the nostalgic songs also score much higher on sadness.)
(13) A hedonist In his autumn, romance lightly worn, And now first signs of tristesse , Faint strains of a hunting horn.
(14) Hedonistic, vacuous, self-important and delusional.
(15) He left his children's mother for Emmanuelle star Sylvia Kristel , with whom he had a brief, hedonistic, tempestuous relationship with violence on both sides.
(16) It now has branches in London and New York, but this vast Dublin brewpub (with possibly the longest bar in the city) is the nerve centre for craft ales in the hedonistic Temple Bar neighbourhood.
(17) This was New York's last golden clubbing period before gentrification and Mayor Giuliani tore out its hedonistic soul… Frankie provided the soundtrack.
(18) He was the nonconformist hero of Ionesco’s Rhinoceros at the Royal Court in 2007 and the hedonistic historian in Rattigan’s After The Dance at the National in 2010 .
(19) It's no longer a hedonistic drug taken in nightclubs.
(20) If Christopher was louche, hedonistic and iconoclastic, Hitchens would be fastidious, puritanical and Christian.