velleity

Noun

velleity (countable and uncountable, plural velleities)

1. The lowest degree of desire or volition; a total lack of effort to act.
   • Rousseau showed through life a singular proneness for being convinced by his own eloquence; he was always his own first convert; and this reconciles his power as a writer with his weakness as a man. He and all like him mistake emotion for conviction, velleity for resolve, the brief eddy of...1870, James Russell Lowell, Rousseau and the Sentimentalists
   • This connoisseuse of “splendid weaknesses”, run not by any lust or even velleity but by vacuum: by the absence of human hope.1973, Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow, 1st US edition, New York: Viking Press, →ISBN
2. A slight wish not followed by any effort to obtain.
   • All were born late enough to breathe the atmosphere of the new poetry young; all had poetical velleities, and a certain amount, if not of originality, of capacity to write poetry. But they were not poets; they were only poetical curiosities.1896, George Saintsbury, chapter II, in A History of Nineteenth Century Literature
   • —And so the conversation slips / Among velleities and carefully caught regrets / Through attenuated tones of violins / Mingled with remote cornets / And begins.1917, T[homas] S[tearns] Eliot, “[Prufrock and Other Observations.] Portrait of a Lady.”, in Collected Poems 1909–1935, London: Faber & Faber […], published September 1954, →OCLC, page 16