What's the difference between pensive and wistful?

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.

Wistful


Definition:

  • (a.) Longing; wishful; desirous.
  • (a.) Full of thought; eagerly attentive; meditative; musing; pensive; contemplative.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) One radio critic described Jacobs' late night Sunday show as a "tidying-up time, a time for wistfulness, melancholy, a recognition that there were once great things and great feelings in this world.
  • (2) I can't pull an invisibility cloak over my house – nor would I wish to," she said, a little wistfully, as if she really wished she had Harry Potter's magic powers.
  • (3) The age-courses of concentrations of reduced (GSH) and oxidized (GSSG) glutathione, of GSH synthesizing enzyme activities, of glutathione S-transferase (GST), of GSSG-reductase (GR) and of biliary GSH and GSSG export were measured in livers from male Uje:WIST rats.
  • (4) – but Russell happily slips in and out of voices and lines from the movie, his recollections punctuated by wistful sighs.
  • (5) The former Internazionale owner Massimo Moratti has been staring wistfully into the distance and wonder what might have been if he had not dished his dosh on the Special One rather than mere players.
  • (6) Shareholders may be forgiven for thinking wistfully of the £55 which Pfizer offered to pay for each of their shiny shares.
  • (7) Jeremy Corbyn still speaks about it wistfully – a rally in Glasgow’s Old Fruitmarket that turned into one of the most emotional moments of his leadership campaign.
  • (8) Softness and tenderness, wistful ironies” he conceded as blindspots, describing Motown as mere “foot fodder” but having a lot of time for relatively minor practitioners such as Joe Tex , who he saw as “hugely smug” but with “great charm and inventiveness”.
  • (9) Every now and then I get wistful for when I was just a consumer of games because I can never have that back, but fortunately the love of the work is strong enough that I’m okay with that, and I’ve played so many life-changing games because I’m seeking them through the lens of a developer.
  • (10) The antiarrhythmic effects and pharmacodynamics of tobanum were evaluated in 28 patients wist paroxysms of reciprocal atrioventricular tachycardia, by using transesophageal cardiac pacing.
  • (11) After the jet-black high school satire Heathers pulled the rug out from under John Hughes and his oversharing Brat Pack, in 1989, American adolescents were left with few offerings, most of them wistful odes to another age – either stylistically, as with the overblown, pirate-radio-themed Christian Slater vehicle Pump Up the Volume; or quite literally, in the case of Richard Linklater’s nostalgia-fuelled 70s pastiche, Dazed and Confused.
  • (12) We are sitting in a boardroom on the seventh floor of the new Birmingham library , the glass walls allowing us a view of a city draped in mist, a sharp contrast to the "paradise" of Swat, with its tall mountains and clear rivers which Malala recalls wistfully.
  • (13) "Oh, it was lovely," said the retired factory worker, 61, as he smiled wistfully in the bright sunshine.
  • (14) The subjects (N = 30) were grouped into high and low levels of thought dysfunction, as measured by the Whitaker Index of Schizophrenic Thinking (WIST).
  • (15) Recently an individually administered instrument (WIST) was introduced as a brief, objective, and quantitative measure of schizophrenic thought processes.
  • (16) There's one aspect of his former life he misses: "The sweat," he sighs wistfully.
  • (17) [Small Talk thinks back wistfully to a time when ice creams were bigger, Liverpool were challenging for the league, Glenn Medeiros was top of the charts…] So you caught the cycling bug?
  • (18) Ss were administered a conjunctive, disjunctive, conditional or biconditional rule learning task, WIST, and Shipley-Hartford Memory Scale.
  • (19) It is now possible to separate wistful thinking from reality.
  • (20) It was with a mixture of wistfulness and his usual forthright bullishness that Sam Allardyce, briefly moving his attention away from the 21st-century football that West Ham United intend to confront Chelsea with on Friday afternoon, looked back eight years and contemplated what he might have achieved in his final season at Bolton Wanderers if he had received greater financial backing – or, to be precise, any financial backing – when his team were hovering around the Champions League places at Christmas.