Example sentences of "[be] [to-vb] oneself [prep] " in BNC.
Next page| No | Sentence |
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| 1 | But not so ( we are told ) : Conservative advocates of tariffs and social reforms like old age pensions , wages councils , regulation of sweated trades were , Fforde argues , simply engaged in ‘ principled opportunism ’ ; this was ‘ not Collectivist Conservatism but expedient Conservatism ’ , and to see it as otherwise would be to allow oneself to be ‘ misled by manufactured appearances ' or what Fforde describes elsewhere as the gap between ‘ professed stance and true intention ’ . |
| 2 | To take one 's finger off the bounding narrative pulse of Crime and Punishment and to open The Possessed — to open it anywhere — is to find oneself out in the sticks once again : the ‘ our town ’ of the novel and the voice relating its affairs bring back the ‘ we ’ of convict life in The House of the Dead and the more sketchy collective of that remote Siberian community outside the prison walls . |
| 3 | How much better it is to surround oneself with nice paintings of collie dogs and children , sunsets and young lovers holding hands … ’ |
| 4 | To sit down in meditation and think of these mystical ideas is to poise oneself for the transcendent journey . |
| 5 | To smoke is to dissociate oneself from the middle-class health fascists , to say no to jogging and yoghurt and yoga . |
| 6 | ‘ It 's the hymns that are the great stumbling block , ’ Everard went on , ‘ but really the only thing is to abandon oneself to the words uncritically and let them flow over one . ’ |
| 7 | The subjective conviction of heightened awareness is so treacherous that to exempt it from the critical tests of reason is to put oneself at the mercy of chance . |
| 8 | Rapturous as the circumstances of its conception may have been , the genesis as a whole could only , in retrospect , seem an extraordinarily painful business , as he intimated to Rohde shortly after the book was out : " No one has any idea how such a book comes into being : the trouble and torment it is to keep oneself as clear as this of other ideas pressing in from all sides ; the courage needed to conceive of it and the honesty needed to carry it through ; and above all , perhaps , my tremendous task vis-à-vis Wagner , which has certainly been the cause of many heavy clouds in my heart " the task of being independent even here , of taking up an , as it were , alienated stance . " |
| 9 | To make such an abstraction is to remove oneself to so rarefied a plane that the object of one 's interrogation becomes an eternal category and is therefore a pointless exercise . |
| 10 | An obvious subject for preparation is to remind oneself of one 's assets . |
| 11 | It was her firm belief that the quickest way to achieve mental health was to absorb oneself in the problems of others and , in this particular centre , it seemed to have worked . |
| 12 | To insist on an overtly Polish identity was to exclude oneself from polite and educated Danzig society and to disqualify oneself from any job that promised social and economic advancement . |
| 13 | To cling to a Polish identity was to exclude oneself from the German monopoly on higher education and from all but menial employment in industry ; given the rapid depopulation of the countryside it was also to insist on the right to become and remain part of a backward , ignorant , illiterate , inward-looking agrarian people , stuck in a rural backwater with no access to the outside world , with scant interest from that world and little hope of progress . |
| 14 | To be seriously concerned with this field was to expose oneself to the possibility of ridicule when it turned out that one had been deceived by a clever confidence trickster ; at best it led to controversy , to results which were suggestive rather than conclusive , and away from those straightforward and answerable questions which since Galileo 's time had been the essence of scientific research . |
| 15 | The belief was that to ritually and voluntarily — and I stress the word ‘ voluntarily ’ — shed one 's own blood was to recommend oneself to and establish a link with the Creator of the Universe , and this is precisely what happened with circumcision . |