"Naive" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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
... had played her part admirably, showing that a young girl, however simple and naive, has the instinct of dissimulation, which only requires opportunity ...
— The Regent's Daughter • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... 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
... naive simplicity, of how a man who was devoted to his fruits and flowers and birds came to fall in love with a ...
— Honey-Sweet • Edna Turpin
... 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 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 fast, made all turn to seize their poles and fend it ...
— To Win or to Die - A Tale of the Klondike Gold Craze • George Manville Fenn
... 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 |
