To read a book is to devote oneself to the book.
The incentive to devote oneself to the long-term glory of the employer was suddenly gone.
Why devote oneself to begonias? A. My specialty is herbaceous plants.
To devote oneself to the pursuit of the latter – at all costs – is to limit one's access to the former.
To devote oneself to the form was to risk being called a conservative, a nostalgist, a manufacturer of bourgeois museum pieces; twentieth-century symphonies tended to be tonal in orientation and spacious in design, the musical equivalent of landscape painting.
It's not the simple picture of stopping work at 60 or 65, moving to Florida and devoting oneself to golf and bridge — not that it was ever totally that.
The piece not only concerns Seurat's particular obsessions, but also extends itself to the problems of art-making more generally, of the detriments and dividends of devoting oneself to creative work.
The whales show up, and while a bordered box accompanying each one summarizes the bridge gibberish in layman's terms, it is difficult to enjoy "The Cardturner" without devoting oneself to an at least cursory understanding of sentences like "Dummy's got king, queen, ten of spades, and I'm sitting behind it with ace, four, doubleton".
There could be a psychological element, too, rooted in the motives for devoting oneself to a documentary subject for years, and the extraordinary duration of production (and pre-production, and post-production, and distribution — in which filmmakers themselves are increasingly involved) is also a matter of difficulties in finding financing.
According to Moyn, the 18th-century philosophers and moralists who "rooted ethics in sentiment and sympathy" were simultaneously troubled that "devoting oneself to an ethic of exposure and sensitivity to others' suffering (or of engagement and action to relieve it) might lead to a numbed ethical sense".
One gets invited to those meetings only if one blindly affirms the right of the US to do whatever it wants, and then devotes oneself to the pragmatic question of how that unfettered license can best be exploited to promote national interests.
