to take to heart
- phrasal verb
- /teɪk tə hɑrt/
- Informal
- Dear George, I took your criticism to heart and after some serious soul searching, I concluded you were right.
- take to heart the lesson
- take to heart the issue
And I will take that to heart every day.
- And I will take that to heart every day.
- And Tenor takes it to heart as her own failure.
- It really hit me and I have taken this to heart.
- But but I never really took it to heart.
- She, she thought she wasn't enough for me and took it to heart.
- And so if you're a manager, if you're an HR director, take this to heart, you work for the company.
- But but it's dangerous because people took it to heart.
- So I'm, I'll be a little bit of a fool if I didn't take it to heart to some degree and say it mattered to them.
- And that was a profound reality and realization that I had to take to heart.
- I wanted to share with you those things because these are concepts that I'm really taking to heart this year.
Examples
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But of all Hector's boys, there is only one who truly took everything to heart, remembers everything he was ever taught.
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I did not take any of it to heart.
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And I will take that to heart every day.
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And I took it to heart and had a great time.
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And what were some of the biggest complaints that you took to heart from the users?
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Let's just say you took my advice to heart.
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Chris, if any of this means anything to you, take it to heart.
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Suppliers should take this finding to heart when trying to keep their customers satisfied.
Academic text (2000) -
As we enter an increasingly global and complex era, I hope you will take to heart the description over the Dexter Gate quote.
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After receiving constructive feedback from his teacher, he decided to take to heart her advice and improve his grades.
Synonyms
Think something is important and pay attention to it
To make someone suddenly understand how serious something is
Antonyms
How Affected
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning 'to be deeply affected' follows directly from combining 'take' (to accept/receive) with 'heart' (the seat of feelings), creating an obvious metaphor of accepting something into one’s emotions. This metaphorical composition is common cross-linguistically (e.g., Spanish 'tomar a pecho', French 'prendre à cœur'), so a B1 learner who knows the constituents will very likely infer the MWE's meaning.
Etymology
The phrase take to heart comes from the image of putting words into your heart, since people think the heart is where feelings live. So to take advice or criticism to your heart means you are 'deeply affected' by it.