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Definition
inability to control bodily bathroom functions; or inability or unwillingness to moderate other things (when not specified, often sexual behavior)- It went on to a grand-mal attack; tonic clonic seizure, urinary incontinence, the whole bit.Michael Crichton -- The Andromeda Strain
- How oft have I preached to you caution, if not continence?Sir Walter Scott -- Ivanhoe
- They prayed: "Endow them with continence and fruitfulness, and vouchsafe that their hearts may rejoice looking upon their sons and daughters."Leo Tolstoy -- Anna Karenina
- I find every evidence that in his old age he regretted having practised continence.Willa Cather -- Death Comes for the Archbishop
- To be bigoted you have to be absolutely sure that you are right and nothing makes that surety and righteousness like continence.Ernest Hemingway -- For Whom the Bell Tolls
- It's a new version of Dahl1 and just as boguslinguistic graphomania, verbal incontinence.Boris Pasternak -- Doctor Zhivago
- While he was angry therefore with the incontinence of Jones, he was no less pleased with the honour and honesty of his self-accusation.Henry Fielding -- Tom Jones
- [2] These three beasts correspond to the triple division of sins into those of incontinence, of violence, and of fraud.Dante Alighieri -- Dante's Inferno
- You have sense enough: don't give way to drunkenness and incontinence of speech; don't give way to sensual lust; and, above all, to the love of money.Fyodor Dostoyevsky -- The Brothers Karamazov
- I encountered with a second priest thereafter, wha said the bridle was for continence and the candle was for faith—it seems that Ector and masel' were lacking these.T. H. White -- The Once and Future King
- "I can't think what that strange person's come about," the butler added, from mere incontinence of remark, as he preceded Adam to the door, "he's gone i' the dining-room.George Eliot -- Adam Bede
- I held my tongue and forbore from saying that the cure for his malady was a little continence, for I wanted his help that day, and I would be hard pressed to get it if I angered him.Geraldine Brooks -- Year of Wonders
- Therefore they call the lawfull use of Wives, want of Chastity, and Continence; and so make Marriage a Sin, or at least a thing so impure, and unclean, as to render a man unfit for the Altar.Thomas Hobbes -- Leviathan
- ] The pox approach, and add to your diseases, If it would send you hence the sooner, sir, For your incontinence, it hath deserv'd it Thoroughly, and thoroughly, and the plague to boot!Ben Jonson -- Volpone
- Denver tended her, watched her sound sleep, listened to her labored breathing and, out of love and a breakneck possessiveness that charged her, hid like a personal blemish Beloved's incontinence.Toni Morrison -- Beloved
- Sancho had not thought it worth while to hobble Rocinante, feeling sure, from what he knew of his staidness and freedom from incontinence, that all the mares in the Cordova pastures would not lead him into an impropriety.Miguel de Cervantes -- Don Quixote
- In the first place, humans who have not the gift of continence can be deterred from seeking marriage as a solution because they do not find themselves "in love", and, thanks to us, the idea of marrying with any other motive seems to them low and cynical.C.S. Lewis -- The Screwtape Letters
- Since an overpopulation of wolves above the carrying capacity of the country to maintain would mean a rapid decline in the numbers of prey animals — with consequent starvation for the wolves themselves — they are forced to practice what amounts to birth control through continence.Farley Mowat -- Never Cry Wolf
- It was the ornament of the temple wall: at first, a rude relief carved on pediments, then the relief became bolder, and a head or arm was projected from the wall, the groups being still arranged with reference to the building, which serves also as a frame to hold the figures; and when, at last, the greatest freedom of style and treatment was reached, the prevailing genius of architecture still enforced a certain calmness and continence in the statue.Ralph Waldo Emerson -- Selected Essays
- Continence is the foe of heresy.Ernest Hemingway -- For Whom the Bell Tolls