toggle menu
menu
vocabulary
1000+ books

martyr
in a sentence

show 189 more with this conextual meaning
  • She was patient—a martyr, indeed but she forebore to pray for enemies, lest, in spite of her forgiving aspirations, the words of the blessing should stubbornly twist themselves into a curse.   (source)
    martyr = someone who suffers to uphold principles
  • Fellow-martyrs, have at him!   (source)
  • I trembled with excess of agitation as I said this; there was a frenzy in my manner, and something, I doubt not, of that haughty fierceness which the martyrs of old are said to have possessed.   (source)
    martyrs = someone who dies or suffers to uphold principles
  • But I'd thought it was a small conflict, like the Boston Massacre, which Dad talked about a lot, in which half a dozen people had been martyred by a tyrannical government.†   (source)
  • Maybe he'd been hallucinating, or his martyrdom fantasies had gotten the better of him.†   (source)
  • "That's the one thing Shi'a people do well," he said, picking up his papers, "passing themselves as martyrs."†   (source)
  • The tithes endure the occasional jeers and hisses from the terribles, like martyrs.†   (source)
  • Maybe they wanted their own martyr, their own one-man Sacco and Vanzetti.†   (source)
  • To lift up Cassie as a martyr, then, is unnecessary.†   (source)
  • Apparently, 'charity, hope, and faith' are also the names of three martyred Catholic saints.†   (source)
  • Standing unprotected as I was, I felt I was living the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian.†   (source)
  • The warmth hit me with the force of an air bag; Mum is a martyr to the cold and keeps the heating on all year round.†   (source)
  • As vividly as any number of the stories in the Bible, Owen Meany showed us what a martyr was.†   (source)
  • Wylie put on a martyr's face.†   (source)
  • Adorned with 140 statues of saints, martyrs, and angels, the Herculean edifice stretched two football fields wide and a staggering six long.†   (source)
  • We were proud of our precious red scarves, which, like the national flag, were dyed red with the blood of our revolutionary martyrs.†   (source)
  • In a frenzy Tita beat, beat, beat the cake batter, as if she wanted to complete her martyrdom once and for all.†   (source)
  • They can turn me into some kind of martyr for the cause and paint my face on banners, and it will do more to rally people than anything I could do if I was living.†   (source)
  • Soldiers and war heroes are honored and commemorated, explorers are granted immortal fame, martyrs are revered, but how many people look upon women too as soldiers?†   (source)
  • His accent made him exotic and interesting; his broken arm made him a martyr; his sadism made him a natural focus for all those who loved pain in others.†   (source)
  • …seemed to be around fifty or sixty, poorly shaven, with a shy, pleasant, large-featured face neither handsome nor plain— a man who would always be bigger than most of the other men in the room, though he also seemed unhealthy in some clammy, ill-defined way, with black-circled eyes and a pallor that made me think of the Jesuit martyrs depicted in the church murals I'd seen on our school trip to Montreal: large, capable, death-pale Europeans, staked and bound in the camps of the Hurons.†   (source)
  • Behind a mystique of adventure, toughness, footloose vagabondage-all much needed antidotes to our culture's built-in comfort and convenience may lie a kind of adolescent refusal to take seriously aging, the frailty of others, interpersonal responsibility, weakness of all kinds, the slow and unspectacular course of life itself… [TIop climbers… can be deeply moved, in fact maudlin; but only for worthy martyred excomrades.†   (source)
  • A martyr?†   (source)
  • Martin Luther King had told them not long before the bullet took him down to his martyr's grave that he had been to the mountain.†   (source)
  • Will you perish as a martyr?†   (source)
  • I have long relied on the comforts of martyrdom.†   (source)
  • But I did not want my husband to go into the quarry as hero and come out as martyr.†   (source)
  • He waited by the passenger door with a martyred expression that was easy to understand.†   (source)
  • The nation could hardly bury its martyred Father Abraham with a lead ball lodged in his brain.†   (source)
  • In a eulogy two friends said Ferris had "miscalculated his powers of endurance, and he died a martyr to his ambition for fame and prominence."†   (source)
  • The skin becomes almost translucent, the eye sockets dark, so that the sufferer takes on the appearance of a martyr in medieval paintings.†   (source)
  • Mae looked up to Bailey's stained-glass ceiling—all those angels—thinking how much Mercer would like to be considered a martyr.†   (source)
  • When the hanging's done and the embers at the burning stake are grayed and cold, the conquered bodies of martyrs become the unconquerable ideas.†   (source)
  • Behind it loomed an ornate gold screen, etched with the figures of saints and martyrs, each with a flat gold disk behind his head representing a halo.†   (source)
  • He prescribed infusions of linden blossoms to calm the nerves and suggested a change of air so he could find consolation in distance, but Florentino Ariza longed for just the opposite: to enjoy his martyrdom.†   (source)
  • Does he think to get himself killed and achieve martyrdom?†   (source)
  • The results of Socrates' martyrdom and Plato's unexcelled prose that followed are nothing less than the whole world of Western man as we know it.†   (source)
  • Feeling pretty smug in my martyrdom, I had just reached the top landing when a still, small voice arose in my heart: And what did my Son do for you?†   (source)
  • Mrs. Breedlove handled hers as an actor does a prop: for the articulation of character, for support of a role she frequently imagined was hers— martyrdom.†   (source)
  • "We'll take up where we left off, Esther," she had said, with her sweet, martyr's smile.†   (source)
  • But in the nearby house of his fellow country-folk the man with the white-marked heard spoke of martyrdom, not as the most desirable outcome but as one possible end of a path the right-minded had no other choice but to follow, and advocated a banding together of migrants along religious principles, cutting across divisions of race or language or nation, for what did those divisions matter now in a world full of doors, the only divisions that mattered now were between those who sought…†   (source)
  • Forty-nine men and boys martyred in those mountains.†   (source)
  • Miss Williams said, "Class, I believe you remember that tomorrow is Valentine's Day, so named for St. Valentine, the martyr, who died around A.D. 270 in Rome.†   (source)
  • Between the helmet and the bit, she looked like she was being tortured, like some kind of martyr.†   (source)
  • In the car, driving back with the money from Tom's house on Cape Cod, Jim Kim said to Paul, "You're no use to anyone as a martyr."†   (source)
  • He was killed in February 1940—just before the peace treaty with the Soviet Union—and thereby became a martyr in the Nazi movement and had a battle group named after him.†   (source)
  • For some reason these did not appeal to me nearly as much as the stories of the saints and martyrs I heard a few months later when I began to study catechism with the Maryknolls.†   (source)
  • He had worked with the scum of the earth before-killers and rapists who fancied themselves martyrs.†   (source)
  • His brother was recently martyred in iraq.†   (source)
  • Oh, what a martyrdom!†   (source)
  • My death—our deaths—would not be in vain; if anything we might serve the cause greater in death as martyrs than we ever could in life.†   (source)
  • He would be a martyr to them.†   (source)
  • BENEATHA: The martyr!†   (source)
  • He didn't say yes, though, only crossed his arms over his chest and blew out a long, martyred sigh.†   (source)
  • These two were as mad with greed at the thought of the silver mine in the mountains as ever were forty-niners in the golden days of California, or those more recent ignoble martyrs who strewed their bones along the icy trails of the Klondike.†   (source)
  • But you're acting like a martyr now.†   (source)
  • Martyrdom.†   (source)
  • Diallo was held up as a martyr.†   (source)
  • Not after saints, theologians or Jesuit martyrs.†   (source)
  • Would there be as many suicide bombers if the presumption was that martyrs would arrive at the Pearly Gates and be handed a dish of white grapes?†   (source)
  • With the regularity of mile markers, white shahid, or "martyr" monuments honored the death of Frontier Works Organization roadbuilders who had perished in their battles with these rock walls.†   (source)
  • "Well, you're certainly not the martyr anymore."†   (source)
  • One disapproving word from her was enough to send us off to hide in a corner, where we would cry and fantasize our own martyrdom.†   (source)
  • It's a story in a part of the encyclopedia called "The Book of Golden Deeds," which is filled with tales of martyrs and brave children and people going through torment and terror.†   (source)
  • In a sudden pause in the shooting, the President gathered the survivors and told them to leave because he did not want any martyrs or needless sacrifice; everyone had a family, and important tasks lay ahead.†   (source)
  • If dropping bombs on the enemy was not a special service, he reflected aloud frequently with the martyred smile of sweet reasonableness that was his loyal confederate in every dispute, then he could not help wondering what in the world was.†   (source)
  • With the prize in hand, he realized his single-minded drive came across as aloof cockiness; his painful martyrdom suddenly looked like self-nomination for sainthood.†   (source)
  • Inside she found a biography that read like the life of a saint or martyr: she had suffered, struggled against injustice, been forced to abandon her bleeding homeland, yet was carrying on the struggle.†   (source)
  • Her eyes burned like a martyr's.†   (source)
  • "So if you know of anyone who should experience the glory of martyrdom so that others may live in paradise, please inform your supervisor immediately," said the woman.†   (source)
  • Maybe they were the two martyrs who'd tried to change history but got gunned down at the gates to Raison Pharmaceutical.†   (source)
  • I am not deceived or a martyr.†   (source)
  • Hale's place in the pantheon of American heroes, as the martyr spy of the Revolution, was not to come until years later.†   (source)
  • "I hope to God it doesn't make him a martyr."†   (source)
  • It was odd to see Annie cast as victim or martyr, as the more sympathetic pieces had it.†   (source)
  • The last time I got kicked out of Martyrs and Saints, the school nurse recommended a psychiatrist whose name was Dr. Vincent Price.†   (source)
  • Pointless, ridiculous monster crouched in the shadows, stinking of dead men, murdered children, martyred cows.†   (source)
  • Don't be a martyr.†   (source)
  • In the months that follow, other monks will also martyr themselves.†   (source)
  • If he dies now, his men will turn him into a martyr.†   (source)
  • He could not understand why Dr. Ferris' face tightened into an injured look, "You will permit me to say that this is unexpected and unwarranted," said Dr. Ferris in that tone of formality which conceals pain and reveals martyrdom.†   (source)
  • But there wasn't any point in being a martyr about it.†   (source)
  • She wouldn't have been able to play her favorite role of the complete martyr.†   (source)
  • The other girls try to contain their glee as Constance and Annabelle engage in a war of martyrdom.†   (source)
  • Some were even martyred on the spot.†   (source)
  • Our army, of late, is composed of saints and martyrs.†   (source)
  • Our martyred Saviour was called seditious, and I may be pardoned if I rejoice that I am a Rebel.†   (source)
  • In Boston, Wendell Phillips, Abolitionist and reformer, commended those who looked "upon that gibbet of John Brown, not as the scaffold of a felon, but as the cross of a martyr."†   (source)
  • Except Mom, of course; she's the biggest polyester, walk-on-me Pollyanna martyr of the world!†   (source)
  • The trial of Socrates, the most interesting suicide the world has ever seen, produced the first martyr for free speech.†   (source)
  • Nor am I sure I would ever suicide; am not stuff of martyrs.†   (source)
  • He believed the worst of his former friend because his own sense of martyrdom made him want to believe it.†   (source)
  • 'And Theophilus was converted to Christianity,' says Mother St Justine, reading very rapidly now, 'and became one of the Holy Martyrs.'†   (source)
  • Another martyr, another dead Jew.†   (source)
  • Her first, blatantly martyred chore was to turn on the cold-water tap.†   (source)
  • A whole new dynamism was put into play at the time of Dr. King's martyrdom.†   (source)
  • The second was largely spent in the protracted torture and eventual murder of a prince of the church who prefers martyrdom to sanctioning Francesca's marriage to her son.†   (source)
  • Oh, we had done our brave and needful part as warriors, but how scant our count of fathers and sons compared to the terrible martyrdom of those unnumbered Europeans.†   (source)
  • They had prepared themselves for death not because they were martyrs; but because what they were and what they knew they were was all they had.†   (source)
  • To have you to die the real death would have made you a martyr.†   (source)
  • She could never be a saint, but she thought she could be a martyr if they killed her quick.†   (source)
  • What do you think spies are: priests, saints and martyrs?†   (source)
  • What use is it to anyone, this voluntary martyrdom?†   (source)
  • Be drunken, if you would not be martyred slaves of Time; be drunken continually!†   (source)
  • If it is for this that I have suffered martyrdom, it is sufficient that I stand at quits with those who have wielded the sacrificial knife.†   (source)
  • MOON LAKE From the beginning his martyred presence seriously affected them.†   (source)
  • (She turns) Set your mind at restthis (Tapping himself) is not the stuff of which martyrs are made.†   (source)
  • For it would never have occurred to either Slatter or the Sergeant that they might be wrong: they were upheld, as in all their dealings with the black-white relationship, by a feeling of almost martyred responsibility.†   (source)
  • The dead men had become martyrs and their degradation was forgotten.   (source)
    martyrs = someone admired for dying or suffering to uphold principles
  • the heir of all the saints and all the martyrs who came before him and who died for the same cause, for the same word, no matter what name they gave to their cause and their truth.   (source)
    martyrs = someone who suffers for the sake of principle
  • 'I didn't never call him unladylike, not even when he tied my Clorinda to the firewood bundle and burned her at the stake for a martyr.'   (source)
    martyr = someone who dies or suffers to uphold principles
  • Here, she said to herself had been the scene of her guilt, and here should be the scene of her earthly punishment; and so, perchance, the torture of her daily shame would at length purge her soul, and work out another purity than that which she had lost: more saint-like, because the result of martyrdom.   (source)
    martyrdom = someone who suffers to uphold principles
  • Give us a martyr to fight for," says Boggs.†   (source)
  • Or perhaps she's one of those, Pile it on, I can take it, a martyr.†   (source)
  • And now they're both shaheed, my boys, both martyrs.†   (source)
  • Lincoln was transformed from a controversial and often unpopular war leader into a martyr and hero.†   (source)
  • Leave Minerva behind to be a martyr all by herself?†   (source)
  • Can you identify with Todd's admission of "getting mad at God" and "feeling smug in my martyrdom"?†   (source)
  • She wore a martyred expression and handed Luke a clunky-looking old-fashioned cell phone.†   (source)
  • The world would remember them forever as martyrs.†   (source)
  • I say that because before she was a martyr, she was a teen.†   (source)
  • Then there's St. Wilgefortis, virgin martyr, July twentieth.†   (source)
  • He could not see himself doing any of those things, least of all becoming a martyr.†   (source)
  • When Patrick spoke again, there was a faint air of martyrdom in his tone.†   (source)
  • Like Cassandra recently told me: I just don't know how Cassie would respond to that label, "martyr."†   (source)
  • She suffered like the martyrs in olden times and God knows that's penance enough.†   (source)
  • February is a powerful month for virgin martyrs.†   (source)
  • By that definition it's not at all inaccurate to call Cassie a martyr.†   (source)
  • Why did virgin martyrs have to be so stubborn?†   (source)
  • But even if Cassie's death is a martyrdom, it is an unlikely one.†   (source)
  • The priests never tell us about virgin martyrs like St. Agatha, February fifth.†   (source)
  • It must suffer martyrdom and expire in a noble cause.†   (source)
  • I giggled at her martyred expression, and she scowled.†   (source)
  • Instead, you walk around feeling like a martyr.†   (source)
  • Only fools expect an infant to martyr herself for the greater good.†   (source)
  • "It is my realm, though I am rarely here," said Asmodeus with a martyred sigh.†   (source)
  • Fine, just stand here and look martyred because I—†   (source)
  • With a martyr's serenity, she walked across the foyer to the maitre d' stand.†   (source)
  • Do you have any idea how hard it is to campaign against an angelic martyr?†   (source)
  • Cedric nods at this judicious response and wants to know Zayd's thoughts on other black martyrs.†   (source)
  • The story claims he was martyred in Romania, still trying to drive away the vampire scourge.†   (source)
  • I suppose that one might find some satisfaction in being a martyr, if one is above reproach.†   (source)
  • She appeared to glory in her new status as the widow of a martyr.†   (source)
  • Most of them will also take a husband—a husband who's likely to soon be a martyr.†   (source)
  • We are on strike against martyrdom-and against the moral code that demands it.†   (source)
  • He wants to be a martyr like his brother.†   (source)
  • I have called out on strike the kind of martyrs who had never deserted you before.†   (source)
  • It declared him a holy martyr and swore to avenge his death by unleashing "rivers of blood."†   (source)
  • There she met a Jordanian named Jalal Nasser who taught her about the beauty of jihad and martyrdom.†   (source)
  • Something men like Jalal and Saladin say to women like us to turn us into martyrs.†   (source)
  • Oh, my poor martyr, that's what you get for exposing all those criminals!†   (source)
  • So, martyr or no, Buddhism will be a second-rate religion henceforth.†   (source)
  • He went willingly to his martyrdom, unknown to me at the time.†   (source)
  • We die as martyrs for our ideals at the dawn of the world revolution.†   (source)
  • We can't all be saints and martyrs.†   (source)
  • …were covered with orange butterflies; and then I looked up at the branches of the apple tree above me, where the small green apples were already forming, and at the patches of blue sky visible beyond, and attempted to cheer myself up, by reflecting that only a benevolent God, who had our good at heart, would have created so much beauty, and that whatever burdens were laid upon me were surely trials, to test my strength and faith, as with the early Christians, and Job, and the martyrs.†   (source)
  • "Oh, shut up, both of you," snapped Clary, earning herself a martyred look from Simon and a leer from Jace.†   (source)
  • I mean, I'm not a martyr.†   (source)
  • A milksop sponge of a woman, always dragging silently around the house with an expression of doomed martyrdom on her face?†   (source)
  • The newspaper article he sent me said Pan Kai Jing—the one your mother married—died as a martyr protecting the whereabouts of the Communist Party, and his father, Teacher Pan, was present to receive his honorable-mention award.†   (source)
  • You'd see Jesus on the cross, and you'd see a dude getting stabbed in the neck, and you'd see people dying at sea and in battle and a parade of martyrs.†   (source)
  • She knew it, and began to provoke his defenseless body with mock caresses, like a kitten delighting in cruelty, until he could no longer endure the martyrdom and he returned to his cabin.†   (source)
  • I had not seen the Rev. Mr. Merrill climb—I suppose, shakily—to the stage; when I noticed him, he was standing beside the martyred Mary Magdalene.†   (source)
  • Fear of pain, the pain of the martyrs is overcome when cigarettes burn not deliberately but naturally down into his fingers until they are extinguished by blisters formed by their own heat.†   (source)
  • Stanton knew that if any person in Washington deserved a precious lock of the martyr's hair, it was Mary Jane Welles.†   (source)
  • Rage rose up in her like a black wave—rage against Alec, because he was partly right, and rage against everything and everyone else: against the icy road that had taken her father away from her before she was born, against Simon for nearly getting himself killed, against Jace for being a martyr and for not caring whether he lived or died.†   (source)
  • Have you come to make me a martyr?†   (source)
  • The Nationalists would say you are a Communist because Kai Jing is now called one of their martyrs, and the Communists would say you are a Nationalist because you lived in an American orphanage.†   (source)
  • He said—I remember it so clearly—he said, "This is your martyrdom, Dede, to be alive without them!†   (source)
  • When the Persians attacked, they had to climb up the wall of death, and the Spartans were able to occupy the high ground atop the corpse mountain, and as the bodies piled up, the wall of martyrs only became higher and therefore harder to climb, and everybody swung swords/shot arrows, and the rivers of blood poured down Mount Death, etc. I took my head off his shoulder for a moment to get a break from the gore and watched Augustus watch the movie.†   (source)
  • North to Tambora and the mountain road to Puerto Plata, the rain drives on, in every bohio and small conuco, and on out to the Atlantic where it is lost in the waves that rock the bones of martyrs in the deepest sleep.†   (source)
  • Every martyr's dream.†   (source)
  • And afterwards we read in the papers how one boat with ninety-three on board had been bombed before it could land; the other with sixty-seven landed, but the army with the help of local campesinos hunted those poor martyrs down.†   (source)
  • People can call Cassie a martyr, but they're off track if they think she was this righteous, holy person, and that all she did was read her Bible.†   (source)
  • Instead, to distract myself—One nail takes out another—I go over the contents of my purse, trying to assess exactly what I've lost: my old wallet with a couple of pesos; my cedula, which I will have to report; a bright red Revlon lipstick I bought at El Gallo; a little Nivea tin Lio gave me with ashes of the Luperon martyrs not killed at sea.†   (source)
  • Finally, it means daring to sacrifice all for Love's sake—not as a hero or a martyr, necessarily—but consistently and with conviction, in the small, everyday things that make up a life.†   (source)
  • Because he loved the motherland, Because he loved the green He goes to meet a martyr's fate With proud and joyous mien; True to the last, oh! true to the last He treads the upward way; Young Roddy McCorley goes to die On the bridge at Toome today.†   (source)
  • -Within a day of the shootings at Columbine High, the story of Cassie's exchange with the boys who killed her was making headlines across the nation, and by the next day, people began calling her the "martyr of Littleton."†   (source)
  • Priests and masters tell us Confirmation means you're a true soldier of the Church and that entitles you to die and be a martyr in case we're invaded by Protestants or Mahommedans or any other class of a heathen.†   (source)
  • He paces back and forth, waves his stick, tells us we must never forget that the moment the Holy Communion is placed on our tongues we become members of that most glorious congregation, the One, Holy, Roman, Catholic and Apostolic Church, that for two thousand years men, women and children have died for the Faith, that the Irish have nothing to be ashamed of in the martyr department.†   (source)
  • It was a tribute to the country's martyrs, and the translation ran something like this: "My death is not my own, but yours, and its significance depends on what you do with it."†   (source)
  • Her mother had nine children, all at the same time, four sets of twins and Wilgefortis the odd one, all winding up martyrs for the faith.†   (source)
  • Sicilian pagans ordered Agatha to give up her faith in Jesus and like all the virgin martyrs she said, Nay.†   (source)
  • How is it the priests never told us about St. Ursula and her eleven thousand maiden martyrs, October twenty-first?†   (source)
  • Virgin martyrs always died singing hymns and giving praise not minding one bit if lions tore big chunks from their sides and gobbled them on the spot.†   (source)
  • Haven't we provided martyrs galore?†   (source)
  • It's the Latin the martyrs prayed in when the barbarians pulled out their nails and cut their skin off inch by inch.†   (source)
  • There are stories about virgins, martyrs, virgin martyrs and they're worse than any horror film at the Lyric Cinema.†   (source)
  • All these virgin martyrs are told by Roman judges they have to give up their faith and accept the Roman gods but they say, Nay, and the judges have them tortured and killed.†   (source)
▲ show less (of above)