Improve your vocabulary by Quiz

Use whim in a sentence

Definition of whim:

  • (noun) a sudden desire
  • (noun) an odd or fanciful or capricious idea

Sentence Examples:

There is no point upon which men are more tender than their privilege of suiting themselves in a partner for life, although many of both sexes are influenced in this important selection more by the wishes and whims of others than is usually suspected; yet, as all imagine what is the result of contrivance and management is the election of free will and taste, so long as they are ignorant, they are contented.

My advocacy of women's suffrage and of Personal Representation, were at the time looked upon by many as whims of my own; but the great progress since made by those opinions, and especially the response made from almost all parts of the kingdom to the demand for women's suffrage, fully justified the timeliness of those movements, and have made what was undertaken as a moral and social duty, a personal success.

In the designations of refuges for deer, various questions are to be considered, such as abundance of food, proximity to water, suitable shelter, an exposure to their liking, for they may be permitted to have whims in a matter of this sort, just as fully as Indians or the residents of the city, when they deign to honor the country by their presence.

In his work he is the reverse of Smollett, the latter being given over to coarse vulgarities, which are often mistaken for realism; the former to whims and vagaries and sentimental tears, which frequently only disguise a sneer at human grief and pity.

It is only then that he sees things quite plain, and takes them for that which they really are: while in earlier years he saw a phantom-world, put together out of the whims and crotchets of his own mind, inherited prejudice and strange delusion: the real world was hidden from him, or the vision of it distorted.

If the dead have any privilege, it ought to be that of holding their tongues; yet an unseemly fashion has prevailed lately of making them gabble for years in Diaries, Remains, Correspondences, and Recollections, perpetuating in a solid telltale record all they may have said and written thoughtlessly or in a momentary pet, giving to a fleeting whim the printed permanence of a settled opinion, and robbing the grave of what is sometimes its only consoling attribute, the dignity of reserve.

As in all Oriental countries, the contact between prince and beggar, vizier and serf is disconcertingly free and familiar, and one must see the highest court officials kissing the hem of the Sultan's robe, and hear authentic tales of slaves given by one merchant to another at the end of a convivial evening, to be reminded that nothing is as democratic in appearance as a society of which the whole structure hangs on the whim of one man.

And this more careful study shows itself in him in no technical peculiarities or fantastic whims, against which the genius of our language revolts; but in a more exact adaptation of the movement to the feeling, and in a finer selection of particular words with reference to their local fitness for sense and sound.

In 1790, which was seven years after the appearance of his first grammar, he published an octavo volume of more than four hundred pages, consisting of Essays, moral, historical, political, and literary, which might have done him credit, had he not spoiled his book by a grammatical whim about the reformation of orthography.

It was also naturally a new grievance for his wife, who began to believe in him as soon as he was blighted, and who at this hour accuses us of having bribed him, on the whim of a meddlesome American, to renounce his glorious office, to become, as she says, like everybody else.

When a boy has reached a certain age he is subjected to a peculiarly disgusting ceremony, and after that he may insult his mother with impunity whenever he chooses: "he may cudgel her, if he pleases, to suit his whim, without any danger of being called to an account for it."

If in the wisdom of the members of the legislature the crime calls for imprisonment in the penitentiary, then the ordinary sentences run one, two, five, ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty years, and life, according to the hazard of the legislature, the whim of the court, the gamble of the jury, or the feeling and means of expression of the unthinking and pitiless crowd who awe courts and juries with their cries for vengeance.

The people recognized no sentiment of human sympathy in the so-called "whims" and "caprices" of the luxurious occupants of palaces; and maddened by countless wrongs, precipitated the French Revolution, which, it has been said, turned back the tide of progress for one hundred years.

Yet to hand over this bright singing bird, so exquisite, so rare, so fitted for purposes of exposition, to the keeping of a mere male being of unfortunate contiguity, to permit him to carry her into the seclusion of an ordinary home to wait on him and regulate her life according to his whim, was really too fantastic for consideration.

As for Louis, chilled by the coldness of his mistress, distracted by her whims and rages, his heart often yearned for the woman he had so cruelly discarded; and separation did more than all her tears and caresses could have done, to awake again the love he fancied was dead.

On the other hand, it is a favorite whim of the genuine pigtail age to draw bird's-eye landscapes and views of cities, in which every elevation of the earth seems flattened out as much as possible, every distinct division of the separate grounds as much as possible obliterated.

It seemed impossible, as furs and laces and brocades were tossed aside, brought back, and at last carelessly selected from, that anything but the whim of the moment need count in deciding whether one should take all or none, or that any woman could be worth looking at who did not possess the means to make her choice regardless of cost.

At the risk of being dry and bald, I have confined myself to telling accurately what has happened, my greatest ambition being to leave no one the chance of misrepresenting, as his whim, fancy, or passion may dictate, facts in which I am so deeply interested.

If my school were only out in the heart of that big forest, I feel that my work would be more effective and that I would not have to potter about among little things to obey the whims of convention and the dictates of technicalities, but that the soul would be free to revel in the truth that sky and space proclaim.

As the American still looked indifferent the porter pointed out with some importance that it was a Ducal courtesy not to be lightly treated; that few, indeed, of the burghers themselves had ever been admitted to this eccentric whim of the late Grand Duchess.

It may be true that the introduction of everything which tends to uplift and enlighten is a proper object for missionary activity, but we venture to argue not all at once, in the same place, nor even any one of them at the whim of any missionary at any time, anywhere.

This is indeed very far from being universal; and some gardens, admired and celebrated still, are so smoothly regular, so over-planted, and so crowded with affected, impertinent, ridiculous ornaments of temples, ruins, pyramids, obelisks, statues, and a thousand other contemptible whims, that a continuation of the same ground in its rude natural state, is infinitely more delightful.

That life, which had grown up with him as a flattering and obsequious friend, obeying all his whims, yielding to all his desires, should now have turned upon him in this traitorous way, inflicting such monstrous reprisals and rebuffs, roused in him the astonishment and resentment natural to such a temperament.

Here was a population, low-class and mostly foreign, hanging always on the verge of starvation, and dependent for its opportunities of life upon the whim of men every bit as brutal and unscrupulous as the old-time slave drivers; under such circumstances immorality was exactly as inevitable, and as prevalent, as it was under the system of chattel slavery.

What I say now is a mere whim, you know; but when I speak of a school of events, I mean one in which, before entering real life, students might pass through the mimic vicissitudes and situations that are necessary to bring out their powers and mark the caliber to which they are assigned.

And as, before her marriage, the wife had insisted on reinstating the greater number of the old servants, who to fidelity to the old line added hostility to a master whom they looked on as an interloper, the husband soon found it to his advantage to conciliate the household by giving way to the whims of his wife.

His father, Philip, was French, pure and simple, quite as French as his grandfather, Philip the Hardy, the first Duke of Burgundy out of the House of Valois, even though Philip the Good had extended his sway to many non-French-speaking peoples and was able to use the Flemish speech if it suited his whim.

She respected him for his calm strength, against which the boisterous moods of George reacted as harmlessly as the whims of a child, and she liked him for his unfailing courtesy, for his patience, for his gentleness, which made her feel that he was, in spite of the material nature of his occupation, the only member of the household who possessed even a glimmer of spirituality.

I am glad that at last you thoroughly appreciate our situation, and I hope that in addition you realize it has been brought about not through any fault of Roland's, who gave in to your whims and childishness until you came to the point of murder and robbery.

Without wishing to yield too much to what may be considered a whim of fashion, we cannot, if we are to note in this book the stage actually reached in the continuous march of physics, refrain from giving a clearly preponderant place to the questions suggested by the study of the new radiations.

That the foregoing is an idle and impertinent invention there is little need to show, inasmuch as both tower and spire might still have been built to satisfy the whim of the old ladies, though placed in the usual manner, one serving as a substratum to the other.

He is a boy, full of adventure, full of romance, and full of whims, seeing life as the finest fairy-tale in the world, and enjoying every incident that comes his way, whether it be the bitterest and most cruel of fights or the opportunity for doing someone a romantic kindness.

Turkey is a very large empire, and the trouble with the present system of government is, that the Sultan does not have resident ministers for the various parts of it, as other countries do, but governs the whole himself, being guided entirely by the advice of the few people near him in his palace, who do not know the affairs of the empire any better than he does, but advise him according to their own whims, or prospects of making money out of the country.

We certainly have had isms enough to indulge the whims and caprices, and to suit the peculiar predilections, prejudices and prepossessions of all concerned; but it appears from present indications, that we are about to have a new ism forced upon us, whether we will or no.

With all my aunts sharp, crusty ways, one could not but respect her, when they noticed with what forbearance she treated every whim and fancy of her aged mother, and upon this occasion when she advised the old lady to retire to rest, and she replied, "that she must sit up to hurry things along," she did not press the matter but allowed her to take her own way.

After all, the success of that style of painting which aims merely at approximating reality, not at rendering it in all its truth, was the fortune of a season which the wind brings and blows away again, a mere whim on the part of the great lunatic city; the stir it caused was like that occasioned by some accident, which upsets the crowd in the morning and is forgotten by night amidst general indifference.

On the lady's side there was no stern, selfish parent who would burden the young shoulders, and drive from her path those inmost pleasures so natural to the young and light-hearted, and cause her to lose her freshness and bloom, by attending solely to his whims and wishes, or crush her young heart with hope deferred.

Her beautiful face crimsoned at this assertion; for she well knew that many a severe imposition had been placed upon her during girlhood, and that, had she been any other girl than she was, her very youth would have been forced into opposition to commands that originated in whim, caprice, and selfishness.

In the beginning of the conversation he was sly and complimentary, afterwards he became more insinuating, then more direct in his praises of their beauty; but as his timidity on the point of character was known, the mischief-loving girls uniformly ended with a threat of exposing him to the priest, to his friends, or to the neighbors, as the whim directed them.

Carl laughed softly but recalling suddenly how Diane had looked as she stood in the doorway, the flame of her honest anger setting off her primitive grace, he frowned thoughtfully at the fire, swayed by one of the mad, reckless whims which frequently rocketed through his brain to heedless consummation.

Again, being at the beck and call of a prejudiced foreman who was all-powerful, and having no assured protection from the whims of such a man, the worker was obliged, practically for self-protection, to try to conciliate the foremen by methods of assuming merits that are obvious, on the surface.

The fair lady, after an engagement of two years, took a whim that there was no happiness in marriage without being madly in love, and that her passion was not sufficiently romantic; in which piece of folly my rebel encouraged her, and the affair broke off in a manner which has brought on her the imputation of having given way to an idle prepossession in favor of another.

"You have hit the nail upon the head," said he, with an assumed expression of respect for the decision of his uncle, "and it is by the means of that very trait of character which you have mentioned, that I hope to work myself through the world, although I am only the son of a poor secretary in a government office, who is embarrassed by debt and a large family, thus you perceive I cannot depend solely upon the whims of fortune."

By some strange whim of a panic-maddened crowd, but few had discovered this exit, high above the seats in the balcony; for all had rushed below and were struggling in a wild, frantic mass, trampling one another underfoot in a mad struggle to reach the doorways.

And if Sterne had pretended to play with this tragic tale, he would have given us the married life of Juliet's parents, with all the humorous whims of old Capulet; and after unending digressions the author might die himself before his heroine was fairly out of the arms of the nurse.

"There is so much real suffering in life, that it is a pity to have any which is merely imaginary; and though, while you are a little girl, living with indulgent friends, your whims might all be gratified, a constant and uniform regard to them will be impossible by and by, when you are old enough to mingle with the world."

Because of a whim that seized her, she helped to prepare the breakfast that was to be served to the household at sunrise, and then she partook of it heartily, looking out of a southern window as she ate, watching the red sun ascend behind the naked boles of the elms.

The proletarian, who has nothing but his two hands, who consumes to-day what he earned yesterday, who is subject to every possible chance, and has not the slightest guarantee for being able to earn the barest necessities of life, whom every crisis, every whim of his employer may deprive of bread, this proletarian is placed in the most revolting, inhuman position conceivable for a human being.

He knows that every breeze that blows, every whim of his employer, every bad turn of trade may hurl him back into the fierce whirlpool from which he has temporarily saved himself, and in which it is hard and often impossible to keep his head above water.

The genial disorder of the chairs, moved at the whim of the Olympians, had all been put straight, and the whole room possessed an air of studied correctness, as though it were anxious to forget the previous evening's laxity with the least possible delay.

He was of that determined nature which performs thoroughly any work once deliberately undertaken; and, although the merest idle whim had originally brought him to this position of utility man in the "Heart of the World" company, he was already beginning to experience a slight degree of interest in the success of the coming show, and to feel a faint esprit de corps, which commanded his best efforts.

Elliott has Palma blood in his veins, and that has certain unmistakable tendencies to obstinacy, though its conduct in love affairs yet remains to be tested; but it occurs to me that if you are in earnest in desiring to crush this foolish whim in the bud, you can very easily accomplish it by empowering me to make to my cousin a simple statement, which will extinguish the matter beyond all possibility of resurrection.

Nature will have it so, and has no end of resources, and will not suffer even the sluggish to sit still, but if nothing else will do, pins a cracker to their skirts, in the shape of a tender passion, or some other whim, and so sets them bouncing in their own obese and clumsy way, to the trouble of others as well as their own discomfort.

If Madame de Lanty were not present, the Count would employ a thousand ruses to reach his side; but it always seemed as if he found difficulty in inducing him to listen, and he treated him like a spoiled child, whose mother gratifies his whims and at the same time suspects mutiny.

In short, Louise was one of those fickle birds of passage who from fancy, and often from necessity, make for a day, or rather a night, their nest in the garrets of the students' quarter, and remain there willingly for a few days, if one knows how to retain them by a whim or by some ribbons.

As for the fighting prima donnas, it is obvious that a singer whose success is constantly dependent upon the whims of a fickle public, is more subject than almost any other mortal to constant attacks of envy and jealousy, so that it is unfair not to make some allowance for temper in her case.

It may be my whim to wander through infinite parks where the deer lie under the clustering shadow of their antlers and flee lightly over the grass; to whisper with white prophets under the elms or bind a child with a daisy-chain or, with a lady, thread my way through the acacias.

Barbara Allison insisted upon joining the excursion down to the mill that morning; she developed a sudden and unshakable resolve to be one of the party, and after his remonstrances had finally brought stormy tears to her eyes, Allison surrendered in perplexity to her whim.

Everywhere the action of capital, the ringing of the plane, now and then, as in those times, the sound of arms, but all tending to far other ends than the welfare of a reigning family, or to satisfy the revengeful whim of a royal mistress, or the bigotry of a monarch.

Hardy his attitude toward her had been one of subtle flattery; partly because it pleased his whim, and partly because on that same day he had seen Irene, and he was shrewd enough to know that his approach to the girl's affections must be made by way of the acquaintanceship which he would establish under the guise of friendship for her mother.

This was no learned curiosity, nor the whim of seeing the universe under drill, but only a clearer instinct of what the purpose of Art is, namely, to see the reality of the actual world in and as the appearance, instead of groping for some ulterior reality hidden behind it.

Protestantism, too, had its orthodoxy, and has not even yet quite realized that the private judgment whose rights it vindicated does not mean personal whim, and therefore is not fortified by the assent of any man or body of men, nor weakened by their dissent, but belongs alone to thought, which is necessarily individual, and at the same time of universal validity; whereas, personality is partial, belongs to the crowd, and to that part of the man which confounds him with the crowd.

She was at first a little afraid that he had become in some way embarrassed; but, as he assured her, with a complacent smile, that this was far from being the case, she soon learned to treat these little attempts at saving as an innocent whim, especially as they only extended to trifling details, the baron insisting as much as ever upon keeping up a dignified and imposing social appearance.

With this resolve he prudently communicated the ladies' intention to a confidential friend of the marquis, who, on receiving an intimation of their intentions, laughed at the whim, and determined to humor the joke, by attending the place, properly disguised, to watch at a distance the frolic of the ladies.

Unable to see any cause for her having missed the appointment he turned upon her in sudden anger; he even had a suspicion that she might have wished to inflict a humiliation, a punishment upon him, or else that she had merely indulged in a whim in order to inflame his desire afresh.

We did not see that it would be a little sooner or a little later discounted by literary demagogues, who, without tradition, without a creed, without any law except their own whims, would become the slaves of every base passion, and of all physical and moral deformities.

Ichabod, on the contrary, had to win his way to the heart of a country coquette beset with a labyrinth of whims and caprices, which were forever presenting new difficulties and impediments, and he had to encounter a host of fearful adversaries of real flesh and blood, the numerous rustic admirers who beset every portal to her heart, keeping a watchful and angry eye upon each other, but ready to fly out in the common cause against any new competitor.

He would have been quite unable to think of anything that he would sooner do than what he did; and he had sufficient of the ingrained human tendency to do something of the sort, which was a matter of routine rather than effort, than have nothing whatever, except the gratification of momentary whims, to fill his day.

He never denied himself the gratification of the slightest whim, whatever expense he might himself incur, or whatever trouble he might give to those about him; and all was done under protestation, that the matter in question was the most indifferent thing to him in the world.

The alacrity with which he and his merry little dog Carlin did the honors of the vehicle, and the stout active appearance of the horse (to say nothing of the whim of the moment, and the fine morning), reconciled us to a mode of conveyance no better than that which calves enjoy in a butcher's cart; and for the first few miles we forgot even the want of springs.

They could endure the whims of their ill-conditioned king all the better for knowing that after him was to come a prince after their own heart, one of English sympathies and English instincts; one who even as a boy had won their hearts by his pluck, his frankness, and his wit, and who, as he grew up, developed into a manhood as vigorous and noble as that of his father was mean and imbecile.

A confused mass of coronets and initials, passing whims and old habits, sullied at that moment by being thrown together promiscuously, all swallowed up in that ghastly place, by lamplight, with a noise as of an intermittent deluge, going to oblivion by a shameful road.

Now the question simply reduces itself to this: Shall this sentiment, this love, be founded on a complete and accurate knowledge of what is necessary to the complete gratification of the whole nature, or shall it be founded upon mere caprice or whim, the gratification of a mere fragmentary instinct which has never been educated to the comprehension of its true needs?

He had thought her soulless, a pretty, light-hearted, unselfish little comrade, swayed by feminine whims and caprices, but incapable of rising to the stature of the perfect woman; and lo, in one moment of unconscious revelation she had shown herself to him as a woman indeed, one who had realized that he had married her for some other cause than love, yet did not stoop to blame him.

She was a fresh, cool, dewy thing, sunny and shadowy, full of pleasant little mischiefs, fitful and changeable with the whim of the moment, but yet as constant as her native stream, which kept the same gush and flow forever, while marble crumbled over and around it.

From the very beginning, the Jansenist vicar was so perplexed and startled by the audacity of his pupil, he had to say so much to calm him into submission, he was obliged to sustain such assaults of bold questions and proud objections, that he had no leisure to teach him the alphabet; and at the end of ten years of studies, broken off and taken up at the bidding of a whim or on compulsion, Patience could not even read.

Bills and drafts came upon him without number, while the account, on her part, of money expended, amounted chiefly to articles of dress that she sometimes never wore, toys that were out of fashion before they were paid for, and charities directed by the force of whim.

Though thought by friends and acquaintances to be a young man of strong mind, fascinating, magnetic manners, and high aspirations, with a brilliant prospective career, he seemed careless of that dubious prestige whose uncertain tenure is subject to the whims of the alleged "select."

He has his whims, and though they have won for him little popularity, we regret that they are not shared more largely by the public, which will never appreciate his merits as a censor, until the best features of our civilization are quite obliterated.

He should appear to the child not like a barrier of whims, which, if need be, one may clear, provided the leap be proportioned to the height of the obstacle; but like a transparent wall through which may be seen unchanging realities, laws, limits, and truths against which no action is possible.

His dinner jacket was not the latest cut, but after giving it much consideration they had decided that it was not far enough off to be noticeable, and how very handsome and assured he looked as he sauntered with the confident air of a man who had only to entertain a whim to gratify it.

It was with a mournful interest that all day I watched him follow the child about, gather her posies, help her to water her flowers, and accommodate himself to those whims and fancies, of which, as the pet and the youngest, Mistress Maud had her full share.

Though they would have cared little for drowning me, or knocking me on the head, to gratify a whim of their own, they would have been sadly grieved had I succeeded in running away from them; and, evidently suspecting that I might harbor such an intention, they took care that I should not have the slightest opportunity of carrying it out.

June, loveliest of the Summer months, introduces to the notice of anglers a large and daily increasing number of the insect tribe; "variety may be charming," but the most expert and knowing of anglers will now occasionally be somewhat puzzled in making a selection of flies adapted to suit the capricious whims, or fastidious appetite of the Trout, now in their prime, fat, strong, and somewhat satiated by a succession of dainty morsels.

Who among you would slave your life away in the sweatshops of the Invaders, knowing that those for whom you worked might, at any time, simply deprive you of your livelihood at their own whim, since they feel no sense of responsibility toward you as individuals?

When inaugurating the Port Folio he wrote of himself: "He has long been urged by a sober wish, or, if the sneering reader will have it so, he has long been deluded by the visionary whim, of making literature the handmaid of fortune, or at least of securing something like independence, by exertion, as a man of letters."

Children also when they have reached maturity, although they owe to their parents a reverent regard for all reasonable desires and wishes, ought not to sacrifice opportunities for gaining a desired education or an advantageous start in business, merely to gratify a capricious whim or groundless foreboding of an arbitrary and unreasoning parent.

The king was clearly in no mood to listen to argument; indeed, he was evidently very much ruffled in temper, and in just that frame of mind which would impel him to insist the more strongly on having his own way should I attempt anything in the nature of dissuasion: therefore all I could see for it was to submit to his whim, and do my best to disarm my antagonist without hurting him.

Such education as he could give them during his continuous wanderings over the North and South Pacific had been but scanty; for he was often away on trading cruises, and his wife, though she could read and write, like all Hawaiian women, was not competent to instruct her children, though in all other respects she was everything that a mother should be, except, as Flemming would often tell her, she was too indulgent and too ready to gratify their whims and fancies.

At this age, a man is eager to contribute to the contentment and happiness of his partner, even if it is necessary to sacrifice his own whims and opinions, and a woman, at this period, is temperamentally so constituted that she will respond to the same impulses.

Whoever, therefore, begins gardening, must not look upon it as an idle sport, to be taken up and thrown aside with the whim of the moment, but as an occupation for leisure hours, that the mind must be brought to bear upon, and which must engage him from day to day, from month to month, from spring to summer, from autumn to winter, and so through all the changes of the varied year.

It then gathered again into a dozen dancing fragments, which alternately advanced and retreated, shot hither and thither, against and across each other, blazed out in yellow and rosy gleams or paled again, playing a thousand fantastic pranks, as if guided by some wild whim.

The greatest disagreeableness I encountered was occasioned by the capricious behavior of the princesses, who sometimes received me with pleasure and at others evinced a disposition to annoy me in every possible way, according as it suited the whims and wishes of those about them.

Very possibly this girl may be in possession of facts more important than you at present conceive possible; the earnestness with which she perseveres in her desire of seeing you, and her repeated prayers to those around her to beg your attendance, proves that it is something more than the mere whim of a sick person, and in your place, I should not hesitate to comply with her wishes.

And she purchased a cookery book and commenced operations, and held to her resolve with Spartan firmness, encouraged by private but enthusiastic bursts of commendation from Griffith, who, finding her out, read the tender meaning of the fanciful seeming whim, and was so touched thereby that the mere sight of her in her nonsensical little affectation of working paraphernalia raised him to a seventh heaven of bliss.

He thought of how the women he liked most were more often than not a docile antithesis to his mother with the notable exceptions of young, recalcitrant, and sexy martinets of selfish whims imposed as laws who when with that same draping and tangled curl of hair and the same totalitarian streak to squelch all males seemed just like his mother, or what little he remembered of her beyond his castrated will under her auspices.

Free to contemplate the unequal plight of man (or woman as it was in his case), to see color in forms and feelings and thought, to mix with forms by allowing licentious whims to twist around the kite in accordance with natural mandates to reign in those turbulent skies, he basked in others perceptions of him as handsome, successful, and affluent.

Each of these two sources in him augments the other: through his faculty of not seeing things as they are, he attributes to himself virtue and genius; satisfied that he possesses genius and virtue, he regards his misdeeds as merits and his whims as truths.

Therefore, as a direct result of this and like experiences, I have learned to make proper allowances for the whims of the Fates. I have learned that it is their pleasure to deluge me with rainstorms at unpropitious moments, also to send me, with my hammock, to eminently desirable countries, which, however, are barren of trees and scourged of every respectable shrub.

They will have something to do with flowers and with bright butterflies, and we shall know why our "favorite color" is more than a whim, and why the Greeks may not have been able to distinguish the full gamut of our spectrum, and why rainbows are so narrow to our eyes in comparison to what they might be.