"Naive" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... scattered rich cushions, oriental mats and costly rugs of fur. The choicest tapestries which the looms of Arras could furnish draped the walls, whereon the battles of Judas Maccabaeus were set forth, with the Jewish warriors in plate of proof, with crest and lance and banderole, as the naive artists of the day were wont to depict them. A few rich settles and bancals, choicely carved and decorated with glazed leather hangings of the sort termed or basane, completed the furniture of the ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... 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 ...
— Women Wage-Earners - Their Past, Their Present, and Their Future • Helen Campbell
... of charity for his neighbor. Profoundly individual, and profoundly attached to his ideas, like all Anglo-Saxons, and in fact like all who have acquired the Protestant habit of free inquiry, he nevertheless had for the Church a docility almost naive and infantile; and this was because he recognized in her the authority and the ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... Between young ladies whose naive exuberance impelled them to throw handkerchiefs at his window and young ladies whose equally naive modesty demanded the withdrawal from his bedroom of a chair on which they had once sat, his lot seemed to have fallen in a troubled ...
— The Heritage of Dedlow Marsh and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... the top of their bent, accoutred from top to toe as Mynheer Punch the Great, while his clever little wife—who, by the way, possesses, I think, more of the "vis comica" than any actress of the day—caused sides to shake and eyes to water by her naive and humorous ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... 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
... naive figure standing on the pedestal is Youth, the United States, the child that has ...
— Palaces and Courts of the Exposition • Juliet James
... 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
... naive question angered the cowboy. "Oh, no we ain't in any danger, not a bit in the world. We're just as safe as if we was sittin' on a keg of powder with the fuse lit. There's nothin' in the world can hurt us except this little old Mizoo, an' it wouldn't ...
— Prairie Flowers • James B. Hendryx
... 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 |
