"Naif" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... down." I observed on this and other occasions that Russian gypsies are very naif. And as it is in human nature to prefer sitting by a pretty girl, these Slavonian Romanys so arrange it according to the principles of natural selection—or natural politeness—that, when a stranger is in their gates, the two prettiest girls in their possession sit at his right and left, the two ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... impossible to resist this invincible naivete. Courtland bit his lip as the vision arose before him of this still more naif English admirer bringing hither, at Miss Sally's bidding, the tribute which she wished to place on the grave of an old lover to please a THIRD man. Meantime, she had put her two little hands behind her back in the simulated attitude of "a good girl," and was saying ...
— Sally Dows and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... genius of France, exquisite in the proportion of his feeling and the expression of feeling to its source and cause. If we do not name him, with some of his admirers, "the French Homer," we may at least describe him, with Nisard, as a second Montaigne, "mais plus doux, plus aimable, plus naif que le premier," and with all the charm of ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... an acquired art. Children rarely have it. That is why the Greeks represented love of a certain kind as a boy, selfish, treacherous, ingratiating, blind to appearances, naif, gracefully ruthless. ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... read like the portrait of a man particularly successful in his love affairs. It does not certainly read like a description of the hero of a novel written by The Duchess or even by Miss Jane Austen. Yet this is the picture of a man plentifully beloved, large-minded but strangely naif; a revolutionist ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 • Rupert Hughes
... which Du Bellay played so great a part. The inversion of the sentence, a trick which gives a special character to all the later formal drama is prominent: the convention of contrast, the purely classical allusion, are mixed with a spirit that is still spontaneous and even naif. But every word is chosen, and it is especially noteworthy to discover so early that restraint in epithet which is the charm but also the danger of what French style has since become. Of this there are two examples here: the eleventh line and the last, which rhymes with it. To contrast slate with ...
— Avril - Being Essays on the Poetry of the French Renaissance • H. Belloc
... much is gone already of the naif abandonment of those boyish friendships, of that candid and ready admiration that, like a well-adjusted spring, leapt forth at a touch, even when I heard a stranger praised! Two or three disillusionments have sufficed to weaken that spring. ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Italian • Various
... wholly lacking in the rudiments of divinity. Of modern exegesis and criticism you are quite innocent. But you evidently have something which is much rarer—what the Quakers call a CONCERN. Of course you should really go to the theological seminary and establish this naif intuitive mysticism upon a disciplined basis. You will realize that we churchmen can only meet modern rationalism by a rationalism of our own—by a philosophical scholarship which is unshakable. I do not suppose that you ...
— Where the Blue Begins • Christopher Morley
... the command of the army, and so forth, and fully admitted that he was bound in honour to play his part effectively; but he was equally convinced that he was subject to nothing outside of his sense of honour. His duties were also his rights. The naif expression of this doctrine by a great borough proprietor, 'May I not do what I like with my own?' was ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen |
