ennoble

The author makes clear that suffering, despite popular mythology, typically does not ennoble.

From The Wall Street Journal ● May 29, 2026

One of U2’s enduring strengths has been the way its songs ennoble yearning and turbulence.

From New York Times ● Mar. 17, 2023

The number of people who, out of civic generosity, think that they can enlarge or ennoble their selves by giving their energies to a good larger than themselves?

From Salon ● May 27, 2019

For Hegel, as Hägglund reads him, a religious institution is really just a community that has come together to ennoble “a governing set of norms—a shared understanding of what counts as good and just.”

From The New Yorker ● May 13, 2019

Would this add one new faculty to the human mind, or ennoble human nature by the eradication of one bad passion?

From The Moral and Intellectual Diversity of Races With Particular Reference to Their Respective Influence in the Civil and Political History of Mankind by T. S. (Timothy Shay) Arthur

It’s a great, and possibly fictitious, myth that ennobles an ethos of isolated bravery.

From Slate ● Mar. 26, 2024

That awful blur is another stain on history, one that ennobles “The High Ground’s” mission.

From Washington Post ● Mar. 1, 2023

Bel Powley and Liev Schreiber breathe life and tenderness into Miep and Otto's partnership, and Powley ennobles Miep with a range of emotions including a plausible measure of humor.

From Salon ● Jan. 21, 2023

We’d like to believe that suffering instructs and ennobles; that our grief, fear and pain increases our sympathy for the grief, fear and pain of others.

From The Guardian ● Oct. 6, 2020

The wise and prudent Mme. de Maintenon succumbed like Mademoiselle, when her turn came, to the irresistible charm of a conversation which "renders agreeable the most serious matters, and ennobles the most trivial."

From Louis XIV and La Grande Mademoiselle 1652-1693 by Arvede Barine

Better to live in a world where freedom of expression is ubiquitous than one where the “truth” is told to us by a few ennobled journalists.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Feb. 13, 2026

He stood down as an MP in 1992 and was ennobled as a cross-bench peer in the same year, despite his party's opposition to the Lords at the time.

From BBC ● Feb. 7, 2025

But on the very eve of publication, Trevor-Roper, who had been ennobled as Baron Dacre, called to say he had changed his mind and now felt they were forgeries.

From Los Angeles Times ● Sep. 21, 2023

And that is the thing about generative AI and language learning models: They exist only by feeding on the ennobled human soul.

From Salon ● Aug. 29, 2023

These opportunities, therefore, made these men successful, and their outstanding virtue enabled them to recognize that opportunity, whereby their nation was ennobled and became extremely happy.

From "The Prince" by Niccolò Machiavelli

It adds a memorable entry to the American project of ennobling voices of the people—in this case, that of the heroine, Janie Crawford, a freethinking woman driven by what Hurston calls “that oldest human longing—self-revelation.”

From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 19, 2026

Her stoicism is all the more ennobling, given how much it costs her.

From Los Angeles Times ● Mar. 19, 2025

People teach, Keegin said, "because they believe in the ennobling of the human soul through encounters with the great minds of the past."

From Salon ● Aug. 29, 2023

Philanthropy, the ennobling pursuit of the rich and famous, is in the headlines.

From BBC ● Nov. 27, 2022

And this confession made his romantic gestures all the more ennobling.

From "The Joy Luck Club" by Amy Tan