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Idealize   Listen
verb
Idealize  v. t.  (past & past part. idealized; pres. part. idealizing)  
1.
To make ideal; to consider as ideal; to give an ideal form or value to; to attribute ideal characteristics and excellences to; as, to idealize real life.
2.
(Fine Arts) To treat in an ideal manner. See Idealization, 2.
3.
To form ideals.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Idealize" Quotes from Famous Books



... the world well lost for the man whom they love and idealize; while upon close acquaintance they would discover that he was not worth even the ...
— Wise or Otherwise • Lydia Leavitt

... to be a little hard on the women of Elisabeth's type, who idealize their fellows until the latter lose all semblance of reality; for experience, with its inevitable disillusionment, can not fail to put their ideal lovers and friends far from them, and to hide their etherealized acquaintances out of their sight; and to give instead, to the ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler

... is really compounded out of quite varied elements: a conventionally respectable element, a rowdy element, and an ennobling element. It is, therefore, equally unreasonable to denounce its vices or to idealize its virtues. It is more profitable to attempt to balance its services and its disservices to the cause ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis

... credit it. He was abashed—ashamed; nay, he could not define the feeling in his breast. He knew that what he read was the true interpretation of her speech, for in some manner—he guessed not how—she had begun to idealize him, to feel that the touch of ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... saga of unknown heroes of ancient times became one of events of world-wide importance; the fall of a mighty race was depicted as the result of Siegfried's death. To render this plausible, it was necessary on the one hand to idealize the hero, so that his death should appear as a deed of horror demanding fearful vengeance, and on the other, to make the king of the Burgundians an active participator in Siegfried's death, for otherwise it would not seem natural, that the whole race should be exterminated ...
— The Nibelungenlied • Unknown

... must be done. It could not be denied that Kitty had been behaving like a romantic, excitable child with this unscrupulous man, whose record with regard to women was probably wholly unknown to her, however foolishly she might idealize the liaison commemorated in his poems. What had Kitty, indeed, been doing with herself this six weeks? Ashe tried to recall them in detail. Ascot, Lord's, innumerable parties in London and in the country, to some ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... his father would make her connections an objection, however they might wish to keep the fact a secret, or otherwise dispose of them by pensions or emigration, but she could not bear to KNOW IT HERSELF! She never could be happy as the mistress of Scrooby Priory with that knowledge; she did not idealize it as a principle! Carefully weighing it by her own practical common sense, she said to herself that "it wouldn't pay." The highest independence is often akin to the lowest selfishness; she did not dream that the same pride which kept her grandfather ...
— Stories in Light and Shadow • Bret Harte

... other Latin countries than in Teutonic lands, may be due not to the occurrence of a smaller proportion of congenital inverts in the former lands, but mainly to general difference in temperament and in the social reaction.[110] The French idealize and emphasize the place of women to a much greater degree than the Germans, while at the same time inverts in France have much less occasion than in Germany to proclaim their legal grievances. Apart from such considerations as these it seems ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... cups, not talking. I wondered where they stood. Mannion, Communications Officer, was neurotic, but an old Armed Force man. Discipline meant a lot to him. Kirschenbaum, Power Chief, was a joker, with cold eyes, and smarter than he seemed. The question was whether he was smart enough to idealize ...
— Greylorn • John Keith Laumer

... flannel, at Susan's expressionless, freckled face, at the boys in their copper-toed boots and overalls, at the good-natured, but hopelessly common-place Martha Spriggs, with her thin hair drawn tight into a knob the size of a bullet, and her bare arms akimbo. 'Idealize her real!' Would it be possible to ...
— A Princess in Calico • Edith Ferguson Black

... manifestation of the consummation of the greatest love and tenderness that can exist between two individuals keenly attuned to the natural desires of a natural act. "The love of man and woman at its best is free and fearless, compounded of body and mind in equal proportions, not dreading to idealize because there is a physical basis, not dreading the physical basis lest it should interfere with the idealization. To fear love is to fear life and those who fear life are already three parts dead." (Bertrand Russell: "Marriage ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks

... "[]" at the points where they are cited in the text. Some spellings were altered. "To-day" and "To-morrow" are spelled "today" and "tomorrow." Some words containing the letters "ise" in the original text, such as "idealise," had these letters changed to "ize," such as "idealize." ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche

... believes in education, because he has heard the commodity highly recommended in the newspapers. Usually, he is a man who has not had college advantages, and so he is filled with the fallacy that he has dropped something out of his life. We idealize the things that are not ours. H. H. Rogers was an exception—he was at home in any company. He took little on faith. He analyzed things for himself. And his opinion was that the old-line colleges tended to destroy individuality and smother initiative. He believed that the High School ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard

... function, it gives rise to proportionality of products and equilibrium in exchange, and consequently opens for us the road to wealth; as also, in showing us infinity everywhere in art and Nature, it leads us to idealize our acts, and makes the creative mind—that is, divinity itself, mentem diviniorem—immanent and ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon

... been so rare of type and lovable in personality. If Busti's Lancinus Curtius be the portrait of a humanist, careworn with study, burdened by the laurel leaves that were so dry and dusty; if Gaston de Foix in the Brera, smiling at death and beautiful in the cropped bloom of youth, idealize the hero of romance; if Michael Angelo's Penseroso translate in marble the dark broodings of a despot's soul; if Della Porta's Julia Farnese be the Roman courtesan magnificently throned in nonchalance at a pope's footstool; if Verocchio's ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds

... latter words he rose from his seat with a light elastic movement, and seemed altogether another person. When relieved from the turmoil of passion, he became gay, cheerful, and at the same time unaffected and natural. He made no effort to pose, nor did he seek to exalt and idealize himself, as he did afterward in the conversations at St. Helena, to meet some philosophic conception, or to fill up the portrait of himself which he desired to bequeath to posterity. He was far from any thing of this sort: in simple reality, he was himself, as it were, turned inside ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various

... convey her meaning. The charm and grace of her manner, all during the talk, her winsomeness, and the almost spiritual kindness and tenderness that characterized her, made me feel that she embodied all those qualities with which we of this earth idealize our own womanhood. ...
— The Girl in the Golden Atom • Raymond King Cummings

... his British tenacity; for his faith in his religion and country; for his keen insight; for his heroic unselfishness, and for all his other fine qualities. Gordon has become recognised in Spain as an original character, grand and complete, whom future generations will idealize, and whom history will call by the name ...
— General Gordon - Saint and Soldier • J. Wardle

... high thought, quite in keeping with the sense of overlordship bred of the upper stillnesses. To company with it, the home valley straightway began to idealize itself from the uplifted point of view on the mount of vision. The Paradise fields were delicately-outlined squares of vivid green or golden yellow, or the warm red brown of the upturned earth in the fallow places. The old negro ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde

... foremost dupe of her inventions. She had a fictitious history in which she believed much more fondly than in her real one, and an infinite capacity for extemporized reminiscence adapted to the mood of the hour. She liked to idealize herself, to take interesting and picturesque attitudes to her own imagination; and the vivacity and spontaneity of her character gave her, really, a starting-point in experience; so that the many-colored flowers of fiction which blossomed in her talk were not so much perversions, ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James

... heart was too heavy to permit continuance in a playful vein, and he told her substantially what had been said. "Well," she concluded, with a complacent little nod, "I think I'll let him pay his addresses a while longer. The absurd fellow to go and idealize me so! Time will cure such folly, however. Papa, there's something troubling you besides ...
— The Earth Trembled • E.P. Roe

... type may be called nature romance. Its purpose is both to entertain and to awaken sympathy and love for animals. Stories of this kind, like other romances, idealize the characters and may have a strong appeal to the emotions. Of the stories in this section, we may classify as nature romance Beatrix Potter's "Peter Rabbit," Sewell Ford's "Pasha, the Son of Selim," Ouida's "Moufflou," and ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry

... these great men did not greatly idealize her, under the double glamour of gallantry and loyalty, Victoria was a most extraordinary young woman. A few days before the death of the King, Greville wrote: "What renders speculation so easy and events so uncertain is the absolute ignorance ...
— Queen Victoria, her girlhood and womanhood • Grace Greenwood

... parts, in his scenes of battle and encounters, he is not often led into the delirium of extravagance. Sober-minded and free from all fanaticism, he leans not too much to Zoroaster or to Mohammed, though his desire to idealize his Iranian heroes leads him to excuse their faith to his readers. And so these fifty or more thousand verses, written in the Arabic heroic Mutakarib metre, have remained the delight of the Persians down to this very day—when the ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 1,Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous

... of course minimized her aid to him and magnified his aid to her. All this was in accord with established form, but it was in still stronger accord with her determination to idealize his share in the incident. His arm had grasped hers firmly—and she felt it yet. But when she went on to say—not for the first time, nor for the second—how kind and sympathetic he had been in supporting her chin against those slapping waves when the shore had seemed so ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller

... their ideal side. This was quite true of Harry and Hope, but not at all true as regarded Emilia. She seemed to him simply a beautiful and ungoverned girl whom he could not respect, and whom he therefore found it very hard to idealize. Therefore he heard with a sort of sadness the outpourings of ...
— Malbone - An Oldport Romance • Thomas Wentworth Higginson

... and a young woman, she had shown a delicate, retiring beauty that might have been made much of, and in spite of gray hair, thirty-five years, and a somewhat drawn look, arising from her discontent, one might discover sufficient traces of this fading beauty to idealize her. All this summer she had watched the wayward young artist with a keen interest in the fresh life he brought among her flat surroundings. His buoyancy cheered her habitual depression; his eagerness and love of life made her blood ...
— Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories • Robert Herrick

... offence of these facts, do not be carried away into supposing that this age is therefore unprecedentedly evil. Such dirt, toil, cruelty have always been, have been in larger measure. Don't idealize the primitive cave, the British hut, the peasant's cottage, damp and windowless, the filth-strewn, plague-stricken, mediaeval town. In spite of all these crushed, mangled, starved, neglected little ones about ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells

... not only interesting in themselves, but have a necessary connection with the plot and purpose. The mind of the author has that combination of shrewdness and romantic fervor, of sense and passion, so necessary to every novelist who desires to idealize without contradicting the experience of ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 4 October 1848 • Various

... easily stimulated to eroticism by pictures or novels, if they are sufficiently aesthetic, or even moral. This is a great danger for both sexes, especially for woman—eroticism dissimulated under hypocritical forms, and intended to idealize dishonest intentions (vide de Maupassant: "Ce ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel

... hopeless strife of Churches, the fundamental attraction of Christianity for human nature remains every bit as strong—to be able to say to all people, 'Imagine and idealize the best human being possible; put into him all the best qualities of all the best people you have ever known—give him strength, sympathy, power beyond the most powerful on earth, and add to that a great deep individual affection for ...
— Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton, B. A. Of Trinity College, Cambridge • Arthur Christopher Benson

... seven of my ingredients of love—the altruistic-supersensual group—he cannot fail to become convinced that there are no instances of what I have described as romantic love in Latin literature any more than in Greek. And since it is the province of poets to idealize, we may feel doubly sure that the emotions which they did not even imagine cannot have existed in the actual life of their more prosaic contemporaries. It would, indeed, be strange if a people so much more coarse-fibred ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck

... what the "something" was, one need not idealize those old conditions. It would be a mistake to suppose that the peasant economy, as practised in this valley, was nearly so good a thing for women as it was for the other sex; a mistake to think that their life was all honey, all simple sweetness and light, all an idyll of samplers and geraniums ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt

... thought than that of simply pure, free tone. It will be found that in the most beautiful voice the tone will be common-place, meaningless; in many voices it will be simply sound. Now place yourself in every way upon a higher, a more lofty plane. Think of higher ideas and ideals. In other words, idealize the tone. Remember, the ideal is the truth, and not exaggeration. Appeal to your emotional energy, the singer's sensation, and give expression to thought and feeling aroused in this way. Give expression to an actual life-throb, ...
— The Renaissance of the Vocal Art • Edmund Myer

... English—AEschylus, Aristophanes, Virgil, and Horace. What I have said of Shakespeare I would say of Calderon, of Moliere, of Corneille, of Racine, of Voltaire, of Alfieri, of Goethe, of those dramatists, in many forms, and with genius the most diverse, who have so steadily set themselves to idealize the great types of public life and of the phases of human history. Let us all beware lest worship of the idiosyncrasy of our peerless Shakespeare blind us to the value of the great masters who in a different world and with different aims have presented the development ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various

... decreases steadily); these devote themselves to the welfare of a brother, or to orphan nephews; they are mothers while remaining virgins. Such old maids attain to the highest heroism of their sex by consecrating all feminine feelings to the help of sorrow. They idealize womanhood by renouncing the rewards of woman's destiny, accepting its pains. They live surrounded by the splendour of their devotion, and men respectfully bow the head before their faded features. Mademoiselle de Sombreuil was neither wife nor maid; ...
— The Vicar of Tours • Honore de Balzac

... beginning? From Space, istud litigium philosophorum, which leaves the mind equally dissatisfied, whether we deny or assert its real existence. To make it wholly ideal, would be at the same time to idealize all phenomena, and to undermine the very conception of an external world. To make it real, would be to assert the existence of something, with the properties of nothing. It would far transcend the height to which ...
— Hints towards the formation of a more comprehensive theory of life. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... is. I resolve neither to soar into romance nor drop into poetry (as even Chicago drummers do here), nor to idealize nor quote too many prodigious stories, but to write such a book as I needed to read before leaving my "Abandoned Farm," "Gooseville," Mass. For I have discovered that many other travellers are as ignorant as myself regarding practical ...
— A Truthful Woman in Southern California • Kate Sanborn

... indirectly, placing imaginary children and boys in the position he had once occupied. Thus it is almost possible, by judiciously selecting from his works, and using such keys as we possess, to construct as it were a kind of autobiography. Nor, if we make due allowance for the great writer's tendency to idealize the past, and intensify its humorous and pathetic aspects, need we at all fear that the self-written story of his life should convey ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials

... "I warned you not to idealize me. Men ought not to idealize any woman. We aren't worth it. We've done nothing to deserve it. And it hampers us. You don't know the thoughts we have; the things we can do and say. You are a sisterless man; you have never heard the ordinary ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells

... Scarcely had I walked three steps in the Tuileries gardens, the place which I had chosen as my destination, before I saw the prototype of the matrimonial situation which has last been described in this book. Had I desired to characterize, to idealize, to personify marriage, as I conceived it to be, it would have been impossible for the Creator himself to have produced so complete a symbol of it as ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part III. • Honore de Balzac

... night of the fire. If he ever got well enough acquainted he would ask her never to wear red again; it made her appear sensual; and even she, delicate and sweet as she was, could not afford to cast a thought like that into the minds of her beholders. It was then he began to idealize Gila. ...
— The Witness • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz

... write,—because I waited for the cider to come, that wife and I might overwhelm you with a joint letter of thanks, laudation, and praise. But I can wait no longer. That is, the cider does n't come, and I begin to think it is a myth. Poets, you know, deal in such. They imagine, they idealize, nay, it is said they create; and if we were poets, I suppose we should before now have as good as drank some of that Long Island champagne. Speaking of poets reminds me that I did n't tell you how charmed I was with those translations from the Odyssey; the blank verse ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey

... exists in New York, on Seventh Avenue, just off Broadway, then I am a bad producer and do not know my business. I do not say there is no suggestion in realism; it is unwise to clutter the stage with needless detail. But we cannot idealize a little sordid ice-box where a working girl keeps her miserable supper; we cannot symbolize a broken jug standing in a wash-basin of loud design. Those are the necessary evils of a boarding-house, and I must be true ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm • David Belasco

... doubted her resolution; and this first night of the westward journey was one of them. She had thought at one time that she might be able to idealize David Kent, but he had gone his way to hew out his fortune, taking her upstirrings of his ambition in a purely literal and selfish sense, so far as she could determine. And now there was Brookes Ormsby. She could by no possibility idealize him. He was a fixed fact, stubbornly ...
— The Grafters • Francis Lynde

... spring from temperament. The conservative temper of such a poet as Sir Walter Scott leads him to idealize the past, and to concern himself but little about the future. The rebellious temperament of such a poet as Shelley leads him to idealize the future, and concern himself but little about the past. But by contriving to idealize both the past and the future, and mixing the two idealizations into one ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton

... "Manual of Buddhism," has rendered a similar service in relation to the Buddhism of Ceylon, while Bigandet has set forth that of Burmah, and Alabaster that of Siam. Sir Monier Williams, in his more recent work, "Buddhism," has done much to counteract the fashionable tendency of most Orientalists to idealize the Buddhist system. ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood

... to confess that I had sometimes written verses, but I had never shown her any. She did not much like that artificial and set form of speech, which, when it does not idealize, generally impairs the simplicity of feeling and expression. Her nature was too full of impulse, too feeling, and too serious, to bend itself to all the precision, form, and delay of written poetry. She was Poetry without a lyre—true as the heart, simple as the untutored thought, dreamy ...
— Raphael - Pages Of The Book Of Life At Twenty • Alphonse de Lamartine

... what to do," said Mrs. Thornton, wearily. "Your power over me is fearful. Lama, I would do any thing for your sake. You talk about your memories; it is not for me to speak about mine. Whether you idealize me or not, after all, you must know ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille

... decoration; besides, he believes in the biblical attitude of woman. Put a woman on the mantelpiece and call her luscious, poetic names and then see how soon she'll hop down when another man simply cries 'I love you.' If a man wishes to spoil a woman successfully let him idealize her." ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker

... discriminate the less from the more graceful. The two kinds of beauty are then felt, and, yielding to that tendency to unity which the mind always betrays, we begin to subordinate and organize these two excellences. The ornament is distributed so as to emphasize the aesthetic essence of the form; to idealize it even more, by adding adventitious interests harmoniously to the intrinsic interest ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana

... Hesiod, tells in his Works and Days of the plebeian and peasant life of his time. Hesiod had not the grace of mind or imagination to idealize anything; he sets down the life of the lower orders with a realism comparable to that of the English Crabbe. It is an ugly and piteous picture he gives. Homer, confining himself in the main to the patrician side of things, ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris

... to tell you, Kenny," he added honestly, hoping to spur the culprit on to more and better work. "It may help. They said downstairs that you interpret everything, even trees and snow, in terms of unreality. You over-idealize. I suppose it's your eternal need of illusion. We've spoken of ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple

... errors, fraught with pain; to escape from such, he delivered up his soul to poetry, and felt happy when he sheltered himself, from the influence of human sympathies, in the wildest regions of fancy. His imagination has been termed too brilliant, his thoughts too subtle. He loved to idealize reality; and this is a taste shared by few. We are willing to have our passing whims exalted into passions, for this gratifies our vanity; but few of us understand or sympathize with the endeavour to ally the love of abstract beauty, and adoration of abstract ...
— Notes to the Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley • Mary W. Shelley

... He did not idealize the woman he loved, for he was not a man of ideals, nor of much imagination. Such defects as she might have, he did not see, and if he had seen them he would have been indifferent to them. To such a man, loving meant everything and admitted of ...
— Taquisara • F. Marion Crawford

... effigies.—A very odd page indeed! Not a creature in it without a curve or a twist, and not one of them a mean figure to look at. You can make your own comment; I am fanciful, you know. I believe she is trying to idealize what we vulgarly call deformity, which she strives to look at in the light of one of Nature's eccentric curves, belonging to her system of beauty, as the hyperbola, and parabola belong to the conic sections, though ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)

... school are, first the wilful closing of its eyes to natural facts;—for, however ignorant a person may be, he need only look at a human being to see that it has a mouth as well as eyes; and secondly, the endeavour to adorn or idealize natural fact according to its own notions: it puts red spots in the middle of the hands, and sharpens the thumbs, thinking to improve them. Here you have the most pure type possible of the principles of idealism in all ages: whenever ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin

... who tries to tell just how he has heard men talk and seen them look, is made to feel guilty of something low and unworthy by people who would like to have him show how Shakespeare's men talked and looked, or Scott's, or Thackeray's, or Balzac's, or Hawthorne's, or Dickens's; he is instructed to idealize his personages, that is, to take the life-likeness out of them, and put the book-likeness into them. He is approached in the spirit of the pedantry into which learning, much or little, always decays when it withdraws itself and stands apart from experience in ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... notion that the worth of a thing can be decided by its origin. Our spiritual judgment, I said, our opinion of the significance and value of a human event or condition, must be decided on empirical grounds exclusively. If the fruits for life of the state of conversion are good, we ought to idealize and venerate it, even though it be a piece of natural psychology; if not, we ought to make short work with it, no matter what supernatural being may have ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James

... all man's activities when he comes to man's estate. In science he has always an ideal of a more perfect knowledge before him though he becomes scientific by experience. In art he is always striving to idealize fresh things, though he first becomes an artist from the pure spontaneous pleasure of expressing what is in him. The deliberate projection of the ideal into the future, seeing how far it will take us and whether we are journeying in the right direction, ...
— Progress and History • Various

... trivial thing, and existence which might otherwise be meagre is raised and glorified. Thus yet more, when we recall that even were the musician's life not so, still it ought to be, and it is the right of the author to idealize, one can believe "Charles Auchester" to be but a faithful transcript. "In proportion to our appreciation of music is also our appreciation of what is not music," Sarona says; and so faithfully does this writer prove it, by ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various

... makes it for the study of it, as if he made it for the sake of making a picture—better probably. The making of a picture for the picture's sake is dangerous to the student. His is less likely to be sincere. He is apt to "idealize," to make up something according to some notion of how a picture should be, rather than from knowledge of how nature is. Real pictures grow from ...
— The Painter in Oil - A complete treatise on the principles and technique - necessary to the painting of pictures in oil colors • Daniel Burleigh Parkhurst

... he was often deeply bored without knowing it at the time, or without a reasoned suffering. He suffered as a child suffers, simply, almost ignorantly: it was upon reflection that his nerves began to quiver with retroactive anguish. He was also able to idealize the situation when his wife no longer even wished to do so. His fancy cast a poetry about these Venetian friends, whose conversation displayed the occasional sparkle of Ollendorff-English on a dark ground of lagoon-Italian, and whose vivid ...
— A Fearful Responsibility and Other Stories • William D. Howells

... . I have been painting a great deal, beside my regular exercises, for my own amusement; I take such delight in testing my power to reflect the visible charm of beauty, and in endeavoring, however faintly, to idealize humanity. Among other efforts, I have finished a miniature of one of the young sisters here, whose sad, placid face, seemed to sketch itself upon my memory. Of course, the likeness was drawn without her knowledge—she ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 5. May 1848 • Various

... is clear. The failure of Reform is the key to the Rebellion and the Union. In a patriotic anxiety to idealize Grattan's Parliament, with a view to justifying later claims for autonomy, Irishmen have generally shut their eyes to this cardinal fact, and have preferred to dwell with exaggerated emphasis on the little good that Parliament did rather than ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers

... has been made from it; as, the models in the Patent Office. A pattern is commonly superficial; a model is usually in relief. A pattern must be closely followed in its minutest particulars by a faithful copyist; a model may allow a great degree of freedom. A sculptor may idealize his living model; his workmen must exactly copy in marble or metal the model he has made in ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald

... could write in some tolerable good style, so that I could idealize, or rather realize to folks, the life and love, and marriage of a working man and his wife. It is in my opinion a working man that really does know what a true wife is, for his every want, his every comfort in life depends on her; and his children's home, their daily lives and future lives, are ...
— Time and Tide by Weare and Tyne - Twenty-five Letters to a Working Man of Sunderland on the Laws of Work • John Ruskin

... to that also," he thought and his mind began to idealize the marriages of men and women. "On every hand here I see them, the neat, well-dressed, handsome women like Clara. ...
— Poor White • Sherwood Anderson

... shops that dealt in specialties; how she had developed their breakfasts, dinners, and lunches to works of art. It is impossible for anyone, however stupid, to stop long in Paris without beginning to idealize the material side of life—for the French, who build solidly, first idealize food, clothing, and shelter, before going on to take up the higher side of life—as a sane man builds his foundation before his first story, and so on, putting the observation tower on last of all, instead ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips

... slaves, and purposed an uprising to conquer their freedom. To Southern imaginations it might well recall Nat Turner and the horrors of his revolt. Mrs. Stowe inevitably idealized everything she touched; and to idealize the leader of a servile insurrection might well be regarded as carrying fire into a powder magazine. The moving expostulation of the Christian slave Milly with Dred, the death of Dred, the frustration of his plans, and the pitiful wrongs he sought ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam

... spring advanced, imperceptibly yet surely, in spite of pauses and apparent retrogressions, just so surely she revealed a certain warmth of sympathy. He was engaged in a work which made it easy for her to idealize him. His unselfish effort to help men live, to keep bitter tears from the eyes of their relatives, appealed most powerfully to all that was unselfish in her nature, and she was beginning to ask, "If I can make this man happier, why should I not do so?" Nichol's letter gained a new meaning in the ...
— Taken Alive • E. P. Roe

... song is an admirable and faithful interpretation of the old Hawaiian manner of cantillation, having received at the hands of the foreign musician only so much trimming as was necessary to idealize it and make it reducible to ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson

... search of new experience. It is usually the younger generation, the more restless, active, and adaptable, who go out from the security of the old home to seek their fortunes in the new. Once settled on the new land, however, immigrants inevitably remember and idealize the home they have left. Their first disposition is to reproduce as far as possible in the new world the institutions and the social order of the old. Just as the spider spins his web out of his own body, so the immigrant tends ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park

... a woman planted in a burning blush, having to idealize her feminine weakness, that she may not rebuke herself for grovelling, the mean material acts by which she sustains a tottering position are speedily swallowed in the one pervading flame. She sees but an ashen curl of the path she has ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... "I don't idealize 'em," cried Rankin. "Good Lord! Don't I say they're just like men? They amount to something if they're given something worth while ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield

... pagan cities of antiquity than concerning the places consecrated by the sufferings of our Lord. He cared more to swim across the Hellespont with Leander than to wander over the sacred hills of Judaea; to idealize a beautiful peasant girl among the ruins of Greece, than converse with the monks of Palestine in ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord

... have for its object an application of these principles to the present state of the cultivation of poetry, and a defence of the attempt to idealize the modern forms of manners and opinions, and compel them into a subordination to the imaginative and creative faculty. For the literature of England, an energetic development of which has ever preceded or ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various

... in Germany, and all the children idealize him. Whatever he puts his name to, goes. He and a popular pastor worked up a huge subscription for war-waifs, and when the money had been raised it was found the waifs were already well provided for. I believe the money was appropriated to a fund for helping ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham

... said Hans. "Agrippa's legs were possibly bad; I idealize that and make them impossibly bad. Art, my Eugenius, must intensify. But never mind the legs now: the third sketch in the series is Berenice exulting in the prospects of being Empress of Rome, when the news has come that ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot

... to the other tribes of the archipelago, by his unfortunate treatment and his possibilities for development, I found myself taking up his cause, and was repaid by intense interest wherever I launched forth on my pet subject. I was so successful that gradually I began to idealize the Moro, weaving around him, not the "might have beens," but the "might be's." ...
— The Adventures of Piang the Moro Jungle Boy - A Book for Young and Old • Florence Partello Stuart

... the sentiment that as man grew in civility he became less ridiculous. The peccadilloes of the upper classes they treated with comparatively gentle humor, and aimed their strokes of satire chiefly against the lower. Rarely did they idealize humble folk: Gay's Sweet William's Farewett to Black-Eyed Susan is in this respect exceptional. Their typical attitude is seen in his Shepherd's Week, with its ludicrous picture of rustic superstition and naive amorousness; and in Allan Ramsay's Gentle Shepherd, where the pastoral, ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum

... idealization of the negro" merely amounts to saying that the writer has been bold enough to stem the current of traditional opinion, and find a poetic view of humanity at the present time and in its most despised portion. The end of dramatic writing is not to reproduce Nature, but to idealize it; a literal copying of the same, as everybody knows, is the merit of the photographer, not of the artist. Again, it should be remembered that the highly wrought characters among the slaves are whites, or whites slightly tinged with African blood. With the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various

... she asked smiling. "If there are obstacles, so much the more interesting. I don't fancy that romantic streak in your nature which permitted you to idealize Mortimer has quite dried up. Once romantic always romantic—I deduce from human nature ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton

... work, Des Types et des Manieres des Maitres Graveurs, though usually moderate in praise, speaks of these sketches as "possessing a boldness and delicacy which charm, being taken, at the height of his genius, by the painter who knew the best how to idealize the painting of portraits." ...
— The Best Portraits in Engraving • Charles Sumner

... his actions. At some time in our life I am sure that each of us has selected the person who filled most nearly our notion of what we should like to become, and measured ourselves by this pattern. But there comes a time when we must idealize even the most perfect individual; when we invest the character with attributes which we have selected from some other person, and thus worship at a shrine which is ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts

... the kind, Cecily. But remember how young you are. You know very little of the world, and often see things in an ideal light. It is your tendency to idealize. You haven't the experience necessary to a woman who ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing

... used the Pastoral Drama to idealize Courts. Guarini vented all the bitterness of his soul against them in his Pastor Fido. He also wrote from his retirement: 'I am at ease in the enjoyment of liberty, studies, the management of ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds

... that," he said quickly, "but it is a great puzzle at present and I am thankful to say, I think it is quite safe to wait a year or two yet. You and I live so much apart from society that we idealize it a good deal, though you are a stray-away bit of it. We too seldom see the ideal gentleman or lady; we have to be contented with keeping the ideal in our minds, it seems to me, and saying that this ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett

... to idealize progress has been responsible for the neglect of Italian harpsichords and virginals during the present day revival of interest in old musical instruments. Whatever laudable traits the Italian builders may have had, ...
— Italian Harpsichord-Building in the 16th and 17th Centuries • John D. Shortridge

... as it is realized, however, that wars are not inevitable, men cease to idealize Demaetia, unless they are sure she did her best to keep the peace. To a realistic poet of war such as Mr. Sassoon, she is an object of pity rather than praise. His sonnet, Glory of Women, suggests that there is another point of view ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd

... Youth Affected Contempt of Refinement Always Inclined to Idealize That Which We Love Attempt to Beguile You from Your Grief Avoid Being Idle Bad Laws Bad Bargain Beauty and Strength of Simplicity. Could Not Afford to Make Money Direct While Appearing to Obey Education ...
— Widger's Quotations from Abraham Lincoln's Writings • David Widger

... finer conceptions and formed the link between preceding artists and the magnificent Claude Lorraine (so called from the place of his birth, his real name being Claude Gelee), who resided for a long time at Munich, and who first attempted to idealize nature as the Italian artists had formerly idealized man. Everdingen and Ruysdael, on the contrary, studied nature in her simple northern garb, and the sombre pines of the former, the cheerful woods of the latter, will ever be attractive, like pictures of a much-loved home, to the German. Bakhuysen's ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks

... entertain, to hunt, at least to do something practical. For her he has abandoned the ideal world he had built up for himself from his books and his dreams and is trying farming. Yet his temperament is such that he must idealize even this. When the curtain rises he is still busy with the project, long since undertaken, of reclaiming a wind-swept heather field fronting the Atlantic and of making it into the best of pasture land. That reclamation and transformation has become a passion with him, and soon we feel that it ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt

... through the floor, which afterwards had been imperfectly trodden down again. The room is whitewashed and very clean, but wofully shabby and dingy, coarsely built, and such as the most poetical imagination would find it difficult to idealize. In the rear of this apartment is the kitchen, a still smaller room, of a similar rude aspect; it has a great, rough fireplace, with space for a large family under the blackened opening of the chimney, and an immense passage-way for the smoke, through which Shakspeare may have seen the blue sky ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... ecstasy of miracle before the image of the Virgin, and the armies of France in battle cried, "Notre-Dame-Saint-Denis-Montjoie." What the Roman could not express flowered into the Gothic; what the masculine mind could not idealize in the warrior, it idealized in the woman; no architecture that ever grew on earth, except the Gothic, gave this effect of flinging ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams

... region, the feeble lamp above the stage door, the shadows opposite, have a peculiar charm, especially at night. One would not think that within that door is a short corridor leading to the mystic realm which the people "in front" idealize into a wonderful inaccessible country, the playworld. Back here, especially on a rainy night and before the playworld's inhabitants begin to sally forth to partake of terrestrial beer and sandwiches, one seems millions of miles away from the crowds of men and women in the theatre and from ...
— Tales From Bohemia • Robert Neilson Stephens

... said the Baron, "we must pardon much to men of genius. A delicate organization renders them keenly susceptible to pain and pleasure. And then they idealize every thing; and, in the moonlight of fancy, even the deformity ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

... forms of seven virgins of Crotona in order to paint his famous picture of Venus. Great as was the beauty of Thryne, or Aspasia, or Lais, yet no one of them could have served for a perfect model. And it required a great sensibility to beauty in order to select and idealize what was most perfect in the human figure. Beauty was adored in Greece, and every means were used to perfect it, especially beauty of form, which is the characteristic excellence of Grecian statuary. The gymnasia were universally frequented, ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord

... natures on which extremes of joy or of grief have a soporific effect. Now on a youth so compounded that he could idealize his mistress to the point of ceasing to think of her as a woman, this sudden incursion of wealth had the effect of a dose of opium. When the Prince had drunk the whole of the bottle of port, eaten half a fish and some portion of a French pate, he felt an irresistible longing for bed. Perhaps ...
— Massimilla Doni • Honore de Balzac

... that flooded him. "I must tell you the truth so that you won't idealize me... and the situation. I am enlisted in this fight for life. Where it will lead me I don't know. But I must follow the road I see. You will lose your friends. They will think me a crank, an enemy to society; and they ...
— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine

... and freely showed what he felt. On the other hand, around Hood and Jervis, who commanded his professional respect and esteem, he quickly threw the same halo of excellence, arising from his tendency to idealize, that colored the medium through which he invariably saw the men whom he himself commanded. The disposition to invest those near to him with merits, which must in part at least have been imaginary, is a most noteworthy feature of his character, ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan

... suppose there is—the world spends a heap of money in fostering the idea—then He's certainly more consistent in His being than I am—though consistency always seems to me His weak point. But you've not got to idealize me, you know. You remember what I once ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston

... lifesaving crews, and what not have been successfully projected to meet and idealize local interest; and the novelty and slightly concealed symbolism seem to take with boys of this age. But the most important factor is never the organization as ...
— The Minister and the Boy • Allan Hoben



Words linked to "Idealize" :   idealization, dream up, deify, idealise, view, ideal, romanticise, think up, think of, reckon, regard, romanticize, glamorize, hatch, see, consider



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