"Puerile" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Emily could think so wisely. She seemed to have grown wiser in her grief. But grief helped her no further in her instinctive perception of the truth, and she resumed her puerile attack ...
— Vain Fortune • George Moore
... on and left her, Andy was somewhat ashamed of such puerile falsehoods. But then, she had started the allegorical method of imparting advice, he remembered. So presently went whistling to round up the boys and tell them what he ...
— The Flying U's Last Stand • B. M. Bower
... endangered by the caprice of the emperor; and his dignity was profaned by a second colleague, who had rowed in the galleys. Yet the murder of his benefactor must be condemned as an act of ingratitude and treason; and the churches which he dedicated to the name of St. Michael were a poor and puerile expiation of his guilt. The different ages of Basil the First may be compared with those of Augustus. The situation of the Greek did not allow him in his earliest youth to lead an army against his country; or ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... but a blind forgetfulness of the evidence of history. The Islam of the earlier centuries evolved and progressed with the nations, and the stimulus it gave to men in the reign of the ancient caliphs is beyond all question. To impute to it the present decadence of the Moslem world is altogether too puerile. The truth is that nations have their day; and to a period of glorious splendour succeeds a time of lassitude and slumber. It is a law of nature. And then one day some danger threatens them, stirs them from their ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... nation" which is "indivertible in aim," and incredulous of the existence of the unattainable. His dominant failing was a self-dependence, which, in a weaker nature, would have degenerated into self-sufficiency, but just stopped short of that complacent, puerile egotism, which narrows the mind, and rears its own opinions upon a judgment-seat to pronounce verdicts upon the rest of the world. He never doubted his ability to scale any height upon which he fixed his eyes; he laughed ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... extravagance. The passages of the Epistles, which were formerly felt to be so objectionable, are yet to be found here in all their unmitigated folly. Ignatius is still the same anti-evangelical formalist, the same puerile boaster, the same dreaming mystic, and the same crazy fanatic. These are weighty charges, and yet they can be substantiated. But we must enter into details, that we may fairly exhibit the spirit, and expose the ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... chemic wonders,—in others a natural fluid, call it electricity, and these may produce electric wonders. But the wonders differ from Normal Science in this,—they are alike objectless, purposeless, puerile, frivolous. They lead on to no grand results; and therefore the world does not heed, and true sages have not cultivated them. But sure I am, that of all I saw or heard, a man, human as myself, was the remote originator; and I believe unconsciously ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... your own lamentations over this work of the abolitionists, and your intimation that the South will never consent to give up her slaves, until the impossibility, of paying her "twelve hundred millions of dollars" for them, shall have been accomplished? Puerile and insulting as is your proposition to the abolitionists to raise "twelve hundred millions of dollars" for the purchase of the slaves, it is nevertheless instructive; inasmuch as it shows, that, in your judgment, the South ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... flood of vitality, so prodigally lavished upon our world in the beginning, has been ebbing lower and lower; and the theory of organic nature steadily advancing from the lower to the higher is manifestly just as puerile as the old hope of creating energy by a perpetual-motion machine,—and a mistake of precisely the same nature. Both are contradicted by the magnificent law of the Conservation of Energy, which, as we have said, is only the scientific expression of the Scriptural statement that Creation is ...
— Q. E. D., or New Light on the Doctrine of Creation • George McCready Price
... kiss her children on the Lord's day—and inflicting actual punishment on the captain of a ship for having embraced his wife on 5 Sunday, when, after a long separation, she hurried to meet him, as he landed from the vessel! To such puerile littlenesses ...
— The Pilgrims of New England - A Tale Of The Early American Settlers • Mrs. J. B. Webb
... hives of puerile resort That are of chief and most approved report, To such base hopes in many a sordid soul Owe their repute in part, but not the whole. A principle, whose proud pretensions pass Unquestion'd, though the jewel be but glass, That with a world not often ...
— Cowper • Goldwin Smith
... reasoning and philosophy. In Cambridge and in Oxford, the art of speaking agreeably is so far from being taught, that it is hardly talked or thought of. These defects naturally produce dry unaffecting compositions in the one; superficial taste and puerile elegance in the other; ungracious or affected speech in both."—DR. BROWN, 1757: ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... rights established by that decree. The efforts then made by Terry, and subsequently by his friends and counsel, to make it appear that his assault upon the marshal and defiance of the court were caused by his righteous indignation at assaults made by Judge Field upon his wife's character were puerile, because based on a falsehood. The best proof of this is the ...
— Personal Reminiscences of Early Days in California with Other Sketches; To Which Is Added the Story of His Attempted Assassination by a Former Associate on the Supreme Bench of the State • Stephen Field; George C. Gorham
... gardens, the burly tutor, and beautiful Madame, or laughed over his childish remembrances of the toad's teeth in Claude Mignon's pocket; whilst Monsieur Crapaud sat well-bred and silent, with a world of comprehension in his fiery eyes. Whoever thinks this puerile must remember that my hero was a Frenchman, and a young Frenchman, with a prescriptive right to chatter for chattering's sake, and also that he had not a very highly cultivated mind of his own to converse with, even if the most highly ...
— Frances Kane's Fortune • L. T. Meade
... "Sin akhi-irib"Sini (Lunus, or the Moon-God) increaseth brethren. The canon of Ptolemy fixes his accession at B.C. 702, the first year of Elibus or Belibus. For his victories over Babylonia, Palestine, Judea, and Egypt see any "Dictionary of the Bible," and Byron for the marvellous and puerile legend— ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... mental preparation to accomplish the aim of his novel. He not only has not the slightest understanding of the new positive philosophy, but even of the old ideal systems his knowledge is merely superficial and puerile. You could laugh at the heroes of the novel alone as you read their silly and 'hashy' discussions on the young generation had not the novel as a whole been founded on these ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... sight of the puerile contrivance, the only thing here that recalls to us the gigantic war raging somewhere under the sky. We begin to laugh bitterly, offended and even wounded to the quick in our new impressions. Tirette ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... deft, and won shy praise from Kennicott, but as her shoulder blades began to sting, she wondered how many millions of women had lied to themselves during the death-rimmed years through which they had pretended to enjoy the puerile methods ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... matter, then spirit acts upon it; and, finally, if it be a compound of the two, then it affords still stronger evidence of reciprocal effects, which are decisive of the whole question in dispute. We are conscious, however, that this reasoning is almost puerile; for laws are mere abstractions, and not actual entities. They indicate the mode in which causes produce effects; in other words, they are signs of the intention and purpose with which the Great Spirit carries on all his ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... of failure crushed him. How weak and puerile the eloquence of words or the beat of the human heart against that mysterious force gleaming at him through ...
— The One Woman • Thomas Dixon
... sterner considerations'; and I asked for fifty regulars to man our defences. M. de Vaudreuil replied by sending me up one man, and he had but one arm! I made Noyan a present of him; his notions of fortification were rudimentary, not to say puerile." ...
— Fort Amity • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... visible that the Poet had his Eye upon Ovid's Account of the universal Deluge, the Reader may observe with how much Judgment he has avoided every thing that is redundant or puerile in the Latin Poet. We do not here see the Wolf swimming among the Sheep, nor any of those wanton Imaginations, which Seneca found fault with, [1] as unbecoming [the [2]] great Catastrophe of Nature. If our Poet ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... of their collaboration are seen in the sky signs of upper Broadway, in New York, and of the lake front, in Chicago. A carnival of contending vulgarities, showing no artistry other than the most puerile, these displays nevertheless yield an effect of amazing beauty. This is on account of an occult property inherent in the nature of light—it cannot be vulgarized. If the manipulation of light were delivered into the hands of the artist, and dedicated to noble ends, it ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... this small force, Timoleon set out to conquer a city and kingdom on whose conquest Athens, years before, had lavished hundreds of ships and tens of thousands of men in vain. The effort seemed utterly puerile. Was the handful of Corinthians to succeed where all the imperial power of Athens had failed? Yet the gods fought ...
— Historic Tales, vol 10 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... still a trifle pale. "Why, my dear sir, all these rites and customs over which the Vicar of Helleston and I have been disputing—these May-day observances, in themselves apparently so puerile but so obviously symbolical to one who looks below the surface—turn out to be not retrospective, not reminiscent, not commemorative at all, but anticipatory. On every 1st of May our small urchins form ...
— The Mayor of Troy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... elevated, has discarded most of the tales which offended it, but has not succeeded in discarding them all."(1) Just as the poets of the Rig-Veda prefer to avoid the more offensive traditions about Indra and Tvashtri, so Homer succeeds in avoiding the more grotesque and puerile tales about his own gods.(2) The period of actual apology comes later. Pindar declines, as we have seen, to accuse a god of cannibalism. The Satapatha Brahmana invents a new story about the slaying of Visvarupa. Not Indra, but ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... rejected the assistance of any idea that presented itself. Ovid, not content with catching the leading features of any scene or character, indulged himself in a thousand minutiae of description, a thousand puerile prettinesses, which were in themselves uninteresting, and took off greatly from the effect of the whole; as the numberless suckers and straggling branches of a fruit-tree, if permitted to shoot out unrestrained, while they are themselves barren and useless, ...
— English Satires • Various
... your letter of July 31st—no number, sheets of different sizes. All these observations mean nothing, unless it is that a person without anything to do or to think occupies herself with puerile things. Indeed, I should do very wrong not to profit by all your lessons, and to persist in the error of believing in friendship, and regarding it as a good; no, no; I renounce my errors, and am absolutely persuaded that of all illusions ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... "The project is puerile and your tactics are baleful. Your Ministers branded the Bolshevists as criminals, and the French government publicly announced that it would enter into no relations with them. In spite of that, all the Allied governments have now ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... trouble there is in establishing the Republic in the interior of our provinces would be quite useless. There can be no illusion: everything is at stake, and the end will perhaps be ORLEANISM. But we are pushed into the unforeseen to such an extent that it seems to me puerile to have anticipations; the thing to do is to ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... practising on insects tricks which to all appearances are as puerile as those which we practised on the Turkeys in the days when the farmer's wife used to run after us cracking her whip. Do not laugh: a serious ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... understood the American language. No such phenomenon has ever been witnessed before. No country before has ever refused to do its own "chores," and called in an army of foreigners for the purpose. To complain bitterly of their want of skill is therefore, under the circumstances, almost puerile, from an economical point of view; while, to anyone who looks at the matter as a moralist, it is hard to see why Bridget, doing the work badly in the kitchen, is any more a contemptible object than the American sewing-girl killing herself in a garret at three dollars a week, ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin
... knowing what to find fault with, do not find themselves warmly interested. In the works of the poets who fasten on their affections, they see grosser faults, and the very images which shock their taste in the modern; still they do not appear as puerile or extrinsic in one as the other.—Why?—because they did not appear so to ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft
... war's alarms and preparing for the work of the day by trusting the watching to those on duty, as they would be trusted in turn when similarly on guard. How often were such incidents repeated, night and day, through campaign after campaign, till they became so familiar that it seems almost puerile ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V2 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... men. On mature reflection it was simply impossible to regard Stanistreet as a purveyor of puerile gossip, or seriously to believe that such gossip had been the cause of his disaster. That was only the last of a long train of undignified circumstances which had made his position in Drayton Parva insupportable; ...
— The Tysons - (Mr. and Mrs. Nevill Tyson) • May Sinclair
... very puerile to me, save as it might possibly account in some remote way for Mrs. Packard's ...
— The Mayor's Wife • Anna Katharine Green
... as the first of a series of such collections made after his time by each successive Archbishop. Many of these indeed have passed away. The manuscripts of Parker form the glory of Corpus College, Cambridge; the Oriental collections of Laud are among the most precious treasures of the Bodleian. In puerile revenge for his fall Sancroft withdrew his books from Lambeth, and bequeathed them to Emmanuel College. The library which the munificence of Tenison bequeathed to his old parish of St. Martin's-in-the-Fields has been dispersed ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... rapid decay of the King; the utter failure of all male heir in the House of Cerdic, save only the boy Edgar; whose character (which throughout life remained puerile and frivolous) made the minority which excluded him from the throne seem cause rather for rejoicing than grief: and whose rights, even by birth, were not acknowledged by the general tenor of the Saxon laws, which ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... done with such puerile talk? When shall we banish charlatanry from science? When shall we cease to manifest this disgusting contradiction between our writings and our conduct? We hoot at and spit upon interest, that is to say, the useful, the right (for to say that all nations are interested in a thing, is to say ...
— What Is Free Trade? - An Adaptation of Frederic Bastiat's "Sophismes Econimiques" - Designed for the American Reader • Frederic Bastiat
... the Assembly constituted, than the twofold feeling that was destined to dispute and contest every act—the monarchical and republican feeling—commenced upon a frivolous pretext, a struggle, puerile in appearance, serious in reality, and in which each party in the course of two days was alternately the conqueror and the conquered. The deputation that had waited on the king to announce to him the constitution of the Assembly, reported the result of ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... fact he will not oppose resistance to a peaceable understanding and afterwards in order to ensure his friendship there only needs a quick intuition of the poor creature's superstitions, beliefs and susceptibilities and a spirit of precaution against offending his puerile vanity or of in any way provoking ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... However puerile the 'art' may appear to us now, there can be little doubt, that the construction of devices, as an incentive to the acquisition of general knowledge, and as a kind of mental training, was not altogether useless in its day, and formed a link, were ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 444 - Volume 18, New Series, July 3, 1852 • Various
... (SUSAN.) SUSIE prophesied then, it will be remembered, that the fair oratress would yet live to be President of the United States and Canadas. Miss LOGAN, with her customary modesty, declined to view the mysterious future in that puerile light, gracefully suggesting, amid a brilliant outburst of puns, metaphors and amusing anecdotes, that SUSIE distorted the facts. Miss ANTHONY, under a mistaken impression that this referred to her peculiar mode of keeping accounts, offered, with a wild shriek of despair and disgust, ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 25, September 17, 1870 • Various
... the other, and instead of being straight, made a sort of elbow or angle. At the point of that angle a short arm joined it to a hexagonal islet with a soil of gravel and its shores faced with dressed stone, a perfection of puerile neatness. A couple of tall poplars and a few other trees stood grouped on the clean, dark gravel, and under them a few garden benches and a bronze effigy of Jean Jacques ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... His love of reading seemed to have increased in proportion to his acquirements, which were equally great: his representing himself as an infidel was better perhaps understood by his master, who believed it to be only puerile vanity; and therefore Coleridge considered the flogging he received on this occasion, a just and appropriate punishment; and it was so, for as a boy he had not thought deep enough on an equally important point, viz., what is Fidelity, and how easily, he particularly might mistake the genuineness ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... which children seem possessed. This branch of the art, however, struggles under some difficulties. It has, of course, to contend with the undisguised opposition of authority. This is hardly a matter for marvel, and perhaps not even a matter for regret. A prudential regard for the knees of puerile knickerbockers and the corresponding region of feminine frocks may explain a good deal of parental discouragement in the matter; and there is little public sympathy to counteract this, for it is felt that the total decay of these mimes would not be ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... is a hard question for evolutionists. Any scientific theory must be ready to give an account of all phenomena. A hypothesis to explain the origin of man must explain all the facts. How did man become a hairless animal? Darwin's explanation is too puerile for any one professing to be a learned scientist to give. He says that the females preferred males with the least hair (?) until the hairy men gradually became extinct, because, naturally, under such a regime, the hairy men would die off, and, finally only hairless men to beget progeny would ...
— The Evolution Of Man Scientifically Disproved • William A. Williams
... amanuensis, the aforesaid Samuel, would not allow him to transcribe. This writer, although he professes to be the first historiographer (9) of the Britons, has sometimes repeated the very words of Gildas (10); whose name is even prefixed to some copies of the work. It is a puerile composition, without judgment, selection, or method (11); filled with legendary tales of Trojan antiquity, of magical delusion, and of the miraculous exploits of St. Germain and St. Patrick: not to ...
— The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle • Unknown
... in that. This one is better; it calls it 'highway robbery.' That sounds something like. But now this one seems satisfied to call it an 'iniquitous scheme'. 'Iniquitous' does not exasperate anybody; it is weak—puerile. The ignorant will imagine it to be intended for a compliment. But this other one—the one I read last—has the true ring: 'This vile, dirty effort to rob the public treasury, by the kites and vultures that now infest the filthy den called Congress'—that is admirable, ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 5. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... not perhaps among the least important, as to the limits fixed by nature to human knowledge. To know of a surety what those things are which never can be known to mortal man, is a knowledge, the want of which has driven many to puerile and superstitious practices, and many more to ...
— The Philosophy of Teaching - The Teacher, The Pupil, The School • Nathaniel Sands
... Their charitable exhortations betrayed a secret wish that the clergy might be permitted to manage the wealth of the faithful, for the benefit of the poor. The most sublime representations of the attributes and laws of the Deity were sullied by an idle mixture of metaphysical subtleties, puerile rites, and fictitious miracles: and they expatiated, with the most fervent zeal, on the religious merit of hating the adversaries, and obeying the ministers of the church. When the public peace was distracted by heresy and schism, the sacred orators ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... Mediterranee sur de freles navires pour venir s'asseoir au foyer de la nationalite Corse, des hommes graves tels que Boswel et Volney obeissaient sans doute a un sentiment bien plus eleve qu'au besoin vulgaire d'une puerile curiosite' ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... troop of brilliant but giddy young nobles. The Bastille was captured by the Parlement, and the university promised its support and a subsidy. Thus arose the civil war of the Fronde, one of the most extraordinary contests in history, whose name is derived from the puerile street fights with slings, of the printers' devils and schoolboys of Paris. The incidents of the war read like scenes in a comic opera. A hundred thousand armed citizens were besieged by eight thousand soldiers. ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... Tennyson's Sonnets; three times too many, and some rather puerile: but scarce one but with something good in Thought or Expression: all original: and some delightful: I think, to live with Alfred's, and no one else's. Old Fred might have made one of Three Brothers, I think, could he have ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... Pope sent round copies to well-known critics. Addison's praise and Dennis's abuse helped, as we shall presently see, to give it notoriety. Pope, however, returned from criticism to poetry, and his next performance was in some degree a fresh, but far less puerile, performance upon the pastoral pipe.[4] Nothing could be more natural than for the young poet to take for a text the forest in which he lived. Dull as the natives might be, their dwelling-place was historical, and there was an excellent precedent for such ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... how to navigate his ship, much less a wife?—what is to be said of Lohengrin? This cheap Italian music, sugar-coated in its sensuousness, the awful borrowings from Weber, Marschner, Beethoven, and Gluck—and the story! It is called "mystic." Why? Because it is not, I suppose. What puerile trumpery is that refusal of a man to reveal his name! And Elsa! Why not Lot's wife, whose curiosity turned ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... the peculiar aggravation of the tone in which the Austrian note had been addressed to Servia. There was further the patent and almost puerile double dealing of Berlin in the attempted negotiations for peace between Russia and Austria—in which negotiations the British Cabinet was very prominent. But beyond all these other minor points, these three causes ...
— The New York Times Current History: the European War, February, 1915 • Various
... breath of life a luxury as well as a necessity, enjoyable as well as useful, to go and quit smoking when then ain't any sufficient excuse for it! Why, my old boy, when they use to tell me I would shorten my life ten years by smoking, they little knew the devotee they were wasting their puerile word upon—they little knew how trivial and valueless I would regard a decade that had no smoking in it! But I won't persuade you, Twichell—I won't until I see you again—but then we'll smoke for a week together, and then ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... your accomplished philological readers will doubtless consider the information of this Note trivial and puerile; but they will, I hope, bear with a tyro in the science, in recording an original remark of his own, borne out by an authority so decisive ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 185, May 14, 1853 • Various
... known, in fact, that a newspaper in Teheran, the Tamadun (Civilization) which did print it and circulate it, publicly admitted the fact the minute they heard that I was charged by Russia with having done so. So these two at best rather puerile pretexts upon which to base an ultimatum from a powerful nation to a weaker one lacked even the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... looking are marvellous in 'Paul the aged, and now also a prisoner of Jesus Christ.' Forgetfulness of the past and eager anticipation for the future are, we sometimes think, the child's prerogatives. They may be ignoble and puerile, or they may be worthy and great. All depends on the future to which we look. If it be the creation of our fancies, we are babies for trusting it. If it be, as Paul's was, the revelation of God's purposes, we cannot do a ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... pupa or puppy state—longer far than that of any other maggot—he emerges a perfect butterfly, vain, empty, fluttering, and conceited, idling, flirting, flaunting, philandering, until the summer of his ton is past, when he dies, or is arrested, and expiates a life of puerile vanity in Purgatory or ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... that I never did see either Jesus or his disciples offer any sacrifice in the Temple, excepting the Paschal lamb; but Joseph and Anna used frequently during their lifetime to offer sacrifice for the Child Jesus. However, even this accusation was puerile, for the Essenians never offered sacrifice, and no one thought the less well of them for not doing so. The enemies of Jesus still continued to accuse him of being a sorcerer, and Caiphas affirmed several times that the confusion in the statements ...
— The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ • Anna Catherine Emmerich
... but in a constant search for exact expression, whose own share of the school work is faultlessly done, who is tolerant to effort and a tireless helper, who is obviously more interested in serious work than in puerile games, will beget essential manliness in every boy he teaches. He need not lecture on his virtues. A slack, emotional, unpunctual, inexact, and illogical teacher, a fawning loyalist, an incredible pietist, an energetic snob, ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... early development of imagination never permitted him to mingle in childish plays; and his natural aversion to tyranny prevented him from paying due attention to his school duties. But he was always actively employed; and although his endeavours were prosecuted with puerile precipitancy, yet his aim and thoughts were constantly directed to those great objects which have employed the thoughts of the greatest among men; and though his studies were not followed up according to school discipline, they were not the less diligently applied ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... drove him from her hand, so that even now, at sight of anything she had touched, his heart contracted painfully. It happened seldom nowadays. Her little presents, one by one, had disappeared from his rooms, and her letters, kept from some unacknowledged puerile vanity in the possession of such treasures, ...
— The Touchstone • Edith Wharton
... Hillstoke are relenting; at least, they run to me with their cut fingers and black eyes, though they won't trust me with their sacred rheumatics. I must also supply myself with vermifuges till the well is dug, and so mitigate puerile puttiness and internal torments." ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... intermittent. He was apparently a stranger to our eighteenth-century authors, both in poetry and prose; of those who followed them in time, he undervalued Scott, disliked Macaulay, admired Napier, admired Trollope. Wordsworth he condemned as puerile, inheriting the Edinburgh Review estimate of his poetry, and often called on me ecstatically to repeat Hartley Coleridge's parody of Lucy. Of Keats he was immeasurably fond, drawn to him by the poet's relation to his family, declaiming his lines often—as he did sometimes ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... the puerile and trashy novels, full of debasing and licentious tendencies, with which our country is flooded, I would earnestly recommend this work. It can be placed in the hands of the youthful not only with safety, but with the utmost confidence that it will ...
— Summerfield - or, Life on a Farm • Day Kellogg Lee
... conversation. Courbet, my master, you don't know what you are talking about, and all true artists will send you to old Harry, you and your federation. Do you know what an artistic association, such as you understand it, would result in? In serving the puerile ambition of one man—its chief, for there will be a chief, will there not, Monsieur Courbet?—and the puerile rancours of a parcel of daubers, without name and without talent. Artist in our way we assert, that no matter, what painter, even had he composed works superior in their way to Courbet's ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... results of introducing bloodshed into such quarrels. The laws which recognize war are and were acknowledged. But when A kills B because he thinks B to have done evil. A can no longer complain of murder. And Cicero's criticism is somewhat puerile. "And thou, boy," Antony had said in addressing Octavian—"Et te, puer!" "You shall find him to be a man by-and-by," says Cicero. Antony's Latin is not Ciceronian. "Utrum sit elegantius," he asks, putting some further question about ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope
... scornful whites than of pity and contempt for them, because they could not appreciate the beauty and grandeur of the Nation of which they were an unwilling part, and of the future that lay just before. She regarded all there had been of violence and hate as the mere puerile spitefulness of a subjugated people. She had never analyzed their condition or dreamed that they would ever be recognized as a power which might prove dangerous either to the freedman's rights ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... generation after generation, given to the study of letters, so that it was only natural that there should be among them one or two renowned writers of verses; for how could they ever resemble the families of such upstarts, who only employ puerile expressions as a makeshift to get through what they have to do? But the why and the wherefore must be sought in the past. The consort, belonging to the Chia mansion, had, before she entered the palace, been, from her infancy, also brought up ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... a petty state and that of the superb kingdom of France, it was requisite that the former should await for some time the audience which the latter accorded. I am sure that when the peace with Frederick was agitated, the face of Louis XV was not more grave and serious than during this puerile debate about etiquette. The duc de Choiseul, who had the control of foreign affairs, was in the apartment to receive his Danish majesty, with his colleagues, the duc de Praslin, the comte de Saint-Florentin (whom I have called by anticipation duc de la Vrilliere), M. ...
— "Written by Herself" • Baron Etienne Leon Lamothe-Langon
... could educate our unusual powers and abilities, if we had the will to apply them actively in our chaotic, untidy existence, which is terribly blocked up with all kinds of idle clack and home-spun philosophy, and which gets more and more saturated with silly arrogance and puerile bragging. Somewhere deep in the Russian soul—no matter whether it is the "master's" or the muzhik's—there lives a petty and squalid demon of passive anarchism, who infects us with a careless and indifferent attitude toward work, ...
— The Shield • Various
... field. The Yellow Book and similar strange exotics of the first period withered and died, and the cult of literature (!) for the British Home was shortly afterwards in full blast. There followed an avalanche of insufferably dull and puerile magazines, in which the word Sex was strictly taboo, and the ideal aimed at was apparently the extreme opposite to real life. It was odd how suddenly the sex note—(as I will call it for want of a better word)—disappeared from the ...
— Modern marriage and how to bear it • Maud Churton Braby
... people zealously attached to their own forms of worship. The clergy united with the aristocracy, and both with the people, in denouncing the conduct of the king and his ministers as tyrannical and unjust. The canons, especially, which Laud had prepared, were, in the eyes of the Scotch, puerile and superstitious; they could not conceive why a Protestant prelate should make so much account of the position of the font or of the communion table, turned into an altar. Indeed, his liturgy was not much other ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... course, never been completely separated from science; but in times past many physicists dissociated themselves from studies which they looked upon as unreal word-squabbles, and sometimes not unreasonably abstained from joining in discussions which seemed to them idle and of rather puerile subtlety. They had seen the ruin of most of the systems built up a priori by daring philosophers, and deemed it more prudent to listen to the advice given by Kirchhoff and "to substitute the description of facts for a sham explanation ...
— The New Physics and Its Evolution • Lucien Poincare
... sanction proceedings which are unknown to the British Constitution, and which appertain only to an independent state. Yet, in place of exposition, and arguments and illustrations that would tell upon the public mind, we have nothing but puerile effusions, thread-bare assertions, and party criminations—nothing that would convince adversaries and make friends of enemies. Your Excellency's replies, and a few passages in the Montreal Gazette, and in a pamphlet which lately appeared in the Kingston Chronicle, are all that I have ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... of obtaining objects that have belonged to celebrated people may be, and often is, considered puerile; but confess to the weakness, and the contemplation of the little memorials I have named awakens recollections in ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... in Spain: we see thrown in its face its cruel intolerance, its puerile practices, its profane language, its blind submission, or rather the absolute slavery in which it places the believer with respect to the priest. There is much truth in these charges; but all of them are accounted for by an observance of ...
— Roman Catholicism in Spain • Anonymous
... temperature is the temperature it receives from the sun, and the difficulty vanishes at once. Its diameter will be invariable, and the only effect of the cooling of the solid parts will be to immerse them deeper in the water, to change the relative level of the sea without changing its volume. This is no puerile argument when rightly considered; but there is another phenomenon which, if fairly weighed, will also conduct ...
— Outlines of a Mechanical Theory of Storms - Containing the True Law of Lunar Influence • T. Bassnett
... manner as denoted a consciousness of having done his duty, and a laudable desire to vindicate his own conduct. His answer contained a further account of the engagement in which he was supposed to have misbehaved, intermixed with some puerile calculations of the enemy's superiority in weight of metal, which served no other purpose than that of exposing his character still more to ridicule and abuse; and he was again so impolitic as to hazard ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... "Yes," said Berry, "puerile as it may seem, I assumed you were coming back. My assumption was so definite that I didn't even get out. For one thing, Death seemed very near, and the close similarity which the slot I was occupying bore to a coffin, had all along been too suggestive to be ignored. Secondly, from my coign ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates
... imaginings were really puerile. "What awful woman? His landlady? Don't be such a goose, Andora. How can it have been kept back from him, when we've found it here among ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... moved by the sublime conception of a God ruling over the world of matter and the world of mind, revealed religion, as her spirit encountered it, consisted only in gorgeous pageants, and ridiculous dogmas, and puerile traditions. The spirit of piety and pure devotion she could admire. Her natural temperament was serious, reflective, and prayerful. Her mind, so far as religion was concerned, was very much in the state of that of any intellectual, high-minded, uncorruptible Roman, ...
— Madame Roland, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... equally erroneous pretentions in Schuessler's therapy which are really too silly to go into in detail. Time and space are too valuable to squander on any such puerile hypothesis. ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann
... exchanged swift glances of intelligence. The presence of the strange engineering party in the canyon was sufficiently explained. At first sight the president's expedient seemed childishly puerile to Ford. Then suddenly in a flash of revealment he saw beyond the puerilities—beyond the stubborn old man who, with all his narrow self-will and obstinacy was merely playing the game ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde
... ladies smothered their faces with pearl powder till they looked like white plaster casts with beautiful living eyes, the peculiar gossip of the town, and the continuous political changes, the constant "saving of the country," which to his wife seemed a puerile and bloodthirsty game of murder and rapine played with terrible earnestness by depraved children. In the early days of her Costaguana life, the little lady used to clench her hands with exasperation at not being ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... by the hatred of the Jews against it, both then and through all time. I said I could as little understand the intellectual anomalies of such a theory. Could men, among the most ignorant of a nation sunk in that gross and puerile superstition of which the New Testament itself presents a true picture, and which is reflected in the Jewish literature of that age, and ever since,—a nation whose master minds then and ever since ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... long has our love of picture and poem, and of all that the glorious impulse to create in beauty achieves, been fickle as the wind; based on discordant fancies and distorted tradition. Symbolism in art, at present means only an arbitrary and puerile substitution of one object or caprice for another. The most successful poetic simile is often as thoroughly conventional, and consequently as perishable, as possible. In short, we are not in an age when there is one poetry ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... seems to me so empty, so unreal, so puerile. I am bored to death with it. Do you think this is real?" He waved his arms impatiently about him. "It is all a sham and a fraud. I am nothing—nobody. I am a puppet on a hired stage, playing to ...
— Gordon Keith • Thomas Nelson Page
... The puerile Tarlingford, interfering at first, was summarily crushed. Aspiring to equestrian distinctions, he wrought upon maternal indulgence, until, not without misgivings, maternal anxiety was stifled, and, with ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... ending, but however strong and resigned one may be, these blows must be felt. Now the poor old woman is gone I am free; she was the only tie that bound me to this Church, in which I no longer believe. Its dogma is absurd and puerile, its history a tissue of crimes and violence. Why should I lie like others, feigning a faith I do not feel? To-day I have been to the palace to tell them they may dispose of my seven duros monthly and my chaplaincy of nuns. I am going away. ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... same; that all his good sides, minus his evil sides, remained forever. Logically stated, this means that man's goal is the world; this world meaning earth carried to a state higher and with elimination of its evils is the state they call heaven. This theory, on the face of it, is absurd and puerile because it cannot be. There cannot be good without evil, or evil without good. To live in a world where there is all good and no evil, is what Sanskrit logicians call ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... from under water; they mingle with the jingling of rattles and the noise of castanets. We also have the impression of being carried away in the irresistible swing of this incomprehensible gayety, composed in proportions we can scarcely measure, of elements mystic, puerile and even ghastly. A sort of religious terror is diffused by the hidden idols divined in the temple behind us; by the mumbled prayers, confusedly heard; above all, by the horrible heads in lacquered wood, representing foxes, which, as they pass, ...
— Madame Chrysantheme • Pierre Loti
... Khudabakhsh wanted his guest to sit, talk, smoke, and sip sherbet all day. But this Burton could not endure. Nothing, as he says, suits the English less than perpetual society, "an utter want of solitude, when one cannot retire into one self an instant without being asked some puerile questions by a companion, or look into a book without a servant peering over one's shoulder." At last, losing all patience, he left his host and went to a khan, where he once more met Haji Wali. They smoked ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... things are all impossible except in a dream. You perceive that they are pure and puerile insanities, the silly creations of an imagination that is not conscious of its freaks—in a word, that they are a dream, and you the maker of it. The dream-marks are all present; you ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the series of the legitimate kings who formed the XXth dynasty did not include him. Ramses III. took for his hero his namesake, Ramses the Great, and endeavoured to rival him in everything. This spirit of imitation was at times the means of leading him to commit somewhat puerile acts, as, for example, when he copied certain triumphal inscriptions word for word, merely changing the dates and the cartouches,* or when he assumed the prenomen of Usirmari, and distributed among his male children the names ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 5 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... dignity of science. The social importance of the problem is too great to allow of its solution being retarded by the fear that scientific men may be accused of having been outrun by the ignorant. True science has none of these puerile susceptibilities; on the contrary, it deems it an honor to be able to seize all the observations of fact, whoever may have been their first recorder, to put them to the crucial test of methodical experiment, and to convert them into a new stepping stone on ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 458, October 11, 1884 • Various
... us. The question is still before us as a nation whether we will undertake the work of furnishing to the world a scientific exposition of Indian society, or leave it as it now appears, crude, unmeaning, unintelligible, a chaos of contradictions and puerile absurdities. With a field of unequaled richness and of vast extent, with the same Red Race in all the stages of advancement indicated by three great ethnical periods, namely the Status of savagery, the Lower Status of barbarism, and the Middle Status of barbarism, [Footnote: ...
— Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines • Lewis H. Morgan
... after a few moments' silence, "accepting your remarkable premisses for the sake of argument, will you kindly enlighten me as to since when you became so beautifully complete and altogether puerile a moralist? Suppose you did sin with her some three-quarters of a century ago, have not time and suffering purified you both—or rather her? I suppose it does not make ...
— What Dreams May Come • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... Reminiscences as a Cowboy, 1930. A blatant farrago of lies, included in this list because of its supreme worthlessness. However, some judges might regard the debilitated and puerile lying in The Autobiography of Frank Tarbeaux, as told to Donald H. Clarke, New York, 1930, ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie
... a bad effect upon the crew. "Yon puir beastie kens mair, ay, an' sees mair nor you nor me!" was the comment of one of the leading harpooners, and the others nodded their acquiescence. It is vain to attempt to argue against such puerile superstition. They have made up their minds that there is a curse upon the ship, and nothing will ever ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... answered the Executive who had pointed out that many lives could have been saved if the Nipe had been killed six years ago. There was no use in fighting back on such puerile terms. ...
— Anything You Can Do ... • Gordon Randall Garrett
... many are cattle.'' In his book on imitation, Tarde says, "In crowds, the calmest people do the silliest things,'' and in 1892, at the congress for criminal anthropology, "The crowd is never frontal and rarely occipital; it is mainly spinal. It always contains something childish, puerile, quite feminine.'' He, Garnier, and Dekterew, showed at the same congress how frequently the mob is excited to all possible excesses by lunatics and drunkards. Lombroso, Laschi, etc., tell of many cruelties which rebelling ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... have fancied between the superiority of the moderns to the ancients, and the elevation of a dwarf on the back of a giant, is {126} altogether false and puerile. Neither were they giants, nor are we dwarfs, but all of us men of the same standard; and we, the taller of the two, by adding their height to our own. Provided always that we do not yield to them in study, attention, vigilance, and love of truth; for if these qualities be ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 68, February 15, 1851 • Various
... ink was a cheap, theatrical trick of a mountebank, a creature who is the laughing-stock of the press and the public, in his idiotic attempts to draw sensational notoriety upon himself. But I do know that this effort has failed! You have dared to plant this outrageous, puerile trap to attempt to ensnare me! You have dared to strike blindly, in your mad thirst for publicity, at a man infinitely beyond your reach. Your insolence ceases to be amusing! If you try to push this ridiculous accusation, I ...
— The Crevice • William John Burns and Isabel Ostrander
... It is pleasant to remember that by the painters, critics, and rich amateurs of "the old gang" the pictures of Ingres were treated as bad jokes. Ingres was accused of distortion, ugliness, and even of incompetence! His work was called "mad" and "puerile." He was derided as a pseudo-primitive, and hated as one who would subvert the great tradition by trying to put back the clock four hundred years. The same authorities discovered in 1824 that Constable's Hay Wain was the outcome of a sponge full of colour having ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... vulgarity greater than that of rallying people on their surnames, but our exquisite gentleman had not wit enough to invent one superior to such a puerile amusement. Thus, on one occasion, he woke up at three in the morning a certain Mr. Snodgrass, and when the worthy put his head out of the window in alarm, said quietly, 'Pray, sir, is your name Snodgrass?'—'Yes, sir, it is Snodgrass.' 'Snodgrass— Snodgrass—it is a very ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... property-room, this mythical creation of "a magnified non-natural man," what is it all but the perpetuation of the false psychology of the past? There is no durable good in this childish "make-believe." It is time for humanity to outgrow this puerile self-deception about its powers and characteristics and limitations. A great man is a man as well as great, and he may be all the wonderful things that Carlyle claimed without ceasing to be human and therefore erring. And if he would go about simply and ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... It may be asked, why I have censured the Earl of CARLISLE, my guardian and relative, to whom I dedicated a volume of puerile poems a few years ago?—The guardianship was nominal, at least as far as I have been able to discover; the relationship I cannot help, and am very sorry for it; but as his Lordship seemed to forget it on a very essential occasion to me, I shall ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... puerile, ridiculous, to think of refusing to continue with the work he had started. As long as he was going to stay at the Lazy Y he might as well keep on. Betty would surely laugh at him if he refused to go on. He fought it out and took a long time to it, but he finally pulled ...
— The Boss of the Lazy Y • Charles Alden Seltzer
... language of my heart. The following composition was the first of my performances, and done at an early period of life, when my heart glowed with honest warm simplicity; unacquainted and uncorrupted with the ways of a wicked world. The performance is indeed, very puerile and silly; but I am always pleased with it, as it recalls to my mind those happy days when my heart was yet honest, and my tongue was sincere. The subject of it was a young girl who really deserved all the praises I have bestowed on her. I not ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... of the past. I had none; if indeed, I had any motive in undertaking this work, it was to seek for political principles. Thus far I have attained to scarcely more than one; and this is so simple that will seem puerile, and that I hardly dare express it. Nevertheless I have adhered to it, and in what the reader is about to peruse my judgments are all derived from that; its truth is the measure of theirs. It consists wholly in ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... back to him; ideas he had never whispered even to the painter whom he worshipped and had gone all the way to France to see. To her they must seem his apology for not having horses and a valet, or merely the puerile boastfulness of a weak man. Yet if she slipped the bolt tonight and came through the doors and said, "Oh, weak man, I belong to you!" what could he do? That was the danger. He would catch the train out to Long Beach tonight, and tomorrow he would go on ...
— Youth and the Bright Medusa • Willa Cather
... admitted on all hands. There is an appetite of the eye, of the ear, and of every sense, for which God has provided the material. Gaiety of every degree, this side of puerile levity, is wholesome to the body, to the mind, and to the morals. Nature is a vast repository of manly enjoyments. The magnitude of God's works is not less admirable than its exhilarating beauty. The rudest forms have something ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... appearance of a demon is apt to excite emotions rather ludicrous than terrific. Accordingly, that of Dryden failed in the representation. The circumstance, upon which the destruction of the wizard turns, is rather puerile; but there are many similar fables in the annals ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... of the two poets of note in our time who have drawn inspiration from this source, or viewed the universe through the vistas which science opens. Renan thought the modern poetic or imaginative contemplation of the universe puerile and factitious compared with the scientific contemplation of it. The one, he said, was stupendous; the other childish and empty. But Whitman and Tennyson were fully abreast with science, and often afford one a sweep of vision that matches the best ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... astonishment to fury. He seemed to realize that this new world, so different from the old sweet, green one, was a world of enemies, every soul against him, and he was ready to fight them all to the death. He neither pawed the sand nor bellowed, for these are puerile betrayals of temper to which the noblest bulls do not descend. Like a tornado he swept across the ring, killed a horse with a single thrust, sent the picador crashing against the barrera; and quick as a wild cat, strong as an African lion, wheeled to lift another animal and its ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... been mentioned, that Sallust was read in the school at Paderborn. It is supposed that Tacitus was known to Wittikind or Dittmar: both relate visions, and several puerile circumstances; but they write with precision, and shew, on ...
— The Life of Hugo Grotius • Charles Butler
... such as he—bungled it hopelessly; but the idea was the same—a bad travesty of a bad idea, badly worked out. For a moment her mind glanced aside from the main issue in disgust and contempt for the method. It was sin without genius, a puerile theft without adequate return, a miserable fall, and for such a purpose! To expect to find the streaked daffodil unguarded in an outhouse! To sell it for five pounds and think to spend the money on creature comforts! ...
— The Good Comrade • Una L. Silberrad
... the active co-operation of every member of the Committee; and whilst the majority regarded it as an august and impressive vindication of the majesty of parliament, the minority regarded it with equal conviction as a puerile tomfoolery, and declined altogether to act their allotted parts in it. Besides, they did not all want to part with the books. For instance, Mr Hugh Law, being an Irishman, with an Irishman's sense of how to behave like a gallant gentleman on occasion, was ...
— The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet • George Bernard Shaw
... that he is concerned. Political individualism, when not a mere blind for the unlimited freedom of civil privateering, is but the outcome of that abstract idea of man which he so energetically condemns as pedantic—that is, inhuman. His opposition of the individual to society is not that of a puerile anarchist to a no less puerile socialist. There is nothing childish about Unamuno. His assertion that society is for the individual, not the individual for society, is made on a transcendental plane. It is not the argument of liberty against authority—which can be easily answered ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... the man himself, how puerile it is to give him this importance! The solitary bit of cleverness about him is his statement that he has no control whatever over the spirits that attend him. Asking him not to summon them, is pretty like asking Mr Windham not to send for his creditors. They ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... it a notable extension in its propriety. The social and moral phenomena of human life cannot be used in interpreting life elsewhere without a certain conscious humour. This makes the charm of avowed writers of fable; their playful travesty and dislocation of things human, which would be puerile if they meant to be naturalists, render them piquant moralists; for they are not really interpreting animals, but under the mask of animals maliciously painting men. Such fables are morally interesting and plausible just because they are psychologically false. If AEsop could have ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... The puerile stories, therefore, of infection being taken from following a coffined corpse to the grave, without reference to the state of grief, fear, and fatigue, not improbably, of drunkenness, in the mourners, must be unworthy of attention. I am no friend to ...
— Letters on the Cholera Morbus. • James Gillkrest
... Probably he had looked at the stories of adventure in penny papers which only boys read, and he determined sportively to compete with their unknown authors. "Treasure Island" came out in such a periodical, with the emphatic woodcuts which adorn them. It is said that the puerile public was not greatly stirred. A story is a story, and they rather preferred the regular purveyors. The very faint archaism of the style may have alienated them. But, when "Treasure Island" appeared as a real book, then every one who had a smack of youth left was a boy again ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... aroused in my mind by the queer character of some of his questions. Take those relating to the arrangement of the house, for example. The pretence that the information would be valuable to him, should he ever again be cast away, was altogether too puerile for consideration; he required the information—and very cleverly extracted it from the unsuspecting Billy, too—for some entirely different reason. But what was that reason? ...
— The Strange Adventures of Eric Blackburn • Harry Collingwood
... felt before they can be removed. The former, that is ignorance, being a fit soil for the latter to work in, tools are employed by them which a generous mind would disdain to use; and which nothing but time, and their own puerile or wicked productions, can show the inefficacy and dangerous tendency of. I think often of our situation, and view it with concern. From the high ground we stood upon, from the plain path which invited our footsteps, to be so fallen! so ...
— George Washington • William Roscoe Thayer
... conversational habits. But it should be a fixed rule that, when strangers are present, the children are to listen in silence and only reply when addressed. Unless this is secured, visitors will often be condemned to listen to puerile chattering, with small chance of the proper attention due to guests and superiors in age ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... crucifixion. The cross is ten inches high: the figure of Christ, without the glory, six inches: St. John is to the left, and the mother of Christ to the right of the cross; and each of these figures is about four inches high. The drawing and execution of these three figures, are barbarously puerile. To the left of St. John is a singular appearance of the upper part of another plate, running at right angles with the principal, and composed also in the form of the upper portion of a gothic window. To the ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Three • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... in order to examine the bill, and then, in the interval, had sent out their indictment of the author. It was certainly unworthy of him to taunt them with having desecrated the Sabbath day by writing their plea. The charge was not only puerile but amusing, when one considers how Douglas himself was observing ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... some stress on this apparently puerile detail, because the most trifling causes have often disastrous effects, and because we wish the reader to understand what must have been the despair, fury, and exasperation of this woman, when she discovered ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... feel sorry for those people who cannot find a certain illusion of happiness in reading. I thank whatever gods there be that I can generally find the means of "getting-away" between the covers of a book. A book has to be very puerile indeed if I cannot enjoy it to a certain extent—even though that extent be merely a mild ridicule and amusement. I can even enjoy books about books—if they are very well done, which is rare. I am not particularly ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... Mr. Steel," she laughed over my shoulder, "I almost thought you had forgotten me." I fled, leaving that ass, Steel, cooing the most puerile rot about how he couldn't forget her and ...
— 32 Caliber • Donald McGibeny
... generous and distracted trio. The opening of the third act, between Elvira and her brother Alvaro, is not at all young-ladyish, and has some strong turns of feeling. The end of the play, with the stabbing of the Princess and the accusation of Agnes by Elvira, is puerile, but was doubtless welcome to a sentimental audience. It is a bad play, but not at ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... their brothers come to Aversa; but Louis of Durazzo, the eldest of the boys, with many tears begged the others not to obey, and sent a message that he was prevented by a violent headache from leaving Naples. So puerile an excuse could not fail to annoy Charles, and the same day he compelled the unfortunate boys to appear before the king, sending a formal order which admitted of no delay. Louis of Hungary embraced them warmly one after the other, asked ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... suppresses Jeanne's trial because he finds it inconvenient? Jean Chartier was extremely weak-minded and trivial; he seems to believe in the magic of Catherine's sword and in Jeanne's loss of power when she broke it;[16] he records the most puerile of fables. Nevertheless it is interesting to note that the official chronicler of the Kings of France, writing about 1450, ascribes to the Maid an important share in the delivery of Orleans, in the conquest of fortresses on the ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... of lyrical styles or the naive, touching crudity of the Christian drama. The seventeenth century turned disdainfully away from the monuments of national genius discovered by it; finding them sometimes shocking in their rudeness, sometimes puerile in their refinements. These unfortunate exhumations, indeed, only serve to strengthen its cult for a simple, correct beauty, the models of which are found in Greece and Rome. Why dream of penetrating the darkness of our origin? ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... monitor. No. Death before dishonour. But the side not so seamy of this picture of school life is the extraordinary power of honour among boys. Of course the laws of the secret society might well terrify a puerile informer. But the sentiment of honour is even more strong than fear, and will probably outlast the very disagreeable circumstances ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... prayers and told, God is here, who listens and will answer you; and you believed, for you were not of an age to inquire. Since then, you have discarded these baubles of your childhood, to conceive a less feminine and less puerile God, than this God of the Christian tabernacles; but the first dazzling glare has not departed from your eyes; the real light that you have thought to see has been blended, unknown to yourself, with that false brightness which fascinated you on ...
— Raphael - Pages Of The Book Of Life At Twenty • Alphonse de Lamartine
... nor alabaster could match. The finest cambric might be supposed from envy to cover that bosom, which was much whiter than itself;" but we must confess we always feel a cold horror shoot through our limbs at the reading of this puerile sublime, and we make no doubt but many other readers do the same, as it greatly tends to make our hearts ache by putting us in mind of what our posteriors have suffered for us at school. We shall therefore content ourselves by saying, this lady had charms sufficient to captivate the heart ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Bampfylde Moore Carew • Unknown
... thoroughly. And I believe that the day will soon come when sin will cease to be connected with intellectual delusion and ignorance, and also with ceremonial irregularity, and will be recognized in its true moral hideousness as a thing of will, and not of intellect, a thing of deepest life, and not of puerile ritual. ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones |
