The energy with which he presses this self-abnegating case is revealing.

Could anyone so self-abnegating feel truly generous, for decades at a time?"

This is many nations with one class of self-abnegating professionals coming together for the good of all.

In her self-abnegating life, desire is met with denial.

Yet she comes bearing a message of self-abnegating femininity.

Adopting a soothing, self-abnegating tone — Everyone works together!

Martin's wife, Leora, is the steadying, sensible, self-abnegating anchor of his life.

But with the slightest nudge he agreed when his self-abnegating housemates suggested a mass walkout.

I'm not as self-abnegating as you are, Miro.

The worship of a sexless, self-abnegating man-child continued unabated at Prada, however.

Let it not be distasteful to us to rediscover in the Gospel the rules for a Peace which we could describe as self-abnegating!

Whole personality types - the self-abnegating mom, the perfectionist housewife, the celibate - have fallen out of favor.

Joe Green is the blocked, self-abnegating playwright who "amongst other things" is overcome by panic over leaving his apartment.

It’s a serious, self-abnegating business.

His neoconservatism was expressed ludicrously with him often coming off as severely intolerant, self-abnegating, and wrongheaded.

It's not in his character to prefer a self-abnegating act of statesmanship to the perks and trappings of office that he so enjoys.

That he waved it off with the self-promoting and self-abnegating line "What touches us ourself shall be last serv'd" is evidence of his popularity.

The author then introduces the baby's parents: a self-abnegating Indian woman and her abusive boyfriend, an amoral slacker named Kenneth.

Everything he was and wrote is gathered up finally in one of his matchless aphorisms: "The response to self-existent love is self-abnegating love."

His body language as he walks to the piano gives nothing away; once there he’s not tense or magisterial, or ostentatiously self-abnegating like some pianists.

I wonder if you are quite in the mood to forget all material things and really throw yourselves into the self-abnegating glory of a hot campaign for souls?

While Mr. Bishop, 50, gives the impression of being under siege, this in part reflects his self-abnegating personality, and he said he welcomed the challenge.

For his cousin's kindness in taking them in, Johnny - as solicitous and self-abnegating as a 19th-century orphan - is abjectly grateful.

The poem is pure late Romantic ecstatic rhetoric, in which the speaker's self-abnegating commitment to "life" is expressed in terms of overheated personal passion.

"Frauenliebe" is a case in point: The music is magnificent, but the woman portrayed is radiantly subservient, self-abnegating, fully defined by reference to her man.