"Childlike" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... like some show of organized resistance, and this young man's playing is what I call impertinently poor, as if he did not think it worth while to try. Winifred seems just as well satisfied to be beaten as to beat, and the Professor takes a guileless and childlike satisfaction in his triumph which is quite pitiable. I take pains to let Mr. Flint see that I at least am not taken in; but he only smiles in that exasperatingly non-committal way of his, as if it mattered little enough to him what I thought one way ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... considerable dependency on her in all domestic affairs, just as she is dependent on him for bodily protection. In the course of ages this has gone so far as to foster a peculiar helplessness on the part of the man, which manifests itself in a somewhat childlike reliance of the husband on the wife. In fact it may be said that the husband is, to all intents and purposes, incapable of maintaining himself without the aid of a woman." This passage will probably seem to many readers to apply quite fairly well to men as they exist to-day in most of those lands ...
— Little Essays of Love and Virtue • Havelock Ellis
... reached the happy conclusion. She was such a simple, normal-minded creature that it took but little to brighten the aspect of life for her and to cause her to break into her good-natured, childlike smile. A little kindness from any one, a little pleasure or a little comfort, made her glow with nice-tempered enjoyment. As she got out of the bus, and picked up her rough brown skirt, prepared to tramp bravely through ...
— Emily Fox-Seton - Being The Making of a Marchioness and The Methods of Lady Walderhurst • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... regarded as only the background of human action, the descriptions of the objects of Nature are wonderfully accurate; and the mind of the poet towards the flowers and trees, the woods and hills and streams, was in a childlike state, and had all the freshness and joyousness of childhood. The student is not to be envied who can read without emotion the enthusiastic description of the Crusader's first sight of Jerusalem, the touching pathos ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... had a good taste of an old-fashioned kind in literature, and he had a library pretty well stocked with the elderly English authors, poets and essayists and novelists, and here and there an historian, and these Kitty read childlike, liking them at the time in a certain way, and storing up in her mind things that she did not understand for the present, but whose beauty and value dawned upon her from time to time, as she grew older. ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells
... made the most indifferent person, meeting her casually in a crowd in the street, stop at the sight of her face and remember it long after. What struck Alyosha most in that face was its expression of childlike good nature. There was a childlike look in her eyes, a look of childish delight. She came up to the table, beaming with delight and seeming to expect something with childish, impatient, and confiding curiosity. The light in her eyes gladdened the ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... our little sailor-boys, though their hearts are childlike still, have the spirit of gallant veterans. Elbows on the parapet of the sea-wall, they gaze out into the offing. It is more than the blue line marking the faint division between sea and sky that they see. Their eyes care little for the soft, changing colours ...
— Child Life In Town And Country - 1909 • Anatole France
... Phyllis to her shocked self defiantly.... Yes, the shape of her face was all right still. Hard work and scant attention couldn't spoil its pretty oval. But her eyes—well, you can't keep your eyes as blue and luminous and childlike as they were back in the New England country, when you have been using them hard for years in a bad light. And oh, they had been such nice eyes when she was just Phyllis Narcissa at home, so long and blue ...
— The Rose Garden Husband • Margaret Widdemer
... came from the English blood in him stole into Maurice's heart. Maddalena looked so soft and young in the dim beauty of the night, so ready to be cherished, to be treated tenderly, or with the ardor that is the tender cruelty of passion, that her childlike submission to the Sicilian code woke in him an almost hot pugnacity. She would be given, perhaps, to some hard brute of a fisherman who had scraped together more soldi than his fellows, or to some coarse, avaricious contadino who would make ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... Dick! You have gone a leetle too far. If God can forgive you and me all them things we've done, which he knows about, and other folks don't, you can, or or'to forgive sister Ethie, let her sin be what it may. Ethie was young, Dick, and childlike, and so pretty, too, and I 'most know you aggravated her some, if you talked to her as you feel now; and then, too, Dick, and mother, and all of you, I don't care who says it, or thinks it, it's a big lie! Ethie never went off with a man—never! I know she didn't. She wasn't that ...
— Ethelyn's Mistake • Mary Jane Holmes
... Andy,' says I, 'that this cigar exponent with the parsley dressing saw fit to bedeck us with his childlike trust and altruism. For,' says I, 'this money of his is an eyesore to my sense of rectitude and ethics. We can't take it, Andy; you know we can't,' says I, 'for we haven't a shadow of a title to it—not a shadow. If there was the least bit of a way we could put in a claim ...
— The Gentle Grafter • O. Henry
... was growing very dark, and the turf on the bank was soft and uneven. Lucia put her hand through Maurice's arm with her old childlike ...
— A Canadian Heroine, Volume 1 - A Novel • Mrs. Harry Coghill
... ticketed in and around the homestead and disposed of by the auction to the highest bidder. He could not understand it, but somewhere deep within the sensitive child was struck a note of pain, the echoes of which have never left him throughout his strenuous life. He felt dimly in his childlike way the loneliness of his mother. He has never forgotten it. Lonely indeed she was. She had but one friend to turn to, and that one friend was her brother, Richard Lloyd, the village shoemaker up in North Wales. To him she wrote ...
— Lloyd George - The Man and His Story • Frank Dilnot
... her new role of acquiescence, shone silently on this interchange of ideas; Amherst even detected in her a vague admiration for his power of conversing on subjects which she regarded as abstruse; and this childlike approval, combined with her submission to his will, deluded him with a sense of recovered power over her. He could not but note that the new phase in their relations had coincided with his first assertion of mastery; and he rashly concluded that, with the removal of ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... driving it away from religion altogether by making it believe that it has committed sins which it has not committed, and deserves horrible tortures which it has not deserved), do perhaps at last awaken in it a new love for God, but one which is not like that first love, that childlike love; one which, I fear, is hardly a love for God at all, but principally a selfish joy and delight at having escaped from coming torments. This is the reason, my friends; and this hindrance, at least, I know. I will not copy those parents, my friends, and tell them, as they ...
— Sermons for the Times • Charles Kingsley
... instance, where we get, first, only abstract colour; then, just a little interfused sense of the poetry of flowers; then, sometimes, perfect flower-painting; and so, onwards, until in Titian we have, as his poetry in the Ariadne, so actually a touch of true childlike humour in the diminutive, quaint figure with its silk gown, which ascends the temple stairs, in his picture of the Presentation ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... deep-set, brooding eyes, as eager to tell what is going on within as to gather in all the glories from without; quick with the wonder and the pride of life; they are eyes that would not be soon satisfied with seeing; eyes that would devour their object, and yet childlike and fearless. And that is a mouth that will not be soon satisfied with love; it has a curious likeness to Scott's own, which has always appeared to us his sweetest, most mobile and ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... of his fantastic manner is imparted to the keen- eared; it made me hold my breath. Wonderful is the ease with which his velvet fingers glide, I might almost say fly, over the keys. He has enraptured me—I cannot deny it—in a way which hitherto had been unknown to me. What delighted me was the childlike, natural manner which he showed in his demeanour ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... way. When I first began my work in India I greatly underestimated the difficulties thus put upon my task. A correction was not long in coming. I thought as our friends think at home—that to prepare my childlike wonder-lovers to listen with favor to my grave message I only needed to charm the way to it with wonders, marvels, miracles. With full confidence I told the wonders performed by Samson, the strongest man that had ever lived—for so ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... childlike little man! He tried to tell me how glad he had been to entertain me. "Why," he said, "I was plumb glad to see you and right sorry to have you go. Why, I would jist as soon talk to you as to a nigger. ...
— Letters of a Woman Homesteader • Elinore Pruitt Stewart
... the wise and prudent, and revealed them unto babes." How happy are we in the presence of a little child; how much at ease! It imposes on us no burden of restraint, of fear, of management! It is in this childlike disposition of meekness, of sweetness, of innocency, that we should seek to ...
— Letters of Madam Guyon • P. L. Upham
... this god, whom the Maya people called Chac, is shown pouring the rain out of a water-jar (just as the deities of Babylonia and India are often represented), and putting his foot upon the head of a serpent, who is preventing the rain from reaching the earth. Here we find depicted with childlike simplicity and directness the Vedic conception of Indra overcoming the demon Vritra. Stempell describes this scene as "the elephant-headed god B standing upon the head of a serpent";[141] while Seler, who claims that god B is ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... thus that the almost childlike spirit of the Milanese painters felt the antique: how differently from their Roman brethren! It was thus that they interpreted the lines of ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... throughout the day. With anxious eyes I see it trip and fall, And hurt itself in many a foolish way: Childlike, unheeding warning word or call. I see it grasp, and grasping, break the toys It cried to own, then toss them on the floor And, breathless, hurry after fancied joys That cease to please, when added to its store. I see the ...
— Poems of Progress • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... which the spirit of American romance has been preserved and heightened from time to time, one becomes aware that although ours is rather a romance of wonder than of beauty, the spirit of beauty is also to be found. The first fervors of the romance of discovery were childlike in their eagerness. Hakluyt's Voyages, John Smith's True Relation of Virginia, Thomas Morton's New England's Canaan, all appeal to the sense ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... is very old-fashioned and queer," said Geraldine, pulling the wrap over the grass stains and looking up into his eyes with a childlike appeal that made him set his teeth. "It was my mother's and you said 'white.' It was all ...
— In Apple-Blossom Time - A Fairy-Tale to Date • Clara Louise Burnham
... to get at my secret——" and he sent a flashing look round the table, embracing all the guests in a flaming glance that blazed with the sun of Brazil,—"I beg of you as a favor to tell me so," he went on, in a tone of almost childlike entreaty; "but do not vilify ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... limited. So much time was spent at Severndale with Peggy, and it was during one of these visits that Mrs. Harold figured in one of the domestic episodes of Severndale. They were not new to Peggy for she was Southern-born and used to the vagaries and childlike outbreaks of the colored people. But even though Mrs. Harold had lived among them a great deal, and thought she understood them pretty thoroughly, she had yet to learn some of the ...
— Peggy Stewart: Navy Girl at Home • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... his pleasures and appreciations, he showed the simplicity and genuineness of a child. He was not only ready to amuse, he could always identify himself with children, his love for whom never failed him in even his latest years. His more than childlike indifference to pecuniary advantages had been shown in early life. He gave another proof of it after his wife's death, when he declined a proposal, made to him by the Bank of England, to assist in founding one of its branch establishments in Liverpool. ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... passage. His own girls were not ready writers, and their mother generally sent their messages for them. Nancy and Kitty did not yet write nearly as well as they talked, but they contrived to express something of their own individuality in their communications, which were free and fluent, though childlike and crude. ...
— Mother Carey's Chickens • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... velly fine much all timee. You tly Charley Moi, you never say solly do samee!" declared the Oriental, his moon-like face illuminated with a childlike and ...
— The Saddle Boys in the Grand Canyon - or The Hermit of the Cave • James Carson
... that wobbled on the shoulders of eight lusty perspiring carriers. As it passed, all the onlookers raised their hats; all save the Russians, the Little White Cows who, standing aside with wonderment written on their childlike faces, were relieved from this necessity, since the wearing of hats had been forbidden by their leader, their self-styled Messiah, the divinely inspired Bazhakuloff; they were to go bareheaded summer and winter, "like the Christians of old." Some ardent ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... yourself were concerned, because you understood her and loved her. And because everybody else said exactly the same sort of thing to her, and because no one would have ventured to crush that blithe and childlike nature by one word of real disapproval, there was not much hope that Kitty would ever reform and become sober-minded and well-behaved and satisfactory. The plague of it was that you couldn't help loving her whatever she did, and she loved you too, which was perfectly intoxicating when you came ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... is his childlike truthfulness. I think he is almost the only earnest trout-fisher I ever knew (unless Sir Humphrey Davy be excepted) whose report could be relied upon for the weight of a trout. I have many excellent friends—capital fishermen—whose word is good upon most ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... experiments, but experiments which have been strictly limited to lines suggested to me by the children themselves. Both the stuff of the stories and the mould in which they are cast are based on suggestions gained directly from children. I have tried to put aside my notions of what was "childlike." I have tried to ignore what I, as an adult, like. I have tried to study children's interests not historically but through their present observations and inquiries, and their sense of form through their spontaneous expressions in language, and to model my own ...
— Here and Now Story Book - Two- to seven-year-olds • Lucy Sprague Mitchell
... Evolution is the development of new organisms through heredity, variation, and adaptation. Darwinism, or the doctrine of natural selection, as best defined in these pages by Darwin himself, is seen to involve quite different factors from those of evolution as thus restricted. For candor and childlike simplicity, the writings of Darwin are especially noteworthy among the modest utterances of great men, and nowhere are these qualities more strikingly revealed than in the following account of the production of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... Childlike simplicity, realism, and tenderness will be evident in this, as in preceding poems, especially in the choice of adjectives. But indeed the combination of certain words had become conventional; as "The hard tree," "The nails great and strong," and ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... scandalous exemption of the peers from all ignominious punishments short of death, and the insolent practice of allowing peers to vote in criminal trials on their honour, while other men vote on their oath." But generally the claims of rank and birth were admitted with a childlike cheerfulness. The high function of government was the birthright of the few. The people, according to episcopal showing, had nothing to do with the laws but to obey them. The ingenious author of Russell's Modern Europe states in his preface to that immortal work that ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... influences that have come into their life with the introduction of Western methods of thought and of business? The most careless traveler has it thrust upon him that here is a people artistic to the tips of their fingers, and with childlike power of idealization, although they have been forced to engage in the fierce warfare of modern business competition. What is it that has kept them unspotted from the world of business? What secret source of spiritual force have they been able ...
— The Critic in the Orient • George Hamlin Fitch
... deal in what you say, Hitty. If I had time I would go into the matter with you, but this is my busy day." Nancy sat up in bed, and began sipping her hot water obediently. She looked very childlike in her straight cut, embroidered night-gown, with a long chestnut pig-tail over either shoulder. "I feel as if I were going to be married, or—or something. ...
— Outside Inn • Ethel M. Kelley
... her so; his ardour had never appealed to her imagination with such constraining reality. Grail was the first to make her conscious of the meaning of passion. It was not passion which rose within her to reply to his, but the childlike security in which she had hitherto lived was at an end; love was henceforth to be the preoccupation ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... a strange look at her. There was gratitude in it, but much more; a fiery bitterness and something childlike and helpless. ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... earliest, examples of this subject I have seen, is a picture in the Esterhazy Gallery at Vienna. The Virgin is in the first bloom of girlhood; she looks not more than nine or ten years old, with dark hair, Spanish features, and a charming expression of childlike simplicity and devotion. She stands amid clouds, with her hands joined, and the proper white and blue drapery: there are no accessories. This picture is attributed to an obscure painter, Lazaro Tavarone, ...
— Legends of the Madonna • Mrs. Jameson
... man. The next heart was also a sanctuary, which he felt almost unworthy to enter; it represented a mean garret, in which lay a sick mother; but the warm sunshine streamed through the window, lovely roses bloomed in a little flowerbox on the roof, two blue birds sang of childlike joys, and the sick mother prayed for a blessing on her daughter. Next he crept on his hands and knees through an overfilled butcher's shop; there was meat, nothing but meat, wherever he stepped; this was the heart of a rich, respectable man, whose name is ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... Gives HIM His praise, and forfeits not her own. Learning has borne such fruit in other days On all her branches. Piety has found Friends in the friends of science, and true prayer Has flowed from lips wet with Castalian dews. Such was thy wisdom, Newton, childlike sage! Sagacious reader of the works of God, And in His Word sagacious. Such too thine, Milton, whose genius had angelic wings, And fed on manna. And such thine, in whom Our British Themis gloried with just cause, Immortal Hale! for deep discernment praised, And sound integrity ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... its childlike petulance, but I knew that drowsiness would do its work, and that he was now safely stowed away for at least ten hours. He would not interfere with ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... five o'clock Burton made tea, which they took together. Alfred first carefully washed his hands, and his manners at table were irreproachable. Burton began to feel uncomfortable. He felt that the spirit of some older person had come to him in childlike guise. There was so little to connect this boy with the Alfred of his recollections. In looking over his work, too, Burton was conscious of an almost awed sense of a power in this child's fingers which could have been directed by no ordinary inspiration. From one to another of those prints, the outlines ...
— The Double Life Of Mr. Alfred Burton • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Tourniquet; he was not the "Black Gentleman," but rather a confiding young man ready to take life as it came, like the two hard-working women who, on the morrow, might lack bread; he seemed alive to all the joys of youth, his smile was quite affectionate and childlike. ...
— A Second Home • Honore de Balzac
... ugliness is more pleasant and sometimes becomes a kind of prettiness. The eyes are still too small and hardly able to open, but the faces are rounder, browner, more vivacious; and in the women there remains a certain vagueness in the features, something childlike which prevails to the ...
— Madame Chrysantheme • Pierre Loti
... slightest degree irritated or grieved by her tirade. But the childlike changeableness and facility of her emotions touched him. He savoured her youth, and himself felt curiously young. It was the fact that within the last year ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... enough," she said, "but I thank you very much, and not only for myself but for them"; she made a slight, graceful, backward motion of her shoulder towards her parents. "I will study hard and try to do you credit," said she. There was something about Ellen's direct, childlike way of looking at her, and her clear speech, which brought back to Cynthia the little girl of so many years ago. A warm flush came over her delicate cheeks; her ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... the swamp dulling down into the remoteness of sleep. The Doctor slackened his sharp, jerking stride, and fell into the monotonous gait of his companion, glancing up to him. McKinstry, he thought, was going out to battle to-morrow with just as cool phlegm and childlike content as he would set out to buy his merino ewes; but he would receive no pay,—meant to transfer it to his men. And he would be in the thickest of the fight,—you might bet on that. Umph! his quick eyes darting over the big, leisurely frame, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... spasmodically in first one, then another locality; and being a good fellow who usually won the hearts of his creditors, it was not until after his death that a multitude of small claims came buzzing about his daughter's ears; and it was these as much as anything which had made her accept with childlike insouciance the arrangement of the friends who packed her away to her relatives with ...
— The Opened Shutters • Clara Louise Burnham
... studying ways of bewitchment, of endearment. She became a bewildering revelation to him, amazing him, delighting him. After he had begun to conclude that he knew her she became not one woman, but a score of women: demure, elfin, pensive, childlike, sedate, aloof, laughing—but always with her delight in him unconcealed: the mask she wore always slipping from its place to reveal her eagerness to draw closer ...
— Children of the Desert • Louis Dodge
... face would take on a look so ineffably, pathetically, angelically simple and childlike that it moved one to the very depths, and made one feel like father and mother to him in one! It was the true revelation of his innermost soul, which in many ways remained that of a child even in his middle age and till ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... hat as a fan. With an unexpected and almost childlike gesture he suddenly threw the hat up on to the rack above ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... impression on his comrades. They never suspected that under the rough exterior of this man, who attended the lectures so regularly, driving up in a capacious rustic sledge, drawn by a couple of horses, something almost childlike was concealed. They thought him an eccentric sort of pedant, and they made no advances towards him, being able to do very well without him. And he, for his part, avoided them. During the first two years he passed at the university, ...
— Liza - "A nest of nobles" • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... to the reality of which the wandering fancies of every human child bear ample witness; not to speak of the dreams of those childlike tribes of the race, who in our progressive insolence we are pleased to name "uncivilized." The deeper we dig into the tissue of convoluted impressions that make up our universe the more vividly do we become aware ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... at me fairly, almost sadly, as if she begged to read my mind. "Monsieur, why should you regret my knowing? It is to your credit that you admire Madame Bertheau. They tell me that she is a woman formed for love, beautiful, childlike, untouched by knowledge of crime or hardship. Monsieur, forgive me. Are you willing—— May I see ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... to him at Cologne, because he "didn't care to see himself 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 for ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... upset him. Warruk scrambled to his feet and followed her to the farther end of the hollow where she licked his foot until the pain left. At the same time she chided him for his disobedience and again tried to impress upon him the peril of venturing too near the outer world while she was away. And childlike, Warruk remembered the lesson for a period of ...
— The Black Phantom • Leo Edward Miller
... the coffee-room had been of ghosts and apparitions, and nearly everybody present had contributed his mite to the stock of information upon a hazy and somewhat thread-bare subject. Opinions ranged from rank incredulity to childlike faith, one believer going so far as to denounce unbelief as impious, with a reference to the Witch of Endor, which was somewhat marred by being complicated in an inexplicable fashion with the story ...
— Lady of the Barge and Others, Entire Collection • W.W. Jacobs
... morality and throw her into a revolutionary protest against society.... Do not cry out that this is exaggeration. It has all been fully developed and proved. Seeing himself unmasked, this poor Nechayeff is indeed so childlike, so simple, in spite of his systematic perversity, that he believed it possible to convert me. He has even gone so far as to beg me to consent to develop this theory in a Russian journal which he proposed to me to establish. He has betrayed the ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... man, the greater his love." We should not set the genius on a pedestal to be first gaped at and then ridiculed. He needs before all else our love and our sympathy; for his nature is essentially that of a child, and, childlike, he craves for human love as the first necessity of his life. To those who set up an idol of their own fancy and worship that as his image, he will be cold and repellent, but to those who know him as he really is he will return their love with all ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... barrel which had done duty for a rostrum being also broken up and added; other wooden articles were quickly flung on, till at length quite a large bonfire was formed, round which these excited men danced hand-in-hand like children round a Maypole. Their manners, however, were hardly childlike, for they jumped, and yelled, and sang with the ruddy firelight glowing on their countenances, till they looked like a lot of demons performing some diabolical incantation. All around was the dark night, and rocks, and trees, which ...
— Jethou - or Crusoe Life in the Channel Isles • E. R. Suffling
... troubled it. For often, as we walked together through the yellow fields of an evening, it had been on my tongue to confess the lie Mr. Allen had led me into. But the sight of the old man, trembling and tremulous, aged by a single stroke, his childlike trust in my strength and beliefs, and above all his faith in a political creed which he nigh deemed needful for the soul's salvation,—these things still held me back. Was it worth while now, I asked myself, to disturb the peace of ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... certain degree, attributable to a better government; but their great advantage consists in their being friends of labor. They are not divided by internal factions; their pistols serve for ornaments, not offensive weapons; their rude exterior hides within a gentle, childlike nature. Though laborious, they seek not to amass wealth; kind to each other, to strangers they are hospitable and generous. They are extremely courteous and polite, and theirs is not the humility of the Austrian peasant, who kisses the scornful hand of his superior; it is the deference and respect ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... reverently read, a prayer perfect in its childlike simplicity, then Miss Latimer laid a hand on her niece's shoulder and bade her "Good-night;" whilst Miss Deborah, lighting a candle, led the way as before, and after seeing she required no further service, ...
— Aunt Judith - The Story of a Loving Life • Grace Beaumont
... see to that," I said to myself; but this time she was not looking even at the brim of my cap. Her eyes, luminous with childlike happiness, searched and photographed each new feature of river-life that skimmed ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... bed with his head on his arm, or perhaps sitting astride a chair with his hands crossed on the back support, he would smile with childlike innocence and sent his barbs in gayly. And Irwin, murder in his dull brain, would glare at ...
— Mavericks • William MacLeod Raine
... such forms of impiety, believe me, is not controversy of any sort; but the childlike study of the Bible, each one for himself,—not without prayer.—Humble must we be, as well as assiduous; for the powers of the mind as well as the affections of the heart should be prostrated before the Bible, or a man will derive little profit from his study of it. Humble, I repeat, ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... Madonna of marble, which was of full length and by the hand of the same Nino; in the attitude of which Madonna the mother is seen handing a rose with much grace to her Son, who is taking it in a childlike manner, so beautiful that it may be said that Nino was beginning to rob the stone of its hardness and to reduce it to the softness of flesh, giving it lustre by means of the highest polish. This figure is between a S. John and a S. Peter in marble, the head of the latter being a portrait of ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Volume 1, Cimabue to Agnolo Gaddi • Giorgio Vasari
... Madeline presented a picture of youth and loveliness such as is rarely seen even in a beauty-abounding land. A form of medium height which would, in later years, develop much of stately grace; a complexion of lily-like fairness; and eyes as deep and brown, as tender and childlike, as if their owner were gazing, ever and always, as infants gaze who see only great, grand wonders, and never a woe ...
— Madeline Payne, the Detective's Daughter • Lawrence L. Lynch
... that when their "family was living on the cliffs of Sorrento a young peasant girl became one of the household,—half nurse, half playfellow to the children. She bore the sweet name of Gelsomina. Simple, innocent, and childlike, yet faithful to duty, Gelsomina was soon in high favor with great and small, and, in charge of the young flock, made one of every family party about the bay." At such times "she was always in gay costume,—light-blue silk jacket with gold ...
— James Fenimore Cooper • Mary E. Phillips
... in patience hope,— Thou at last thy flowers shalt gather; God is full of tender love,— Childlike speak thou to thy Father. From believing, trusting hearts, The God of mercy ...
— Hymns, Songs, and Fables, for Young People • Eliza Lee Follen
... on her; I only wish that this suffering soul should find rest," said Simonson, with such childlike tenderness as no one could have expected ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... the aisle to the end. It seemed hardly worth while reaching it into the last pew. Just little Maggie sitting there alone, with her one foot dangling above the floor. But with fine courtesy he stopped and passed the plate in. And Maggie in her childlike simplicity lifted her crutches, and tried rather awkwardly to put them on the collection plate. Quick as a flash the man caught her thought, and with a queer lump in his throat reached out and steadied her strange gift on ...
— Quiet Talks on Service • S. D. Gordon
... the dance was ended, and performing cavalier seul with stately simplicity, was a sight indeed to remember. If Clive Newcome had not such a fine sense of humour, he would have blushed for his father's simplicity.—As it was, the elder's guileless goodness and childlike trustfulness endeared him immensely to his son. "Look at the old boy, Pendennis," he would say, "look at him leading up that old Miss Tidswell to the piano. Doesn't he do it like an old duke? I lay a wager she thinks she is going to be my mother-in-law; all the women are in love ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... however poorly equipped mentally and in training, and too busy with life's common duties to get much time for reading, not one of us, who may not reach out your hand, the hand of your heart, the hand of your life, the hand of your simple childlike trust—if you're great enough in simplicity to be childlike, to be natural, not one of us, but may reach out the hand and take in all there ...
— Quiet Talks on John's Gospel • S. D. Gordon
... have been weak, unworthy a woman of spirit; but Christian was, in one sense—not Miss Gascoigne's—still a very child. And most childlike in their passionate bitterness, their keen sense of injustice, were the tears she shed in her own room, alone. For she did not go to Dr. Grey: why should she? Her complaints could only wound him: and somehow ...
— Christian's Mistake • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... devoted souls whose lives and thoughts had no concern but to make Mrs. Clayton and Dorothy happy, and who had taken me into the circle of their interest! What were the colored people but the shadows of the white people, following them and imitating them in a childlike, humorous, innocent way? How difficult for selfishness, seeking its own happiness, to understand Mammy and Jenny, whose whole happiness and undivided heart were in giving happiness to ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... they thought they heard the drawing-room door open, and their aunt go up-stairs towards the nursery department again; but then for a long while they heard no more; and at last, childlike, began to amuse themselves by seeing how far along the oil-cloth pattern they could each step, as they walked the length of the hall, the great object being to stretch from one particular diamond to another, without touching ...
— Aunt Judy's Tales • Mrs Alfred Gatty
... insanity. Against this background the hymn appears like a ray of sunlight breaking through a clouded sky. And as such it must undoubtedly have come to its author. As an indication of Grundtvig's simple trust in God, it is noteworthy that another of his most childlike hymns, "God's Child, Do Now Rest Thee," was likewise composed during a similar period of distress that beset him many ...
— Hymns and Hymnwriters of Denmark • Jens Christian Aaberg
... grow old as silence became massive betwixt his wife and him. The moon rose, piercing the cannon embrasure, and showed Marguerite weeping against the wall. The mass of silence drove him resistless before her will. That soft and childlike shape did not propose treason to him. He understood that she thought only of herself and him. It was her method of bringing profit out of the times. He heard his relief stumble at the foot of the turret stairs, and went down the winding ...
— The Lady of Fort St. John • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... even as a crowd of men divides into that same majority and minority. The world has an instinct for recognizing its own, and recoils from certain qualities when exemplified in books, with the same disgust or defective sympathy as would have governed it in real life. From qualities for instance of childlike simplicity, of shy profundity, or of inspired self-communion, the world does and must turn away its face towards grosser, bolder, more determined, or more intelligible expressions of character and intellect; and not otherwise ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... waking at last from his reverie, and drawing that light, childlike form nearer to him, "you enjoy this hour ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... pacify me; but I did not trust him, and was, when he quitted me at last, in a most terrible state. I now reproached myself for having told the affair, and brought all the positions to light. I foresaw that our childlike actions, our youthful inclinations and confidences, would be quite differently interpreted, and that I might perhaps involve the excellent Pylades in the matter, and render him very unhappy. All these images pressed vividly one after the other before my soul, sharpened ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... Through varied scenes of happiness and woe; But, constant through the wide vicissitude, He has confessed the Giver of his joys, And kissed the hand that took them; and whene'er Bereavement has oppressed his soul with grief, Or sharp misfortune stung his heart with pain, He has bowed down in childlike faith, and said, "Thy will, O God—Thy will be done, not mine!" His gentle wife, a dozen summers since, Passed from his faithful arms and went to heaven; And her best gift—a maiden sweetly named— His daughter Ruth—orders the ancient house, And fills her mother's ...
— Bitter-Sweet • J. G. Holland
... "Childlike, I strove to pick them up, But stumbling forward, sunk, O'er the wild pea and buttercup, Across the ...
— Our Boys - Entertaining Stories by Popular Authors • Various
... at last he woke, and his knee he bent In grateful, childlike prayer, And he prayed till an answer of peace was sent, And Faith and Hope as a rainbow bent O'er the clouds of his ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... childlike boy, he was now, and for many years longer, intensely fond of all kinds of games and sports, in which his light active form, great agility, and high spirit made him excel. Cricket, riding, running-races, all the school amusements were his delight; fireworks for the 5th of November ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... men into swine, and the man who bores out the big foolish giant's eye, and the cap of darkness, and the shoes of swiftness, that were worn later by Jack the Giant-Killer. These fairy tales are the oldest stories in the world, and as they were first made by men who were childlike for their own amusement, so they amuse children still, and also grown-up people who have not forgotten how ...
— The Green Fairy Book • Various
... where the schools are not yet well established, the good people are still found, and their doings are narrated with a childlike faith in the power of these first inhabitants of Ireland, for it seems to be agreed that they were in the country long before the coming either of the Irishman or of his ...
— Irish Wonders • D. R. McAnally, Jr.
... I thought, as I noted the sweet, childlike gravity of her face. Then, in a voice that proved to be a sympathetic, pure soprano, well trained, but not at ...
— A Day Of Fate • E. P. Roe
... chirping approvingly above us, the blue sky peeped caressingly at us through the delicate foliage. My head was going round with excess of bliss. I hasten to remark, Liza was not a bit in love with me. She liked me; she was never shy with any one, but it was not reserved for me to trouble her childlike peace of mind. She walked arm in arm with me, as she would with a brother. She was seventeen then.... And meanwhile, that very evening, before my eyes, there began that soft inward ferment which precedes the metamorphosis of the child into the woman.... I was witness of ...
— The Diary of a Superfluous Man and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... style, and treatment as the novel. As diverse in talent and quality as the story-teller himself,—now harlequin, now gossip, now threnodist,—with weird ghostliness, moping melancholy, uncouth laughter, or gentle serious smile,—now relating the story, with childlike interest in it, now with a good heart and now with a bad heart ridiculing mankind, now allegorical with rich meanings, now freighting the little story-cricket that creeps along from page to page with immense loads of science, history, politics, ethics, religion, ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... full of vigorous pignuts, H. glabra, which for eleven years I have been grafting with faith which now seems childlike, that soon I would have fourteen acres of bearing hickory trees. Yet as a result of all these years of grafting the only hickories that I have found to thrive are the Brooks, which appears to be vigorous, the Terpenny, which is vigorous and bearing nuts ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Fifteenth Annual Meeting • Various
... Him. Some years have passed wherein I have had only a kind of half-sleep; but my soul waked the more for the Lord, as sleep seemed to steal from it every other attention. The Lord made it known also to many persons, that He designed me for a mother of great people, but a people simple and childlike. They took these intelligences in a literal sense and thought it related to some institution or congregation. But it appeared to me that the persons whom it would please the Lord that I should win over to Him, and to whom I should be as a mother, through His goodness, should have ...
— The Autobiography of Madame Guyon • Jeanne Marie Bouvier de La Motte Guyon
... did after five minutes' talk with the cynical doctor. "I suppose you would not say much for their science; but, as poetry, they are just what you ask for—the expression of thoughtful spirits, who looked round upon nature with awe-struck, childlike eyes, and asked of all heaven and earth the question, 'What are you? How came you to be?' Yet—it may be my fault—while I admire them, I cannot sympathise with them. To me, this zoophyte is as a being of another sphere; and till ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... of doing it, do not you?' inquired Hollenstein with a childlike smile. 'I practised all last summer on my father's orderly. You know we always keep fencing ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... inevitably be wrong. So he embarked upon a program of supplying a certain proportion of errors. He discovered that supplying a wrong answer that was consistent with the age of his contemporaries took too much of his intellect to keep his actions straight. He forgot to employ halting speech and childlike grammar. His errors were delivered in faultless grammar and excellent self-expression; his correct answers came out in the English of his companions; mispronounced, ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith
... black and speckled, would come out and scratch in the litter, perennially undiscouraged by the fact that the only thing they found beneath it was the snow. The vivid crossbills, red and black and white, would come to the yard in flocks, and the quaker-coloured snow-buntings, and the big, trustful, childlike, pine grosbeaks, with the growing stain of rose-purple over their heads and necks. These kept Lidey interested, helping to pass the days that now, to her excited anticipations, seemed so long. Perhaps half a dozen ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... tree, the bare-legged little aspen with its restless and childlike ways is a tree that it is good to know. When alone, these little trees seem lonely and sometimes to tremble as though just a little afraid in this big strange world. But generally the aspen is not alone. Usually you find a number of little aspens playing together, with their ...
— Wild Life on the Rockies • Enos A. Mills |
