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Definition
to praise to achieve an end- She is blunt, uninterested in small talk, and irritated by blandishment.
- She neither languished nor blandished. No feminine lures were wasted on him.Jack London -- Adventure
- As thus he spake, each bird and beast behold Approaching two and two; these cowering low With blandishment; each bird stooped on his wing.John Milton -- Paradise Lost
- For when a heart insists on its destiny, resisting the general blandishment, then the agony is great; so too the danger.Joseph Campbell -- The Hero With a Thousand Faces
- Him Dido now with blandishment detains; But I suspect the town where Juno reigns.Virgil -- The Aeneid
- The expression with which the youth received this present was indescribable, He appeared to yield to the blandishment of her air, in opposition to a strong inward impulse to the contrary.James Fenimore Cooper -- The Pioneers
- She may do it by blandishment, like Rosalind, or by stratagem, like Mariana; but in every case the relation between the woman and the man is the same: she is the pursuer and contriver, he the pursued and disposed of.George Bernard Shaw -- Man And Superman
- Their condition of domiciliary comradeship put her, as the woman, to such disadvantage by its enforced intercourse, that he felt it unfair to her to exercise any pressure of blandishment which he might have honestly employed had she been better able to avoid him.Thomas Hardy -- Tess of the d'Urbervilles
- They would know that inconsistency in human decision can make nonsense of the bestplanned espionage approach; that cheats, liars and criminals may resist every blandishment while respectable gentlemen have been moved to appalling treasons by watery cabbage in a departmental canteen.John Le Carre -- The Spy Who Came In From The Cold
- So, through the rest of the walk, he claimed Adam's conversation for himself, and Hetty laid her small plots and imagined her little scenes of cunning blandishment, as she walked along by the hedgerows on honest Adam's arm, quite as well as if she had been an elegantly clad coquette alone in her boudoir.George Eliot -- Adam Bede
- "But you know," Liz insisted, a note of blandishment in her voice, "you are Commissar at the prison.John Le Carre -- The Spy Who Came In From The Cold
- ...honour of God, or for the intent to yield his wife his debt of his body; eke when he will not visit the sick, or the prisoner, if he may; eke if he love wife, or child, or other worldly thing, more than reason requireth; eke if he flatter or blandish more than he ought for any necessity; eke if he minish or withdraw the alms of the poor; eke if he apparail [prepare] his meat more deliciously than need is, or eat it too hastily by likerousness [gluttony]; eke if he talk vanities in the...Geoffrey Chaucer -- The Canterbury Tales