What's the difference between introspective and pensive?

Introspective


Definition:

  • (a.) Inspecting within; seeing inwardly; capable of, or exercising, inspection; self-conscious.
  • (a.) Involving the act or results of conscious knowledge of physical phenomena; -- contrasted with associational.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) But at least one customer signalled that America's gun lobby might be on the cusp of a moment of introspection.
  • (2) To a generation of young Germans, raised under the crushing, introspective guilt of postwar Germany , the sight of such facile antics was simply incomprehensible.
  • (3) The alleged killer could not imagine how the city of Charleston, under the good and wise leadership of Mayor Riley – how the state of South Carolina, how the United States of America would respond – not merely with revulsion at his evil act, but with big-hearted generosity and, more importantly, with a thoughtful introspection and self-examination that we so rarely see in public life.
  • (4) Man of Steel gets three stars from him, thanks largely to an opening section that "creates a plausible context for the introspection and self-doubt that dogs the adult version of [this] costumed warrior".
  • (5) There is a striking amount of national introspection in a hearteningly vibrant press.
  • (6) The people of Australia are sick to death of this introspection when there are very important, significant issues in constituencies like mine.
  • (7) While O'Dwyer's defence portrayed him as the vulnerable, introspective young man whose promising career would be derailed by extradition, prosecutors contend he is a skilled businessman who made large sums of money from a website he knew was profiting from pirated material.
  • (8) Academic medicine is entering a period of introspection created by changing patterns of health and disease and changing patterns in reimbursement and health policy.
  • (9) The first Labour MP I spoke to today put it well: “As our standing and his standing has got worse, Labour MPs talk of little else.” Party introspection, angst and fear were always on the cards for this period – it just wasn’t meant to be Labour that would suffer.
  • (10) South Africans have undergone sombre introspection of late with the economy slowing, unemployment sky highand, worst of all, violent unrest that included the killing of workers at the Lonmin platinum mine in August.
  • (11) Pharmacists can grow in a current or second career by using introspection and self-assessment and by adapting to changes that occur in the profession.
  • (12) Ex-HSBC banker denies fraud charges brought in US Snowden endorses phone case warning system Whistleblower Edward Snowden has endorsed a mobile phone case called the “introspection engine” that, he claims, will show when data is being monitored.
  • (13) Ishiguro's flawed but introspective narrators are always fascinating portraits of unusual characters: in A Pale View from the Hills, the narrator is a Japanese widow living in England, The Remains of the Day is narrated by the butler of an Nazi-sympathising English aristocrat, and a callow English private detective is the central character in When We Were Orphans.
  • (14) Michael Cavanagh, the JP Morgan executive who conducted the bank's internal investigation, opened his testimony by proudly noting that the bank had engaged in "introspection" and was "determined to be a better company because of this experience".
  • (15) This approach focuses on the "only or never" phenomenon, the parallel process, and introspective curiosity as modes of identifying the existence of countertransference responses.
  • (16) He stressed three essentials to meeting the future: an effective and introspective organization; ample participation by the membership of the specialty; and a plan.
  • (17) The results are interpreted through the theory of memory introspection proposed by Herrmann.
  • (18) This superposition of introspection and austere secrecy, of simplicity and opacity, is not new.
  • (19) It includes introspective consciousness of introspective consciousness itself.
  • (20) Steeped in introspection, ambiguity and a total lack of plausible strategic sense, the Corbynistas aren’t going anywhere.

Pensive


Definition:

  • (a.) Thoughtful, sober, or sad; employed in serious reflection; given to, or favorable to, earnest or melancholy musing.
  • (a.) Expressing or suggesting thoughtfulness with sadness; as, pensive numbers.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Similarly literary and pensive was Clouds of Sils Maria , in which France's Olivier Assayas combined some modish themes — the internet, celebrity gossip, superhero movies — with some hoarier themes regarding the theatre-cinema divide, ageing and female rivalry.
  • (2) It celebrates smoking's conviviality and the splendid isolation of the smoker, the smoker's exhibitionism and her pensive introversion.
  • (3) Aware always of what he called "the desperately thin ice" we walked on, he surveyed the world and our place in it with a pensive realism, striking no heroic postures.
  • (4) Like Evra at Anfield the other week, he looks pensive.
  • (5) Watching 5,000 people stream into the UK's biggest nightclub, recently voted one of the top 20 clubs in the world by DJ magazine, boss Sacha Lord looks pensive.
  • (6) Gunduz, standing pensively before the image of Ataturk, seems to have a different idea of what is Turkish.
  • (7) His was a slow and pensive start, in which was not only overtaken by the Ferrari pair but also by Rosberg, Max Verstappen and Felipe Massa.
  • (8) The party leader, Pablo Iglesias , is featured looking pensive on his balcony, working at a table in a sparsely furnished room and watering a solitary ivy plant.
  • (9) The guitarist also revealed he is working on a new X-pensive Winos album, the first since 1992's Main Offender.
  • (10) Hou became Mao's personal photographer and, over 12 years, produced pictures that burnished his image and shaped the way he is seen even now: on the seashore; pensive before the Yellow river; jovial in a crowd.
  • (11) The plot of Anderson's pink gateau of a movie, with its dowager duchesses, murderers and bakers, turns on the fate of a "priceless" Renaissance portrait of a youth pensively clawing an apple with long, bony fingers.
  • (12) After all, the lead actor is Shia LaBeouf, a boy-man who never explains to viewers whether he's deliberately trying to be a cheap copy of pensive Ed Norton.
  • (13) Real Madrid's coach Carlo Ancelotti looks pensive ahead of the final.
  • (14) So it is right that data-privacy and data-retention issues involving Facebook, Google and their brethren are being scrutinised in the European courts , and that the European Commission is working up a consumer-data protection plan that would include the right to have your data erased – or as the EC puts it, with a pensive Mediterranean poetry, the "right to be forgotten".
  • (15) Messi runs around in delirium, Mascherano is in floods of tears, Sabella doesn't appear to believe he's led a team to a World Cup final (stop it, be nice), Kuyt, Robben and Sneijder look pensive, and Van Gaal goes around doing the polite thing, shaking hands.
  • (16) The rendition , complete with pensive stares, strummed chords and graceful spins of a floating guitar, went viral – Bowie himself retweeted it, quoting his 1995 song Hallo Spaceboy.
  • (17) Next was the high jump, the event she was more pensive about having had only four practice sessions this year.
  • (18) 7.57pm BST The teams are in the tunnel Liverpool skipper Steven Gerrard is looking pensive, staring straight ahead as he waits to lead out Liverpool, whose players are wearing largely white shirts with red trim, black shorts and black socks.
  • (19) The 16-year-old, a slight boy with a pensive air, had hoped to reach his brother in Germany but had spent two months stranded in the squalid improvised refugee camp at Idomeni in northern Greece, praying for Macedonia to reopen the gateway to central Europe.
  • (20) It'd be disingenuous to omit that there were a fair number of ding-dong-style celebratory messages amidst the pensive reflections on the end of an era.