MORALIZE • DICTIONARY ONE.COM • Definition of Moralize

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/mˈɔrəlˌaɪz/ Listen

verb

Moralize v. t. (past & past part. moralized; pres. part. moralizing)

1.

To apply to a moral purpose; to explain in a moral sense; to draw a moral from. "This fable is moralized in a common proverb." "Did he not moralize this spectacle?"

2.

To furnish with moral lessons, teachings, or examples; to lend a moral to. "While chastening thoughts of sweetest use, bestowed By Wisdom, moralize his pensive road."

3.

To render moral; to correct the morals of. "It had a large share in moralizing the poor white people of the country."

4.

To give a moral quality to; to affect the moral quality of, either for better or worse. "Good and bad stars moralize not our actions."

Moralize v. i.

1.

To make moral reflections; to regard acts and events as involving a moral.

2.

To lecture to a person in a manner asserting moral principles.

Synonyms: sermonize, preachify, moralise.

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Etymology of 'Moralize'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Moralize" Quotes from Famous Books

... nations or the natural growth of institutions which fill modern treatises on political philosophy seem hardly ever to have attracted the attention of Plato and Aristotle. The ancients were familiar with the mutability of human affairs; they could moralize over the ruins of cities and the fall of empires (Plato, Statesman, and Sulpicius' Letter to Cicero); by them fate and chance were deemed to be real powers, almost persons, and to have had a great share in political events. The wiser ...

— The Republic • Plato

... ere long, and all superstition end in accurate science. Meanwhile, many, even of the enlightened, will cling to the unforgotten fancy which gave rise to the word lunatic, and in cases of mental derangement will moralize with young Banks in the Witch of Edmonton (1658), "When the moon's in the full, ...

— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley

... knowledge of men, and of a good art struggling to free itself from self-consciousness. But it does mean that Balzac, when he wrote it, was under the burden of the very traditions which he has helped fiction to throw off. He felt obliged to construct a mechanical plot, to surcharge his characters, to moralize openly and baldly; he permitted himself to "sympathize" with certain of his people, and to point out others for the abhorrence of his readers. This is not so bad in him as it would be in a novelist of our ...

— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... extremest verge. He is most wonderful in his last half-hidden smile or frown ... by that flash of the moment of parting the one that sees it shall be encouraged or terrified afterward for many years. The greatest poet does not moralize or make applications of morals ... he knows the soul. The soul has that measureless pride which consists in never acknowledging any lessons but its own. But it has sympathy as measureless as its pride and the one balances the other and neither can stretch too far while it stretches ...

— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot

... the moral of the 'Iliad,' I insist upon your telling me what is the moral of a rattlesnake or the moral of a Niagara. I suppose the moral is—that you must get out of their way, if you mean to moralize much longer. The going-up (or anabasis) of the Greeks against Troy, was a fact; and a pretty dense fact; and, by accident, the very first in which all Greece had a common interest. It was a joint-stock ...

— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey

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