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Deify   Listen
verb
Deify  v. t.  (past & past part. deified; pres. part. deifying)  
1.
To make a god of; to exalt to the rank of a deity; to enroll among the deities; to apotheosize; as, Julius Caesar was deified.
2.
To praise or revere as a deity; to treat as an object of supreme regard; as, to deify money. "He did again so extol and deify the pope."
3.
To render godlike. "By our own spirits are we deified."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Deify" Quotes from Famous Books



... Hermia—the wrapt, absorbed attitudes of the man and the woman and the air of sacro-sanctity which pervaded the place. It was like a ceremonial in which this queer animal was being deified. She, at least, couldn't deify him. ...
— Madcap • George Gibbs

... other men early devoted to meditation and books, had adopted, at different periods, different systems of opinion on topics connected with religion and morals. His earliest creeds tended to efface the impressions of his education; to deify necessity and universalize matter; to destroy the popular distinctions between soul and body, and to dissolve the supposed connection between the moral condition of man anterior ...
— Edgar Huntley • Charles Brockden Brown

... place which God has assigned to it in the soul, and to suspect the reality of the exalted delight which He has designed His saints and angels to enjoy in its exercise. But while the deifiers of mere intellect are ever reminded that it alone cannot deify, but may be abused so as to demonise man, yet let those who slight it remember also that it is the head without whose inventive genius or directing skill the strong arms of labour would be idle. Let the man of material wealth or material power recollect that ...
— Parish Papers • Norman Macleod

... need her voice; tell her you need her faith in you. Damn central! Talk out in church! Don't make a goddess of a woman. The men who want to marry her, and can't, will do that! The nincompoop can always be counted on to deify the commonplace. And she is commonplace. If she isn't, she's no good! Commend me to sanity and the commonplace. I take off my hat to it! I honour ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers

... almost voiceless residence in Dewsbury, is far from being a complete or unique one. I offer it to you only as a single facet of her wonderful temperament, of the rich spectacle of her talent. I have ventured to propose it, because, in the multiplication of honours and attentions, the tendency to deify the human, to remove those phenomena of irregularity which are the evidence of mortal strength, grows irresistible, and we find ourselves, unconsciously, substituting a waxen bust, with azure eyes and golden hair, for the homely features which (if we could but admit it) so infinitely better match ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse

... to admit a larger popular element to a share of political power. The result would be good or bad as the new rulers acted or did not act in the spirit properly called Liberal. Unluckily the flattery of the working-man has come into fashion; we ignore his necessary limitations, and we deify the 'casual opinions and ineffectual public sentiments' of the half-educated. 'The great characteristic danger of our days is the growth of a quiet, ignoble littleness of character and spirit.' We should aim, therefore, ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen

... sensations then hidden at the bottom of our hearts and finding their first expression ever renewed? Can we feel again the nameless pleasures that we felt when, like Ernest de La Briere, we looked up our sharpest razors, our finest shirt, an irreproachable collar, and our best clothes? We deify the garments associated with that all-supreme moment. We weave within us poetic fancies quite equal to those of the woman; and the day when either party guesses them they take wings to themselves and fly away. Are not such things like the flower of wild fruits, bitter-sweet, grown in the ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac

... on no other authority than their own ignorant assumptions, and to Deify errors on no other authority than their own heated imaginations, has in all ages been the practice of Theologians. Of that practice they are proud, as was the mouse of our Fabulist. Clothed in no other panoply than their own conceits; they deem ...
— An Apology for Atheism - Addressed to Religious Investigators of Every Denomination - by One of Its Apostles • Charles Southwell

... deify the powers of Nature is due partly to a clear atmosphere and sunny climate, which incline a people to live much in the open air in close communion with all that Nature offers to charm the senses and excite the imagination; ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson

... or historians. Take into your consideration, if you please, cases seemingly analogous; but take them as helps only, not as guides. We are really so prejudiced by our education, that, as the ancients deified their heroes, we deify their madmen; of which, with all due regard for antiquity, I take Leonidas and Curtius to have been two distinguished ones. And yet a solid pedant would, in a speech in parliament, relative to a tax of two pence in the pound upon ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield

... upon the Deification (105/1. "If we confound 'Variation' or 'Natural Selection' with such creational laws, we deify secondary causes or immeasurably exaggerate their influence" (Lyell, "The Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man, with Remarks on Theories on the Origin of Species by Variation," page 469, London, 1863). See Letter 131.) of ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin

... fly into the spider's web and the fish with a wide ocean for play-ground into one small net? I know there is a consoling fashion of ascribing our blunders to the inscrutable wisdom of a long-suffering Providence; but common-sense forbids I should call evil good, deify my errors, and give thanks for what befalls me solely through ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut

... admiration given to him in liberal measure by the great mass of mankind both in the generations which knew him as a living contemporary and in those which hear of him only as one of the figures of history. It is not worth while to deify him, or to speak with extravagant reverence, as if he had neither faults nor limitations. Yet it seems ungracious to recall these concerning one who did for his fellow men so much as Franklin did. Moral, intellectual, and material ...
— Benjamin Franklin • John Torrey Morse, Jr.

... as to excite alarm that what had begun with the hideousness of Femmes Damnees would not even end there; finally, that the unpleasant truth demanded to be spoken—by whomsoever had courage enough to utter it—that to deify mere lust was an offence and an outrage. So much for the justice on Mr. Buchanan's side; with the mistaken criticism linking the writers of Dante's time with French writers of the time of Baudelaire it is hardly necessary ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine

... saw him next alone;—nor camp Nor chief his steps attended; Nor banner blazed, nor courser's tramp With war-cries proudly blended. He stood alone, whom Fortune high So lately seemed to deify, He, who with Heaven contended, Fled like a fugitive and slave!— Behind, ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick

... be defended less strenuously than in the early doubtful phase of their being, and still less need for their support virulent onslaughts upon antagonistic views. It is no longer necessary to degrade some painters utterly for the proper exaltation of some others; or it may be better to say, to deify one by the damnification of the whole balance of the fraternity. There have been victims enough on the shrine of Turner, and his manes are now appeased and his wrongs avenged. What need of further holocausts? So Mr. Ruskin loosens his grip and half sheaths his ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook

... now it was in the name of woman that man's better part adjured his baser in every sort of strife towards the divine. Is it alleged that it is man's passion for woman that has moved him thus in a sort to deify the sex? Passion is no teacher of reverence. Moreover, it is as the race outgrows the dominion of passion that it recognizes the worshipfulness of woman. The gross and sensual recognize in her no element of sacredness. It is the clear soul ...
— A Positive Romance - 1898 • Edward Bellamy

... to deify his beloved in an ode, dedicated to her under a title in favor with all lads who write verse after leaving school. This ode, so fondly cherished, so beautiful—since it was the outpouring of all the love in his heart, seemed to him to ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac

... revelations by God himself, from which not one jot or tittle should be taken without blasphemy; given by God when he founded his one true religion to mankind. We lose sight of the spirit, and exalt the substance; then we forget the substance, and deify the shadow. We crucify our Saviors when they are with us; and when they are gone, we crucify them worse with our unmeaning worship and dogmas made ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris

... or Gula or Greek aesthetics,—a beauty that is not the disjecta membra that modern maudlin sentimentality has left it,—but that perfect and immortal 'Beauty of Holiness,' that outlives marble and silver, pigment, stylus, and pagan poems that deify dust." ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson

... paper, eulogising the Licensed Victuallers' fete at Vauxhall Gardens, on Tuesday evening, bursts into the following magnificent flight:—"Wit has been profanely said, like the Pagan, to deify the brute" (the writer will never increase the mythology); "but here," (that is, in the royal property,) "while intellect and skill" (together with Roman candles) "exhibit their various manifestations, Charity" (arrack punch and blue fire) "throw their benign halo over the festive scene" (in ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various



Words linked to "Deify" :   deity, idealise, idealize, exalt



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