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Definition of nurture:

  • (noun) the properties acquired as a consequence of the way you were treated as a child
  • (noun) helping someone grow up to be an accepted member of the community
  • (verb) help develop, help grow; "nurture his talents"
  • (verb) bring up; "raise a family"; "bring up children"
  • (verb) provide with nourishment;

Sentence Examples:

Most of the men in Jack's company, at least, were gently nurtured, but the steaming oysters, cold beef, and generous "chunks" of bread, filled their eyes with a magnificence and their stomachs with a gentle repletion no banquet before or after ever equaled.

His fine metaphysical intellect and grand imagination, nurtured and matured in the German schools of philosophy and theology, reproduced the speculations of their great thinkers in a form and coloring which could not fail to be attractive to all seeking and sincere minds in England.

Men who have been educated in conditions of ordinary refinement and who have volunteered in the ranks or gone to sea before the mast have experienced something very like what befell Margaret; but men are not delicately nurtured beings whose bloom is damaged by the rough air of reality, and the camp and the forecastle are not the stage.

The day following, I visited the nearest point from which the cries were heard, but I could discern no sign of the sufferer, nor could I even trace footmarks; this, however, is not remarkable, as they would speedily be obliterated by the many reptiles nurtured in the morass.

Nor is that all, for one marvels also how the aforesaid gentleman was able to give such an orderly description of all that he had seen; seeing that such an accomplishment was possessed by very few in his day, and he had had a large part of his nurture among those uncultivated Tartars, without any regular training in the art of composition.

If your brother acts unjustly, do not lay hold of the act by that handle wherein he acts unjustly, for this is the handle which cannot be borne; but lay hold of the other, that he is your brother, that he was nurtured with you, and you will lay hold of the thing by that handle by which it can be borne.

Surely, from the large standpoint of true national economy, no wiser use could be made of the vast expansion of the wealth-producing power of the nation under the reign of machinery, than to secure for every woman destined to be a wife and a mother, that relief from the physical strain of industrial toil which shall enable her to bring forth healthy offspring, and to employ her time and attention in their nurture, and in the ordering of a cleanly, wholesome, peaceful home life.

When the warriors are waiting in the haunted hall for the coming of the marsh-fiend Grendel, they fall into untroubled sleep; and the poet adds, with Homeric restraint: "Not one of them thought that he should thence be ever seeking his loved home again, his people or free city, where he was nurtured."

The latter by virtue of his Athenian nurture as well as of his own greater natural gifts reveals to us a greater number of thoughts, and those more advanced and more interesting than we find in Pindar, but the similarity in moral temper and tone is very striking, as also is the way in which we see this temper acting on their beliefs.

Whilst this irreparable loss brings its natural sorrow to every American heart and will be heard far beyond our borders with mournful respect wherever civilization has nurtured men who find in transcendent intellect and faithful, patriotic service a theme for praise, it will visit with still more poignant emotion his colleagues in the Administration, with whom his relations have been so intimate and so cordial.

In his intense selfishness, nurtured by the eternal flattery which was the very air he breathed, he could not see that the fifteen years of her life which he had absorbed, or the loss of the husband whom he had supplanted, gave her any claim upon him.

We need not, however, be hypercritical about distinctions; we know that the bulk of the respective provinces of nature and nurture are totally different, although the frontier between them may be uncertain, and we are perfectly justified in attempting to appraise their relative importance.

We can inquire into the history of twins who were exceedingly unlike in childhood, and learn how far their characters became assimilated under the influence of identical nurture, inasmuch as they had the same home, the same teachers, the same associates, and in every other respect the same surroundings.

It must be borne in mind that it is not necessary to ascribe the divergence of development, when it occurs, to the effect of different nurtures, but it is quite possible that it may be due to the late appearance of qualities inherited at birth, though dormant in early life, like gout.

Hitherto we have investigated cases where the similarity at first was close, but afterwards became less; now we will examine those in which there was great dissimilarity at first, and will see how far an identity of nurture in childhood and youth tended to assimilate them.

I could quote others just as strong as these, in some of which the above phrase "complementary" also appears, while I have not a single case in which my correspondents speak of originally dissimilar characters having become assimilated through identity of nurture.

In himself William Sharp was so prodigiously a personality, so conquering in the romantic flamboyance of his sun-like vitality, so overflowing with the charm of a finely sensitive, richly nurtured temperament, so essentially a poet in all he felt and did and said, that it was impossible patiently to accept his writings as any fair expression of himself.

Throughout the rest of the world the young girl, who will one day become a mother (and I speak of those who may be held to be well brought up), is nurtured on the plainest food attainable, with the scantiest addition of meat or other condiments; whilst as to wine they train them either to total abstinence or to take it highly diluted with water.

And the more it leads us into curious byways and nurtures us into indifference for the beaten highways of the world, the sooner we shall end, if we be not specialists and students by profession, in ceasing to treat our books as the companions and solace of our lifetime, and in using them as the instruments of a refined sort of self-indulgence.

Could the airy creatures nurtured in those nests have left permanently traced upon the air behind them their own bright summer flight, the whole atmosphere would be filled with interlacing lines and curves of gorgeous coloring, the center of all being this forsaken bird's-nest filled with snow.

And I shall ever remain grateful for the intellectual and moral training it gave me, for the self-reliance it nurtured, for the altruism it inculcated, for the deep feeling of the unity of man that it fostered, for the inspiration to work that it lent.

Although the crop of corn thus obtained is valuable, yet when a good and permanent meadow is wanted, and when all the strength of the land is required to nurture the young grass thus robbed and injured, the proprietor is often at considerable expense the second year for manure, which, taking into consideration the trouble and disadvantage attending it, more than counterbalances the profit of the corn crop.

You would have thought that after the shameful way in which Theodore treated me in the matter of the secret treaty that I would then and there have turned him out of doors, sent him back to grub for scraps out of the gutter, and hardened my heart once and for all against that snake in the grass whom I had nurtured in my bosom.

This heroic woman, nurtured in courts, and accustomed to all the luxury that such an exalted station as hers can give, has thought herself fortunate, during many a night of the last year, when she could have the shelter of the poorest hovel, with some brown bread and milk for food, and has partaken, at the same humble board, the frugal repast of the peasants who sheltered her.

The result might be that we should spend less of our national income on preparations for war and more in making the conditions of life tolerable for the poor; that we should begin to pay something of the same sort of care for the training of children that we now bestow on the nurture of pigs and calves.

I have heard it said that this apparently brutal action has anything but the maddening effect tenderly nurtured persons might suppose, and that the patient is soothed and satisfied with a rapidity and completeness unattainable by other and more polite methods.

Yet I send it forth into the world thinking that haply there may be some, and they not of the baser sort, who reading therein as the humor takes them, may draw from it nurture for their minds.

One of the greatest problems of nurture at this time, as has already been suggested, centers around the wise use of this energy in the home, the day school, the Sunday School and, most important of all, in the hours unoccupied with definite tasks, for habits are forming through its outgoing.

When it is remembered that during these years the desire for reading is so great that it will be satisfied, surreptitiously if not openly, that the heroes and heroines strengthen ideals of their own type in the soul of the child, that these are the years in which taste is being formed, not only in reading but in living, nurture again has a great task outlined.

The Iris, on the other hand, flowing with a swifter course than any river I know, for a short space billows along the adjacent rock, and then, plunging over it, rolls into a deep whirlpool, affording a most delightful view to me and to every spectator, and abundantly supplying the needs of the inhabitants, for it nurtures an incredible number of fishes in its eddies.

Glades, bursting with a wealth of flowers nurtured by the mildness of the climate, penetrated the wood in every direction; streams bubbling up from springs, and forming little cascades where their course was checked by granite boulders, lent an additional charm.

It is supported by millions of Irish settled in America and in Australia; and here I would say that it has often struck me that the strong feeling of dissatisfaction, or, I might say, of disaffection, among the Irish is fed and nurtured by the marked contrast existing between the social condition of large numbers of the Irish in the South and West of Ireland and the views and habits of their numerous relatives in the United States.

Yet, despite the checkered lives that have run their course within its pale, and notwithstanding the luster shed upon its history by the many great jurists nurtured there, the Temple gains its greatest renown from the residence therein of that famous trio, Johnson, Goldsmith, and Lamb.

Physical training will be made an integral part of the course of study, medical and dental inspection will obtain both in the school and in the home, insanitary conditions will no longer be tolerated, intemperance in every form will disappear, and every child will receive the same careful nurture that we now bestow upon the prize winners at our live-stock exhibition.

They ranged the seas and learned the value of the land; and while they fed the great despot of the Middle Ages, the light of intelligence, born of energy and nurtured by activity, cast its benignant gleams from the central island of the Rhine, and drove from their mountain nooks the owls and bats of tyranny and superstition.

A ballot in behalf of our candidate will be a vote of confidence in the ability of the plain people of this country to adopt the best educational methods without the patronizing dictation of aboard of specialists nurtured on foreign and uninspiring theories of instruction.

I found these people degraded because of their habits and not of their tendencies, which statement I can justify; whatever may be their natural instincts, born, nurtured in their unlovely environment, they have no choice but to fall into the usages of poverty and degradation.

Doubtless all of this enthusiasm for the nurture of children will at last arouse public opinion in regard to the transmission of that one type of disease which thousands of them annually inherit, and which is directly traceable to the vicious living of their parents or grandparents.

That primitive maternal instinct, which has always been as ready to defend as it has been to nurture, will doubtless promptly grapple with certain crimes connected with the white slave traffic; women with political power would not brook that men should live upon the wages of captured victims, should openly hire youths to ruin and debase young girls, should be permitted to transmit poison to unborn children.

To such advantages of situation, on the very highway between two oceans, are added a soil of unsurpassed richness, and a fascinating, undulating beauty of surface, with a health-giving climate, calculated to nurture a powerful and generous people, worthy to be a central pivot of American institutions.

Life in the Metropolis of the Pacific Brought up in a bountiful country, where no one really has to work very hard to live, nurtured on adventure, scion of a free and merry stock, the real, native Californian is a distinctive type; as far from the Easterner in psychology as the extreme Southern is from the Yankee.

The frame of the entire creature when young has the triangles of each kind new, and may be compared to the keel of a vessel which is just off the stocks; they are locked firmly together and yet the whole mass is soft and delicate, being freshly formed of marrow and nurtured on milk.

The fruits or herbs which are our daily sustenance take all sorts of colors when intermixed, but the color of red or fire predominates, and hence the liquid which we call blood is red, being the nurturing principle of the body, whence all parts are watered and empty places filled.

One thing at least is certain, that crime will never permanently decrease till the material conditions of existence are such that women will not be called upon to fight the battle of life as men are, but will be able to concentrate their influence on the nurture and education of the young, after having themselves been educated mainly with a view to that great end.

Vigilance, not the nervous vigilance, unquiet and anxious, which rouses to mischief the sporting instinct of children and stings the rebellious to revolt, but the vigilance which, open and confident itself, gives confidence, nurtures fearlessness, and brings a steady pressure to be at one's best.

You yourselves can imagine what the journey on foot along the bleak coast in winter, through tribe after tribe of hostile savages, must have been to delicately nurtured men and women, naked but for a piece of raw deerskin and utterly without food save for the few nauseous berries or offal rejected by the Indians.

There were others, again, which were frozen and dead, where the drifting snow piled itself up over the gigantic and pathetic contrivances of a race living underground, with huge vents and chimneys, burrowing further into the earth in search of shelter, and nurturing life by amazing processes which I cannot here describe.

It was pleasant music to their ears to hear those four new voices in their secluded home; and though they knew it would increase their labor to provide food for those gaping mouths, what cared they for their own comfort, if they could nurture their precious charge, and rear them to be an honor and a blessing?

It is neither a short nor an easy undertaking to substitute the love of beauty for mere desire, to place the mind above the senses; but is not this the sum of the immemorial obligation which rests upon the adults of each generation if they would nurture and restrain the youth, and has not the whole history of civilization been but one long effort to substitute psychic impulsion for the driving force of blind appetite?

Tenderly loved and gently nurtured by her parents, it was at that period in her life in which their presence and guardianship were most seriously needed, that she became an orphan; and her future charge necessarily devolved upon an uncle, between whom and her father, since their early manhood, but little association of any kind had taken place.

Since impediment and bias are never a part of the essence of the soul, the statement that the aim of nurture is to furnish a full and free opportunity for each individual to secure a normal development is, practically, identical with what Emerson has said of culture.

Shortly the country will pass through a period when an unearned increment will fall into the hands of a half-educated class, whose life has nurtured in them strong animal passions; but I see no reason why we should not pass through the social as we are passing through the political crisis, and obtain a modified aristocracy in the third generation, which in the fourth should become as profitable to the country as an aristocracy well can be.

Now I would rather not say whether I consider it quite likely that a boy of this birth and nurture would fly at a boy much bigger than himself in vindication of the fair fame of a mother whom he had never known, or would freely risk his life to warn a sleeping household that they were being robbed, or would, on all occasions, exhibit the most excellent manners and morals, and a delicacy of feeling that is quite dainty.

I have never heard of a man who had been spared and nurtured by wolves having been found; and, as many boys have been recovered from wolves after they had been many years with them, we must conclude that after a time they either die from living exclusively on animal food, before they attain the age of manhood, or are destroyed by the wolves themselves, or other beasts of prey, in the jungles, from whom they are unable to escape, like the wolves themselves, from want of the same speed.

Out of his studies of metamorphosis of parts there grew in his mind the belief that the multitudinous species of plants and animals about us have been evolved from fewer and fewer earlier parent types, like twigs of a giant tree drawing their nurture from the same primal root.

And now, assuming children of both sexes to have been born, it will be proper for us to consider, in the next place, their nurture and education; this cannot be left altogether unnoticed, and yet may be thought a subject fitted rather for precept and admonition than for law.

Between Alexis, the beautiful page whom the late countess had found and fancied among a wandering Bohemian horde, and the high-born daughter of the feudal house, an attachment had sprung up, nurtured by the isolation in which they lived, and the romantic character and youth of the parties.

She recognizes them as within her pale, provides in her standards for their nurture, and though not faultless in her treatment of them, she does seek their improvement, through the influence of her ministers, and by urging upon parents their responsibility.

A loving sensitive nature was too likely, under such nurture, to have its susceptibility heightened into unfitness for an encounter with any harder experience; all the more, because there were gleams of fierce resistance to any discipline that had a harsh or unloving aspect.

I desire to call special attention here to the fact that should the mother be in such a condition that she is unable to nourish her babe, it is not given to another woman for nurture, but is sustained temporarily on soup, rice water, and sugarcane juice.

Although the emancipation proclamation, written and promulgated by the immortal Lincoln, has been operative for more than thirty-six years, yet a species of slavery still exists there, fostered and nurtured by the statutes authorizing the convict lease system.

To accord them any significant role would be to open the door to precisely those dogmatic influences that have nurtured social conflict and blocked human progress.

We are dealing now with "nurture," not with "nature," but we are dealing with a department of nurture which can only be understood when we realize that human beings begin their lives nine months or so before they are born, and that the first stage of their nurture is coincident with what we call expectant motherhood, whilst the second stage of their nurture, normally and properly, ought to be coincident with what we may call nursing motherhood.

Our task, we shall soon discover, is not an easy one: because it is rarely easy to disentangle the effects of nature from those of nurture, all the phenomena, physical and psychical, of all living creatures being not the sum but the product of these two factors.

It is only in our own time that we are learning the measure of the natural differences between individuals, it is only lately that we have come to see that races cannot rise by the transmission of acquired characters from parents to offspring, since such transmission does not occur, and it is only within the last few years that the relative potency of heredity over education, of nature over nurture, has been demonstrated.

Amongst the many things alleged against woman as natural defects by those who have never for a moment troubled to distinguish between nature and nurture, are an incapacity to combine with her sisters, petty dishonor in small things, a blindness to the meaning of "playing the game."

Yet this curious movement, bleak and squalid as it may seem to men nurtured in the venerable decorum of ecclesiastical tradition, was at bottom identical with the yearning for stronger spiritual emotions, and the cravings of religious zeal, that had in older times filled monasteries, manned the great orders, and sent wave upon wave of pilgrims and crusaders to holy places.

This opinion of the American seamen is precisely the converse of what is generally believed in Europe, however, and more particularly in England; for, following out the one-sided political theories in which they have been nurtured, disorganization, in the minds of the inhabitants of the old world, is inseparable from popular institutions.

Men nurtured in luxury or competence at home, as soon as the unfailing ennui arising from want of society in the backwoods begins to succeed the excitement of settling, too frequently drink, and in many cases drink from their waking hour until they sink at night into sottish sleep.

The big windlass, with its coil of seemingly never-ending chain, winding and unwinding, lowering and raising the old, oaken bucket green with age, full and flowing; the cooling water oozing between the age-warped staves, nurturing the green grasses growing about the box-like enclosure.

As to the changes wrought on the body during its lifetime by peculiarities in nurture, habits, and surroundings, these dents or modifications are often very important for the individual, but it does not follow that they are directly important for the race, since it is not certain that they are transmissible.

Birds have inborn predispositions to certain effective ways of pecking, scratching, swimming, diving, flying, crouching, lying low, nest-building, and so on; but they are marked off from the much more purely instinctive ants and bees by the extent to which individual "nurture" seems to mingle with the inherited "nature."

This little book then is an account, as far as I can give it, of what we may do to help ourselves in the matter, by feeding and nurturing the finer and sweeter thought, which, like all delicate things, often perishes from indifference and inattention.

In it the soul is compared to a charioteer driving two winged steeds, one mortal, the other immortal; the one ever tending towards the earth, the other seeking ever to soar into the sky, where it may behold those blessed visions of loveliness and wisdom and goodness, which are the true nurture of the soul.

Woman should be unshackled, her soul set free, her ambition awakened, her nobility developed, her strength nurtured, her mind educated, her normal sense quickened, her consciences sanctified, her affections taught to wind their tendrils about all that is noble.

Accustomed from their youth to innumerable hardships, they soon become superior to a sense of danger, or the dread of death, and their fortitude, implanted by nature, and nurtured by example, by precept, and by accident, never experiences a moment's allay.

I appended my letter, for want of a better opportunity, and at the request of several members, to a paper on the doctrine of the Myth, read at the time; observing, that if the account is credible, perhaps Niebuhr may have been precipitate in treating the nurture of the founders of Rome as fabulous, and consigning to the Myth facts of infrequent occurrence.

Here was she, a carefully nurtured daughter of society, until now never daring to step one inch beyond the line of conventionality, sitting afar from all her friends and kindred on a wide desert plain, under a bit of canvas with a strange missionary's arm about her, and sitting as securely and contentedly, nay happily, as if she had been in her own cushioned chair in her New York boudoir.

Next, it was a deed most odious to the people, and not only to your party, but to many among ourselves; and, as it is perilous for any government to outrage the public opinion, so most was it perilous for a government which had from that opinion alone its birth, its nurture, and its defense.

Solitude and familiarity with nature helped to nurture the poetical side of his character, and to strengthen that meditative habit which blends so strangely with his impetuous activity, and which for the most part kept tumults and toils from invading his central soul.

Since then, having been domesticated and widely disseminated, it now offers varieties of wide departure from the original type, and which have been nurtured into self-sustaining breeds, distinguished from each other by the possession of peculiar characteristics.

Was it not a purer, perhaps a higher, ambition to prove that in the most frightful times and through long years a simple citizen had it in his power by his example, his voice and his pen, by courage, by disinterestedness, by toil, to become a real power in the State of himself; and have not you, delicately nurtured woman as you are, also cherished a similar ambition and done a similar work, even from a more difficult position?

Cider, he insisted, drawing from his pocket a clipping much tarnished with age, is a drink for men of reason and genteel nurture; a drink for such as desire to drink pleasantly, amiably, healthily, and with perseverance and yet retain the command and superintendence of their faculties.

The conventional proprieties are a law written on the hearts of refined, delicately nurtured girls; and though, in the desperation of unreciprocated and jealous love, she had dared to violate them, not the less did they now thoroughly revenge themselves.

They tell us there is no longer much place or use for gentility in the world, for men and women nurtured and refined above the common level; tell us in particular that woman is only now emancipating herself from centuries of ineffectual nonage, only now entering upon her active career.

Is it fair that one child shall be carefully nurtured amid healthful surroundings, and given a chance to develop all that is in him, and that the other shall be cradled in poverty, neglected, poorly nurtured in a poor hovel where pestilence lingers, and denied an opportunity to develop physically, mentally and morally?

If the combs are not removed too fast, and care is taken not to deprive the stock of so much brood that the bees cannot keep up a vigorous population, a queen in a hive so managed, will lay her eggs in cells to be nurtured by the bees, instead of being eaten up; and thus, in the course of the season, she may become the mother of three or four times as many bees, as are reared in a hive under other circumstances.

Interestingly enough, social principles adopted in the age when pragmatics required that society support childbirth, family nurturing, and education are extended today, under totally different circumstances, in ignorance of the necessities that were reflected in these principles.

The great torrents and inland seas of that noble country have schooled the generation, nurtured by their side, into a strong conception of freedom, and the right to be justly dealt with, at the hands of those with whom it is connected by the double alliance of kindred predilection.

Nurtured as he had been in the old school and the strong traditions which taught an austere simplicity of life, a contempt for luxury and show, he was bewildered and saddened by the rapid growth of riches, the shameless worship of wealth, the unrestrained passion for amusement at all costs, the thirst for new sensations, and the ostentatious airs of the youth of the day, who seemed to be born disillusioned and whose palates were jaded before they knew the taste of food.

Nurtured as he had been from his youth upward among the magnates of the land, accustomed to magnificence and luxury till he had almost fancied that the world had nothing left of beautiful or new that he had not witnessed, Paul stood awhile, after the freedman had departed, gazing with mute admiration on the richness and taste displayed in all the details of this the scholar's sanctum.

It is true, that in my occasional visits to the more civilized portions of my country, I saw many of the beautiful and gently nurtured, but they were placed so far above me that it would have seemed as rational to become enamored of the fairest star in heaven, and think to make it mine.

And a few more crises like the one through which we have just begun to pass, will open our eyes to the necessity of doing something ourselves to make money, and show that foreign trade in every form, and the sale of every species of product known to the industry of a skillful people, must be watched with jealous national and individual care, and nurtured as we would nurture a young and tender child.

Her course of instruction unites the conservatism of experience with adaptation to the needs of modern scholarship, all under the acknowledged influence of religious nurture; her well-stocked library and ample museum, with her unrivalled accommodations for students, furnish her for her work, so that she is, in reality as well as in name, in the affections of her members as well as in her profession, a home of sound learning.

If the heart be but attuned to harmony, it will vibrate to the simplest notes, faint though they be, as by the wafting of the evening breeze among the chords of a neglected harp, sadly hung upon the willows; it will cherish the feeblest idea, and nurture it into perfect melody.

In the region about the great lakes and for some distance to the northward and to the east and west there are great areas amounting in the aggregate to some hundred thousand square miles that would apparently be well suited to the nurture of this form, and which in the present condition of the country, as well as for the immediate future, cannot be turned to better use.

Ninety-nine people in a hundred, taken as they come in the census, would find more to admire in Morris's songs, than in the writings of any other American poet; and that is a parish in the poetical episcopate, well worthy a wise man's nurture and prizing.

Living as newspapers do in the fierce light focussed from a million eyes, fighting daily with keen competition, the instinct of self-preservation compels their directors to engage the highest talent where it is discoverable, and, failing that, the most sedulously nurtured skill.

The great qualities thus nurtured in the bosom of the multitudes destined soon to return to peaceful life will assuredly make a powerful impression on the whole society, which must be thoroughly pervaded with the manly virtues thence destined to be infused into it.

As a rule, a bad-tempered thoroughbred does not sulk, he fights openly, says his say, like an irritated master or mistress, and, having relieved his mind, lets the matter drop, and does not nurture it up for future use, like the servants in the kitchen.