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More "Naive" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... decisions of the men of the senses, or the men of the schools, let him fearlessly condemn any work in which he cannot find wrought into its very heart suggestions or manifestations of the Divine attributes, or an earnest effort on the part of its author, naive and unconscious as it may be, to imitate the Spirit ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. IV. October, 1863, No. IV. - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... importance must be imported into the significance of that word—the sick-room became a shrine, served by two ageing priestesses and a naive acolyte. Everything was done to make Henry an invalid in the grand manner. His bed of agony became the pivot on which the household life flutteringly and soothingly revolved. No detail of delicate attention ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett
... sermons. He takes comparisons from it: "You who have been to Carthage—" he often says to his listeners. For the boy from little Thagaste to go to Carthage, was about the same as for our youths from the provinces to go to Paris. Veni Carthaginem—in these simple words there is a touch of naive emphasis which reveals the bewilderment of the Numidian student just landed ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... Beechhurst four years ago, and spoke in a congratulatory, patronizing manner that was peculiarly annoying to Bessie: "There is a difference between now and then—eh, Bessie? Mrs. Wiley and I have often smiled at one naive little speech of yours—about a nest-egg that was saving up for a certain event that young ladies look forward to. It must be considerably grown by now, that nest-egg. ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... from over-consciousness of their inferior position or the preoccupation of their labor, never indulged in any gallantry toward her, and he himself, in his revulsion of feeling against the whole sex, had scarcely noticed that she was good-looking. But this naive exhibition of preference could not be overlooked, either by his companions, who smiled cynically across the table, or by himself, from whose morbid fancy it struck an ignoble suggestion. Ah, well! the girl was ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... yesterday! That means the afternoon of to-day.—And why the P—Maisie P. Lockwood? Is that for Pollock, her first husband?—Unusual! A rather naive person!" Then his face went blank. "She must be a thought-reader! How the dickens did she guess that I wanted to make her acquaintance? I scarcely knew it myself at the time that she ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... light, colour, every-day gesture, which the poetry of the Divine Comedy involves, and before the Fifteenth Century Dante could hardly have found an illustrator. Botticelli's illustrations are crowded with incident, blending with a naive carelessness of pictorial propriety three phases of the same scene into one plate. The grotesques, so often a stumbling-block to painters who forget that the words of a poet, which only feebly present an image to the mind, must be lowered in key ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... thought it good taste to admire the rustic and naive. The idyls of Gessner and the pastorals of Florian were the favorite reading, and Watteau the popular painter. Gentlefolks, steeped in artifice, vice, and intrigue, masked their empty lives under the as sumption of Arcadian simplicity, and minced and ambled in the costumes of shepherds ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... introduction, and then broke in rather breathlessly: "There, Doctor, I shall leave you with royalty; do not let your republican ignorance forget her proper title. Mr. Arnold, Mrs. Merrill is beckoning to us; will you come?" and with a naive, superbly impish look at Ruth, she drew Arnold away before he ...
— Other Things Being Equal • Emma Wolf
... that which I do not believe he had done a dozen times in all his life—he threw back his head and laughed loud. Melville caught the contagion and gave way to his mirth, which was increased by the naive remark of Dot that she couldn't see ...
— The Story of Red Feather - A Tale of the American Frontier • Edward S. (Edward Sylvester) Ellis
... teach it you." The copy of a document straight from the Emperor's own office did not have any effect on the prison inspector either. He decidedly refused to let Nekhludoff come inside the prison walls. He only smiled contemptuously at Nekhludoff's naive conclusion, that the copy he had received would suffice to set Maslova free, and declared that a direct order from his own superiors would be needed before any one could be set at liberty. The only things he agreed to do were to communicate to Maslova that ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... were the following naive reports which drifted into her employer's office from day to day, as this ...
— The Golden Slipper • Anna Katharine Green
... brought back to her the soulful joys of that innocent and mutual and sanctioned love; sometimes a rendezvous beneath the linden, where speech could be freer than before witnesses; sometimes a furtive clasp, or a stolen kiss,—in short, all the naive instalments of a passion that did not pass the bounds of modesty. Reliving in her vision those delightful days when she seemed to have too much happiness, she fancied that she kissed, in the void, that fine young face ...
— The Hated Son • Honore de Balzac
... securely to herself. She begged me to be seated and she fully explained everything to me. Of course I was even better acquainted than herself with all she communicated, but I confirmed the idea she evidently entertained of her being my first instructress by various naive remarks on all she was telling me. Of course I proved an apt scholar, and by my close-put questions brought out all her own knowledge, and left nothing for me to learn. At the ...
— The Romance of Lust - A classic Victorian erotic novel • Anonymous
... answer to the first assault of the world's power. How beautifully natural that is, 'Being let go, they went to their own,' and how large a principle is expressed in the naive words! The great law of association according to spiritual affinity has much to do in determining relations here. It aggregates men, according to sorts; but its operation is thwarted by other conditions, so that companionship is often misery. But a time comes when it will work unhindered, and men ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... enduring with but little external change in the shadow of a hostile faith. This is notably true of the village festivals and their ludi. Their full significance only appears when they are regarded as fragments of forgotten cults, the naive cults addressed by a primitive folk to the beneficent deities of field and wood and river, or the shadowy populace of its own dreams."[1] We may, I think, take it that we have established at least the possibility that in the Grail romances we ...
— From Ritual to Romance • Jessie L. Weston
... measure of Anita's earnest naive personality. Or was he a very clever scoundrel, with irony lurking in his soft voice, and a chuckle that he ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, March 1930 • Various
... some Ritualistic epigrams to say to Mr. Smith to-night. How delightfully rustic we all are! So naive! I am going to order dinner, and add up ...
— The Green Carnation • Robert Smythe Hichens
... sympathies. It was the old, old story of the gallant who woos and rides away, leaving the maiden to weep. The poetry was poor, and at another time its conventionality would have excited only my ridicule. But, reading it in conjunction with the quaint, naive notes scattered about its margins, I felt no inclination to jeer. These hackneyed stories that we laugh at are deep profundities to the many who find in them some shadow of their own sorrows, and she—for it was a woman's handwriting—to ...
— Sketches in Lavender, Blue and Green • Jerome K. Jerome
... do not give passion, do not give character, do not give refined or naive beauty. But you may think that the absence of these is intended to give dignity to the gods and nymphs; and that their calm faces would be found, if you long observed them, instinct with some expression of divine mystery ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... naive ideas possessed the minds of people at that time. Satan did not know that Jesus possessed a divine nature, and that, consequently, he could not beholden of death; and so, when he entered into this bargain, he was cheated, he found out to his dismay that he had lost not only ...
— Our Unitarian Gospel • Minot Savage
... to reap the fruits of your care, and the distinguished post to which you have just been appointed [He had been made Assistant Public Prosecutor in 1850.] seems to justify the hopes that you confided to me formerly, and which I treated, probably wrongly, as so much naive ambition. At the point at which you have arrived it would be entirely out of place for me to poke advice and counsel out of season at you. Permit me, for the sake of the lively friendship I bear you, and the ties of relationship which bind us together, to make this one and only ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 1, "From Paris to Rome: - Years of Travel as a Virtuoso" • Franz Liszt; Letters assembled by La Mara and translated
... Ephraemite (E)—appear to have been composed, the first in Judah in the time of Elijah, the second in Israel in the time of Amos. J gives us the immortal stories of Paradise and the Fall, Cain and Abel, Noah and the Flood; E, Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac; and the documents conjointly furnish the more naive and picturesque parts of the grand accounts of the Patriarchs generally—the first great narrative stage of the Pentateuch. God here gives us some of His most exquisite self-revelations through the Israelitish peasant-soul. And Isaiah ...
— Progress and History • Various
... quite naive: "Inasmuch as the Indians of this country had no use for the enema, why should ...
— Intestinal Ills • Alcinous Burton Jamison
... the while they both regarded the tiny fire which had set each content of the room a-dancing in the companionable darkness. For each, I take it, preferred to think of the other as being still the naive young person each remembered; and the firelight made ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... recovered his bird-like manner, and was full of a mysterious assassination that had just taken place in New York, all the thrilling details of which were at his fingers' ends. It was at once comical and sad to see this harmless old gentleman, with his naive, benevolent countenance, and his thin hair flaming up in a semicircle, like the footlights at a theatre, reveling in the intricacies ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... its private heart with nobilities of its own creation, call her "Daughter of God," "Savior of France," "Victory's Sweetheart," "The Page of Christ," together with still softer titles which were simply naive and frank endearments such as men are used to confer upon children whom they love. And so one saw a new thing now; a thing bred of the emotion that was present there on both sides. Always before, in the march-past, ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc Volume 2 • Mark Twain
... the first time, apparently, on his stage: the alternately cringing and familiar slave or valet of comedy, in his Xanthias and Karion; and in Dicaeopolis, Strepsiades, Demos, Trygaeus, and Dionysus, the sensual, jovial, shrewd, yet naive and credulous middle-aged bourgeois gentilhomme or 'Sganarelle,' who is not ashamed to avow his poltroonery, and yet can, on occasion, maintain his ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... blunt woman by nature, and it was only by great effort that she had become fine-edged. So she said to Miss West, with a sort of naive abruptness, "I'll tell you what, Miss West, we'll have cake to tea, because there are only you and I, and it is the first night of the holidays; and we'll have a strong cup, since we have all the teapot to ourselves. I think I shall try my hand ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... that of taking things as they are and taking them comfortably, is carried to a still further development. I am prepared to be told that the whole philosophy is horribly immoral; perhaps it is; but the play, certainly, is not. It is vastly amusing, its naughtiness is so naive, so tactfully frank, that even the American daughter might take her mother to see it, without fear of corrupting the innocence of age. "On peut tres bien vivre sans etre la plus heureuse des femmes": that is one of the morals of the piece; and, the more you think over ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... had bewitched him; there was something quaint and original about her naive remarks. The disappointed man might have found her brightness refreshing—her very contrast to Margaret might have been her attraction in his eyes. Well, Raby supposed that it was all right; no doubt she ...
— Wee Wifie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... de gloire, couleur des reines!" I heard him murmur. He thrust the sleeve under his chin and closed his eyes. His loud, rapid breathing was the only sound in the room. If Cressida brushed back his hair or touched his hand, he looked up long enough to give her a smile of utter adoration, naive and uninquiring, as if he were smiling at a dream or ...
— Youth and the Bright Medusa • Willa Cather
... a naive way models have of appropriating work in which, truly enough, they have no small share. They often speak of "our ...
— In the Quarter • Robert W. Chambers
... the claim of the specialist that I would repudiate. People are too apt to suppose that in order to discuss morals a man must have exceptional moral gifts. I would dispute that naive supposition. I am an ingenuous enquirer with, I think, some capacity for religious feeling, but neither a prophet nor a saint. On the whole I should be inclined to classify myself as a bad man rather than a good; not indeed as any sort of picturesque scoundrel or non-moral ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... amusing to watch the naive and childish way in which this vanity is shown. For instance, when perspective was first invented, the world thought it a mighty discovery, and the greatest men it had in it were as proud of knowing that retiring lines converge, as if ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin
... inappropriate for Cupid. Stopping in at Schaus' a day or two later, I inquired of young Mr. Schaus, to whose taste we had left the selection of the frames, his reason for this extraordinary innovation. His reply was as naive as unexpected: ...
— The Story of a Summer - Or, Journal Leaves from Chappaqua • Cecilia Cleveland
... most naive and vivid illustrations of this conception of headache is the remedy adopted for generations past, in this all too familiar and distressing condition, by the Irish peasantry. It consists of a band or strip of tough cloth, or better, of ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... this grotesque and sinister scene, we could see—last word of this antithesis—the white figures of the young girls of the sisterhood, kneeling on the chairs nearest the coffin of their companion, and who undoubtedly were beseeching God, in their naive and original prayers, to grant her the paradise of their dreams: a pretty paradise in the Jesuitical style, all in carved and gilded wood, and many-colored marble, where one could see at the end a tableau ...
— Ten Tales • Francois Coppee
... doctrine—a practical individualistic doctrine. You would not thank me for expounding it to you at large. Indeed I think that she herself did not enlighten me fully. There must have been things not fit for a man to hear. But shortly, and as far as my bewilderment allowed me to grasp its naive atrociousness, it was something like this: that no consideration, no delicacy, no tenderness, no scruples should stand in the way of a woman (who by the mere fact of her sex was the predestined victim of conditions ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... attract my boyish attention. It was headed by a naive little drawing of the carriage at an Italian inn door, and described how, after the dangers and discomforts of an Alpine pass, they descended by sunny slopes into Lombardy. Oh! the rapture that breathes from those simple pages! The vintage scenes, ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory
... against the laws of harmony, the fixed rules of counter point—and behold the men of the schools, how they will shrug their classic shoulders in contempt at his name and besotted ignorance! Or, should he venture to delight in the original and naive lyrics of some untaught bard of nature, without being able to justify his admiration by learned citations from Virgil and Horace, to say nothing of the categories of Aristotle—he is considered as an ignoramus, who might possibly impose ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No. V, May, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Something must be added to common life before we can understand it.... They are beside you day and night, and you perceive them only at the moment when they depart forever.... And yet the strange little soul she must have had; the poor, naive, exhaustless little soul she had, my son, if she said what she must have said, if she did what she ...
— Pelleas and Melisande • Maurice Maeterlinck
... "You don't understand me, sir; what I mean is that you have no business here." "Noa, lad; aw niver come to theeas shops when aw've ony business, aw allus do that furst." This rayther puzzled th' young swell an' his face went as red as a hep, cos aw laff'd at him; an' he struck his naive o'th' table; "Sir," said he, "will you take your departure?" "Noa," he said, "aw'll tak nowt 'at doesn't belang to me if aw know on it." "You're an insolent scoundrel, and I leave you with contempt." ...
— Yorkshire Ditties, First Series - To Which Is Added The Cream Of Wit And Humour From His Popular Writings • John Hartley
... manner showed a hesitation that was almost naive. She smiled, and there was apology in her smile, though none in her voice, as she remarked with ...
— The Circular Study • Anna Katharine Green
... needed and put it out of reach, and then to haggle yourself wealthy. You buy up land upon which people will presently want to build houses, you secure rights that will bar vitally important developments, and so on, and so on. Of course the naive intelligence of a boy does not grasp the subtler developments of human inadequacy. He begins life with a disposition to believe in the wisdom of grown-up people, he does not realise how casual and disingenuous has been the development of law and custom, and he thinks that somewhere ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... environment thus far instanced are obvious in themselves and easily explained. Far different is it with the majority of physical effects, especially those of climate, whose mode of operation is much more obscure than was once supposed. The modern geographer does not indulge in the naive hypothesis of the last century, which assumed a prompt and direct effect of environment upon the form and features of man. Carl Ritter regarded the small, slit eyes and swollen lids of the Turkoman as "an obvious effect of the desert upon the organism." Stanhope Smith ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... has rejected as unworthy of serious consideration the naive egoism of an Aristippus or an Epicurus is not on that account done with egoism, by any means. [Footnote: The question of self-sacrifice recurs again ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... The straightforward naive way in which this was said seemed so absurd on the face of it that the cousins could not refrain from smiling: but the sight of a great mass of rock ahead dividing the swift stream into two, and toward which the raft seemed to be rushing ...
— To Win or to Die - A Tale of the Klondike Gold Craze • George Manville Fenn
... grotesque amalgam of empiricism and tradition. The Latin classics, apart from their use as a source of tropes and commonplaces, only served to inspire a superstitious and uncomprehending reverence for ancient Rome. Of this new learning Otto II and his son were naive disciples. They could not sufficiently admire the encyclopaedic Gerbert, the most fashionable and incomparably the ablest teacher of their day. Otto II and his court listened patiently for hours while Gerbert disputed with a Saxon rival ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis
... graceful concealment of a self of which he knew nothing; and he was not surprised to find that her pretty gray eyes, now no longer hidden by her veil, really told him no more than her lips. He was a little afraid of her, and now that she had lost her naive enthusiasm he was conscious of a vague remorsefulness for his interrupted work in the forest. What was he doing here? He who had avoided the cruel, selfish world of wealth and pleasure,—a world ...
— A First Family of Tasajara • Bret Harte
... first movement, in the second the emotional phase grows slowly from the naive melody of the beginning. Against the main melody that begins in oboe solo (with pizzicato strings), semplice ma grazioso, plays later ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp
... A naive confidence that the political upheaval meant regeneration and inaugurated a reign of justice and happiness pervaded France in the first period of the Revolution, and found a striking expression in the ceremonies of the universal "Federation" in the Champ-de-Mars ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... fancies. Conversations with the Twin Sailors filled many of the pages; accounts of Paul's "adventures" occupied others. Sometimes it seemed impossible that a child of eleven should have written them, then would come an expression so boyish and naive that Miss Trevor laughed delightedly over it. When she finished the book and closed it she found Stephen Kane at her elbow. He removed his pipe and nodded ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... invaluable naval guns which had arrived so dramatically at the very crisis of the fight, in time to check the monster on Pepworth Hill and to cover the retreat of the army. But for them the besieged must have lain impotent under the muzzles of the huge Creusots. But in spite of the naive claims put forward by the Boers to some special Providence—a process which a friendly German critic described as 'commandeering the Almighty'—it is certain that in a very peculiar degree, in the early months of this war there came again and again a happy chance, or a merciful interposition, which ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... them both, when they're nice; and I'm sorry for them both when they're not." And she added, with a naive air of confidence: "But I think I like young men better than either, as ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... appearance by his descent from Pocahontas. If all these men were a little like becalmed ships, there was certainly one man whose sails were full. Three or four doors off, on our side of the road, lived a decorative artist in all the naive confidence of popular ideals and the public approval. He was our daily comedy. 'I myself and Sir Frederick Leighton are the greatest decorative artists of the age,' was among his sayings, & a great lych-gate, bought from some country church-yard, reared its thatched roof, ...
— Four Years • William Butler Yeats
... am certain that the report that we should have drawn up would have been dead against the whole thing. The objections raised from the military side would have been quite sufficient to dispel any doubts that the sailors had left on the subject. As for that naive theory that we might draw back in the middle of the naval operations supposing that the business went awry, of which I do not remember hearing at the time—— Pooh! We could hardly, left to ourselves, have been such flats ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... the symbol primarily represented—such instances as have their analogues in the legend of Ritter Tannhaeuser, or in Aucassin's resolve in the romance to go down into hell with "his sweet mistress whom he so much loves," or (here perhaps most perfectly exampled) in Arnaud de Merveil's naive declaration that whatever portion of his heart belongs to God heaven holds in vassalage to Adelaide de Beziers. It is upon this darker and rebellious side of domnei, of a religion pathetically dragged dustward by the luxuriance and efflorescence ...
— Domnei • James Branch Cabell et al
... and children around, and Mr. B is breakfasting under another tree, hard by; and messages, nods, and smiles pass backward and forward. Families see each other daily in these public resorts, and exchange mutual offices of good-will. Perhaps from these customs of society come that naive simplicity and abandon which one remarks in the Continental, in opposition to the Anglo-Saxon, habits of conversation. A Frenchman or an Italian will talk to you of his feelings and plans and prospects with an unreserve that is perfectly unaccountable ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... in a letter to his sister. "I am happy, very happy," he wrote. "She is twenty-seven, possesses most beautiful black hair, the smooth and deliciously fine skin of brunettes, a lovely little hand, is naive and imprudent to the point of embracing me before every one. I say nothing about her colossal wealth. What is it in comparison with beauty. I am intoxicated with love." The one drawback to the meeting was Monsieur Hanski. "Alas!" adds the writer, ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... There is always a younger generation but it is not always articulate. The war may not have changed the face of the world, but it changed the faces of very many young men. Faces of naive enthusiasm and an innocent expectancy were not particularly noticeable in the years 1918 to 1922. The sombreness, the abruptness, the savage mood evident in the writings of such men as Barbusse and Siegfried Sassoon ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... Every naive and laboured line of the stilted letter touched and amused and also flattered Neeland; for no young man is entirely insensible to a young girl's gratitude. An agreeable warmth suffused him; it pleased him to remember that he had been associated in ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... the mirage-like show of Venice sleeping softly over beyond—was not quite clear. Perhaps because his companion seemed so careless and unfamiliar with the monitions of strenuous living; perhaps because her face was brilliant and naive—some spontaneous thing of nature, unmarked by ...
— Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories • Robert Herrick
... harbor, with three young women in it, rested her paddles abreast the sloop. One of the fair crew, hailing with the naive salutation, "Talofa lee" ("Love ...
— Sailing Alone Around The World • Joshua Slocum
... grace that seems to be all its own. But the spell thou art asking me to catch for thee looks from thy eyes, and lurks in thy lips, and murmurs in thy marvellous voice, which was silent all the while I was considering: and it is, some naive and submissive gentleness in the quality of thy soul, which turns all thy other perfections into instruments of delirium, and yet notwithstanding contradicts them all. For any other woman but thyself ...
— The Substance of a Dream • F. W. Bain
... the recorded word.... It seems such a short time ago that he was taking his first stumbling steps along the dim hallways of language. I have been turning back to the journal I began shortly after his birth and kept up for so long, the naive journal of a young mother registering her wonder at the unfolding mysteries of life. It became less minute and less meticulous, I notice, as the years slipped past, and after the advent of Poppsy and Pee-Wee the ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... the School. Renoir's woman comes from a primitive dream-land; she is an artless, wild creature, blooming in perfumed scrub. He sets her in backgrounds of foliage or of blue, foam-fringed torrents. She is a luxuriant, firm, healthy and naive woman with a powerful body, a small head, her eyes wide open, thoughtless, brilliant and ignorant, her lips blood-red and her nostrils dilated; she is a gentle being, like the women of Tahiti, born in a tropical clime where vice is as unknown as shame, and where entire ingenuousness ...
— The French Impressionists (1860-1900) • Camille Mauclair
... house; I see something of the inhabitants (having had a good many letters to some of them); I have got my gondola; I read a little, and luckily could speak Italian (more fluently than correctly) long ago, I am studying, out of curiosity, the Venetian dialect, which is very naive, and soft, and peculiar, though not at all classical; I go out frequently, and ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... carriage—as also what he says of 'the conspicuous justice of God in hanging up the bones of Oliver Cromwell, the disgracing of the two Goodwins, blind Milton, John Owen, and others of that maleficent crew,' all crowned with the naive remark that 'the wisest and best are quiet till they see whither these things will go'—it is plain that while our wise and good author is carrying his dish as level as the uneven roads will allow, Guthrie is as plainly carrying his head straight ...
— Samuel Rutherford - and some of his correspondents • Alexander Whyte
... he knew Plank, contented to accept him anywhere he met him; but Plank's upward evolutions upon the social ladder were of no interest to him, and his naive snobbery was becoming something of ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... Ustenka's high voice from behind the vine at no great distance, followed by her shrill laugh. 'Come and help me, Dmitri Andreich. I am all alone,' she cried, thrusting her round, naive little face through ...
— The Cossacks • Leo Tolstoy
... success. It was one of those wild letters in which a young man points a pistol at a refusal, letters full of boyish casuistry and the incoherent reasoning of an idealist; a delicious tissue of words embroidered here and there by the naive utterances that women love so well—unconscious revelations of ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... you been recalled to the throne of Poland?" asks Marie, and the naive question reveals that many years of banishment have not quenched in the hearts of the exiles the hope of a return ...
— A Versailles Christmas-Tide • Mary Stuart Boyd
... isn't this the way?" Her slender hands lifted the hat to her hair, so sweetly rumpled from her pillows, "Look, Grandy, look at me! I am wearing Maman's hat —she told me I could wear it when I came to the House in the Woods! Do you think it looks well on me?" Her naive vanity almost broke their hearts. "Do you, Grandy? Look ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke
... have given up thinking about it as completely as I had done, until the sound of that lady's name, and the sight of her big black eyes, recalled it to me, and set me thinking of the sunny spring afternoon on which my sister Anne and I journeyed from Verona to Venice, and of her naive exclamations of delight on finding herself in a real gondola, gliding smoothly down the Grand Canal. My sister Anne is by some years my senior. She is what might be called an old lady now, and she certainly was an old maid then, and had long accepted her position as such. Then, as now, ...
— Stories By English Authors: Italy • Various
... marriage after the exile. The Jewish idea of marriage was naive and primitive. The purpose was procreation. Every man was bound to marry, after the exile, and could be compelled to do so, and to beget at least one son and one daughter. By direct inference sterility made marriage void. It had failed of its purpose. It was the naivete of this notion of marriage ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... At these naive words a smile lighted up the stern faces of the judges, and sped like a ray of sunlight over all the countenances of the spectators. Even the rigid features of the attorney-general were touched ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach
... slowly, his eyes upon her, "But she knows that you are not one of those others and has requested that you do her the grace to call upon her. I assured her that you would, for I know that you are kind, and also," with an air of naive pride which Arlee found admirable in him, "it is not all the world who is invited to the home of our—our haut-monde, you understand?... And then it will interest you to see how our ladies live in that seclusion which is so ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley
... how the various guns were invented is perhaps naive, but nevertheless interesting: "Although the main intent of the inventors of this machine [artillery] was to fire and offend the enemy from both near and afar, since this offense must be in diverse ways it so happened that they formed various classes ...
— Artillery Through the Ages - A Short Illustrated History of Cannon, Emphasizing Types Used in America • Albert Manucy
... Pompey, the subduer of the pirates, the conqueror of Asia, the glory of the Roman name. Even Cicero had feared that the fame of the saviour of his country might pale before the lustre of the great Pompey. "I used to be in alarm," he confessed with naive simplicity, "that six hundred years hence the merits of Sampsiceramus[4] might seem to have been more than mine." [5] But how would Pompey appear? Would he come at the head of his army, like Sylla, the armed soldier of the democracy, to avenge the affront ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude
... chance, In contact with her people while in France The previous season: she was wholly sweet And fair and gentle; so naive, and yet So womanly, she was at once the pet Of all our party; and, ere many days, Won by her fresh face, and her artless ways, Roy fell a helpless captive at her feet. Her home was in the Highlands; and she came Of good old stock, of ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... now know of microscopic anatomy, you cannot hold to the simple idea that the human body is a single life-unit. This is the naive belief that is everywhere current among men today. Inquire among your own friends and acquaintances and you will find that not one in a thousand realizes that he is, to put it jocularly, singularly plural, that he is in fact an ...
— Psychology and Achievement • Warren Hilton
... attitude, while it amazed her cousins in the extreme, was certainly highly satisfactory. The boys, when they realized that she had no desire to wrest their pets from them, waxed suddenly friendly. With the naive impulsiveness of childhood they gave her a full account of what they ...
— The Princess of the School • Angela Brazil
... labor are Anarchists at heart, plotting to let loose the torch of red revolution over this fair land. We have clearly showed their nefarious purpose to overthrow the Statue of Liberty and set up in its place the Dictatorship of the Walking Delegate. But, evil as we thought them, we were naive enough to give them credit for an elemental sense of decency. Even though they had no respect for the works of man, we thought at least they would spare the works of God, the most sacred symbols of divine revelation ...
— They Call Me Carpenter • Upton Sinclair
... with a gaiety that seemed a little forced, and at mention of her departure a subtle change had come over her face. O'Neil realized that she had matured markedly since his last meeting with her; there was no longer quite the same effect of naive girlishness. ...
— The Iron Trail • Rex Beach
... time he had a naive horror of bolshevism and anything unconstitutional, and he watched the transformation of his "brave lads" into discontented and idle workmen with dismay and deep distress. He used sometimes to come around to my rooms and talk to me; he had the bewildered air of a man ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Various
... own relations so rich, and Phil never knew where the money was coming from for to-morrow's tobacco. Why couldn't they do something for him? But they were so selfish. Why couldn't they build country-houses? She had all that naive dogmatism which is so pathetic, and sometimes achieves such great results. Bosinney, to whom she turned in her discomfiture, was talking to Irene, and a chill fell on June's spirit. Her eyes grew steady with anger, like old Jolyon's when his ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... to German and Flemish pictures and to miniatures, both of which are interesting. In the first are more Duerers, and that alone would make it a desirable resort. Here is a "Virgin and Child"—No. 851—very naive and homely, and the beautiful portrait of his father—No. 766—-a symphony of brown and green. Less attractive works from the same hand are the "Apostle Philip"—No. 777—and "S. Giacomo Maggiore," an old man very coarsely painted by comparison with the artist's father. Here ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... such naive admiration of the achievement that Trevor Mordaunt, on the verge of anger, found himself checked suddenly by an ...
— The Rocks of Valpre • Ethel May Dell
... world masterful men have drawn to them the eyes and thoughts of women. June was no exception. Among the hours when she hated Houck were increasing moments during which a naive wonder and admiration filled her mind. She was primitive, elemental. A little tingle of delight thrilled her to know that this strong man wanted her and would fight to win what his heart craved. After all he was her first lover. A queer shame distressed ...
— The Fighting Edge • William MacLeod Raine
... where his eyes had been that all this should hitherto have passed him unnoticed. He thought he had never seen anything so exquisite. But Hannah Gropphusen would scold him when he stood gazing thus in naive admiration. ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... sense of human oneness and social responsibility is strong will be intensely interested in these genuine experiences and in the naive, if perverted, viewpoint of a pick-pocket, thief and burglar who has served three terms in ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... symmetrical lines, a wooden belfry, tapering from a square tower into a delicately modelled spire. To complete and accentuate the note of the picturesque, the superstructure was held in its place by rude modern beams, propping the tower with a naive disregard of decorative embellishment. We knew it at once as the quaint and famous ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... mental labour; his kindly, mild eyes looking forth under the shadow of prominent brows; his amiable mouth surrounded by a copious silver-white beard. The cordial, prepossessing expression of the whole face, the gentle, mild voice, the slow, deliberate utterance, the natural and naive train of ideas which marked his conversation, captivated my whole heart in the first hour of our meeting, just as his great work had formerly, on my first reading it, taken my whole understanding by storm, I fancied a lofty world-sage out of Hellenic ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany
... it to me with a kind of naive suburban pride: the bath-rooms, the speaking-tubes, the dress-closets, the trouser-presses—all the complex simplifications of the millionaire's domestic economy. And whenever my wonder paid the expected tribute he said, throwing out his chest a ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 2 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... spontaneity, a youthful vivacity, in her manner, which saved it from the charge of conceit; she spoke with a naive earnestness pleasantly relieved by the smile in her grey eyes and by something in the pose of her head ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... said Mrs. Camber, smiling in her naive way, "we only have one servant, except Ah Tsong, her name is Mrs. Powis. She is visiting her daughter who is married. We made the poor old lady take ...
— Bat Wing • Sax Rohmer
... In their naive songs, our people long remembered the valley in which the chieftain parted from his comrades. Our fathers called it the Valley of Farewells; our children so will call it should our songs endure through another generation—should not our ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... sometimes with a credulity and exaggeration of language which raise a smile; but they reveal the state of men's minds and fancies within the circle of Charlemagne's influence and at the sight of him. This monk gives a naive account of Charlemagne's arrival before Pavia, and of the King of the Lombard's disquietude at his approach. Didier had with him at that time one of Charlemagne's most famous comrades, Ogier the Dane, who fills a prominent place in the romances ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... please. Alfieri's Italian style marches with dignity and Latin terseness. He rarely condescends to smile. He writes to instruct the world and to satisfy himself. Grim humour sometimes flashes out, as when he tells the story of the Order of Homer, which he founded. How different from Goldoni's naive account of his little ovation in the ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... that I should certainly feel better if she would allow me to kiss her. The only answer of the innocent girl was to offer me her laughing lips, which seemed to call for kisses. I was burning; but my respect for that innocent and naive young creature was such that I only kissed her cheek, and even that in a manner very cold ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... conquer the naive instincts of that crowd. In a moment they gave him their compassion, jocularly, contemptuously, or surlily; and at first it took the shape of a blanket thrown at him as he stood there with the white skin of his limbs showing his human kinship through the black fantasy ...
— The Nigger Of The "Narcissus" - A Tale Of The Forecastle • Joseph Conrad
... display, expose, manifest, evince. Shrink, flinch, wince, blench, quail. Shun, avoid, eschew. Shy, bashful, diffident, modest, coy, timid, shrinking. Sign, omen, auspice, portent, prognostic, augury, foretoken, adumbration, presage, indication. Simple, innocent, artless, unsophisticated, naive. Skilful, skilled, expert, adept, apt, proficient, adroit, dexterous, deft, clever, ingenious. Skin, hide, pelt, fell. Sleepy, drowsy, slumberous, somnolent, sluggish, torpid, dull, lethargic. Slovenly, slatternly, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... personality could be to a man capable of appreciating in a woman something else than the mere grace of femininity. Her glance was as direct and trustful as that of a young man yet unspoiled by the world's wise lessons. And it was intrepid, but in this intrepidity there was nothing aggressive. A naive yet thoughtful assurance is a better definition. She had reflected already (in Russia the young begin to think early), but she had never known deception as yet because obviously she had never yet fallen under the sway of passion. She was—to look at her was enough—very capable of being roused ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... had played her part admirably, showing that a young girl, however simple and naive, has the instinct of dissimulation, which only ...
— The Regent's Daughter • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... whipped. "As soon as Napoleon's interpreter had spoken," says Thiers, "the Cossack, seized by amazement, did not utter another word, but rode on, his eyes fixed on the conqueror whose fame had reached him across the steppes of the East. All his loquacity was suddenly arrested and replaced by a naive and silent feeling of admiration. Napoleon, after making the Cossack a present, had him set free like a bird restored ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... the report that we should have drawn up would have been dead against the whole thing. The objections raised from the military side would have been quite sufficient to dispel any doubts that the sailors had left on the subject. As for that naive theory that we might draw back in the middle of the naval operations supposing that the business went awry, of which I do not remember hearing at the time—— Pooh! We could hardly, left to ourselves, have been such flats as to ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... for hours. Riding back the next day to meet the women and children, we still brooded, or we discussed this "if," that "if," and yet others. But after we had once opened it all to them,—and when we had once answered the children's horribly naive questions as best we could,—we very seldom spoke to each other of it again. It was too hateful, all of it, to talk about. I went round to Tom Coram's office one day, and told him all I knew. He saw it was dreadful to me, and, with his eyes full, just squeezed ...
— The Brick Moon, et. al. • Edward Everett Hale
... paradoxes that only a revolutionary syndicalist and Frenchman could have put forward. M. Sorel is engaged in presenting the General Strike as the decisive battle of the class struggle and the core of the socialist movement. Now whatever else he may be, M. Sorel is not naive: the sharp criticism of other socialists was something he could not peacefully ignore. They told him that the General Strike was an idle dream, that it could never take place, that, even if it could, the results would not be very significant. ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... she was singularly naive, at times. He watched her digest the idea, sitting up on the hay, her chin cupped in her two hands, straws in her hair. Her eyes were swollen and her nose red, and his handkerchief was now almost as wet as her own. "I thought I was an awful ...
— The Camerons of Highboro • Beth B. Gilchrist
... but he had never safeguarded her from the temptation of cutthroat competition, or even of business shrewdness which her lawyer showed her how to make legal. Blair, on the contrary, had long ago discarded the naive brutalities of Presbyterianism; church-going bored him, and he was not interested in saving souls in Africa. But, like most of us—like his mother, in fact, he had a god of his own, a god who might have ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland
... distorted reminiscences and chronological errors, and they are written sometimes with a credulity and exaggeration of language which raise a smile; but they reveal the state of men's minds and fancies within the circle of Charlemagne's influence and at the sight of him. This monk gives a naive account of Charlemagne's arrival before Pavia, and of the King of the Lombard's disquietude at his approach. Didier had with him at that time one of Charlemagne's most famous comrades, Ogier the Dane, who ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... many things to think about—alas! to think about only. I have once more arrived at a point where retreat is impossible; I must think out my thoughts before becoming once more a naive and confident artist, although I shall be that again, and look forward with pleasure to reaping the richest benefit. You lay stress in your letter upon the fact that the enemy whom we have to fight is not only ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 1 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... observe. She began by expressing her delight at their thoughtfulness in supplying the wash tub. When the machine began to move she clapped her hands in childish glee. From glee to wonderment her mood changed as they spun along the park roads. A hundred naive questions were asked about the objects unfamiliar to a lady whose habitat was at the bottom of a big pond. Edwin answered faithfully, and had his reward in his enjoyment of her artlessness and winsomeness. Occasionally Tom looked round to ...
— The Mermaid of Druid Lake and Other Stories • Charles Weathers Bump
... agreeable intelligence quite meekly; simply wondering, in his own heart, how many of these doomed men had wives and children, and whether they would feel as he did about leaving them. It is to be confessed, too, that the naive, off-hand information that he was to be thrown into jail by no means produced an agreeable impression on a poor fellow who had always prided himself on a strictly honest and upright course of life. Yes, Tom, ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... and file, and delightful people they are. As a boy of fifteen, I remember meeting, on a seaside front, a member of a troupe then appearing called The Boy Guardsmen. He was a sweet child. Fourteen years old he was, and he gave me cigarettes, and he drank rum and stout, and was one of the most naive and cleanly simple youths I ever met. He had an angelic trust in the good of everything and everybody. He worshipped me because I bought him a book he wanted. He believed that the ladies appearing in the same bill at his hall were angels. He loved the manager of his troupe as a great-hearted ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... say anything needlessly harsh, but I ask any prudent man these questions. Could I, under these circumstances, trust any uncorroborated statement emanating from headquarters, or made by the General's order? Had I any reason to doubt the truth of Mr. Hodges's naive confession of the corrupting influence of Mr. Booth's system? And did it not behove me to pick my way carefully through the mass of statements before me, many of them due to people whose moral sense might, by possibility, have been ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... of the will to live, the human organism, with the cunning and complex working of its machinery, must fall to dust and yield up itself and all its strivings to extinction—this is the naive way in which Nature, who is always so true and sincere in what she says, proclaims the whole struggle of this will as in its very essence barren and unprofitable. Were it of any value in itself, anything unconditioned and absolute, it could not thus end ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Studies in Pessimism • Arthur Schopenhauer
... absolutely ignored, and it is obvious that the Hindoo poetess was chanting to herself a music that is discord in an English ear. The notes are no less curious, and to a stranger no less bewildering. Nothing could be more naive than the writer's ignorance at some points, or more startling than her learning at others. On the whole, the attainment of the book was simply astounding. It consisted of a selection of translations from nearly one hundred French poets, chosen by the poetess herself on a principle of her own ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson
... in her dressing-gown (her beautiful hair, released from its ribbons, streaming down her neck and shoulders), and comes most unexpectedly upon him. He is young. The senior, over whose face "a smile flickers for a moment" when the heroine says something naive, and whom she (entirely misunderstanding her feelings) thinks she hates, smokes unostentatiously; but though a little inclined to quiet "chaff," he is a man of deep feeling. By and by he will open out and gather her up in his arms. The scorner's chair is filled. I ...
— My Lady Nicotine - A Study in Smoke • J. M. Barrie
... locations, and rather to Anthony's annoyance paraded him circuitously to a table for two at the far side of the room. Reaching it she again considered. Would she sit on the right or on the left? Her beautiful eyes and lips were very grave as she made her choice, and Anthony thought again how naive was her every gesture; she took all the things of life for hers to choose from and apportion, as though she were continually picking out presents for herself from ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... comprehension or sympathy the various loves of Germaine. One can perhaps understand that after Benjamin Constant had escaped from her stormy endearments she could turn for solace to young Albert Rocca, and yet why did she still cling to Benjamin's outworn affection, and then, with naive inconsistency, declare that he had not been the supreme object of her devotion, but that Narbonne, Talleyrand and Mathieu de Montmorency were the three men whom she had most ...
— In Chteau Land • Anne Hollingsworth Wharton
... progressed, Big Jerry began to ply the visitor with questions, and press him to talk on many subjects connected with the wide world of men; and, as Donald's natural reticence yielded to the naive interrogations, he answered with a readiness which somewhat surprised even himself. The child ate little; but sat with her elbows on the table, her firmly rounded chin resting on her clasped hands, and drank in his words. Her luminous eyes were fixed on his face, and expressions of wonder ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson
... occasion could not suppress; Minnie was fond, extremely free about the touching of hands and suchlike endearments; Miriam was quieter and regarded him earnestly. Mrs. Larkins was very happy in her daughters, and they had the naive affectionateness of those who see few people and find a strange cousin a wonderful outlet. Mr. Polly had never been very much kissed, and it made his mind swim. He did not know for the life of him whether he liked or disliked all or any ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... sympathetically, amused and touched by the boy's naive philosophy. He did not tell him that the race was relatively unimportant—he was sure that Hugh would find that out for himself—but he ...
— The Plastic Age • Percy Marks
... the station by a tall gentleman in uniform and gold-laced hat, how he was invited to enter a carriage, and how great was his astonishment when the 'officer' preferred standing in the open air behind to accompanying him inside. After this naive debut he showed tact. Mr. Dean wished to know if anything could be done towards advancing the interesting guest in his 'profession'—not trade. We talk of an English school-master, but a mulatto ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... regulated—as being in some way worthier than the corresponding habits of their neighbors. The case of the German Culture has latterly come under a strong light in this way. But while it may be that no other nation has been so naive as to make a concerted profession of faith to the effect that their own particular way of life is altogether commendable and is the only fashion of civilisation that is fit to survive; yet it will scarcely be an extravagance to assert that in their own secret mind these others, too, are blest ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... endured much ridicule, not the least being for a certain naive vanity perceptible directly he passed from the south to the north of France; but he had some knowledge; he was acquainted with Hebrew, then a sufficiently rare accomplishment, and he was an assiduous student of ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... be whimsical and freakish, though it is perhaps most beautiful when there is something of the child about it, something naive and unconventional. There are men, of whom I think that Cardinal Newman was pre-eminently one, who seem to have had the appeal of a pathetic sort of beauty and even helplessness. Newman seems to have always been surprised to find himself ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... rose as poor Tonal's naive question was heard, and the old man tucked his pipes under his arm, and then took hold of the sheath and raised his claymore to return it to its peaceful state; but, as he raised the glistening basket-hilt ...
— Three Boys - or the Chiefs of the Clan Mackhai • George Manville Fenn
... which seems to-day banal and outlandish, having lost little by little its large frame of gardens, cramped now between the walls of the tall buildings, Philippe Dechartre's little house, by the roughness of its stones, by the naive heaviness of its windows, by the simplicity of the roof, which the architect's widow had caused to be covered with little expense, by all the lucky accidents of the unfinished and unpremeditated, corrected the lack of grace ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... blench, quail. Shun, avoid, eschew. Shy, bashful, diffident, modest, coy, timid, shrinking. Sign, omen, auspice, portent, prognostic, augury, foretoken, adumbration, presage, indication. Simple, innocent, artless, unsophisticated, naive. Skilful, skilled, expert, adept, apt, proficient, adroit, dexterous, deft, clever, ingenious. Skin, hide, pelt, fell. Sleepy, drowsy, slumberous, somnolent, sluggish, torpid, dull, lethargic. Slovenly, slatternly, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... racing from one thing to another. The brothers began to argue hotly about a new girl who was visiting in town; whether she was pretty, how pretty she was, whether she was naive. To Claude this was like talk in a play. He had never heard a living person discussed and analysed thus before. He had never heard a family talk so much, or with anything like so much zest. Here there was none of the poisonous reticence ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... Asia, the glory of the Roman name. Even Cicero had feared that the fame of the saviour of his country might pale before the lustre of the great Pompey. "I used to be in alarm," he confessed with naive simplicity, "that six hundred years hence the merits of Sampsiceramus[4] might seem to have been more than mine." [5] But how would Pompey appear? Would he come at the head of his army, like Sylla, the armed soldier of the democracy, to avenge ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude
... The naive bravado of the child's speech was irresistible. It won my heart as completely as I had won his, and I straightway emptied my candy box into his hands. "Oh!" he breathed, looking at the heap of dainties with infantile delight. And then he ...
— Emerson's Wife and Other Western Stories • Florence Finch Kelly
... blithe spirit, a kind of scout skylark as one might say, he had not many friends in camp. The rank and file laughed at him, were amused at his naive independence, and regarded him, not as a poor scout, but rather as not exactly a scout at all. They did not see enough of him; he flew too high. He ...
— Tom Slade's Double Dare • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... without an understanding of Hebrew cosmogony than we can understand Dante without a knowledge of medieval cosmogony. But, given this knowledge which is the common possession of all sound scholarship, we can at least understand what the passage means, even though we have long left behind us the naive conception of the vaulted skies ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins
... people will say the same of us! At all events, the man called himself "Master" and his school was a school and not an "Institute." It is no advance to call things by other than their right names. In his school boys and girls sat together indiscriminately, according to the naive custom of those days. They learned, or might learn, Reading, Writing, Arithmetic, National History, Psalmody, Sewing, Knitting, and Religion. These were the order of the day, but if anyone distinguished himself by a show of talent, diligence or ...
— Walter Pieterse - A Story of Holland • Multatuli
... man, thin, close-lipped, with high cheekbones, and long nose, a man utterly unlike his daughter save for the wide-open, all-seeing eyes, smiled at the naive correction; with that smile some enchanter's wand mirrored Cynthia in her father's face. Even Simmonds, who had seen no semblance of a smile in the features of the chilly, skeptical man by whom he was dragged out ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... it to you at large. Indeed I think that she herself did not enlighten me fully. There must have been things not fit for a man to hear. But shortly, and as far as my bewilderment allowed me to grasp its naive atrociousness, it was something like this: that no consideration, no delicacy, no tenderness, no scruples should stand in the way of a woman (who by the mere fact of her sex was the predestined victim of conditions created by men's selfish passions, ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... and especially over appointments to the cabinet. The resulting impeachment, although it did not result in conviction, brought about a distinct shrinkage in executive prestige. Grant was so inexperienced in politics and so naive in his judgments of his associates that he fell completely into the power of the machine and failed to revive the former importance and independence of ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley
... lower. Rarely did they idealize humble folk: Gay's Sweet William's Farewett to Black-Eyed Susan is in this respect exceptional. Their typical attitude is seen in his Shepherd's Week, with its ludicrous picture of rustic superstition and naive amorousness; and in Allan Ramsay's Gentle Shepherd, where the pastoral, once remote from life, assumes the manners and dialect of the countryside in ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... caught a Tartar! Outside at the end of the corridor, in full view, but out of earshot, of Narayan Singh, Yussuf Dakmar made a proposal to Jeremy that was almost perfect in its naive obliquity. There was nothing original or even unusual about it, except the circumstances, time and place. Green-goods men and blue-sky stock salesmen, race-course touts and sure-thing politicians get away with the same proposition ...
— Affair in Araby • Talbot Mundy
... ten-thousand-dollar banquet one night, in the Ten Eyck in Albany, in honor of the newsboy who every morning for twenty-two winters had brought morning papers to him in bed in his hotel room. Or like that of the millionaire merchant who told me with the most naive pride of the eleven hundred electric lights in his new home on Fifth Avenue, and of how the bathrooms of both his large daughters were fitted in solid ...
— The Harbor • Ernest Poole
... was not diminished by the fact; while Joan, for reasons of her own, preferred the constraint which the presence of another visitor put upon Demorest's uxoriousness. Of late, too, there were times when Dona Rosita's naive intelligence, which was not unlike the embarrassing perceptions of a bright and half-spoiled child, was in her way, and she would willingly have shared the young lady's company with her husband had Demorest ...
— The Argonauts of North Liberty • Bret Harte
... not to attract attention and admiration wherever she went, and she was not yet blasee and hackneyed enough to take no pleasure in the court thus paid to her, and the admiration so universally shown her, nor even to omit doing her part to win them. But, while she was naive and innocent at heart, she required of her husband that these trifling outside coquetries should not disquiet him nor render him distrustful, and that he should repose the most unshaken confidence in her. ...
— Queen Hortense - A Life Picture of the Napoleonic Era • L. Muhlbach
... the present time absolutely no figures to go upon if one wishes to learn something about the hours and wages of girls who follow certain occupations in the city. The factory inspectors (admirable men, but very much overworked) come, with the most naive delight, to visit any person who has information to give about the people over whose interests they are supposed to watch with fatherly interest. Clergymen shake their heads, or refer one to homes and charities. One has to find out the truth for one's self. ...
— Women Wage-Earners - Their Past, Their Present, and Their Future • Helen Campbell
... of knowledge is in the study of things." Not a syllable is added on that prolific text. A note informs the reader that there was a chapter on the subject, but that it has been lost. Chinese scholars, when taxed with the barrenness of later ages in every branch of science, are wont to make the naive reply, "Yes, and no wonder—how could it be otherwise when the Sage's chapter on that ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... present century the very men of the elder day of religion. Their robes shine with an unearthly light, and their abstracted eyes are hypnotized by the effulgence of their own haloes. Yet the poet never fails to insinuate some naive foible in their personification, a numbness of the heart or an archaism of soul, which reveals the possessed one as but a human brother, after all, shaped by his environment, and embodying the spirit of an historic epoch out of which the current of ...
— Men and Women • Robert Browning
... closed in I have often come upon, bending over beneath her tallow candle, writing to the dear one at the front. To this task as to all the others she concentrates her every effort and attention, anxious that no news be forgotten,—news which is as fresh and naive as the events and the nature that inspires it. "The sow has had twelve little pigs, the donkey has a nail in its hoof, little Michel has a cold, and butter now sells for forty-three ...
— With Those Who Wait • Frances Wilson Huard
... timidly reflected below in the big puddles. The visitor walked through the entry with his portfolio to get into the trap, and at that moment Zhmuhin's wife, pale, and it seemed paler than the day before, with tear-stained eyes, looked at him intently without blinking, with the naive expression of a little girl, and it was evident from her dejected face that she was envying him his freedom—oh, with what joy she would have gone away from there! —and she wanted to say something to ...
— The Horse-Stealers and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... to the Thessalonians—we have the naive picture of Messiah coming on the clouds, which, as we now know, was part of the Pharisaic tradition. In the central group the Christology is far more complex. Besides the Pharisaic Messiah, and the records of the historical Jesus of Nazareth, we have now to reckon with the Jewish-Alexandrian ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... his narration—naive, truthful, in correspondence with the character of the man—all three listen attentively. The senoritas are charmed, and, strange to say, more with his accounts of Figi and New Caledonia, than those relating to Otaheite and Hawaii. For to the last-named group of islands have gone ...
— The Flag of Distress - A Story of the South Sea • Mayne Reid
... abruptly, feeling that she was letting her enthusiasm run away with her tongue. But Madam, noting the quick leap of light to her eyes and the eager clasping of her hands as she spoke of him wanted to hear more. She was sure that in these naive confessions she would find the key-note to Mary's character. So with a few well chosen questions she encouraged her to go on, till she had gathered a very accurate idea of the conditions which had produced this wholesome ...
— The Little Colonel's Chum: Mary Ware • Annie Fellows Johnston
... however, I did not insist on rapid and naive judgments; but by a close observation of the subject as he was about to make a judgment I could tell quite plainly which judgments were spontaneous and which were deliberate. By keeping track of these with a system of marks, I was able to collect them in the end into groups representing fairly ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... and Susie were absent from the midday dinner. The shy, fluttering glances which he occasionally surprised from her, the look of mutual appreciation which sometimes passed between them at a quaint bit of philosophy or naive remark, started his pulses dancing and set the whole world singing a wordless song ...
— 'Me-Smith' • Caroline Lockhart
... Steinmann, "the prospect of an altered conception of the process of formation of the organic world." According to the new conception, the many extinct forms of antiquity are not, as Darwin supposed, "unsuccessful attempts and continued aberrations of nature"—how this reminds one of that old, naive, much-ridiculed idea that fossils were models that God had discarded as unserviceable—but would gain new life and assume hitherto unsuspected relationship ...
— At the Deathbed of Darwinism - A Series of Papers • Eberhard Dennert
... to compose a Christ drama must be looked upon as proof of the profound sincerity of his belief in the art-form which he fondly hoped he had created; also, perhaps, as evidence of his artistic ingenuousness. Only a brave or naive mind could have calmly contemplated a labor from which great dramatists, men as great as Hebbel, shrank back in alarm. After the completion of "Lohengrin" Wagner applied himself to the creation of a tragedy which he called "Jesus of Nazareth." We know his ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... 'History of Civilisation' makes a naive remark in connexion with this subject. Speaking of the other country, which he censures equally with Scotland for its slavery to superstition, he says of the Spaniards that they are a well-natured, truthful, industrious, temperate, pious people, innocent ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... Roger, as Mrs. Mifflin made no comment. "Don't you think it will be rather interesting to get a naive young girl's reactions toward the problems of our ...
— The Haunted Bookshop • Christopher Morley
... blows can give Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears;"*16* and beside them one may put this line of Lanier's, "The little green leaves would not let me alone in my sleep,"*17* because, as the context shows, he was "Shaken with happiness: The gates of sleep stood wide."*18* And how naive and tender was this nature-worship! He speaks of the clover*19* and the clouds*20* as cousins, and of the leaves*21* as sisters, and in so doing reminds us of the earliest Italian poetry, especially of 'The Canticle of the Sun', by St. Francis ...
— Select Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... had done, until the sound of that lady's name, and the sight of her big black eyes, recalled it to me, and set me thinking of the sunny spring afternoon on which my sister Anne and I journeyed from Verona to Venice, and of her naive exclamations of delight on finding herself in a real gondola, gliding smoothly down the Grand Canal. My sister Anne is by some years my senior. She is what might be called an old lady now, and she certainly was an old maid then, and had long accepted ...
— Stories By English Authors: Italy • Various
... had roused his dislike, now showed as something rather pathetic, a mere trapping of feminine weakness which would deceive no one who saw them at close quarters. Under her loud voice, her almost barbaric appearance, her queerly truculent manner, was a naive mixture of child and woman—soft, simple, eager to please. He knew of no other woman who would have given herself away quite so directly and naturally as she had ... and his manhood was flattered. He was far from suspecting the practical nature of her intentions, but ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... except Clute's just mentioned and Mrs. Parsons' "How to Know the Ferns." Both of these are valuable handbooks and amply illustrated. Clute's is larger, more scholarly, and more inclusive of rare species, with an illustrated key to the genera; while Mrs. Parsons' is more simple and popular, with a naive charm that creates ...
— The Fern Lover's Companion - A Guide for the Northeastern States and Canada • George Henry Tilton
... elaborately than any other character except the author's, and with a massive man's striving after subtlety. Moreover, Borrow has made it impossible to ignore him or to cut him out, by interlacing him with every other character in these two books. With sad persistency and naive ingenuity he brings it about that every one shall see, or have seen in the past, this terrible priest. Borrow's natural way of dealing with such a man would be that of the converted pugilist who, on hearing ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... the scent of roses," were the words Condillac put in the mouth of his statue; and these words translate the immediate truth exactly, as soon as observation becomes naive and simple enough to attain pure fact. In a passing breath I breathe my childhood; in the rustle of leaves, in a ray of moonlight, I find an infinite series of reflections and dreams. A thought, a feeling, an act, may reveal a complete soul. My ideas, my sensations, ...
— A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson • Edouard le Roy
... alone could serve as priests in the sacred rites of the temple at Jerusalem, so only the seed of Wagner can serve as priests—that is to say, as chief directing priests—when "Parsifal" is played. Thus declare the naive dwellers in Villa Wahnfried, modestly forgetting the missing link in the chain of argument which should prove them alone to be the people qualified to perform "Parsifal"; and I regret to observe the support they receive from a number of Englishmen and Scotchmen, ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... but the honest-minded youth discovered the plan and refused to accept the well meant kindness, since he believed, no doubt rightly, that this money would be used to pay for an army substitute in his place. The Diary relates in simple, naive style the experiences which befell the narrator as he followed his hard path of duty, and incidentally it reveals a fine and sensitive type of character, not unlike that which comes so beautifully to light in the Journal of ...
— The Record of a Quaker Conscience, Cyrus Pringle's Diary - With an Introduction by Rufus M. Jones • Cyrus Pringle
... Even the legend betrays its sense of the strangeness of the fact: the story of the foundation of Rome by refugees from Alba under the leadership of the sons of an Alban prince, Romulus and Remus, is nothing but a naive attempt of primitive quasi-history to explain the singular circumstance of the place having arisen on a site so unfavourable, and to connect at the same time the origin of Rome with the general metropolis of Latium. Such tales, which profess to be historical but are merely improvised ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... simply with childhood and love as emotional manifestations of the deity. The same ideas occur in Christianity, and even in the Gospels Christ is compared to a bridegroom, but the Krishna legend is far more gross and naive. ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... comfortably, is carried to a still further development. I am prepared to be told that the whole philosophy is horribly immoral; perhaps it is; but the play, certainly, is not. It is vastly amusing, its naughtiness is so naive, so tactfully frank, that even the American daughter might take her mother to see it, without fear of corrupting the innocence of age. "On peut tres bien vivre sans etre la plus heureuse des femmes": that is ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... in the vast, undiscovered hearts of men and women young and old. The half-clad lovely were protected from the satyrs in the audience by an impalpable screen made of light and of ascending music in which strings, brass, and concussion exemplified the naive sensuality of lyrical niggers. The guffaw which, occasionally leaping sharply out of the dim, mysterious auditorium, surged round the silhouetted conductor and drove like a cyclone between the barriers of ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... This charmingly naive narrative makes us doubly regret that the editor's projected Chrestomathie Algonquine has not been ...
— Aboriginal American Authors • Daniel G. Brinton
... Studies in the American Race Problem (1908), has given a record of his experiences and reflections as a cotton planter in the delta region of Mississippi, while Patience Pennington (pseud.) in A Woman Rice-Planter (1913) gives in the form of a diary a naive but fascinating account of life in the lowlands of South Carolina. Edgar Gardner Murphy, whose Problems of the Present South has already been mentioned, discusses in The Basis of Ascendancy (1909) the proper relations of black and white. The title ...
— The New South - A Chronicle Of Social And Industrial Evolution • Holland Thompson
... Their isolation makes thorough organization especially imperative. And the argument for co-operation gains force from the fact that relatively the agricultural population is declining. In the old days farmers ruled because of mere mass. That is no longer possible. The naive statement that "farmers must organize because other classes are organizing" is ...
— Chapters in Rural Progress • Kenyon L. Butterfield
... moreover, to convince him of the policy of endeavouring in the first instance to effect a reconciliation between the Queen and the favourite. This was, however, no easy task; but at length the zealous Marquis succeeded in the attempt, as he informs us in his usual naive style. ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... inquiring suspicious glances of the Squire. The others dispersed according to their pleasure—Mr Waters joining the party up-stairs, while Mr Proctor followed Jack Wentworth and Wodehouse to the door with naive natural curiosity. When the excellent man recollected that he was listening to private conversation, and met Wodehouse's look of sulky insolence, he turned back again, much fluttered and disturbed. He had an interest in the matter, though the two in whose hands it ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... of Philips' efforts to create a fresh and simple pastoral manner. As a poet, Purney moved sharply away from the classical pastoral by curiously blending an entirely original subject matter with a sentimentalized realism and a naive, diffuse expression; and as a critic he pointed in the direction of Shenstone and Allan Ramsay by emphasizing the tender, admitting the use of earthy realism in the manner of Gay, and recommending for pastoral such "inimitably pretty and delightful" tales as The ...
— A Full Enquiry into the Nature of the Pastoral (1717) • Thomas Purney
... the critical standard of the day is applied. Yet one may actually know that in the Kantian sense the limits of possible knowledge are here exceeded: one may know in what way Herbart (who never arrived at an "arrangement of ideas") would discover his "naive realism." One may even know the degree to which the modern pragmatism of James and Schiller and others would find the bounds of "true presentments" transgressed—those presentments which we are able to make our own, to ...
— An Outline of Occult Science • Rudolf Steiner
... it all over town. Policemen talk. For me, they jump through hoops. Everybody knows. You'd be smart to lie low before someone jumps out of a sung-bush and says boo! at you. If you expected the cops to do anything, you're naive. Or stupid. About those Martian workings, is ...
— Master of the Moondog • Stanley Mullen
... impulse in his nature was to be a giver of entertaininent, a source of joy in others, a recognized element of delight in the little world where he moved. He had the artistic temperament in its most primitive and naive form. Nothing pleased him so much as the act of pleasing. Music was the means which Nature had given him to fulfil this desire. He played, as you might say, out of a certain kind of selfishness, because he enjoyed ...
— The Ruling Passion • Henry van Dyke
... sense and enormous knowledge of men. From one point of view it is easy to be a saint, and it is easy to be a man of the world; the difficulty is to combine the two qualities, the cunning of the serpent with the innocence of the dove. There is nothing of the naive and guileless innocence of a cloistered virtue in the book, but though the serpent is very cunning his wiliness and craftiness coexist with a simple enthusiasm of humanity which is very marvellous to behold. When we read General Booth's expressions of confidence in the salvability ...
— Darkest India - A Supplement to General Booth's "In Darkest England, and the Way Out" • Commissioner Booth-Tucker
... court-fool was generally not a wit, but a naive blockhead, who believed all that was said, and was therefore a butt for jests. He only placed a letter in Cercas' hand, and disappeared. When Cercas had read the letter, she changed colour and seemed to become a different being. Overcome ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... big blisters on my arms and throat which were very painful. When we got back to camp, Dorothea laved the burns for me with cool milk. Ah! she was very pretty; and, what 'blackguard' Heine, as Carlyle dubs him, would have called 'naive schmutzig.' When we parted next morning I thought with a sigh that before the autumn was over, she would be in the seraglio of Mr. Brigham Young; who, Artemus Ward used to say, was 'the most married man he ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... Perhaps it was the easy finesse of ceremonial. He looked at Brillon. He had seen him sit arms folded like that, looking from the top of a bluff down on an Indian village or a herd of buffaloes. There was wonder, but no shyness or agitation, on his face; rather the naive, naked look ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... report of Werdet's supposed disaster is false, and Balzac virtuously remarks that in the present century honesty is never believed in.[*] Sometimes his want of candour appears to have its origin in his hatred to allow that he is beaten, and there is something childlike and naive in his vanity. We are amused when he informs Madame Hanska that he is giving up the Chronique de Paris —which, after a brilliant flourish of trumpets at the start, was a complete failure—because the speeches in the Chambre des Deputes are so silly that he abandons the idea of ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... make the child a hypocrite," said Adelaide. "You, of all people in the world, Edgar, objecting to her naive truth!—you, who ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... force that the God of the Scriptures shows his superiority. The entire revealing process can be looked upon as one long story of the moralization of the idea of God. Let it be granted that the biblical idea was at the beginning marked by the naive and the crude. Personally, we have never been able to see the pertinency of the reasonings which make the Hebrew Jehovah as imperfect as some students would have us believe. Nevertheless, for the ...
— Understanding the Scriptures • Francis McConnell
... woman back.' Father had set a dog on him. A less ingenuous character would be silent about such passages—I should be too egotistical and humiliated altogether—but that is not his quality. He tells us in tones of naive wonder. He talks about it and talks about it. 'I don't care what the old woman did,' he says, 'not—reely. What 'urts me about it is that I jest made a sort of mistake 'ow she'd tike it. You see, I sort of feel I've 'urt and insulted ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... had not been so very sick, Lone would have laughed at her naive method of identifying the spot. But he was too sorry for her to be amused at the vagaries of her sick brain. He did not believe anything she had said, except that she had been coming to the ranch and had left her bag under a bush beside the road. It should not be difficult to find ...
— Sawtooth Ranch • B. M. Bower
... but furtive smile struggled around the mortified mouth of the Carmelite, as he listened to the naive ...
— The Bravo • J. Fenimore Cooper
... there. He retained his women's clothes, for Nancy would not let him wear any other, and was a source of great amusement not only to the smugglers' wives, but also to little Lilly, who would listen to his conversation and remarks, which were almost as naive and unsophisticated ...
— Snarley-yow - or The Dog Fiend • Frederick Marryat
... Samoyed. Thereupon one of the Russians invited us to enter his cabin, where we were entertained with tea, Russian wheaten cakes of unfermented dough, and brandy. Some small presents were given us with a naive notification of what would be welcome in their stead, a notification which I with pleasure complied with as far as my resources permitted. A complete unanimity at first prevailed between our Russian and Samoyed hosts, but on the following day a sharp dispute was like to arise because the ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... must often have appeared naive and undevious. The fact was that his passion for truth-probing and his worship of the undiscovered loveliness of life had obscured whatever self-consciousness had been born in him. Meeting him for the first time was like entering ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... significant glances and liftings of their eyebrows. Nat was left to Josie, who conducted him to the side porch, out of sight of everybody, and planted herself in the baggy hammock there. She was gay, even brilliant within her limitations, arch, naive, coquettish, shy, petulant, by turns: animated by a sense of conquest. She supplied the major part of the conversation, chatting volubly on the thousand subjects she didn't understand, the dozen she did. ...
— The Fortune Hunter • Louis Joseph Vance
... public, admiring apostrophes from affected readers. I read these and am myself touched in view of the warm and inarticulate human feeling which my art has aroused in these people; a kind of sympathy comes over me at the naive enthusiasm which the letters utter, and I blush at the thought of how it would sober these honest folk if they could ever cast a glance behind the scenes, if their innocence could ever comprehend that ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... him after the bath she broke out in admiration of his physical presence. "The handsome fellow! No wonder her ladyship was seized by the love wind." In the evening's entertainment he had proved himself no fool in interesting anecdote of the town, and a quaint and naive description of the view the lowly take of those who call themselves the great. Under the skilful questioning of one or other this simple fellow—of keen wit and observation—had shown a phase of life unknown ...
— Bakemono Yashiki (The Haunted House) - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 2 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... the same way can a child really get the beauty of Siegfried? What can he make out of the incestuous love of Siegmund and Sieglinda? And of Siegfried's naive passion on his first glimpse of a woman? What do we want him to make of it? Is that the way we wish to introduce him to sex? And as for the rest, the allegory of the ring itself, the sword, the dragon's blood, what do little children get from this except ...
— Here and Now Story Book - Two- to seven-year-olds • Lucy Sprague Mitchell
... Cochran's naive habit of blushing told him it was not necessary to proceed. In tones of rage and mortification Cochran swore explosively; Post was relieved to find ...
— The Lost Road • Richard Harding Davis
... for us at this distance of time, and with our colder Northern temperament, to comprehend the romantic feelings of attachment subsisting between Schubert and some of his friends,—feelings which, however, are by no means rare among the impulsive youth of South Germany,—but his naive simplicity, cheerful and eminently sociable disposition, insensibility to envy, and incorruptible modesty, were qualities calculated to transform the respect due to his genius into a strong personal liking. Schubert was, in truth, a child of nature, one whom ...
— Among the Great Masters of Music - Scenes in the Lives of Famous Musicians • Walter Rowlands
... room was mostly rose color. It was like an unhealthy and bloated boudoir. And yet there was nothing sybaritic or uncleanly in the sight of this paunchy, middle-aged man sinking into the rosy-cushioned luxury of his ridiculous home. It was a frank and naive indulgence of long-starved senses, and there was in it a great resemblance to the rolling-eyed ecstasy of a school-boy smacking his ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... When she loves, it is without any airs and graces. She has not an atom of self-consciousness; she cannot premeditate; she loves because she must, rather than because she will, because it is the condition of her life. Some of the naive remarks she has to utter, might in clumsy lips seem coarse. Miss Anderson delivered them with consummate grace and innocence, but her fine smile, her bright sparkling eye, proved sufficiently, that the innocence ...
— Mary Anderson • J. M. Farrar
... thunderously at his own poor jest. Particularly from the back, as he retreated, he seemed a harmless fat man, very simple, very naive. But Ronicky Doone regarded him with an interest both cold and keen. And, with much the same regard, after Fernand had passed out of view, the Westerner regarded the table at which they ...
— Ronicky Doone • Max Brand
... gives us another glimpse of that awful winter. His naive words are, "Chie-ke-nayelle, a Slavi from Fort Norman, was a winning fellow, handsome, gracious, the possessor of a happy countenance. On his features played always a smile of contentment and innocence. In his ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... un soir joyeux de cabaret, Un de ces soirs plutot trop chauds ou l'on dirait Que le gaz du plafond conspire a notre perte Avec le vin du zinc, saveur naive et verte. On s'amusait beaucoup dans la boutique et on Entendait des soupirs voisins d'accordeon Que ponctuaient des pieds frappant presque en cadence. Quand la porte s'ouvrit de la salle de danse Vomissant ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... meanwhile such original excellences as Nature in Sambo shapes and inspires, was the task of the time. But the task fell into bungling hands. The intuitive utterance of the art was misapprehended or perverted altogether. Its naive misconceits were construed into coarse blunders; its pleasing incongruities were resolved into meaningless jargon. Gibberish became the staple of its composition. Slang phrases and crude jests, all odds and ends of vulgar sentiment, without ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... apparently fast asleep, in his cradle, whereupon, Apollo angrily aroused the pretended sleeper, and charged him with the theft; but the child stoutly denied all knowledge of it, and so cleverly did he play his part, that he even inquired in the most naive manner what sort of animals cows were. Apollo threatened to throw him into Tartarus if he would not confess the truth, but all to no purpose. At last, he seized the babe in his arms, and brought him ...
— Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome • E.M. Berens
... how to be tolerant of the enthusiasms and beliefs of a younger man. I suspect that the sentiment I find somewhat foreign to me in the season of cooler pulses, and the situations and motives that seem rather naive now, had something to do with the acceptability of the stories. The popularity of these early tales in their day encouraged me to go on, and a little later to set up in more permanent and wholesale business as a novelist. To certain of these stories of my apprenticeship ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston
... in protest, and had frankly connived with the others,—I confess that I felt shame for us and pity for the friendless man we were sending out into the world. Something childlike in his acceptance of the proposal, a few phrases of naive enthusiasm for his new prospects, repeated to me by Solon, touched me strangely. It was, therefore, with real embarrassment that I read the Argus notice. "With profound regret," it began, "we are obliged ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... the happy years of peaceful married life. The prince liked early hours and country pleasures, and the Queen, like a loyal wife, not merely consented to his tastes, but made them absolutely her own. Before she had been married a year, she made the naive pretty confession that 'formerly I was too happy to go to London and wretched to leave it, and now, since the blessed hour of my marriage, and still more since the summer, I dislike and am unhappy to leave the country, and would be ...
— Queen Victoria • Anonymous
... only to make the originality of the single mind more bold and clear. Into the furnace all vessels of gold, of all ages, had been cast; but from the mould came the new coin, with its single stamp. And, happily, the subject of the work did not forbid to the writer the indulgence of his naive, peculiar irony of humor, so quiet, yet so profound. My father's book was the "History of Human Error." It was, therefore, the moral history of mankind, told with truth and earnestness, yet with an arch, unmalignant smile. Sometimes, indeed, the smile ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... transform La Tina into a wine-press, is ludicrously amusing. La Tina is the rustic mistress to whom the sonnets are supposed to be addressed; and every one knows that rusticale and contadinesca is that naive and pleasing rustic style in which the Florentine poets delighted, from the expressive nature of the patois of the Tuscan peasantry; and it might have been said of Malatesti's sonnets, as of ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 204, September 24, 1853 • Various
... occupy his maturer mind. In his latest poems—in "Rose Mary," for instance—I see this first impulse returning upon him with more than its early fascination. In his youth, however, the mysticism was very naive and straightforward. It was fostered by one of the very few excursions which Rossetti ever took—a tour in Belgium in October, 1849. I am told that he and the painter-friend who accompanied him were so purely devoted to the mediaeval ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... takes comparisons from it: "You who have been to Carthage—" he often says to his listeners. For the boy from little Thagaste to go to Carthage, was about the same as for our youths from the provinces to go to Paris. Veni Carthaginem—in these simple words there is a touch of naive emphasis which reveals the bewilderment of the Numidian student just landed ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... of appreciating in a woman something else than the mere grace of femininity. Her glance was as direct and trustful as that of a young man yet unspoiled by the world's wise lessons. And it was intrepid, but in this intrepidity there was nothing aggressive. A naive yet thoughtful assurance is a better definition. She had reflected already (in Russia the young begin to think early), but she had never known deception as yet because obviously she had never yet fallen under the sway of passion. She was—to look at her was enough—very capable of being ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... indicated a finished education; there was no subject on which she could not speak well and with ease. While admitting that she was naive, it was evident that she was at the same time profound in thought and fertile in resource; an intelligence at once broad and free soared gently over a simple heart and over the habits of a retired life. The sea-swallow, whirling ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset
... to be offended with such charming self- complacency,—the naive conceit of the man was as harmless as the delight of a fair girl who has made her first conquest, and Theos smiling, kept the flowers. By this time the surrounding throng had broken up into little knots and groups,—all ill-humor on the part of the populace ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... fossilized"; whether he spoke of the unprecedented popular ovations given to him at his final departure from Berlin as a "first-class funeral"—there are always the same childlike directness, the same naive impulsiveness, the same bantering earnestness, the same sublime contempt ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... originality in versification. The pantoum is particularly theirs—a form arising from their habits of improvisation and competitive versifying. They have also the epic or sjair, generally a pure romance, with much naive simplicity and natural feeling. And finally, they have the popular song, ...
— Malayan Literature • Various Authors
... halt in front of it, and two hundred pairs of eyes, brimful with simple faith and simple trust, gazed in reverence on the naive wax figure behind the grating, within its throne of rough stone and whitewash. It was dressed in blue calico spangled with tinsel, and had a crown on its head made of gilt paper and a veil of coarse tarlatan. Two china pots containing artificial flowers were placed on either side of the ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... on our arms. Her blue eyes regarded us earnestly. Her manner was naive; childlike. But I could not mistake her intelligence; the force of character stamped on her face for all its ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... years that had stripped his head; he found his eyes clear enough to see distinctly his young companion, who, following the injunctions of the Lady of Azay, regaled him well with glance and gesture, believing there could be no danger near so old a fellow, in such wise that Blanche—naive and nice as she was in contradistinction to the girls of Touraine, who are as wide-awake as a spring morning—permitted the good man first to kiss her hand, and afterwards her neck, rather low-down; at least so said the archbishop who married them ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 1 • Honore de Balzac
... knowledge of the world, and she was just as attractive, a sweet little creature whom one wanted to protect and yet whom, in a way, one could lean on and rely on, too. She was so subtle, so strangely wise and sensible—she seemed to know everything while having the naive, unconscious air of a person who knows next to nothing. And all these gifts she used—for what? She made Percy happy, she was charming and kind, clear-sighted, indulgent (if a little cynical), and always amusing; full of dash and spirit, and yet with ...
— Bird of Paradise • Ada Leverson
... ago, a group of unpretentious patriots, ignored by the great world, signed a document which formed these lands into a loose Confederation. By this act they laid the foundation upon which the Swiss state was afterward reared. In their naive, but prophetic, faith, the contracting parties called this agreement a perpetual pact; and they set forth, in the Latin, legal phraseology of the day, that, seeing the malice of the times, they found it necessary to take an oath to defend one another ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume VI • Various
... something naive in the popular clamour for a general as a Deus ex machina. For, in spite of apparent exceptions, the tendency of the transition from heroic to democratic ages is to transfer both in war and in politics the decisive influence from the individual to the mass, from the protagonist to the ...
— A Short History of the Great War • A.F. Pollard
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