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Definition
universal or inclusive of a wide range of people or interests- When the Apostles Creed uses the word "catholic", it does not reference the church headed by the Pope, but rather a universal church.
catholic = universal; or inclusive of a wide range of people or interests
- She is catholic in her tastes.
- Their taste in books was catholic, at any rate; Plato in Greek touched Omar in English; Nietzsche partnered Newton; Thomas More was there, and also Hannah More, Thomas Moore, George Moore, and even Old Moore.James Hilton -- Lost Horizon
- In fact, a hyena's catholicity of taste is so indiscriminate it nearly forces admiration.Yann Martel -- Life of Pi
- The church is catholic, universal, so are all her actions; all that she does, belongs to all.John Donne -- Meditation 17
- It was just that I possessed small wit or patience for scientific abstractions, and this was something I think I deplored in myself as much as I envied the capacious and catholic range of Nathan's mind.William Styron -- Sophie's Choice
- (Sor Asuncion said we should all resolve this as young ladies in the holy Catholic and Apostolic church.) I resolve not to be so tenderhearted as even Minerva says crying will bring on prematuring wrinkles.Julia Alvarez -- In the Time of the Butterflies
- Some of the other workers were family men and some were bachelors and they were of different ages and they led a catholic variety of lives, yet on Monday morning they all came to work with a kind of gravity, almost decorum.William Faulkner -- Light in August
- Every book supplies its time with one good word; every municipal law, every trade, every folly of the day, and the generic catholic genius who is not afraid or ashamed to owe his originality to the originality of all, stands with the next age as the recorder and embodiment of his own.Ralph Waldo Emerson -- Selected Essays
- Mae and Tuck clattered on into the village proper, past a catholic mixture of houses which soon gave way to shops and other places Of business: a hot-dog stand; a dry cleaner; a pharmacy; a five-and-ten; another gas station; a tall, white frame building with a pleasant verandah, The Treegap Hotel—Family Dining, Easy Rates.Natalie Babbitt -- Tuck Everlasting
- Why not here, and perhaps elsewhere, plant deeply and for all time centres of learning and living, colleges that yearly would send into the life of the South a few white men and a few black men of broad culture, catholic tolerance, and trained ability, joining their hands to other hands, and giving to this squabble of the Races a decent and dignified peace?W. E. B. Du Bois -- The Souls of Black Folk
- Comfort's catholicity of perception and image ... continues to evoke that trembling atmospheric accumulative hinting at a cruel, an inexorably serene timelessness...George Orwell -- Politics and the English Language
- It may be that the meaning attached to the word "fede" was "the faith," i.e. the Catholic creed, and not as rendered here "fidelity" and "faithful."Nicolo Machiavelli -- The Prince
- They can be met in but one way,—by the breadth and broadening of human reason, by catholicity of taste and culture.W. E. B. Du Bois -- The Souls of Black Folk
- No doubt the feat was easy to Mr. Utterson; for he was undemonstrative at the best, and even his friendship seemed to be founded in a similar catholicity of good-nature.Robert Louis Stevenson -- Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
- Or, going one step farther, with those striking remarks to which Naphta had treated Pater Unterpertinger in their colloquy about Hegel and the "Catholicity" of that state philosopher, about how "politics" and "Catholicism" were psychologically related and formed a single objective reality?Thomas Mann -- The Magic Mountain
- Whether due to his general bent for paradox or out of courtesy, he called Hegel a "Catholic" thinker; and in response to the priest's smiling question about the basis for this comment, inasmuch as Hegel was actually the state philosopher of Prussia and generally considered a Protestant, Leo had replied: the very term "state philosopher" confirmed he was correct in pointing to Hegel's Catholicity in the religious sense, if not, of course, in regard to Church dogmatics.Thomas Mann -- The Magic Mountain
catholic = inclusive of a wide range of things
catholic = inclusive of a wide range of people or interests
catholicity = wide ranging
catholic = universal
catholicity = including a wide variety
catholic = universal