How to Use tabula rasa in a Sentence

tabula rasa

noun

• Keeping the tabula rasa in mind for the reader’s progress through the book.
  — Ryan Chapman, Longreads, 28 Aug. 2019
• That’s life: the tabula rasa, rarely so clean to begin with, gets quickly soiled.
  — Vinson Cunningham, The New Yorker, 3 Feb. 2020
• There’s no tabula rasa, no matter what John Locke may tell you.
  — Dominic Pino, National Review, 3 July 2021
• Call it a digital tabula rasa where the vibes are happy and hopeful.
  — Liana Satenstein, Vogue, 5 Jan. 2019
• Each season is a tabula rasa in which the accomplishments of the past have been totally erased.
  — Larry Stone, The Seattle Times, 30 Aug. 2017
• The song's rhythm bangs as, before our very eyes, this Swiftian tabula rasa transforms into some sort of android.
  — Los Angeles Times Staff, latimes.com, 29 Oct. 2017
• In many ways the fossils served as tabula rasa upon which artists project many other narratives.
  — Simon Worrall, National Geographic, 2 Sep. 2017
• For many Americans, New Year’s Day means a new set of resolutions, a slight headache, and a refreshing tabula rasa.
  — Aarian Marshall, Wired, 18 Dec. 2019
• Ever since the time of Aristotle, thinkers have assumed that the soul or the mind is initially a blank slate, a tabula rasa on which experiences are painted.
  — György Buzsáki, Scientific American, 14 May 2022
• The pandemic eliminated many commutes, took cars off the roads, and felt, at times, like a transportation tabula rasa.
  — Aarian Marshall, Wired, 11 Mar. 2021
• This process, called the tabula rasa, or blank slate, wipes their minds clean of learned prejudices, greed, and hate, as well as memories of their personal lives and connections with others.
  — Catherine Gaugh Writer, San Diego Union-Tribune, 23 May 2021
• The young men and women demonstrators, when speaking to both local and foreign journalists, sometimes speak of their desire for a tabula rasa.
  — Edwidge Danticat, The New Yorker, 10 Oct. 2019
• Anyone who can’t envision a transformation of that tabula rasa isn’t trying very hard.
  — Ann Killion, San Francisco Chronicle, 29 May 2021
• Building off of this, advocates of state communism, such as Vladimir Lenin or Josef Stalin, believed that each of us was born tabula rasa, with a blank slate, and that human nature could be molded in the interests of those in power.
  — Guest Blogger, Discover Magazine, 5 Oct. 2012
• This is a man who has spent more than three decades immersed in America, but not the version envisioned by so many Americans—instead, he’s been digging up what’s buried beneath the tabula rasa of street names like Plymouth and Cambridge.
  — Dw Gibson, The Atlantic, 20 May 2022
• And yet, despite these decidedly unglamorous associations, the messenger bag feels like a tabula rasa for the return to the office.
  — Liana Satenstein, Vogue, 9 Aug. 2021
• Notre Dame’s site itself was no immaculate tabula rasa.
  — Klara Glowczewska, Town & Country, 19 Apr. 2019
• While Kardashian has had bombastic and excessive fashion moments, her Balenciaga era is a clean slate, a tabula rasa setting the stage for what’s to come.
  — Liana Satenstein, Vogue, 9 Dec. 2021
• Thackray is not asking anyone to trade in their Strad for a slim-olin—one, after all, is not like the other—but, rather, to posit that the violin can be a tabula rasa for gleeful, impractical experimentation.
  — Jennifer Gerste, The New Yorker, 2 July 2021
• Her underlying aim was to explore the idea—derived from John Locke—of the newborn as a tabula rasa, whose character is determined by experience rather than innate qualities.
  — The Economist, 17 Feb. 2018
• For many in policymaking circles, the pandemic is a tabula rasa, a moment to rethink the status quo of transportation and development dominated by the car.
  — Aarian Marshall, Wired, 19 May 2020
• Voluminous white shirt-dresses served as a tabula rasa, a blank canvas, which Piccioli then adorned with delicate gold jewelry, such as a round necklace with a figurative bird pendant.
  — San Diego Union-Tribune, 29 Sep. 2019
• Progressives take a tabula rasa view of the human condition, the human animal, the human experience, and human society.
  — Kevin D. Williamson, National Review, 8 Oct. 2017
• Caril Ann Fugate, at only 14, became a tabula rasa onto which civilians could project almost exclusively negative and damning thoughts.
  — Daniel Fienberg, The Hollywood Reporter, 16 Feb. 2023
• By invoking the tabula rasa as an integral feature of human nature in which individuals can advance from inferior to superior upwards along the chain of life.
  — Guest Blogger, Discover Magazine, 5 Oct. 2012
• With uproarious derisiveness yet also empathetic warmth, Jarmusch borrows a small but solid batch of horror-movie tropes to evoke an existential tabula rasa with (almost) no way out.
  — Paige Williams, The New Yorker, 14 June 2019
• Neuroscience inherited the blank slate framework millennia after early thinkers gave names like tabula rasa to mental operations.
  — György Buzsáki, Scientific American, 14 May 2022

Last Updated: 12 Dec 2024