What's the difference between pensive and quixotic?

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.

Quixotic


Definition:

  • (a.) Like Don Quixote; romantic to extravagance; absurdly chivalric; apt to be deluded.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Tap the relevant details into Google, though, and the real names soon appear before your eyes: the boss in question, stern and yet oddly quixotic, is Phyllis Westberg of Harold Ober Associates.
  • (2) It also highlights how mass-resettlement is not a quixotic policy; it has been achieved before in the aftermath of a bloody war – and could be achieved again.
  • (3) Based more on disappointment in McConnell than Bevin's promise (or crazy talk), his otherwise quixotic campaign (unseating a five-term minority leader) has gotten national attention and support from the likes of the Senate Conservative Fund (early backers of Cruz and Lee, as well as Cotton) and Palin.
  • (4) Asked why he had not relied on US intelligence for a claim with extraordinary legal implications, Trump offered a quixotic reply: “Because I don’t want to do anything that’s going to violate any strength of an agency.
  • (5) Gilliam also said that he would be restarting work on The Man Who Killed Don Quixote next year.
  • (6) There are further echoes, inevitably, of films about the quixotic, sometimes cruel exercise of journalistic power in Citizen Kane and the Sweet Smell of Success.
  • (7) Gilliam himself took to the stage to reveal plans for his long-delayed film version of the story of Don Quixote - the feature he was forced to abandon in 1999 after a freak storm destroyed his set.
  • (8) The world is flat in ways the high-flying global theoreticians don't always acknowledge; these days, even someone from the materially fortunate parts of the world – a man with a ruddy complexion, a woman in a Prada suit – is pulled aside for what is quixotically known as "random screening".
  • (9) It appears the Don Quixote that finally makes it into multiplexes will be radically different from that which might once have been seen.
  • (10) 4.31pm BST Texas Senator Ted Cruz, whose quixotic campaign to "defund" Obamacare was the stick in the spokes that got us here, could – could – cause a default all by himself, Joshua Green reports in Bloomberg BusinessWeek: How could this happen?
  • (11) The hard graft for centre-left parties across Europe is to turn this around – not to be a 21st-century Don Quixote forever tilting at 19th- or 20th-century windmills.
  • (12) Perhaps it is the classically gaunt face, or maybe it is the aquiline nose, but he looks exactly like Don Quixote.
  • (13) LA cyclists, until then lonely, quixotic figures, felt emboldened to organise their own rides, using force of numbers to co-exist with traffic in mass rides, and for races acting like flash mobs, briefly sealing off an alley here, a boulevard there.
  • (14) Royal Ballet Christmas season Instead of its regular Christmas staples – The Nutcracker, Cinderella or The Tales of Beatrix Potter – the Royal is courting the festive box office with two recent productions: Christopher Wheeldon’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Carlos Acosta’s Don Quixote.
  • (15) Remember Yusor Abu-Salha as more than just a victim of the Chapel Hill shooting | Rana Odeh Read more But even setting aside the questions that must be asked by law enforcement – and even now, we are learning more about the accused killer, including details of a stash of weapons he reportedly had at his apartment – the local community, and America at large, must begin the quixotic mission of trying to find deeper meaning in the tragedy.
  • (16) Suddenly we've discovered in our midst an exotic prancer, a quixotic chancer, an electronic Elgar who has penned some of the gaudiest, most soaring rock and roll anthems to be heard in a decade.
  • (17) Breezeblocks is the sort of idiosyncratic indie we'd imagine bands we've never heard such as Swell Maps or Arab Strap would have purveyed, affirming that there are quixotic imaginations at work here.
  • (18) He told Podemos’s followers to dream and, like that noble madman Don Quixote, “take their dreams seriously”.
  • (19) He made his name with quixotic docs about Elvis, medieval animal trials and US murder sprees, and went on to direct Man on Wire , which won him an Oscar in 2009, as well as films such as 2012's Shadow Dancer .
  • (20) Lars Von Trier is known for being unpredictable, quixotic, puckish and deliberately provocative.