to harden one's heart
1
7.7
- idiom
- Informal
:
endurecer el corazón
- If we harden our hearts now, then we are despising the mercy and love of God; we are treading God's love underfoot.
Examples
-
I understand your anguish, my son... but you must not let it harden your heart.
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Morgan could see that hardening his heart was exactly what he was doing.
Fiction book (1996) -
You must not harden your heart, brother.
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You have to harden your heart.
-
You then have a choice: learn from your mistake, or harden your heart.
Blog text (3) -
To do this, we had to harden our hearts against the suffering outside.
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Addy had told him not to harden his heart, and the words had been good.
Fiction book (1996) -
We harden our hearts and grow callous.
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It is not possible for many of us to harden our hearts enough to become blind to the suffering of the children.
Blog text (1) -
After experiencing betrayal, it's easy to harden one's heart and shut others out.
Antonyms
How Uncaring
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning is directly derivable from combining 'harden' (to make hard) with 'heart' (the emotional center): to make one's emotions 'hard' is transparently to become less compassionate or emotionally responsive. This metaphorical but regular compositional pattern is common cross-linguistically and would be understandable to a B1 learner who knows the constituents.
Etymology
The idiom harden one's heart comes from the picture of a heart turning hard like stone. If your heart is hard, you cannot feel or care, so the phrase means 'to stop feeling or caring'.