"Puerility" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... still talk of death at times as if it were an embodied force of some kind, and of love in the same way; but I don't believe that any man of the commonest common-school education thinks of them so. If you try to do it yourself, you are rather ashamed of the puerility, and when a painter or a sculptor puts them in an objective shape, you follow him with ...
— Questionable Shapes • William Dean Howells
... Theatre, people like Siddons and Kean and Cushman and Macready illustrating this art with the resources of their fine intellects and great attainments,—surely these need scarcely be mentioned, to relieve the drama from the reproach that some would put upon it, of puerility. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... undertake to advocate political measures, either in speeches or publications, it becomes most essential to attain our object. Praise is doubly valuable when it conveys the certainty of success. This certainty once established, I care little for mere compliments, from which a certain degree of puerility and ridicule is inseparable; sympathy without affected words has alone a true and desirable charm. I had a right to set some value on that which the Opposition evinced towards me; for I had done nothing to gratify the passions ...
— Memoirs To Illustrate The History Of My Time - Volume 1 • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... wish to; but there are two things in Mr. Taggett's story which stagger me. The motive for the destruction of Shackford's papers,—that's not plain; the box of matches is a puerility unworthy of a clever man like Mr. Taggett, and as to the chisel he found, why, there are a hundred broken chisels in the village, and probably a score of them broken in precisely the same manner; but, Margaret, did Richard every breathe a word to you of that quarrel ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... words into realization of the puerility of her act, and yet she felt that he had magnified it unduly and was consequently resentful. They sat in silence for a long time, she thinking desperately and he pondering upon his love which had departed. He knew, now, that ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... up ... the puerility of applying to industrial competition phrases applicable to war,—a way of speaking which is only specious when applied to competition between two rival trades. The moment we come to take into account the effect produced on the general ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... usually gates opening into the fields, which I have before mentioned have walks around and across them, and are the common promenade of all who choose to use them. In the season of harvest or vintage, nothing can be more charming than these walks; the French gaiety and simplicity, not to say puerility, is then seen in all its perfection; it is then a common sport amongst the ladies and the gallants of the town to chase each other amongst the standing corn, and as they endeavour to keep to the furrows, which are too narrow for their feet, the chace is generally terminated by the fall of ...
— Travels through the South of France and the Interior of Provinces of Provence and Languedoc in the Years 1807 and 1808 • Lt-Col. Pinkney
... program music, or at least music descriptive of a certain subject. It was in vain that they denounced literature: they needed the support of a literary crutch. Strange crutches they were, too, as a rule! Christophe observed the odd puerility of the subjects which they labored to depict—orchards, kitchen-gardens, farmyards, musical menageries, a whole Zoo. Some musicians transposed for orchestra or piano the pictures in the Louvre, or the frescoes of the Opera: ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... producing the change to which I have referred. It found the greater portion of the noblesse luxuriating in pleasure, and thinking only of selfish, if not of criminal indulgence, in pursuits equally marked by puerility and vice. ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... these lines have been cited as a specimen of despicable puerility. So much the worse for the citer; not willingly in his presence would I behold the sun setting behind our mountains.... But let the dead bury their dead! The poet sang for the living.... I was always ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... child-nature extravagant and bizarre. The only thing which seems impossible to him is to be natural. In short, his passion is grandeur, his fault is excess; his distinguishing mark is a kind of Titanic power with strange dissonances of puerility in its magnificence. Where he is weakest is, in measure, taste, and sense of humor: he fails in esprit, in the subtlest sense of the word. Victor Hugo is a gallicized Spaniard, or rather he unites all the extremes of south ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... frilosity were what impressed his associates at St. Helena. The deterioration of his mentality was also exemplified in his literary diversions, the "Siege of Troy" and the "Essay on Suicide." The puerility of these productions, as well as of his conduct, a sulking before his captors, and the decline of his physical energy, once a bottomless well, all ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... Sublime," and falls on the other side. Our author gives more examples of puerility. "Slips of this sort are made by those who, aiming at brilliancy, polish, and especially attractiveness, are landed in paltriness and silly affectation." Some modern instances we had chosen; the field of choice is large and richly fertile in those blossoms. But the ...
— On the Sublime • Longinus
... first and last meeting, let me say that I wish you success with all my heart!' Knight's warmth revived towards the end; the solemn impressions he was beginning to receive from the scene around them abstracting from his heart as a puerility any momentary vexation at words. 'It is a strange place for us to meet in,' he continued, looking ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... her spirits were raised by what she felt to be an atmosphere tiede, as the French say; full of indulgence, sympathetic, relaxing, in which either cleverness or stupidity could float equally at its ease. The puerility of the silly little arrangements to amuse removed all sense of ceremony. The note is always struck by the hostess, and she was everything that was amiable, without ...
— Tenterhooks • Ada Leverson |
