"Naive" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... work for a man out hunting rabbits, for they could penetrate places and be welcome where a grown man would be killed—at the very least—for intruding or attempting to intrude. Harems, for instance. And they could be naive and wheedling toward a woman ...
— The Lion of Petra • Talbot Mundy
... MILDRED—How naive age makes one! But I said he did, Aunt. I even said he had given me a letter to them—which I had lost. And they were afraid to take the chance that I might be lying. [Excitedly.] So it's ho! for the stokehole. The second engineer is to escort me. [Looking at her ...
— The Hairy Ape • Eugene O'Neill
... not talk much. The nervous loquacity and opinionation of the Zenith Athletic Club dropped from them. But when they did talk they slipped into the naive intimacy of college days. Once they drew their canoe up to the bank of Sunasquam Water, a stream walled in by the dense green of the hardhack. The sun roared on the green jungle but in the shade was sleepy peace, and the water was golden and rippling. ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... noticed what she was eating, to think of the villagers with nothing but herrings and oatcakes. She hated to think of things hungry, things in pain. She even felt a great, inarticulate pity for her father. For all his striding autocracy and high-handedness there was something naive and childish about him that clutched at her heart. He was like Ben Grief, alone and bare when ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... the book is not without some claim to attention, as affording a naive specimen of the current astronomical notions of the time. One of these assumed, that the "gravitating power" extended but a short distance from the earth's surface, and, accordingly, we find our voyager "carried insensibly around ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... so musical a people as the Germans should be masters of lyric poetry is but natural,—every longing, every impression, every impulse gushes into song; and in 'Des Knaben Wunderhorn' we hear the tuneful voices of a naive race, singing what they have seen or dreamed or felt during three hundred years. The work is dedicated to Goethe, who wrote an almost enthusiastic review of it for the Literary Gazette of Jena. "Every lover or master of musical art," he ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... briefly as follows: In past ages men subscribed to the naive belief that what they have in their consciousness as thought pictures of the world, actually reproduces the real content of that world. The microscope now demonstrates, however, how much the familiar appearance of the world depends on the structure of our sense apparatus; for it reveals a realm ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... 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 to announce to our readers the determination ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... eighteenth century G-major was still a brilliant, ingratiating, voluptuous key—indeed, in the seventeenth century, Athanasius Kircher goes so far as to call it tonum voluptuosum. We, on the contrary, consider G-major particularly modest, naive, harmless, faintly-colored, simple, even trivial. Aristotle ascribes to the Dorian key, which corresponds approximately to our D-minor, the expression of dignity and constancy; five hundred years later Athaenaeus also calls this key manly, magnificent, majestic. D-minor, therefore, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... flinch, wince, blench, quail. Shun, avoid, eschew. Shy, bashful, diffident, modest, coy, timid, shrinking. Sign, omen, auspice, portent, prognostic, augury, foretoken, adumbration, presage, indication. Simple, innocent, artless, unsophisticated, naive. Skilful, skilled, expert, adept, apt, proficient, adroit, dexterous, deft, clever, ingenious. Skin, hide, pelt, fell. Sleepy, drowsy, slumberous, somnolent, sluggish, torpid, dull, lethargic. Slovenly, slatternly, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... individual qualities of each of us; it is besides a great informing and educating force. I see among us too many practical people, so called, who go about armed with terrifying spectacles and huge shears to ferret out naive things and clip their wings. They uproot ingenuousness from life, from thought, from education, and pursue it even to the region of dreams. Under pretext of making men of their children, they prevent their being ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... Education merely turns inherent mental powers to good account; it makes very little change in those powers themselves. To suppose that a father can, by study, raise his innate level of intelligence and transmit it at the new level to his son, is a naive idea which finds no warrant in the known facts of ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... was a curious medley of quaint thoughts and fancies. Conversations with the Twin Sailors filled many of the pages; accounts of Paul's "adventures" occupied others. Sometimes it seemed impossible that a child of eleven should have written them, then would come an expression so boyish and naive that Miss Trevor laughed delightedly over it. When she finished the book and closed it she found Stephen Kane at her elbow. He removed his pipe and ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... painter, like Gozzoli or Pinturicchio, to produce brilliant and harmonious general effects at a small expenditure of intellectual energy. Where the human body struck the keynote of the music in a work of art, he judged that such simple adjuncts and naive concessions to the pleasure of the eye should be avoided. An architectural foundation for the plastic forms to rest on, as plain in structure and as grandiose in line as could be fashioned, must suffice. These principles he put immediately to the test in his first decorative ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... uncongenial theme with his accustomed ingenuity and good sense. Without vailing the character of the voluptuous queen, or concealing the poetical aspects of her romantic history, he delineates the events in her life, for which she is now chiefly remembered, with a naive simplicity that becomes piquant from its apparent artlessness. Nor does he indulge, to any disagreeable excess, in the superfluous moralizing which a less shrewd writer would have deemed essential to the effect. He leaves the ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... sun-god Michabo was represented as a hare, his name being compounded of michi, "great," and wabos, "a hare"; yet wabos also meant "white," so that the god was doubtless originally called simply "the Great White One." The same naive process has made bears of the Arkadians, whose name, like that of the Lykians, merely signified that they were "children of light"; and the metamorphosis of Kallisto, mother of Arkas, into a bear, and of Lykaon into a wolf, rests apparently upon no other ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske
... 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, ...
— A Short History of the Great War • A.F. Pollard
... expression of a gentle kindness that went out to him because he needed it. The walk had whipped the color into her cheeks and she bloomed in that squalid cell like a desert rose. There was in the fluent grace of the slender, young body a naive, virginal sweetness that took him by the throat. He knew that she believed in him and the trouble rolled from his heart like ...
— The Yukon Trail - A Tale of the North • William MacLeod Raine
... its pride, its darling, whom it had ennobled in its private heart with nobilities of its own creation, call her "Daughter of God," "Savior of France," "Victory's Sweetheart," "The Page of Christ," together with still softer titles which were simply naive and frank endearments such as men are used to confer upon children whom they love. And so one saw a new thing now; a thing bred of the emotion that was present there on both sides. Always before, in the march-past, the battalions had gone swinging by in a storm of cheers, ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc Volume 2 • Mark Twain
... And it is especially naive when Hellwald, the author of a history of culture, warns us away from all "ideals," simply because history has killed them off one after ...
— We Philologists, Volume 8 (of 18) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... the harbor, with three young women in it, rested her paddles abreast the sloop. One of the fair crew, hailing with the naive salutation, "Talofa lee" ("Love to you, ...
— Sailing Alone Around The World • Joshua Slocum
... passion and yearning of the music. Then Fullerton and Blair prayed, and the sceptic heard two men humbly uttering petitions like children, and, to his humorous Scotch intellect, there was something nearly amusing in the naive language of these two able, keen men. They seemed to say, "Some of our poor men cannot do so much as think clearly yet; we will try to translate their dumb craving." Charles Dickens, that good man, that very great man, should have heard the two evangelists; he would have altered some of the savage ...
— A Dream of the North Sea • James Runciman
... is breakfasting under another tree, hard by; and messages, nods, and smiles pass backward and forward. Families see each other daily in these public resorts, and exchange mutual offices of good-will. Perhaps from these customs of society come that naive simplicity and abandon which one remarks in the Continental, in opposition to the Anglo-Saxon, habits of conversation. A Frenchman or an Italian will talk to you of his feelings and plans and prospects with an unreserve that is perfectly unaccountable to you, who ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... is a good deal more to be said on this subject, if this were the place to say it; even superstition has its uses, and sometimes, its sound heart of truth. He who does not see in the legend of Santa Claus a beautiful faith on one side, and the naive embodiment of a divine fact on the other, is not fit to have a place at the Christmas board. For him there should be neither carol, nor holly, nor mistletoe; they only shall keep the feast to whom all ...
— Christmas - Its Origin, Celebration and Significance as Related in Prose and Verse • Various
... always looked a little sleepy under their long lashes, kept straying about the cheerful rooms with naive admiration. Presently she drew on her cotton gloves. 'I guess I must be ...
— My Antonia • Willa Cather
... be the amount of overtime imposed on many clerks, sometimes paid for, but often obligatory whether paid for or not. There is a naive arrangement in the Civil Service Typing Department. It seems that the typists are allowed 9d. or 10d. an hour for overtime up to a limit of fifteen hours a month, but any overtime beyond that is not paid for. In the Minutes of Evidence before ...
— Women Workers in Seven Professions • Edith J. Morley
... In this naive history we learn to look at life from the Esquimaux point of view. Mr. Hall's sympathetic nature fitted him for this difficult task; and having accomplished it well, he is enabled, by his vivid descriptions, to invite the reader ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... proud, pale wife and his slim, high-stepping horses and his grinning blacks. The general conviction was, Grandmother Carmody said, that he had come—or been sent—west to make a fresh start. There was something rather pathetically naive about that theory. There could never be a fresh start for the "Wild Kings" in a world of excellent cellars and playing cards. In a surprisingly short time he had re-created his earlier atmosphere for himself—an ...
— Play the Game! • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... recorded word.... It seems such a short time ago that he was taking his first stumbling steps along the dim hallways of language. I have been turning back to the journal I began shortly after his birth and kept up for so long, the naive journal of a young mother registering her wonder at the unfolding mysteries of life. It became less minute and less meticulous, I notice, as the years slipped past, and after the advent of Poppsy and Pee-Wee the entries seem a bit hurried and often incoherent. But I have ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... earliest of the series—full of faults, but imbued with the sweetest feeling; there is a look of naive curiosity, mingling with the modest and meek humility of the Virgin, which almost provokes ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... stir—I mean people will be asking questions; and then you know how a pseudonym whets curiosity—they will certainly find out—and they will talk all the more then. That ought to do the book some good. And then you understand, Mr. Moore," continued this remarkably naive person, "if your friend happened to know any of the reviewers, and could suggest how some little polite attention might be paid them, there would be nothing wrong in that, would there? I am told that they are quite gentlemen nowadays—they go everywhere—and—and ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... been transformed into almost illusive groups in painted terra-cotta. The scenes of the Last Supper, of the Martyrdom of the Innocents, of the Raising of Jairus' daughter, for instance, are certainly touching in the naive piety of their life-sized realism. But Gaudenzio Ferrari had many [94] helpmates at the Sacro Monte; and his lovelier work is in the Franciscan Church at the foot of the hill, and in those two, truly Italian, ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... bold enough to announce their belief in the radical doctrine which demands a complete transformation of essential values. For them, good is evil and evil good, and they seem not ashamed to avow it. The conspicuous German philosopher of later years, Nietzsche, with a naive simplicity insists that the great need of our modern civilization is that which he designates as "the transvaluation of all values." By this he means the complete transformation of certain ideas of supreme ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... hat had left its mark in a deep red cincture. His loose shooting jacket, worn open, displayed a flannel shirt, white, but not too white. This much of Hardy was raised and supported on his elbow; the rest of him, encased in knickerbockers, stockings, and exceedingly muddy boots, sprawled with a naive abandonment at the feet of the owner of the drawing-room. Lying in this easy attitude, he delivered himself of the ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... to the manner and mode of thought of the ancient balladist. The latter, it may be said, does not stop to think or to analyse or moralise; he feels, and is content to tell us in the most direct and naive language, all that he has felt. He has not learned the new trick of introspection; he is guided by intuition and the primaeval instincts. He carries from his own lips to ours a draught of pure, strong, human passion, stirred into action by provocations of love, jealousy, revenge, and grief such ...
— The Balladists - Famous Scots Series • John Geddie
... wondrous naive in a lover who, when asked by his mistress to sing a song in her honour, breaks out into versical praises of her parts. But even the classical Arab authors did not disdain such themes. See in Al-Hariri (Ass. of Mayyafarikin) where Abu Zayd laments the ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 8 • Richard F. Burton
... with a naive remembrance only of the chivalry of this idyllic indiscretion, "when I look at you I can understand how a knight ...
— The Flaw in the Sapphire • Charles M. Snyder
... knew how to judge of people and yet remain full of charity for his neighbor. Profoundly individual, and profoundly attached to his ideas, like all Anglo-Saxons, and in fact like all who have acquired the Protestant habit of free inquiry, he nevertheless had for the Church a docility almost naive and infantile; and this was because he recognized in her the authority and the action of the ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... to pass the verdict of "childishness" whenever 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 vindicate, enforce, and ...
— An Outline of Occult Science • Rudolf Steiner
... has often been censured by the fastidiousness of his native critics, as bas and du style familier. This does not offend the foreigner, who is often struck by its simplicity and vigour. Moliere preferred the most popular and naive expressions, as well as the most natural incidents, to a degree which startled the morbid delicacy of fashion and fashionable critics. He had frequent occasions to resist their petty remonstrances; and whenever Moliere introduced an incident, or made an allusion of which he knew the truth, and ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... in which the child finds satisfaction for his instinct to dominate. Showing off is one, bragging is one, doing all the talking is one; and, though in growing older and mixing with people the child becomes less naive in his manner of bragging and showing off, he continues even as an adult to reach the same end in more subtle ways. Going about to win applause or social recognition is a seeking for domination. Anything in ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... delight my conversation with this captured boy, he was such a naive specimen of the true Southern ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... creating language over again, to fit a hair's-breadth of difference in the form of thought or sensation. That is why, in this book, in translating a 'roundel' of Villon which Rossetti had already translated, he misses the naive quality of the French which Rossetti, in a version not in all points so faithful as this, had been able, in some subtle way, to retain. His own moulds of language recur to him, and he will not stop to think that 'wife,' though a good word for his rhyme scheme, is not a word that ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... There was something so naive and innocent in Sadie's attitude and expression that Whitney Barnes was charmed. It also tickled his soul to see how thoroughly his friend was stumped. So to add to Travers's confusion ...
— Officer 666 • Barton W. Currie
... with Chinese technical and philosophical terms, further assists us to get a measurably correct idea of what is called The Divine Age. Of the two books, however, the "Kojiki" is much more valuable as a true record, because, though rude in style and exceedingly naive in expression, and by no means free from Chinese thoughts and phrases, it is marked by a genuinely Japanese cast of thought and method of composition. Instead of the terse, carefully measured, balanced, and antithetical sentences of correct Chinese, those of the "Kojiki" are long and involved, ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... his considerable brain and his poet's heart, something of the "imperishable child." Like a wholesome child, he did not easily "think evil"; his temper towards all men—even the owners of "way-leaves" and mining royalties—was optimist. He had the most naive admiration for Wharton's ability, and for the academic attainments he himself secretly pined for; and to the young complex personality itself he had taken from the beginning an unaccountable liking. The bond between the two, though incongruous and recent, was real; Wharton was as glad ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Charles was calm. Mark was sardonic, Charles was naive. Mark was a cynic, Charles was an idealist. Mark was often sad; ...
— Beside Still Waters • Robert Sheckley
... 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 order to ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... sense. The health shoes were comfort. The hat was strictly business. Sophy Decker made and sold hats, both astute and ingenuous, to the female population of Chippewa, Wisconsin. Chippewa's East-End set bought the knowing type of hat, and the mill hands and hired girls bought the naive ones. But whether lumpy or possessed of that indefinable thing known as line, Sophy ...
— Half Portions • Edna Ferber
... control over appointments to office 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 ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley
... Nevertheless they met nothing, and soon became absorbed in the exercise. Dick felt something of his old tenderness return to this wholesome, pretty girl at his side; perhaps he betrayed it in his voice, or in an unconscious lingering by her bridle-rein, but she accepted it with a naive reserve which he naturally attributed to the effect of his own previous preoccupation. He bore it so gently, however, that it awakened her interest, and, possibly, her pique. Her reserve relaxed, and by the time ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... with Geoffrey Croyden's affairs than any one else, Colin," she said, crossing her knees, in the reckless fashion women have now-a-days, and exposing a ravishing expanse of blue silk stockings, with an unconscious consciousness that was delightfully naive. "And I want to ask you something—or ...
— In Her Own Right • John Reed Scott
... distracted between the two, and excited both by the lacrima and his triumph, turned to the younger child with so naive and grotesque a pride, "I don't know which to thank the most. You give me so much joy, child,—I am so proud of thee and myself. But he and I, poor fellow, have ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... bounds of consistency and happily forgets the moral because the story is so interesting, or forgets for a moment the story because the moral is so important. In the Second Part the two characters fall apart more definitely. Now you have delightful pieces of crude human nature, naive and sparkling. Then you have long and intricate theological treatises. Neither the allegorical nor the narrative unity is preserved to anything like the same extent as on the whole is the case in Part ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... intuition to know it, was not only greatly welcome to Margaret, but to all the others—from the gardener up to the senator. Manners' distinction of manner, his wellbred, easy ways, his charmingly enunciative and gracious voice, together with his naive and simple nature, went far with people's hearts. Aladdin bitterly conceded every advantage to his rival except that of mind. To this, for he knew even in his humble moments that he himself had it, he clung ...
— Aladdin O'Brien • Gouverneur Morris
... 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 schoolboy smacking his lips over an ...
— One Basket • Edna Ferber
... sung in the Faroes, begging him to translate it some day, "as none but he can translate it." "It is so sad, that no tenderness less exquisite than his can prevent its being painful; and at least in its denouement, so naive, that no purity less exquisite than his can prevent its being dreadful."[24] Later in the lecture he commends to his hearers the Heimskringla of Snorri Sturluson, the "Homer of ...
— The Influence of Old Norse Literature on English Literature • Conrad Hjalmar Nordby
... 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 ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... a French. French eyes see beauty in everything. To the German eye the sense of beauty has been denied. You cannot compare a beast and a man. In the old days, when there were wolves, it was the custom of the naive people of those days to torture a wolf if they caught one. They put him to death with the same refinements which were requisitioned for human criminals. This meant nothing to the wolf. The mere fact that he had ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... personal appearance, of which he always took the greatest care, he had a naive admiration that he did not disguise. His candor in this respect was comical; yet, strange to say, he was really ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... you?" she enquired seriously; and immediately he knew that her husband had been Irish, and that she held a naive and touching belief that no one but a man of his race would have behaved as he had done, that all other men would have been kind. Particularly now that Ellen was growing such a big girl she didn't want any Irish coming into this little ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... set up Democracy on the ruins of feudalism: the end of it all for us is that already in the twentieth century there has been as much brute coercion and savage intolerance, as much flogging and hanging, as much impudent injustice on the bench and lustful rancor in the pulpit, as much naive resort to torture, persecution, and suppression of free speech and freedom of the press, as much war, as much of the vilest excess of mutilation, rapine, and delirious indiscriminate slaughter of helpless non-combatants, old and young, as much prostitution of professional talent, ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... example. If you wish to guide a young man on the path of true culture, beware of interrupting his naive, confident, and, as it were, immediate and personal relationship with nature. The woods, the rocks, the winds, the vulture, the flowers, the butterfly, the meads, the mountain slopes, must all speak to him in their own language; in them he must, as it were, come to know himself again in countless ...
— On the Future of our Educational Institutions • Friedrich Nietzsche
... no possible tinge of patronage or condescension in her voice, but rather, instead, a bumpy, naive sort of friendliness, as lonesome Royalty sliding temporarily down from its throne might reasonably contend with each bump, "A King may look at a cat! He ...
— The Indiscreet Letter • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... obstacle. The golden age of love, during which we enjoy our own sentiments, and in which we are almost as happy by ourselves, was not likely to last long with Sarrasine. However, events surprised him when he was still under the spell of that springtime hallucination, as naive as it was voluptuous. In a week he lived a whole lifetime, occupied through the day in molding the clay with which he succeeded in copying La Zambinella, notwithstanding the veils, the skirts, the waists, and the bows of ribbon ...
— Sarrasine • Honore de Balzac
... threw back the words in surprise, half contemptuous, "Oh, Lord, no, it's not money! I haven't much of it now, but I'm going to make a bunch of the stuff—if I want to." He spoke with naive and amazing confidence which somehow struck astounded belief into the listener. "There's enough of it there, waiting to be made—no, it's not money—though perhaps one might well think it ought to be. I suppose my work might strike a girl ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley
... the only way to do it: you engage a few score of the theatrical tribe by promising them high salaries and give them small advances; you look for a lady treasurer who is wise enough to have a bond and naive enough to deposit it; with it you buy the necessary accessories, have them sent on account and you are ready either to begin, or to break up. And in two months you can repeat the same prescription until you get ...
— The Comedienne • Wladyslaw Reymont
... recognition to the delicacy and sincerity of imagist verse, to its magical skill in seeming to open new doors of sense experience by merely shutting the old doors of memory, to its naive courage in rediscovering the formula of "Back to Nature." [Footnote: See the discussion of imagist verse in chap. III.] Like "free verse," it has widened the field of expression, although its advocates have sometimes ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... tried in a delicate manner, without being offensive to me, to give the impression that my conviction that mankind could be guided by such a naive doctrine as that of the Sermon on the Mount proceeds from two causes: that such a conviction is partly due to my want of knowledge, my ignorance of history, my ignorance of all the vain attempts to apply the principles of the Sermon on the Mount to life, which have ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... frank, naive. She was impressed by his nearness; but Lane saw that it was the fact of his being a soldier with a record, not his mere physical propinquity that affected her. She seemed both bold and shy. But she did not show ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... Bangana," the king responded in a small, thin tone, as though the virile resonance of his voice had passed away with all his naive and grandiose hopes. "All those tales! To whom shall I listen now at night? Besides, it has been good to see you here every day; for you alone in these forests have really understood my heart—and have stabbed it ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... she glanced up at him again, with a sweet wistfulness, that was rather frequent with her; turning half round—for he stood at her side, not quite enough at his ease to look continually in her face—he was much surprised to find her so charming, so naive in all her movements, and in the flitting expressions of ...
— Fated to Be Free • Jean Ingelow
... that benign mental disorder par excellence, they had the theory of a wandering about of the womb in the organism as a cause. That provided an image of something material happening as an explanation. With the triumphs of anatomy after the Renaissance, that naive view had to be discarded. In its place the humoral theory held sway, with its good humors and its bad humors, and their bilious, lymphatic, nervous and sanguine admixtures. But that, too, went the way of all flesh. During the first half of the ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... this 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, we must confess it, was rather proud ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... moist in patches that the slanting morning rays were slowly coaxing away. Ronald Wyde, having set his favorite books handily on the dimity-draped table, which comprised for him the process of getting to rights, and having given more than one glance of amused wonderment at the naive blue-and-white scriptural tiles that cased his cumbrous four-story earthenware stove, and smiled lazily at poor Adam's obvious and sudden indigestion, even while the uneaten half-apple remained in his guilty hand, he stepped out on his balcony, leaned his elbows ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 8 • Various
... clever young man, without, I suspect, ever trying to understand anything. My daughter knew him from childhood. I am a busy man, and I confess that their engagement was a complete surprise to me. I wish their reasons for that step had been more naive. But simplicity was out of fashion in their set. From a worldly point of view he seems to have been a mere baby. Of course, now, I am assured that he is the victim of his noble confidence in the rectitude of his kind. But that's mere idealising of a sad reality. For my part ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... second day. As the maid dressed 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 to them, beyond the careless view afforded from between the ...
— Bakemono Yashiki (The Haunted House) - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 2 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... laughter 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
... of this period Gabrielle, being taken as a matter of course, had practically dropped out of Arthur's letters. The episode of the rabbit changed all this, for while Arthur now began to expand in a naive enthusiasm, Gabrielle's attempts at writing about him fell altogether flat. Judging by her letters Mrs. Payne might reasonably have supposed that she had grown ...
— The Tragic Bride • Francis Brett Young
... abreast. In the van were a number of big, square-headed fellows, who seemed to possess the herculean strength and naive confidence of giants. They would doubtless prove blind, intrepid defenders of the Republic. On their shoulders they carried large axes, whose edges, freshly sharpened, glittered in ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... empiricism and tradition. The Latin classics, apart from their use as a source of tropes and commonplaces, only served to inspire a superstitious and uncomprehending reverence for ancient Rome. Of this new learning Otto II and his son were naive disciples. They could not sufficiently admire the encyclopaedic Gerbert, the most fashionable and incomparably the ablest teacher of their day. Otto II and his court listened patiently for hours ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis
... which they never ceased to thirst. No hint is given of those fishermen of the Persian Gulf who lived entirely, according to Herodotus, upon dried fish ground to powder and made into a kind of cake.[120] The naive, picturesque, and anecdotic illustrations of common life, which are so plentiful in Egypt, are almost completely wanting ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... who were watching her, the sight was so comical that Red Feather did that which I do not believe he had done a dozen times in all his life—he threw back his head and laughed loud. Melville caught the contagion and gave way to his mirth, which was increased by the naive remark of Dot that she couldn't see anything to ...
— The Story of Red Feather - A Tale of the American Frontier • Edward S. (Edward Sylvester) Ellis
... Abel into a cul-de-sac, handed down to the keeping of the Roman aristocrat, the baron, the first Galland, and the fat, pompous little man. It would deprive armies of an occupation. It would make statesmanship too simple and naive to have the distinction of craft, which gave one man the right to lead another. Both sides had to act in the old fashion of ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... be temporarily stricken speechless by the discovery that a man who had acted for the British Government should be capable of stooping to the work of a private inquiry agent. Staring all about the room with a sort of naive wonderment, he drew out a big silk handkerchief and loudly blew his nose, all the time eyeing Harley questioningly. Replacing his handkerchief he directed his regard ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... outward things, light, colour, everyday gesture, which the poetry of the Divine Comedy involves, and before the fifteenth century Dante could hardly have found an illustrator. Botticelli's illustrations are crowded with incident, blending, with a naive carelessness of pictorial propriety, three phases of the same scene into one plate. The grotesques, so often a stumbling-block to painters who forget that the words of a poet, which only feebly present an image ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... spoke to her their voices softened to an undernote of tenderness never used among themselves. She had won her way steadily to every girl's heart. They had marveled at her invariable sweetness of temper; they had laughed at her quaint, naive sayings, and, most of all, they had loved her for the warm, grateful heart that found room and to spare ...
— Lucile Triumphant • Elizabeth M. Duffield
... letters with naive envy. "You are pals with the fat-fed capitalists. They will see that you get something easy, and one of these days you will marry one of their daughters. Then you will join the bank accounts, ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... and polishing. The technical processes are interestingly described by the writers of the old treatises on divers arts. In the earliest of these, by the monk Theophilus, in the eleventh century, we have most graphic accounts of processes very similar to those now in use. The naive monastic instructor, in his preface, exhorts his followers to honesty and zeal in their good works. "Skilful in the arts let no one glorify himself," say Theophilus, "as if received from himself, and not from elsewhere; but let him be thankful humbly in the ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... Rachel now became inquisitive, calculating, It seemed to be saying: "One day I may be able to make use of this piece of goods." But there was a certain careless good-humour in it, too. What he saw was a naive young maid, with agreeable features, and a fine, fresh complexion, and rather reddish hair. (He did not approve of the colour of the hair.) He found pleasure in regarding her, and in the perception that he had abashed her. Yes, he liked to see her timid and downcast before him. He ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... Ratignolles'. Monsieur and Madame Ratignolle made much of the Colonel, installing him as the guest of honor and engaging him at once to dine with them the following Sunday, or any day which he might select. Madame coquetted with him in the most captivating and naive manner, with eyes, gestures, and a profusion of compliments, till the Colonel's old head felt thirty years younger on his padded shoulders. Edna marveled, not comprehending. She herself ...
— The Awakening and Selected Short Stories • Kate Chopin
... she, stopping at a sort of /naive/ point; "but it is a pity that it is not destined for a real purpose."— "That were indeed very desirable," I cried; "and, oh! how happy must he be, who receives from a girl he infinitely loves, such an assurance of her affection."—"There is much ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... 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 him, most likely to ask advice about her children. And what a pitiable figure she was! ...
— The Horse-Stealers and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... 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 enthusiastic little creature, almost a woman ...
— The Little Colonel's Chum: Mary Ware • Annie Fellows Johnston
... 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" ...
— Chapters in Rural Progress • Kenyon L. Butterfield
... insistence on a few simple essentials. It embodies everything essential to an understanding of the old mentality of China which has not yet been completely destroyed. From a literary standpoint it has also much that is valuable because it is so naive; and although it is concerned with such a distant region of the world as China its treatment of modern political ideas is so bizarre and yet so acute that ...
— The Fight For The Republic in China • Bertram Lenox Putnam Weale
... is sufficient for him and has no need of affiliating itself with the affairs of the village; that the farmers should develop their own cooperative stores and selling agencies so that they can be economically independent of the "parasitic" trader of the village. Such a naive point of view has a certain logical simplicity which is based on the presupposition that conflict is inevitable and that justice and equity can be secured only through dominance. The same line of reasoning finds no solution of the problem of capital and labor, or of the ...
— The Farmer and His Community • Dwight Sanderson
... look that nice," she said with a candor at once pathetic and naive. "I've been wishing he wouldn't come, but now I kinda ...
— Betty Gordon in Washington • Alice B. Emerson
... kindly, mild eyes looking forth under the shadow of prominent brows; his amiable mouth surrounded by a copious silver-white beard. The cordial, prepossessing expression of the whole face, the gentle, mild voice, the slow, deliberate utterance, the natural and naive train of ideas which marked his conversation, captivated my whole heart in the first hour of our meeting, just as his great work had formerly, on my first reading it, taken my whole understanding by storm, I fancied a lofty world-sage ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany
... tone, her irritation increasing every moment. This irritation was not diminished when she beheld the captain, enchanted with the gypsy, and, most of all, with himself, execute a pirouette on his heel, repeating with coarse, naive, ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... Deity minimizes or leaves out divine transcendence; thus it starves one fundamental impulse in man—the need and desire to look up. Instead of this transcendence modern preaching emphasizes immanence, often to a naive and ludicrous degree. God is the being who is like us. Under the influence of that monistic idealism, which is a derived philosophy of the humanistic impulse, preaching lays all the emphasis upon divine immanence in sharpest contrast ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... a step towards him, and then hesitated. She had to form a plan of campaign all in a moment! She had to keep her wits and to use them! How could she give him confidence about his absurd picture? She noticed that naive look that sometimes came into his eyes, a boyish expression that gave the He to his greying beard ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... Entente's plans for passage through Belgium, Calais, and England. France doubtful protectors, Barnardiston's insinuations relative Flushing question, both perfidious and naive postulates dressing plan of battle against threatening Franco-British invasion ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War from the Beginning to March 1915, Vol 1, No. 2 - Who Began the War, and Why? • Various
... bracket, hence, more appearance of solidity is required at the top, and less at the foot, than true proportions would admit. It is all done so unostentatiously that one might look for hours at the figure without noticing the license. Not that I should advise you to imitate this naive way out of a difficulty. The childlike simplicity of its treatment succeeds where conscious effort would only ...
— Wood-Carving - Design and Workmanship • George Jack
... advantage of the offer. He "lifted up his eyes, and beheld all the plain of Jordan, that it was well watered everywhere, even as the garden of the Lord." So they parted, and Lot "pitched his tent towards Sodom," whose inhabitants, says our naive story, "were wicked and sinners before the Lord exceedingly." Commentators explain that Lot's approach to such a detestable sink of iniquity indicated the native corruption of his heart, or at least a sad ...
— Bible Romances - First Series • George W. Foote |
