Free TranslationFree Translation
Synonyms, antonyms, pronunciation

  Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Moralize   /mˈɔrəlˌaɪz/   Listen
Moralize

verb
(past & past part. moralized; pres. part. moralizing)
1.
Interpret the moral meaning of.  Synonym: moralise.
2.
Speak as if delivering a sermon; express moral judgements.  Synonyms: moralise, preachify, sermonise, sermonize.
3.
Improve the morals of.  Synonym: moralise.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |





"Moralize" Quotes from Famous Books



... that never cop'd with stranger eyes, Could pick no meaning from their parling looks, Nor read the subtle-shining secrecies Writ in the glassy margents of such books; She touch'd no unknown baits, nor fear'd no hooks; Nor could she moralize his wanton sight, More than his eyes ...
— The Rape of Lucrece • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]

... the old well-remembered landing-place, and she finds herself so near, so very near her lost home. How precious are such moments—how few we have in life! They are created from our very sorrows; without our cares our joys would be less lively. But we have no time to moralize. Catharine flies with the speed of a young fawn to climb the cliff-like shoulder of that steep bank; and now; out of breath, she stands at the threshold of her log-house. How neat and nice it looks ...
— Lost in the Backwoods • Catharine Parr Traill

... actions and passions of life almost. He takes upon himself to be the week-day preacher, so to speak. Accordingly, as he finds, and speaks, and feels the truth best we regard him, esteem him—sometimes love him. And, as his business is to mark other people's lives and peculiarities, we moralize upon his life when he is gone—and yesterday's preacher becomes the text ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various

... to more mundane things, to moralize at last upon the waiter's fate and the folly of quarrelling with our lot in life. It is interesting to learn from Fitzgerald that the Cock's plump head-waiter read the poem, but disappointing to know that his only remark on the performance was, "Had Mr. Tennyson dined oftener ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley

... 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 or deductions but its own. But it has sympathy as measureless as its pride, and the one balances the other, and neither can stretch too far ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman

... he goes on to moralize in a half-believing, half-doubting kind of way, on the probability of a life to come, and ends by speaking of or rather apostrophizing Jesus Christ in a strain which would seem to savour of Socinianism. This letter he calls "a distracted scrawl which the writer ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp

... laughed George. "You can stand here and moralize till the cows come home, and it won't move you half an inch in the ...
— Boy Scouts in the Coal Caverns • Major Archibald Lee Fletcher

... conditions of inferior vegetable do not in the least suggest, to the unbitten or unblighted human intellect, the notion of development into anything other than their like: one does not expect a mushroom to translate itself into a pineapple, nor a betony to moralize itself into a lily, nor a snapdragon to soften himself ...
— Proserpina, Volume 2 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin

... been carefully brought up at home, and every temptation kept out of his way: suppose him to have been in appearance virtuous, amiable, religious: suppose, farther, that at the age of twenty-one he goes out into the world, and falls into sin by the first temptation:—how will a Calvinistic teacher moralize over such a youth? Will he not say: "Behold a proof of the essential depravity of human nature! See the affinity of man for sin! How fair and deceptive was this young man's virtue, while he was sheltered from ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman

... which bear the marks of Giles's teeth; and I make no doubt that, a hundred or two years hence, there'll be strange stories about those marks, and that people will point them out as a proof that there were giants in bygone time, and that many a dentist will moralize on the decays which human teeth ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow

... thought equally unreasonable to insist, [under penalty of] forfeiting almost every thing reckoned valuable in life, that he should not love another: whilst woman, weak in reason, impotent in will, is required to moralize, sentimentalize herself to stone, and pine her life away, labouring to reform her embruted mate. He may even spend in dissipation, and intemperance, the very intemperance which renders him so hateful, her property, and by stinting her expences, not permit her to beguile in society, ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft

... going to moralize this fable, when our attention was called off to a warm dispute between my wife and Mr Burchell, upon my daughters intended expedition to town. My wife very strenuously insisted upon the advantages that would result from it. Mr Burchell, on the contrary, ...
— The Vicar of Wakefield • Oliver Goldsmith

... want to cure your wife or some other female relative of lacing, don't moralize. Say to ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane

... deep study of human nature, and a great discrimination of character, or that the hand of a habitual drunkard could operate with such beauty and precision. Nor is it probable that a mind besotted by drink, and debased by low intercourse, could moralize so admirably as he has done on the evil consequences of intemperance and the ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects and Curiosities of Art (Vol. 3 of 3) • S. Spooner

... me take thee out, and moralize— Thus 'tis with mortals, as it is with flies, Forever hankering after Pleasure's cup: Though Fate, with all his legions, be at hand, The beasts, the draught of Circe can't withstand, But in goes every nose—they must, ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various

... spoke untruly—that I had abjured the world, and all its joys, for ever; and that, henceforth, William Mowbray would not be as other men. But so it is. I state the fact, and leave others to account for and moralize ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland Volume 17 • Alexander Leighton

... dined: a wandering meteor, and at length a falling star, his light and ambitious spirit had successively dropped from the firmament of Prussia, of France, and of Austria; and his faults, which he styled his misfortunes, had driven him into philosophic exile in the Pays de Vaud. He could now moralize on the vanity of the world, the equality of mankind, and the happiness of a private station. His address was affable and polite, and as he had shone in courts and armies, his memory could supply, and ...
— Memoirs of My Life and Writings • Edward Gibbon

... that the progress of 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 ...
— The Republic • Plato

... out or which may suggest itself as the lesson progresses. If, as all this material has been presented, the application has been made sufficiently clear to the pupils, the presentation is complete; otherwise avenues of action should be pointed out, care being taken to stimulate rather than to moralize. ...
— Principles of Teaching • Adam S. Bennion

... with exceeding care, nor did he ask uncomfortable things, or moralize visibly. Thus he came to hear how it had fared with Lin his friend, and Lin forgot altogether about its being a parson he was delivering the fulness of his heart to. "And come to think," he concluded, "it ...
— Lin McLean • Owen Wister

... numbers indicate the output of sermons and theological works. Then come novels. John Lyly was ingenious; he combined good advice and storytelling. Not skillfully, hiding the sermon amid lively talk and adventure, but blazoning the fact that he was going to moralize as long as he would. He shows no timidity, even declares upon one of his title-pages that in this volume 'there is small offense by lightness given to the wise, and less occasion of looseness proffered ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent

... of Destiny, who must either have heaven or hell, the hospice of St. Bernard or riotous excess. Only just now I lacked the heart to moralize about those two," and he pointed to Euphrasia and Aquilina. "They are types of my own personal history, images of my life! I could scarcely reproach them; they stood ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac

... was doubled. It is easy to moralize about the misfortunes of others, and to find good in the evil that they suffer;—only a true philosopher could speak thus lightly ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt

... the power, and the profit of the priests. Sweep away their gossamer fabrics of factitious religion, and they would catch no more flies. We should all then, like the Quakers, live without an order of priests, moralize for ourselves, follow the oracle of conscience, and say nothing about what no man can understand, nor therefore believe; for I suppose belief to be the assent of the mind to an ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson

... country woman could not consciously moralize. She was no philosopher, but she felt, without putting it into thoughts, as if she had descended far below the surface of all things, and found out that good and evil were the root and the life of them, and the outside leaves and froth ...
— Jane Field - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

... witnessed so total a wreck in so short a space of time. The violence of the surf had completely beaten her sides out, leaving stem and stern hanging together as by a thread, while her ribs and broken cordage and sails, completed the picture, had any thing been wanting to perfect it. I could moralize any day on a single bit of plank on a shore—each fragment seems to tell its tale, and awakens a train of thoughts and feelings in the mind; but "grim desolation" ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13, No. 375, June 13, 1829 • Various

... ready to moralize, and her moralizing degenerates unfortunately often into commonplace platitudes. She is even at times disagreeably pompous and authoritative, and preaches rather than argues. This was due partly to a then prevailing tendency in literature. Every writer—essayist, poet, and novelist—preached ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell

... little flaxen-haired fairy with her eyes of sapphire, leaving her grandfather to relapse upon his couch in the posture in which we first saw him, and to moralize on the impatience with which his neighbour Captain Tompkins seemed to bear the approaching infirmities of age. And now, Dear Reader, do thou emulate the patience of the old Valetudinarian, while I relieve thee of my further presence; or, if ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various



Words linked to "Moralize" :   preachify, reclaim, regenerate, advocate, preach, sermonise, rectify, moralization, sermonize, interpret, moralise, reform, moralizing, rede



Copyright © 2024 e-Free Translation.com