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personify
in a sentence
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  • She personifies optimism.
    personifies = is a perfect example of
  • There are texts from Maya, who saw me on the news and thinks I'm dope personified...   (source)
    personified = represented perfectly
  • Gail's life is the American Dream personified: a beautiful house, three great kids, a happy marriage, and a saintly demeanor.†   (source)
  • He was wisdom personified, his manner so serious and formal that Tally found herself wishing she had dressed up.†   (source)
  • He finally decided that children liked dinosaurs because these giant creatures personified the uncontrollable force of looming authority.†   (source)
  • She was the sort of girl who personified Death; after all, she thought that Owen Meany's voice was simply the speaking vehicle for the Devil.†   (source)
  • He's goodness personified.†   (source)
  • The two of us personified the mix of arts and technology; right brain/left brain, drama guy/computer guy.†   (source)
  • "If Richard personified the family's dark, fanatical side, Gottfried embodied the indolent one.†   (source)
  • Then the four women who personified the elements moved as one to the table.†   (source)
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  • In Trueba's opinion, the time had arrived for him to come out in defense of the national interest and of the Conservative Party, since no one better personified the honest, uncontaminated politician, as he himself declared, adding that he had pulled himself up by his own bootstraps, and not only that, had created jobs and a decent life for all his workers and owned the only hacienda with little brick houses.†   (source)
  • For us Ultima personified goodness, and any risk in defense of goodness was right.†   (source)
  • If a mother was Sacrifice personified, then a daughter was Guilt, with no possibility of redress.†   (source)
  • Here I was, a loner to the core, burnout personified, with a train wreck of a home life.†   (source)
  • She was simply knowledge embodied, embalmed, and personified.†   (source)
  • Representative Fisher Ames of 'Massachusetts later wrote of sitting "entranced," as though he were witnessing "an allegory on which virtue was personified."†   (source)
  • The al Qaeda leader personified everything we were fighting against.†   (source)
  • I thought that for Deo the begging woman personified the problems of his country, and his fears for it.†   (source)
  • He personified the Institute's capacity for deviance.†   (source)
  • Better than telling my deepest secret to a girl who is basically evil personified?†   (source)
  • …starting with Herzen, its assassinations of Tsars, some only plotted, others carried out, the whole of the workers' movement of the world, the whole of Marxism in the parliaments and universities of Europe, the whole of this new system of ideas with its newness, the swiftness of its conclusion, its irony, and its pitiless remedies elaborated in the name of pity-all of this was absorbed and expressed in Lenin, who fell upon the old world as the personified retribution for its misdeeds.†   (source)
  • It was he who, from the beginning of the tragedy to its end, personified Society for the Turners.†   (source)
  • , and they worship a goddess who is known as Night personified.†   (source)
  • Consequently, I'm also in training to be a High Priestess of Nyx, the vampyre Goddess, who is Night personified.†   (source)
  • She swung into her ground-eating canter easily and I was amazed to see that the snow and ice seemed to fly back from her hooves as we magically blasted through the night under the watchful eye of the Goddess who was, herself, Night personified.†   (source)
  • Perhaps it was the fascination of seeing that particular force so explicitly personified in a human body.†   (source)
  • The female principle was personified in the beautiful girl whom Raven encountered in the great room within the animal; meanwhile the conjunction of male and female was symbolized separately in the flow of the oil from the pipe into the burning lamp.†   (source)
  • In lifeless squares and avenues these tawdry idols lorded it under the lowering sky; stolid monsters that might have personified the rule of immobility imposed on us, or, anyhow, its final aspect, that of a defunct city in which plague, stone, and darkness had effectively silenced every voice.†   (source)
  • Your own conscience, conveniently personified in the body of another person and attending to your concern for the less fortunate of this world, thus leaving you free not to attend to.†   (source)
  • "The incident illustrates to perfection," wrote Ellsworth Toohey, "the antisocial nature of Mr. Howard Roark's egotism, the arrogance of the unbridled individualism which he has always personified."†   (source)
  • Now, and by the few words at the door, he had become the thing personified.†   (source)
  • He resembled a pilot, which to a seaman is trustworthiness personified.†   (source)
  • Peeperkorn was courtesy personified, by the way.†   (source)
  • Look at Aramis, now; Aramis is mildness and grace personified.†   (source)
  • In her imagination he was that terrible moaning personified.†   (source)
  • In the midst of the personified impersonal, a personality stands here.†   (source)
  • My dear Aramis, you speak like theology personified.†   (source)
  • Anne sat up, tragedy personified.†   (source)
  • The conventional farm-folk of his imagination— personified in the newspaper-press by the pitiable dummy known as Hodge—were obliterated after a few days' residence.†   (source)
  • The most unhappy aspect of their relations was Dick's growing indifference, at present personified by too much drink; Nicole did not know whether she was to be crushed or spared—Dick's voice, throbbing with insincerity, confused the issue; she couldn't guess how he was going to behave next upon the tortuously slow unrolling of the carpet, nor what would happen at the end, at the moment of the leap.†   (source)
  • And indeed the poor girl, whose pregnancy had swelled and stoutened every part of her, even to her face, and the vertical, squared outlines of her cheeks, did distinctly suggest those virgins, so strong and mannish as to seem matrons rather, in whom the Virtues are personified in the Arena Chapel.†   (source)
  • In the jugglery of circumstances preceding and attending the event on board the Indomitable, and in the light of that martial code whereby it was formally to be judged, innocence and guilt personified in Claggart and Budd in effect changed places.†   (source)
  • She personified the figure of death and made him now a strong black-haired youth running over hills, now a stem quiet man marked and scarred by the business of living.†   (source)
  • Phileas Fogg was, indeed, exactitude personified, and this was betrayed even in the expression of his very hands and feet; for in men, as well as in animals, the limbs themselves are expressive of the passions.†   (source)
  • I have frequently used the word "equality" in an absolute sense—nay, I have personified equality in several places; thus I have said that equality does such and such things, or refrains from doing others.†   (source)
  • Night, in its sad, solemn, and benevolent aspect, apart from its stealthy and cruel side, was personified in this form.†   (source)
  • As the envoy of the prefect of police arrived ten minutes before ten, he was told that Lord Wilmore, who was precision and punctuality personified, was not yet come in, but that he would be sure to return as the clock struck.†   (source)
  • I did not know whether to resent this language or pursue my explanation; but he seemed so powerfully affected that I took pity and proceeded with my dreams; affirming I had never heard the appellation of 'Catherine Linton' before, but reading it often over produced an impression which personified itself when I had no longer my imagination under control.†   (source)
  • Bovary was searching at the bottom of his purse for a centime, and without appearing to understand all there was of humiliation for him in the mere presence of this man, who stood there like a personified reproach to his incurable incapacity.†   (source)
  • Without putting the thing clearly to himself, but with a confused intuition of the necessity of his presence and of his success, he, Javert, personified justice, light, and truth in their celestial function of crushing out evil.†   (source)
  • All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick.†   (source)
  • "Oh, sir," said Danglars, after he had convinced himself of the authenticity of the documents he held, and rising as if to salute the power of gold personified in the man before him,—"three letters of unlimited credit!†   (source)
  • He had just viewed the malice of men and the misery of society under a new aspect— incomplete aspects, which unfortunately only exhibited one side of the truth, the fate of woman as summed up in Fantine, and public authority as personified in Javert.†   (source)
  • Nor even in our superstitions do we fail to throw the same snowy mantle round our phantoms; all ghosts rising in a milk-white fog—Yea, while these terrors seize us, let us add, that even the king of terrors, when personified by the evangelist, rides on his pallid horse.†   (source)
  • Or, in view of the enormities of which he had been a witness for the past two hours, did he say to himself, that it was necessary to recur to supreme resolutions, that it was indispensable that the small should be made great, that the police spy should transform himself into a magistrate, that the policeman should become a dispenser of justice, and that, in this prodigious extremity, order, law, morality, government, society in its entirety, was personified in him, Javert?†   (source)
  • BOOK XXV Proud Music of the Storm 1 Proud music of the storm, Blast that careers so free, whistling across the prairies, Strong hum of forest tree-tops—wind of the mountains, Personified dim shapes—you hidden orchestras, You serenades of phantoms with instruments alert, Blending with Nature's rhythmus all the tongues of nations; You chords left as by vast composers—you choruses, You formless, free, religious dances—you from the Orient, You undertone of rivers, roar of pouring…†   (source)
  • The lady was also in green, and so richly and splendidly dressed that splendour itself seemed personified in her.†   (source)
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  • The author personifies the house by calling it lonely.
    personifies = attributes human characteristics to
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show 10 more examples with any meaning
  • My father says that princesses personify the decadence of a vanquished era.†   (source)
  • Oskar Schindler personifies that definition.†   (source)
  • — … But these demons can hardly be distinguished from the diseases they personify — — — and many of the diseases sound, to modern ears, as though they must be psychosomatic.'†   (source)
  • I hope you will agree that in these two instances I have cited from his career - both of which I have had corroborated and believe to be accurate - my father not only manifests, but comes close to being the personification itself, of what the Hayes Society terms 'dignity in keeping with his position'.†   (source)
  • Possibly the fellow claims to levitate, or personifies a dead Indian, or produces spirit rappings, like the celebrated Fox sisters.†   (source)
  • Sophia is a personification of Papa's wisdom."†   (source)
  • With his gentle demeanor, Gandhi seemed the very personification of nonviolence, and he insisted that the campaign be run along identical lines to that of his father's in India.†   (source)
  • Then the Goddess Nyx, the ancient personification of Night, leaned forward and kissed me on my forehead.†   (source)
  • As for me, I fell somewhere between my sisters and their strong personalities, the very personification of the vast gray area that separated them.†   (source)
  • This was the ponderous challenge—and the incomparable excitement—of reaching a mass public in an age before television: a great roving road show that would personify the war's realities and deliver them to Americans' home precincts.†   (source)
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  • And that woman, that personification of absolute fortuity, now again lay asleep beside him, breathing deeply.†   (source)
  • We went through the main hall, four-armed Amaat looming, the air still smelling of incense and the heap of flowers at the god's feet and knees, back to a tiny chapel tucked into a corner, dedicated to an old and now-obscure provincial god, one of those personifications of abstract concepts so many pantheons hold, in this case a deification of legitimate political authority.†   (source)
  • He's invisible, a walking personification of the Negative, the most perfect achievement of your dreams, sir!†   (source)
  • To the Yankee matron from Braintree, the sloppy, ill-mannered, egotistical old woman seemed the very personification of the decadence and decay inherent in European society.†   (source)
  • While the other awards are given to a student who exhibits one particular quality, the Founders' Stone is awarded to that rare student who personifies many.†   (source)
  • They let me play nothing but symbols of depravity, nothing but harlots, dissipation-chasers and home-wreckers, always to be beaten at the end by the little girl next door, personifying the virtue of mediocrity.†   (source)
  • Ever since my adolescent mind began to comprehend the complexities of our daily life, I looked upon a human being as a personification of that great unknown with a very specific mission on earth to fulfill.†   (source)
  • In many ways, Luke personifies the dramatic shift in the U.S. industrial labor market.†   (source)
  • Every single Republican voted in the affirmative, and Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania—the crippled, fanatical personification of the extremes of the Radical Republican movement, master of the House of Representatives, with a mouth like the thin edge of an ax—warned both Houses of the Congress coldly: "Let me see the recreant who would vote to let such a criminal escape.†   (source)
  • So we personify it …. but we don't tell you what it is.†   (source)
  • And as I moved toward the center of the circle I felt like I was literally personifying the emotion.†   (source)
  • Confused, I followed his hand to see a beautiful silver thread of light connecting each of my four friends—the four personifications of the elements—and making a boundary of power within the candles that had already lit the circumference.†   (source)
  • From Hesiod's poem to Nyx, the Greek personification of night: "There also stands the gloomy house of Night; ghastly clouds shroud it in darkness.†   (source)
  • The other three girls who were supposed to be personifying the elements followed her lead, disappearing quickly into the night and leaving their candles overturned and unlit.†   (source)
  • An amusing Chinese myth personifies these emanating elements as five venerable sages, who come stepping out of a ball of chaos, suspended in the void: Before heaven and earth had become separated from each other, everything was a great ball of mist, called chaos.†   (source)
  • The wives and daughters of the Moon Man are the personifications and precipitators of his destiny.†   (source)
  • The gods are symbolic personifications of the laws governing this flow.†   (source)
  • But he felt a tremendous respect for Ellsworth Toohey, because Toohey represented the exact opposite of his own life; Toohey had no concern whatever for worldly wealth; by the mere fact of this contrast, he considered Toohey the personification of virtue; what this estimate implied in regard to his own life never quite occurred to him.†   (source)
  • It was right to personify nations.†   (source)
  • This is the anthropomorphic personification of the power of generation, the Mighty Living One, as it is called in the Kabbala.†   (source)
  • The vivid personifications prepare the intellect for the doctrine of the interdependence of the inner and the outer worlds.†   (source)
  • She is a personification of the primal element named in the second verse of Genesis, where we read that "the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters."†   (source)
  • WITH THE PERSONIFICATIONS of his destiny to guide and aid him, the hero goes forward in his adventure until he comes to the "threshold guardian" at the entrance to the zone of magnified power.†   (source)
  • He was a personification of the Threefold Fire and of the difficulties of the last test, a final threshold guardian to be passed by the universal hero on his supreme adventure to nirvana.†   (source)
  • The prince beholds, dumbfounded, not only hisfriend transformed into the living personification of the Support of the Universe, but the heroes of the two armies rushing on a wind into the deity's innumerable, terrible mouths.†   (source)
  • WHEN THE HERO-QUEST has been accomplished, through penetration to the source, or through the grace of some male or female, human or animal personification, the adventurer still must return with his life-transmuting trophy.†   (source)
  • In the Babylonian version the hero is Marduk, the sun-god; the victim is Tiamat—terrifying, dragon-like, attended by swarms of demons—a female personification of the original abyss itself: chaos as the mother of the gods, but now the menace of the world.†   (source)
  • He donned a hat that was on the one side red but on the other white, green before and black behind [these being the colors of the four World Directions: i. e., Edshu was a personification of the Center, the axis mundi, or the World Navel]; so that when the two friendly farmers had gone home to their village and the one had said to the other, "Did you see that old fellow go by today in the white hat?" the other replied, "Why, the hat was red."†   (source)
  • We know it through the Hebrew mythology of Yahweh, in whom the traits of two gods are united (Yahweh, a storm-god, and El, a solar); it is apparent in the Navaho personification of the father of the Twin Warriors; it is obvious in the character of Zeus, as well as in the thunderbolt and halo of certain forms of the Buddha image.†   (source)
  • Othin (Wotan), the chief of the gods, has asked to know what will be the doom of himself and his pantheon, and the "Wise Woman," a personification of the World Mother herself, Destiny articulate, lets him hear: Brothers shall fight and fell each other, And sisters' sons shall kinship stain; Hard is it on earth, with mighty whoredom; Ax-time, sword-time, shields are sundered, Wind-time, wolf-time, ere the world falls; Nor ever shall men each other spare.†   (source)
  • Oh, he is the exact personification of what I have been led to expect!†   (source)
  • Yes, the personification of shiftlessness.†   (source)
  • The lamp beat upon his face, and so intent was it and so still that it might have been that of a clear-cut classical statue, a personification of alertness and expectation.†   (source)
  • I hope, Cecily, I shall not offend you if I state quite frankly and openly that you seem to me to be in every way the visible personification of absolute perfection.†   (source)
  • It was human—the personification of pain and terror—the tremendous struggle of precious life against horrible death.†   (source)
  • One day, when reflections of this order had brought him once again to the memory of the time when some one had spoken to him of Odette as of a 'kept' woman, and when, once again, he had amused himself with contrasting that strange personification, the 'kept' woman—an iridescent mixture of unknown and demoniacal qualities, embroidered, as in some fantasy of Gustave Moreau, with poison-dripping flowers, interwoven with precious jewels—with that Odette upon whose face he had watched the…†   (source)
  • But he had not moved; his massive figure looked the very personification of unbending pride, of fierce obstinacy.†   (source)
  • He symbolised it, was its personification: so that when they showed their teeth to him they were defending themselves against the powers of destruction that lurked in the shadows of the forest and in the dark beyond the camp-fire.†   (source)
  • The latter, rigid, erect and defiant, with one hand still upon her daughter's arm, seemed the very personification of unbending pride.†   (source)
  • But to Pierre he always remained what he had seemed that first night: an unfathomable, rounded, eternal personification of the spirit of simplicity and truth.†   (source)
  • Dorothea was not only his wife: she was a personification of that shallow world which surrounds the appreciated or desponding author.†   (source)
  • Had there been painters in those days capable to execute such a subject, the Jew, as he bent his withered form, and expanded his chilled and trembling hands over the fire, would have formed no bad emblematical personification of the Winter season.†   (source)
  • I should say, 'My esteemed Boythorn'—to make you the personification of our imaginary friend—'my esteemed Boythorn, you object to the mighty potentate?†   (source)
  • It contained a brilliant account of the festivities and of the beautiful and accomplished Mrs. Rawdon Crawley's admirable personifications.†   (source)
  • 'Five minutes ago Hareton seemed a personification of my youth, not a human being; I felt to him in such a variety of ways, that it would have been impossible to have accosted him rationally.†   (source)
  • The eight of clubs, for instance, represented a huge tree bearing eight enormous trefoil leaves, a sort of fantastic personification of the forest.†   (source)
  • Jupiter, whose thunder could be heard rumbling in the dressing-room, supported her claim, and Venus was on the point of carrying it off,—that is to say, without allegory, of marrying monsieur the dauphin, when a young child clad in white damask, and holding in her hand a daisy (a transparent personification of Mademoiselle Marguerite of Flanders) came to contest it with Venus.†   (source)
  • The two gigantic negroes that now laid hold of Tom, with fiendish exultation in their faces, might have formed no unapt personification of powers of darkness.†   (source)
  • Nay, more, to render their mode of speech more succinct, they personify the subject of these abstract terms, and make it act like a real entity.†   (source)
  • The Press and the Public are but vague personifications for me, and I must thank them in vague terms; but my Publishers are definite: so are certain generous critics who have encouraged me as only large-hearted and high-minded men know how to encourage a struggling stranger; to them, i.e., to my Publishers and the select Reviewers, I say cordially, Gentlemen, I thank you from my heart.†   (source)
  • By some nations the monarch has been regarded as a personification of the country; and the fervor of patriotism being converted into the fervor of loyalty, they took a sympathetic pride in his conquests, and gloried in his power.†   (source)
  • You could sense that his everyday conversation must have been packed with such vivid figures of speech as personification, symbolism, and misplaced modifiers.†   (source)
  • "I" is here introduced to personify the world in general—the Mrs. Grundy of each respected reader's private circle—every one of whom can point to some families of his acquaintance who live nobody knows how.†   (source)
  • Count Ilya Rostov with the other members of the committee sat facing Bagration and, as the very personification of Moscow hospitality, did the honors to the prince.†   (source)
  • She was a direct embodiment and personification of the New Testament,—a living fact, to be accounted for, and to be accounted for in no other way than by its truth.†   (source)
  • Napoleon is the Mahomet of the West, and is worshipped by his commonplace but ambitions followers, not only as a leader and lawgiver, but also as the personification of equality.†   (source)
  • They were of Saracen origin, and consequently of Arabian descent; and their fine slender limbs, small fetlocks, thin manes, and easy springy motion, formed a marked contrast with the large-jointed, heavy horses, of which the race was cultivated in Flanders and in Normandy, for mounting the men-at-arms of the period in all the panoply of plate and mail; and which, placed by the side of those Eastern coursers, might have passed for a personification of substance and of shadow.†   (source)
  • Political parties in the United States are led to rally round an individual, in order to acquire a more tangible shape in the eyes of the crowd, and the name of the candidate for the Presidency is put forward as the symbol and personification of their theories.†   (source)
  • The poet will not attempt to people the universe with supernatural beings in whom his readers and his own fancy have ceased to believe; nor will he present virtues and vices in the mask of frigid personification, which are better received under their own features.†   (source)
  • George turned, and, with one indignant blow, knocked Legree flat upon his face; and, as he stood over him, blazing with wrath and defiance, he would have formed no bad personification of his great namesake triumphing over the dragon.†   (source)
  • When Pierre remembered them afterwards they all seemed misty figures to him except Platon Karataev, who always remained in his mind a most vivid and precious memory and the personification of everything Russian, kindly, and round.†   (source)
  • As daughters of Mnemosyne, "memory," the Muses personify oral tradition, and Greek song traditions about Troy constitute the third and most immediate context in which to locate The Iliad.†   (source)
  • I have proposed to myself to imitate, and, as far as is possible, to adopt the very language of men; and assuredly such personifications do not make any natural or regular part of that language.†   (source)
  • The Reader will find that personifications of abstract ideas rarely occur in these volumes; and, I hope, are utterly rejected as an ordinary device to elevate the style, and raise it above prose.†   (source)
  • And by the spells which ye vouchsafe to those your ministers in earnest, I here personify and call my themes, to make them pass before ye.†   (source)
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