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Idealize   /aɪdˈilˌaɪz/   Listen
Idealize

verb
(past & past part. idealized; pres. part. idealizing)
1.
Consider or render as ideal.  Synonym: idealise.
2.
Form ideals.  Synonym: idealise.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Idealize" Quotes from Famous Books



... 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

... warm, corner in Jimmy Wallace's bachelor heart for youth, and innocence, and enthusiasm. Especially for young girls who were innocent and enthusiastic. But since he suspected himself of a tendency to idealize these qualities, even to sentimentalize upon them, he generally kept a cautious distance off. Rose, with the bloom that was on her, and the glow that radiated from her the night he was introduced to her at ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster

... 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

... lens he bought on purpose), and this delving search into his own deep consciousness of her, into his keen remembrance of every detail of feature and color and shade of expression, made him realize and idealize and foresee what the face might be some day—and what ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier

... always managed somehow to 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 ...
— The Girl in the Golden Atom • Raymond King Cummings

... 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 to spin ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park

... other words, progress is accelerated. Among the most effective agencies for the promotion of progress, therefore, must be included those which stimulate this power of idealization. In short, he who in any age helps to idealize those factors and forces upon which the progress of his age depends, is perhaps the most useful man, the most powerful agent in the promotion of human well-being, even though from the strictly realistic point of view he only succeeds in making things appear other than ...
— Quaker Hill - A Sociological Study • Warren H. Wilson

... intellectual plan of life Quite irrespective of life's plainest laws, But one, a man, who is man and nothing more, May lead within a world which (by your leave) Is Rome or London, not Fool's-paradise. Embellish Rome, idealize away, Make paradise of London if you can, You're ...
— Men and Women • Robert Browning

... develop a tendency to exalt and idealize the common-place phases of life beyond all limits of reason or possibility. We flatter our buoyant expectations with the conviction that there is honey in the heart of every trifling flower we must gather by life's dusty roadside, ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"

... 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 goes about in ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing

... 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 Endeavoring to Blow up a Storm That He May Ride ...
— Widger's Quotations from Abraham Lincoln's Writings • David Widger

... 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 ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler

... right. Both ways lead to the same goal. I am fond of exceptional beings. I am one myself. Moreover, I need them to give relief to my common characters; and I never sacrifice them without necessity. But these common characters interest me more than they interest you. I aggrandize them; I idealize them in an inverse direction, in their ugliness or their stupidity. I give to their deformity terrifying or grotesque proportions. You could not do this. You are wise not to look at people and things that would cause you nightmare. Idealize in that which ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton

... very important way. In Herndon, Lincoln had for a partner a talented young man who looked up to him, almost adored him, who was quite willing to be his man Friday. Fortunately, for all his adoration, Herndon had no desire to idealize his hero. He was not disturbed by his grotesque ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson

... from control; and show no purposeful arrangement. Law and order have given place to individual fancy, unless in cases where earlier schemes are adopted. And with artistic arrangement has disappeared all attempt to idealize, to produce forms nobler and more beautiful than those seen every day. The figure of Antinous is the latest in which we find any attempt to produce a type of ideal beauty. Even the Virgin Mary and her Son are depicted without any attempt ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various

... 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

... opinions as to what constitutes Love. One opinion is that Love is sexual love, sexual attraction, sexual desire. To people holding this opinion love and sexual desire or "lust" are synonymous. And they laugh and sneer at any attempt to idealize love, to present it as something finer and subtler, let alone nobler, than mere sex attraction. The writer has heard one cynical woman—and more than one man—say: Love? There is no such a thing. Sexual intercourse is love, and that's all there is ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson

... 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 an attitude ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... who have the particular kind of ice-cold intellect necessary if one is to detach one's self completely from the idols of the market-place. Indeed, the poetic temperament is only too apt, out of the very warmth of its sensitive humanity, to idealize the old traditions and throw a glamour around them. That is why, both in politics and religion, there have been, ever since Aristophanes, so many great reactionary poets. Their warmth of human sympathy, ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys

... his fancy in "Meditations on a Broomstick," which My Lady Berkeley heard seriously and to edification. Meditations on a "Shoe-box" are less promising, but no doubt something could be made of it. A poet must select, and if he stoops too low he cannot lift the object he would fain idealize. ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes

... 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 ...
— The Grafters • Francis Lynde

... 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 perceptible ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon

... 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 ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd

... Zion from the shoulder of the Mount of Olives, as he came over it on his journey from Galilee; to conceive how the temple and the ritual would fill him with awe in his readiness not to criticise, but to idealize everything he saw, and to think only of the significance given by it all to the scripture; to imagine how eagerly he would talk in the temple court with the learned men of his people about the law and the promises with which in home and school his youth had been ...
— The Life of Jesus of Nazareth • Rush Rhees

... properly inspired they need to be better informed as to what the ambitious members of the race are doing in their various fields of endeavor. An effort is made to get away from former biographical works largely given to eulogy of individuals unduly advertised. The aim seems rather to idealize the life of obscure men, who have achieved merit in applying themselves to the ordinary duties of life. Referring to the failure to treat more extensively the biographical material of the whole race the editor states that such accounts cannot be ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various

... always been dominant. It was at once retaliatory and precautionary and on a par with the instructions for the removal of the Acadians on the eve of the breaking out of the French and Indian War. The banished Missourians have, however, as yet found no Longfellow to sentimentalize over them or to idealize, in a story of Evangeline, their misfortunes and their character. History has been spared ...
— The American Indian as Participant in the Civil War • Annie Heloise Abel

... conscious and the influence of anterior instincts from which we are not wholly detached,—carnal love and divine love. One man combines them, another abstains altogether; some there are who seek the satisfaction of their anterior appetites from the whole sex; others idealize their love in one woman who is to them the universe; some float irresolutely between the delights of matter and the joys of soul, others spiritualize the body, requiring of it ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac

... 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 from the workhouse and support by his daughters, ...
— Stories in Light and Shadow • Bret Harte

... ornament of red 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 idealize anything ...
— A Princess in Calico • Edith Ferguson Black

... variety of characters which are 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

... will understand and even idealize plant and animal life if he learns of plant and animal life first in human terms. His moral development is menaced if this process is reversed so that a counter-tendency is set up,—a tendency to interpret the human functions in animal terms. It is better for the child to humanize animal relationships ...
— The Social Emergency - Studies in Sex Hygiene and Morals • Various

... And should I take liberties with what we know for a fact 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

... Mr. Abner Nott, in a practical relapse, raged against the derelicts, and talked of dispossessing them, or even dismantling his tenement, but he was easily placated by a compliment to the "dear old ship," or an effort made by some tenant to idealize his apartment. A photographer who had ingeniously utilized the forecastle for a gallery (accessible from the bows in the next street), paid no further tribute than a portrait of the pretty face of Rosey Nott. The superstitious reverence in which Abner Nott held ...
— By Shore and Sedge • Bret Harte

... 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 ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various

... 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. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard

... hero 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 ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham

... attributes to "feverish pulse, disturbed digestion, and irritable nerves." No doubt he is right,—within limits. But may not a healthy laborer find in the startling effects of the younger Cobb refreshment as precisely adapted to idealize his life, and divert his thoughts from a hard day's work, as that for which the college-professor seeks a tragedy of Sophocles or a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various

... similar innocent beginnings often pave the way for more familiar caresses. Passionate kisses—the promiscuous kiss, by the way, may be the carrier of that dread infection, syphilis—violently awaken a young girl's sex instincts. The fact is that many innocent girls idealize their seducers. They believe their lying promises, actually come to love them, and think that in gratifying their inflamed desires, they are giving a proof of the depth and purity ...
— Sex - Avoided subjects Discussed in Plain English • Henry Stanton

... air. 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 I then ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part III. • Honore de Balzac

... the male sex. On the other hand, they are 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 ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel

... an affection as he had cherished for Hallam is an inspiration. Keen and acute as the sense of loss may be, it purifies rather than destroys the influence of a hallowed love—its effect is to idealize and sanctify. This general truth is enforced by several ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson

... him for any serviceable friendship Laura was uncertain. As a youth he had inclined to idealize women, but she was suspicious of his later record. Good or bad it had left no mark on him. Probably he had not much principle where women were concerned. Few of the men Laura had known in early life had had any principles of any sort ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde

... a decidedly remarkable scene, pictorially, I agree with you. And an artist, of course—but isn't it a trifle quixotic, Peter, to idealize them because they are having a good time? There's no virtue in it. It is conceivable that they might have to work just as hard and have just as many little children to look after, and yet not have these dances you praise them for ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning

... instances which in their sum total prove important—trivial and uncertain though each one may be, when regarded by itself. It would be difficult to know how to convey these to anyone in words: glances, movements, a certain "live appeal"—it would require a poet to catch and fix—in short—to idealize—telling us the true inwardness, so that we might indeed comprehend ... and even then he would, I fear, make for weariness, when grappling with what well may seem interminable.[20] Here are ...
— Lola - The Thought and Speech of Animals • Henny Kindermann

... kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate: or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... 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

... of the imagination &c. (exaggeration) 549; mythogenesis[obs3]. idealist, romanticist, visionary; mopus[obs3]; romancer, dreamer; somnambulist; rhapsodist &c. (fanatic) 504; castle-buildier, fanciful projector. V. imagine, fancy, conceive; idealize, realize; dream, dream of, dream up; "give to airy nothing a local habitation and a name" [Midsummer Night's Dream]. create, originate, devise, invent, coin, fabricate; improvise, strike out something new. set one's wits to work; strain one's invention, crack one's invention; rack ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... been thinking of 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 man is gentlemanly, and that woman ladylike. But I do believe in aiming at the best things, ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett

... ourselves," she thought. "We're not in the good old Tennysonian days. There's precious little chivalry now! Men don't idealize women as they used. They're grown far more suspicious—and harder. Perhaps because women have grown so critical of them! Anyway something's gone—what is it? Poetry? Illusion? And yet!—why is it that men still put us off our balance?—even now—that they matter so much less, now that ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... 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

... 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 clay. ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald

... characteristics of this utterly dead 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: ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin

... down the long piazza, indifferent for the first time in his life to the loveliness of the soft April atmosphere, that seemed to blend, raise and idealize the features of the landscape until earth, water and sky were harmonized into celestial beauty. Paul was growing very anxious for the reappearance of Miriam, or for some news of her or her errand, yet dreading every moment ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth

... poet would see it, and as Lamartine saw Jerusalem. But Byron was more curious about the 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

... successful with this, if he 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 ...
— The Painter in Oil - A complete treatise on the principles and technique - necessary to the painting of pictures in oil colors • Daniel Burleigh Parkhurst



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



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