"Naif" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a little prelude, as if a bluebird were tuning his throat, we are enveloped in the key of the symphony (A major) and the Spring runs lilting up the 'cellos to the violins (which are divided in the naif archaic interval of the tenth, too much ignored in our over-colored harmonies). The second subject is propounded by the oboes (in the rather unusual related key of the submediant). This is a lyrical and dancing idea, and it does battle with the underground resistance of the Winter motives. ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... pouvait s'empecher de sourire en entendant cette voix enfantine apres la votre ... et cependant, ce contraste meme lui pretait quelque chose de naif ... ...
— Bataille De Dames • Eugene Scribe and Ernest Legouve
... was amazed at the naif simple jealousy that swept over him at the sight. She had danced with Conroy twice already—he ought to be more considerate than to bring the girl into notice that way—a chump like Charlie Conroy, what would he understand of such a nature as Johnnie ...
— The Power and the Glory • Grace MacGowan Cooke
... falling into the heresies of the Gnostics and the Fratricelli, into the errors of Dulcin de Novare and his wife Marguerite, into the filth of abbe Beccarelli, and the abominations of Segarelli of Parma, who, on pretext of becoming a child the better to symbolize the simple, naif love of the Paraclete, had himself diapered and slept on the ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... but it will continually vanish before humour or mere fun; while having no deep root in life or interests in common with the settled Anglo-Saxon citizen, he cannot fail to appear at times to the latter as a near relation to Mephistopheles. But his "mockery" is as accidental and naif as that of Jewish Young Germany is keen and deliberate; and the former differs from the latter as the drollery of Abraham a Santa Clara differs from the brilliant ...
— The Breitmann Ballads • Charles G. Leland
... with a strange delicious pleasure at that unfamiliar, darkly-glittering foreign object, moving so meteorically before her, an ambiguous creature of wilfulness and Destiny. And, to her surprise, where she had dreaded antagonisms, she discovered only sympathies. He was, she said, "so quiet, so simple, naif even, so pleased to be informed about things he does not know, so gentle, so full of tact, dignity, and modesty, so full of kind attention towards us, never saying a word, or doing a thing, which could put me out... There is something fascinating, melancholy, ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey
... slave of things, and therefore the conqueror of the world, the unquestioning, the undoubting, the child with the muscles of a man, the European stripped bare, and shown for what he is, a predatory, unreflecting, naif, precociously accomplished brute. ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... It is quite evident he also is a medium. Especially as he is very like Home in appearance. You remember Home—a fair-haired naif sort of fellow? ...
— Redemption and Two Other Plays • Leo Tolstoy et al |
