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Childish   Listen
adjective
Childish  adj.  
1.
Of, pertaining to, befitting, or resembling, a child. "Childish innocence."
2.
Puerile; trifling; weak. "Methinks that simplicity in her countenance is rather childish than innocent." Note: Childish, as applied to persons who are grown up, is in a disparaging sense; as, a childish temper.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Childish" Quotes from Famous Books



... of sadness. Yes, I would rather die than stay longer in this house. Look at that embroidery; there is not a stitch there which I did not set with dreadful thoughts. How many times I have thought of escaping to fling myself into the sea! Why? I don't know why,—little childish troubles, but very keen, though they are so silly. Often I have kissed my mother at night as one would kiss a mother for the last time, saying in my heart: 'To-morrow I will kill myself.' But I do not die. Suicides go to hell, you know, and I am so afraid of hell that I resign myself ...
— Juana • Honore de Balzac

... and she went to his room. He had been calling her just before, and when she came he did not know her. He was very ill that day, and he was wandering, and when he saw her he talked some childish nonsense about ...
— East of the Shadows • Mrs. Hubert Barclay

... Pauline was old enough to form a desire, she learned to hear it opposed. "Une petite fille attend qu'on lui donne se qui lui faut," was the invariable reply to all her childish longings. According to the old French system, every slight offence was followed by her mother's "Allez vous coucher, mademoiselle;" so that half her life was spent in bed, while she lay awake ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol. XXXII No. 2. February 1848 • Various

... I will escort thee to thy chamber; 'tis a childish trick of thine to seek bread and ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne

... and Kearny joined a few days later, and very soon a conflict of authority arose between the leaders. It was a childish affair throughout, and probably at bottom arose from Fremont's usual over-ambitious designs. To Kearny had undoubtedly been given, by the properly constituted authorities, the command of all the land operations. Stockton, however, claimed to hold supreme land command by instructions ...
— The Forty-Niners - A Chronicle of the California Trail and El Dorado • Stewart Edward White

... trickling down my grandfather's face when he told of the sufferings of that awful winter," said his granddaughter, Mrs. Temple to the writer, "and I used to wonder at seeing a grown man cry, and often I said in my childish way that war should never bring a tear in my eyes. Little did I know then that the bitterest tears I should ever shed would be caused by war, and for eighteen months during the terrible struggle between the North and the South I should mourn as dead my soldier husband, whom God in His mercy restored ...
— In Ancient Albemarle • Catherine Albertson

... evening there had been much to interest and engage her. She had the old house to explore, and dim childish memories to recall. Here was the room where her mother died, the room in which she herself had first seen the light—perhaps not until a month or so after her birth, since the seventeenth-century baby ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon

... on me. It may have been the depth of the silence that made me so conscious of my gesture. The squeak of my match sounded as loud as the scraping of a brake, and I almost fancied I heard it fall when I tossed it onto the grass. But there was more than that: a sense of irrelevance, of littleness, of childish bravado, in sitting there puffing my cigarette-smoke into the face ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 1 (of 10) • Edith Wharton

... aged Vainamoinen, "Childish tales, and woman's wisdom, But for bearded men unsuited, And for married men unfitted. Tell me words of deepest wisdom. Tell me now ...
— Kalevala, Volume I (of 2) - The Land of the Heroes • Anonymous

... don't think I should dare to let you read these letters," interrupted Alice, laughing. "No doubt they are from two of my lady friends, and I have always heard that men consider letters that women write to each other very silly and childish." ...
— Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks - A Picture of New England Home Life • Charles Felton Pidgin

... the development of any individual mind engaged in the same direction. It has its infancy, with the first recognition of surrounding objects; and, indeed, the early observers seem to us like children in their first attempts to understand the world in which they live. But these efforts, that appear childish to us now, were the first steps in that field of knowledge which is so extensive that all our progress seems only to show us how much is ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various

... the spell Of its vast size and its mysterious tongue. How the floor trembled, and the dark boat swung With a man in it, and a great wave fell Within a stone's cast! Words may never tell The passion of the moment, when I flung All childish records by, and felt arise A thing that died no more! An awful power I claimed with trembling hands and eager eyes, Mine, mine for ever, an immortal dower.— The noise of waters soundeth to this hour, When I look ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald

... well-lighted, and neat room. Seated in an armchair near the window, but with her back toward it, was what on first view appeared to be a golden-haired child in black; one elbow rested on the arm of the chair, and a childish hand supported the flower-like head. As Ruth hesitated after closing the door behind her, she found a pair of listless violet eyes regarding her from ...
— Other Things Being Equal • Emma Wolf

... that every night before going to bed he used to sing a little air that he had composed on purpose, his father having placed him standing in a chair, and singing the second to him. During the singing he often kissed his father on the top of the nose, (the epicurism of childish fondness), and as soon as this solemnity was over, he was laid in bed, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 394, October 17, 1829 • Various

... their work and call to a child of two or three playing in the street for him to come and take the breast. Did Augustin remember these things? At least he recalled his nurses' games, and the efforts they made to appease him, and the childish words they taught him to stammer. The first Latin words he repeated, he picked up from his mother and the servants, who must also have spoken Punic, the ordinary tongue of the populace and small trader ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand

... Annie's conduct she had borne, she had forgiven her, scarcely appearing conscious of the danger her daughter had escaped; but Cecil was her darling, and his disgrace came upon her as a thunderbolt, drawing the veil from her eyes, with startling and bewildering light. She had concealed his childish faults, she had petted him in every whim, encouraged him in every folly in his youth; to hide his faults from a severe but not too harsh a judge, she had lowered herself in the eyes of her husband, and achieved no good. Cecil was expelled, disgracefully expelled, and the wretched mother, ...
— The Mother's Recompense, Volume II. - A Sequel to Home Influence in Two Volumes • Grace Aguilar

... Hayneville, when only five or six years old began to make figures in clay, and now (1885) has a large collection of mud cats, hogs, dogs, cows, horses, and men. The figures are declared to be not childish imitations, but remarkably acute likenesses. Her best piece represents a negro praying, and is said ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various

... not with honey-sweet excesses, With passionate prodigalities of praise, With wreaths of daisied words and quaint caresses, Adore me not in charming childish ways. This pastoral is beautiful enough: But never shall it antidote my drouth: I want a reticent ironic Love With smiling eyes and faintly mocking mouth. Sweetness is best when bitterly 'tis bought: So in Love's deadly ...
— The Hours of Fiammetta - A Sonnet Sequence • Rachel Annand Taylor

... all about it," I began, breaking out in my childish anger. "You know how that furrow as long as a man's finger got on the Black Abbot's right knee. You know—" I stopped suddenly. Cynthia's eyes were resting on me, and there was something in their grey depths that ...
— Dwellers in the Hills • Melville Davisson Post

... insolent Goliath: "The Lord that delivered me out of the paw of the lion, and out of the paw of the bear, he will deliver me from this Philistine." The Philistine stood for any and all threatening dangers of soul and body, and this passage cheered the little Italian through many a childish trouble, and many an encounter with the big boys from the village, who delighted to assail him in solitary places, and reproach him with being an outlandish stranger, living on charity, and not as much of a Swede as the ugly bear he was ...
— The Golden House • Mrs. Woods Baker

... de Franquetot, who, on the contrary, was extremely popular, thought it effective and original to shew all her fine friends that she preferred to their company that of an obscure country cousin with whom she had childish memories in common. Filled with ironical melancholy, Swann watched them as they listened to the pianoforte inter, mezzo (Liszt's 'Saint Francis preaching to the birds') which came after the flute, and followed the virtuoso in his ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust

... The semi-darkness of her room was broken by images, brilliant or tormenting—Mr. Manisty's mocking look in the Piazza of St. Peter's—his unkindness to his cousin—his sweetness to his friend—the aspect, now petulant, even childish, and now gracious and commanding beyond any other she had ever known, which he had worn at Nemi. His face, upturned beside her, as she and her horse climbed the steep path; the extraordinary significance, fulness, warmth of the nature ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... harassed man. "Not for me. My business runs smoothly. My relations are mostly dead. I have no friends and no enemies. My wife and I live alone, and all we ask," he added in a sudden outburst of almost childish resentment, "is to be ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... feelings are in the main right, and even their judgment in the long run is better than that of the pampered Roman aristocracy, inasmuch as it proceeds more from the instincts of manhood. Shakespeare evidently loved to play with the natural, unsophisticated, though somewhat childish heart of the people; but his playing is always genial and human-hearted, with a certain angelic humor in it that seldom fails to warm us towards the subject. On the whole, he understood the people well, and they have well repaid him in understanding him better than the critics ...
— The New Hudson Shakespeare: Julius Caesar • William Shakespeare

... bring our rifles too?" asked Brown sarcastically. "Upon my honor, Juggut Khan! You're getting childish! Are your nerves upset, or what? Lead on, ...
— Told in the East • Talbot Mundy

... that it would be just about as hopeful to feed the locusts of Egypt on a loaf of bread. But it is hard to refuse children, especially to a mother who has left five or six at home, and who fancies she sees, in some of these little eager, childish faces, something now and then that reminds her of her own. For my part, I got schooled so that I could stand them all, except the little toddling three-year olds—they fairly overcame me. So I supplied my pocket with a quantity of sugar lozenges, for the ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... talking between them, and that kept by him studiously on subjects of purely ephemeral, childish interest. Her mind, by the happy dispensation of nature which facilitates healing by all means when once healing has begun, was blank to any impressions save the luxury of rest, of passive enjoyment, indifferent to ought but ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle

... connoisseur, a fellow-laborer, had done good service for art, and had applied his learning to its true improvement. Heinecken, on the contrary, could not be honorably mentioned, partly because he devoted himself too assiduously to the ever-childish beginnings of German art; which Oeser little valued, partly because he had once treated Winckelmann shabbily, which could never be forgiven him. Our attention, however, was strongly drawn to the labors of Lippert, since our instructor knew how ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

... shall have to content ourselves with a few more indications. In the Chinese sentence "Man kill duck," which may be looked upon as the practical equivalent of "The man kills the duck," there is by no means present for the Chinese consciousness that childish, halting, empty feeling which we experience in the literal English translation. The three concrete concepts—two objects and an action—are each directly expressed by a monosyllabic word which is at the same time a radical element; the two relational concepts—"subject" ...
— Language - An Introduction to the Study of Speech • Edward Sapir

... considerations or prejudice, but only upon the impartial judgment of experts whom he himself joins in electing, and from whose unfavorable decision he can always appeal to the general vote of the whole community,—all of which is to-day against him or impossible. The childish notion that all contest of intellect would be held down in a Socialist society they alone can maintain who hold the bourgeois world to be the most perfect social system, and who, out of enmity to Socialism seek ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel

... o'clock, spent in foolish reveries about balloons.' p. 12. Horace Walpole wrote on Sept. 30 (Letters, viii. 505):—'I cannot fill my paper, as the newspapers do, with air-balloons; which though ranked with the invention of navigation, appear to me as childish as the flying kites of school-boys.' 'Do not write about the balloon,' wrote Johnson to Reynolds (post, p. 368), 'whatever else you may think proper to say.' In the beginning of the year he had written:—'It ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell

... patriots, reprisals began to be visited upon the Tories of Cartagena, and their possessions fell, one after another, into the hands of the successful revolutionists, or were seized by former slaves, Don Ignacio found it difficult to meet his royal master's demands. The fickle King, already childish to the verge of imbecility, gave scant thanks in return for the Rincon loyalty, and when at last, stripped of his fortune, deserted by all but the few Tory families who had the courage to remain in Cartagena until the close of the war, Don Ignacio received with sinking heart the news ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking

... small case of plasters, lint, ointments, etc., for childish cuts and bruises. She despatched a couple of boys to the playground pump to fetch water, and then glanced at ...
— Shining Ferry • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... destroy the artistic effect, which is at least a true reflection of real life. Moreover, it is dangerous for learned men sitting in libraries to regard as incredible facts stated by these old writers. The legend of Romulus and Remus having been suckled by a wolf has been dismissed as a childish fable. Yet it is certain that this very thing has happened more than once in the forests of India within the memory of living men. You cannot be particular about details, you must take ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall

... Phoenix, and a pleasant visit I had with them at their beautiful little home, during which time I showed the letter to George that I had received from Lieut. Jackson. He expressed a desire to accompany me on the trip, but as his parents were now getting old and childish, he did not like to leave without their consent, ...
— Thirty-One Years on the Plains and In the Mountains • William F. Drannan

... the United States, the climate better, and by and by it will supply all Europe with grain. Settling there, an Englishman will not always be put in mind of the inferiority of the British to the Americans, will not always be told that kings and queens are childish humbugs, and will not have his work hindered and his mind poisoned by constant elections and ...
— Canada and the Canadians - Volume I • Sir Richard Henry Bonnycastle

... showed deserted as far as the eye could reach, and her light footsteps seemed to awaken a hundred echoes. Having proceeded for some distance without meeting anyone, she observed—and experienced a childish alarm—the head-lights of an approaching car. Instantly the idea of hiding presented itself to her, but so rapidly did the big automobile speed along the empty thoroughfare that Rita was just passing a street lamp ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer

... those of Jo Portugais and Louis Trudel, with which he had had to do, the simplicity of the life around him—the uncomplicated lie and the unvarnished truth, the obvious sorrow and the patent joy, the childish faith, and the rude wickedness so pardonable because so frankly brutal—had worked upon him. The elemental spirit of it all had so invaded his nature, breaking through the crust of old habit to the new man, that, when he fell before his temptation, and ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... some familiar dream, wound at last into the village. Down the street where her childish feet had pattered in their playing, by the old town pump, where, coming home from school, she used to drink the cool, clear water on summer noons, she passed,—a silent shadow. She might have been the ghost of ...
— Men, Women, and Ghosts • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps

... duration in which Alps and Andes come and go as rainbows. The good spirit of our life has no heaven which is the price of rashness. Love, which is the essence of God, is not for levity, but for the total worth of man. Let us not have this childish luxury in our regards, but the austerest worth; let us approach our friend with an audacious trust in the truth of his heart, in the breadth, impossible to be overturned, of ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson

... than the Queen. One can get an admirable idea of the state of Ontario feeling in the addresses at the various U.E. L. celebrations in the year 1884; in both its resentments and its affections there was something childish and confiding. ...
— Laurier: A Study in Canadian Politics • J. W. Dafoe

... main gate. The half-effaced figures and old heraldic emblems held his attention for a moment only. He had already taken hold of the brass bell-handle and paused cautiously, as if it were his habit to reconsider at the last moment; he gave a sudden shiver. A clear, childish voice behind his back ...
— The Created Legend • Feodor Sologub

... said sharply. "How exceedingly childish, letting yourself be ruled by whims, when common sense must show you that you are wrong. I wonder if you aren't ever going ...
— Cloudy Jewel • Grace Livingston Hill

... the King perfectly; and could not be ignorant of the power of novelty over his mind, of which power she had herself made a happy experiment. What she had to fear was another herself—I mean a Princess on the same terms with the King as she was, who, being younger than she, would amuse him by new childish playfulness no longer suited to her age, and yet which she (the Duchess) was still obliged to employ. The very contrast of her own untimely childishness, with a childishness so much more natural, would injure her. The new favourite would, moreover, not ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre

... his words, even more than his smile, seemed to be those of a madman. He spoke very softly, with that childish, lisping voice, which is peculiar to negroes, and his mysterious, almost menacing words, consequently, sounded all the more as if they were uttered at random by a man bereft of his reason. But his looks, the looks of ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne

... is vain for the singer to burst into clamour With the great black piano appassionato. The glamour Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for ...
— New Poems • D. H. Lawrence

... the forest and, oh, wonder! there stood a hut, and what a curious one! It stood on tiny hen's feet, and at the top was a rooster's head. With their shrill, childish voices they ...
— Folk Tales from the Russian • Various

... you some more of these stories which have been gathered from all parts of the world, and which, though they may be pronounced childish and tedious by some critics, seem to me to glitter with the brightest dew of nature's own poetry, and to contain those very touches that make us feel akin, not only with Homer or Shakespeare, but even with ...
— Chips From A German Workshop, Vol. V. • F. Max Mueller

... life was sadly broken in 1837 by the death of De Quincey's wife. He who was now left as guardian of the little household of six children, was himself so helpless in all practical matters that it seemed as though he were in their childish care rather than protector of them. Scores of anecdotes are related of his odd and unpractical behavior. One of his curious habits had been the multiplication of lodgings; as books and manuscripts accumulated about him so that there remained room for ...
— De Quincey's Revolt of the Tartars • Thomas De Quincey

... control his rage. He began to plunge around. His actions were violent, random, half insane. He seemed to want to destroy himself and everything. But the weapons were guarded by his men and the room contained little he could smash. There was something magnificent in his fury, yet childish and absurd. Even under its influence and his abandonment he showed a consciousness of its futility. In a few moments the inside of the cabin was in disorder and Kells seemed a disheveled, sweating, panting wretch. The rapidity and violence of ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey

... thirteen brings to a hitherto silent house. Of him Rosamond stood considerably in awe, and though she could willingly have worshipped him for giving her so pleasant a home, she felt afraid of him and kept out of his way, watching him with childish curiosity at a distance, admiring his noble figure, and wondering if she would ever dare speak to him as fearlessly as ...
— Rosamond - or, The Youthful Error • Mary J. Holmes

... could. It had been a sore grief to her when Tim, her only boy and the baby of the home, had become crippled. Perhaps she sensed more clearly than did the lad the full seriousness of the calamity. As for Tim, he accepted it in childish fashion, hopefully ignoring the problems ...
— The Story of Sugar • Sara Ware Bassett

... entirely lost to her sense of hearing. About midnight the glare of a candle crossed her eyes, and she was broad awake in an instant. On rising in her berth she found Nanny Sidley, who had so often and so long watched over her infant and childish slumbers, standing at her side, and ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper

... was en penitence. She had been guilty of some childish fault that day at Aunt Cornelia's, which, coming to the knowledge of Mrs. Carlyle, after their return home the young lady was ordered to the nursery for the rest of the day, and to be regaled ...
— East Lynne • Mrs. Henry Wood

... Brenda her name, as she told me in her childish way of confidence, had hidden in the brushwood all day, trembling and afraid. But at last she divined that the men had come to slay me, for as the afternoon advanced they disposed themselves among bushes and behind trees, also in the hut ...
— Tales of Destiny • Edmund Mitchell

... insects, and foliage, combine with the human form to complete its ensemble. The least natural of the group is the floriated fish, whose general form has evidently been based on that of the dolphin. When Hogarth ridiculed the taste for virtu, which the fashionable people of his own era carried to a childish extent, and displayed its follies in his picture of "Taste in high life," and in the furniture of his scenes of the "Marriage-a-la-mode," he exhibited a somewhat similar absurdity in porcelain ornament. In the second scene of the "Marriage" ...
— Rambles of an Archaeologist Among Old Books and in Old Places • Frederick William Fairholt

... had on Ottenheim, the ex-forger who enjoyed his parole only on condition that he remain a stool-pigeon of the high seas. He pondered what force he could bring to bear on her, what power could squeeze from those carmine and childish lips the information he ...
— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer

... mountain-privacy My father's rustic cot appears, The haunts of happy infancy, The fields my childish sport endears; Where victor of each game I stood, And climb'd the ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West

... result; and a third time, full of wrath and chagrin, he guzzled at its contents, but found that the liquor still foamed near to the brim. He gave back the horn in disgust. Then Utgard-Loki proposed to him the childish exercise of lifting his cat. Thor put his hands under Tabby's belly, and, lifting with all his might, could only raise one foot from the floor. He was a very Gulliver in Brobdignag. As a last resort, he proposed to retrieve his tarnished reputation by wrestling with some ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various

... incorrigibly childish can be inclined to ascribe to good luck a prosperous career extending over near twenty-three years, spent under the fiercest glare of the world's sunshine. No minister of any age was more bitterly assailed or opposed, even at the court of which he is now the acknowledged ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various

... illiterate as he was, he possessed all the refinement, the innate culture, the unconscious delicacy and tact, the kindliness of speech and feeling and the beautiful heart of that comely race whose foremost sons seem to be purified and spiritualized from their first childish steps by the most radiant sunshine in the world. One would say that they were directly related to those exquisite ephebes of ancient Greece who sprang into existence ready to understand all things and to experience life's purest emotions before they themselves had ...
— The Wrack of the Storm • Maurice Maeterlinck

... There has been childish talk that the Western Hemisphere would offer a refuge from oppression. Put that thought from your mind. If the Allies were defeated Germany would not need to send a single battleship over the Atlantic. She would issue an order, ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 4, July, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various

... near the door of the church, so that I might be heard both inside and out, for a large portion, perhaps nearly half my congregation were on the outside; and this, in Darlington, where, about two years ago, a girl was hung for making a childish and indiscreet speech. Victory was perched on our banners. Our army had been through, and this poor, ill-fated girl, almost a child in years, about seventeen years of age, rejoiced over the event, and said that she was going ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still

... expression sponged from it in an instant as he looked into her eyes, and then it seemed to dissolve into something ugly and yet childish. She saw tears burst through and furrow the dust ...
— Moment of Truth • Basil Eugene Wells

... express. He was never taken to Marriner's, but he still occasionally accompanied his friend to the yard—on Sundays, usually, because of the card-playing, to which he had taken a great fancy. He still thought in his heart that it was very wrong, but Saurin laughed at such scruples as being so very childish and silly that he was thoroughly ashamed of them. Saurin, who was so clever and manly that he must know better than he did, saw no harm. Besides, he was very fond of playing at cards, and though he did not much like the very low company ...
— Dr. Jolliffe's Boys • Lewis Hough

... to step out of current life into the Grand Manner;—and unless the Soul happens to be there and vocal at the time, achieves mostly pombundle. The Chinaman presents his illumination as if it were nothing at all,—just the simplest childish-foolish thing; nothing in the world for the brain-mind to get excited about. You take very little notice at the time: more of their quaint punchinello chinoiserie, you say. Three weeks after, you find that it was a clear voice from the supermundane, a high revelation. The Chinese ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris

... his face intensely earnest, his head bent over his task, a lock of dark hair drooping across his forehead; then he looked up, throwing himself back in his chair and gazing up at his companion with the egotistical triumph—the intense, childish satisfaction of the artist in the ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston

... to hear the lovely woman, looking more divine than human, Talk with such discrimination of Ingersoll and Cook, With such a childish, sweet smile, quoting Huxley, Mill, and Carlyle— It was quite a revelation—it was better than ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn

... child lives, the parents know it in their hearts, or by which, if it dies, God seems to have called it away, leaving the sound lingering faintly and sweetly through the house. In Pansie's case, it may have been a certain pensiveness which was sometimes seen under her childish frolic, and so translated itself into French, (pensee,) her mother having been of Acadian kin; or, quite as probably, it alluded merely to the color of her eyes, which, in some lights, were very like the dark petals of a tuft of pansies in the Doctor's garden. It might well be, indeed, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various

... spiteful enough to be guilty of it. The "Notices to Correspondents" in subsequent numbers continued to be filled with references and allusions to Seymour, dictated by a malice which was alike silly and childish. They are not worthy of repetition here, and we must refer the reader for them to the numbers of "Figaro in London" of 20th September and 15th November, 1834, or (if he have not access to its pages) to the short biographical notice prefixed to ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt

... this vast blue crystal case had been set down over Carlyle's birthplace to protect and mark it out from other places. There was the narrow, high-banked brook—"the gentle Kuhbach kindly gushing by" (as Sir S. quoted)—which had made music in Carlyle's childish ears, to echo through them all his life. Perhaps he paddled in the brook on hot summer days, just as little boys were paddling when our Gray Dragon suddenly broke the respectable silence of Ecclefechan; ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

... which, for many years past, has prevailed in Paris even to a degree perfectly childish, of idolizing the memory of your Henry the Fourth. If anything could put any one out of humour with that ornament to the kingly character, it would be this overdone style of insidious panegyric. The persons who have worked this engine the most busily are those who ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke

... the deep sleep of childish things, the boy finds a being by his side of a strange hushing fairness, as though in the night he had opened his eyes and found an angel by his bed. Speech he has not at all, and his glance dare not rise beyond her bosom; till, ...
— The Book-Bills of Narcissus - An Account Rendered by Richard Le Gallienne • Le Gallienne, Richard

... became hardy and fearless under his foster father's training, and Ingeborg rapidly developed the sweetest traits of character and loveliness. Both were happiest when together; and as they grew older their childish affection daily became deeper and more intense, until Hilding, perceiving this state of affairs, bade the youth remember that he was a subject of the king, and therefore no mate ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber

... love. She was grief-stricken and she was pale, but she was mother, and the three young things tore open the door and clasped her in their arms, sobbing, choking, whispering all sorts of tender comfort, their childish tears falling like healing dew on her poor heart. The Admiral soothed and quieted them each in turn, all but Nancy. Cousin Ann's medicine was of no avail, and strangling with sobs Nancy fled to the attic until she was strong enough to say "for mother's sake" without a quiver ...
— Mother Carey's Chickens • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... laws, while when you go to Germany you wonder how he can submit so patiently to the pettiness and multiplicity of his written ones. He vaguely feels the pressure and criticism of your indefinite code of manners; you think his elaborate system of titles, introductions, and celebrations rather childish and extremely troublesome. If you have what the English call manners you will take the greatest care not to let him find this out, and in course of time, however much you like him on the whole, you will lose your patience a little with the individual you are ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick

... which we have to live is not yet a point, but may be a point which, together, shall be and shall have been. And with all this we crowd our memories with genealogies: this one is intent upon the deciphering of writings, that other is occupied in multiplying childish sophisms, and we shall see, for example, a volume full of: Cor est fons vitae. Nix est alba, ergo cornix est fons vitae alba, and one prattles about the noun; was it first, or the verb; the other, whether ...
— The Heroic Enthusiast, Part II (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno

... his cunning, and interested in spite of myself at the childish eagerness he displayed to tell his tale, I waited with a secret impatience almost as great as his own perhaps, for her to leave the room again, and thus give him the opportunity of finishing his sentence. At last there came an imperative call for her presence ...
— The Old Stone House and Other Stories • Anna Katharine Green

... charm that lay enshrined within thy smiling eyes? What made me all thy childish, winning ways so dearly prize? It was thy likeness to another,—one whose looks of love, No longer blessing earth, were met by angel eyes above. Yet thou hadst not the golden hair, the brow of radiant white, Nor the blue eyes so soft and deep, like violets ...
— Autumn Leaves - Original Pieces in Prose and Verse • Various

... to say. I was surprised myself, and I felt a childish curiosity to see what would happen next. But the sergeant was thinking of the difficulty of controlling Gaspar Ruiz when the time for ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad

... there cause for moan or mirth, 'Tis WE, not you, should sigh or scorn, Oh, latest children of the Earth, Most childish children Earth has borne.' ...
— Ban and Arriere Ban • Andrew Lang

... coloring, but it stood in the midst of a four-acre field, just on the edge of the farmland. Sheltered by noble elms and stately maples, its windows fronted on a low range of wooded hills, whose skyline (deeply woven into my childish memories) had for me the charm of things remembered, and for my mother a placid beauty which (after her long stay on the treeless levels of Dakota) was almost miraculous in effect. Entirely without architectural dignity, our new home was spacious and suggested the comfort of ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland

... just as simple as Czipra. Her beautiful pale face, with its still childish features, her calm quiet look,—all beamed sympathy ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai

... not at all handsome, but she had a merry sort of face that never seemed to have forgotten certain childish ways and looks, any more than her voice and manner had; and these things, hard to describe but very plain to see and feel, made her a genial, comfortable kind of person, easy to get on with, and generally "jolly," as boys ...
— Little Men - Life at Plumfield With Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott

... violence, and as an omen of a possible understanding to be arrived at yet. Otherwise Dain was not uneasy. Although recognising the justice of Lakamba's surmise that he had come back to Sambir only for the sake of the white man's daughter, yet he was not conscious of any childish lack of understanding, as suggested by Babalatchi. In fact, Dain knew very well that Lakamba was too deeply implicated in the gunpowder smuggling to care for an investigation the Dutch authorities into that matter. When ...
— Almayer's Folly - A Story of an Eastern River • Joseph Conrad

... to keep for my own, Cousin Godfrey?" cried Letty, in sweet, childish fashion, letting the skimmer dive like a coot to the bottom of the milk-pool, and hastily wiping her hands in her apron. Her face had flushed rosy with pleasure, and grew rosier and brighter still as she took the rich morocco-bound thing from Godfrey's hand into her own. Daintily she peeped ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald

... was awakened in the morning feeling little hands tugging at him as he lay in his bunk, and childish ...
— Bunny Brown and His Sister Sue on an Auto Tour • Laura Lee Hope

... doleful bell which seemed to be ever tolling for school, funerals, church, or prayer meetings. Next to the worms, those clanging bells filled me with the utmost dread; they seemed like so many warnings of an eternal future. Visions of the Inferno were strongly impressed on my childish imagination. It was thought, in those days, that firm faith in hell and the devil was the greatest help to virtue. It certainly made me very unhappy whenever my mind dwelt on such teachings, and I ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton

... will not let you take the risk you ask for. Give me time; I've fought it off since that miserable night. Heaven alone knows why I surrendered—turning to my deadly enemy for countenance and comfort to support my childish ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers

... give a sort of reflected happiness even in the saddest future? Is it not because we know how in life's bitterest moments, its most barren and desolate paths, we feel a warmth about our heart, a smile upon our lips, when we remember the old home days with their eager childish interests and hopes, their vividly recollected pleasures, their sheltered luxuriance of fatherly and motherly love? For how many thousands did the ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall

... seniority till we died of loneliness and boredom with our aristocratic noses in the air.... As it is, I don't believe even Sybil Gascoigne could have done it if she hadn't been the Honourable Mrs. Gascoigne. That carried her over some pretty rough ground, childish though it sounds." ...
— The Long Trick • Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie

... Moore; nor am I so regardless of sympathy. But when I have any grief, I fear to impart it to those I love, lest it should pain them; and to those whom I view with indifference I cannot condescend to complain. After all, you should not taunt me with being childish, for if you were as unhappy as I have been for the last three weeks, you too would want ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte

... pensive moods. The two upper faces at the right show quite another expression. The lips of both are parted, and they seem to be singing. One is reminded of the rapturous faces sometimes seen among choir boys when the music lifts them out of their surroundings. All childish troubles and questions are forgotten, as the two faces, flooded with light, seem to look into the glory ...
— Sir Joshua Reynolds - A Collection of Fifteen Pictures and a Portrait of the - Painter with Introduction and Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll

... I've behaved, Frank. It was silly and childish of me to struggle with you. You irritated me, you see, by the way you spoke and the tone ...
— The Land of Promise • D. Torbett

... think I thought it was?" snapped her daughter; but the next instant she added, with an outbreak of childish disappointment: "It's only from Mr. Marvell's sister—at least she ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton

... gathered round him, making the desolate home fair with their young faces, and his sad heart gay with their sweet, childish voices. The love they bore he could not cast away, sunlight stole in, the dark thoughts passed away, and the earth was a ...
— Flower Fables • Louisa May Alcott

... result of an hallucination; but on the other hand, it would be very unwise, in the present state of our ignorance on the subject, to dogmatise as to the possible action of unseen forces upon what is commonly called matter. It is interesting to note that this senseless and childish trick coincides with what was said by Miss A—— as to the presence of mischievous elementals, and also what she says ...
— The Alleged Haunting of B—— House • Various

... of expostulation and remonstrance was now heard—the childish hand disappeared and scarcely knowing what she was about, Edith stepped into the hall and advanced into the library, where she sat down to wait for Arthur. It was not long ere he appeared, locking the door as he came in and thus cutting off all communication between that room and the stairway ...
— Darkness and Daylight • Mary J. Holmes

... upon. One also meets with resentfulness. One patient, who frequently showed this reaction, explained it retrospectively by saying that she wanted to be left alone. Quite analogous to this is sulkiness that occasionally appears. Then we have, particularly as recovery begins, other childish tricks, such as flippancy in answering questions or the playing of pranks. Such tendencies naturally lead ...
— Benign Stupors - A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction Type • August Hoch

... attorney to the Dillsborough club,—as was his habit of old; but it would perhaps be premature to say that there are very valid grounds for the hopes which Mrs. Masters already entertains in reference to Kate. Kate is still too young and childish to justify any prediction in ...
— The American Senator • Anthony Trollope

... undertaken from a spirit of boyish unsteadiness, the entire body of Brahmanas here will be rendered ridiculous in the eyes of the assembled monarchs. Therefore, forbid this Brahmana that he may not go to string the bow which he is even now desirous of doing from vanity, childish daring, or mere unsteadiness.' Others replied, 'We shall not be made ridiculous, nor shall we incur the disrespect of anybody or the displeasure of the sovereigns. Some remarked, 'This handsome youth is even like the ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli

... understand until you get the trick of it. And the trick of it is in the accent and intonation, and not so much in any peculiar form of words. They have a peculiar way of dropping their voices, too, which is sometimes disconcerting. But it is a clean wholesome language, undefined by the disgusting and childish obscenity which is too often a disgrace to other districts in England. It reminds me a little of the Scottish tongue, but rather more of the country speech in the northern parts of Yorkshire, but in some ways it is all its very ...
— Q.6.a and Other places - Recollections of 1916, 1917 and 1918 • Francis Buckley

... from the boarding-school, put away the proverbial childish things, and came to college, we were given a freedom such as we had never had before. No interfering master, no provoking lack of light to annoy us. We could burn our lamps all night, and receive no paternal rebuke or master's chastisement. And now, though there is none of that sweetness of stolen ...
— A Williams Anthology - A Collection of the Verse and Prose of Williams College, 1798-1910 • Compiled by Edwin Partridge Lehman and Julian Park

... I interrupted, "pardon me for suggesting such a thing, but are you not surrendering yourself to a very childish weakness? Is it possible that you, a man in the very prime of life and apparently in perfect bodily and mental health, can be so utterly devoid of self- control that because you have suffered injury, ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood

... they fear the loss of privileges, one of which is the immunity from punishment for a misdemeanor committed in the husband's presence? "When I was a child, I spake as a child, I thought as a child, I understood as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things." ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various

... soft arms stole around his neck, a childish, tear-wet cheek was pressed close to his, and a sweet voice whispered, tenderly: "Dear, I'm sorry! I'm so sorry I can't live another minute unless you ...
— At the Sign of the Jack O'Lantern • Myrtle Reed

... real self, was impotent. In his soul he was dependent, forlorn. He was childish and dependent on the mother. To hear him say, 'Grazia, mamma!' would have tormented the mother-soul in any woman living. Such a child crying in the ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence

... Menexenus came back and sat down in his place by Lysis; and Lysis, in a childish and affectionate manner, whispered privately in my ear, so that Menexenus should not hear: Do, Socrates, tell Menexenus what you have ...
— Lysis • Plato

... of age. Born in the chateau, where his father and his grandfather before him had served the Marquis de Chamondrin, he had shared the childish sports of the lad who afterwards became his master. He absolutely worshipped the Marquis, regarding him with a veritable idolatry that was compounded of respect and of love. Outside of the chateau and its ...
— Which? - or, Between Two Women • Ernest Daudet

... the narrow little house by the Gate and the clamour and business of the sea-front, our Christopher's feet carried him daily during some part of his childish life. What else he did, what he thought and felt, what little reflections he had, are but matters of conjecture. Genoa will tell you nothing more. You may walk over the very spot where he was born; you may unconsciously tread in the track of his vanished feet; you may wander about ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young

... young man could hold. That he was about to abandon. But, as he told himself, without abandoning it he could not rid himself from the horror of Davis. He was quite prepared to acknowledge his own vice and childish stupidity in regard to Davis. He had looked all round that now, and was sure that he would do nothing of the kind again. But how could he get rid of Davis in any other way than this? And then Folking had no charms for him. ...
— John Caldigate • Anthony Trollope

... issues—the identity of her family with that of the knightly d'Urbervilles. Barren attribute as it was, disastrous as its discovery had been in many ways to her, perhaps Mr Clare, as a gentleman and a student of history, would respect her sufficiently to forget her childish conduct with the lords and ladies if he knew that those Purbeck-marble and alabaster people in Kingsbere Church really represented her own lineal forefathers; that she was no spurious d'Urberville, compounded of money and ambition like those at Trantridge, but true d'Urberville ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy

... group of children were playing beside the gutter. They were all dirty and ragged, and the faces of many were old and worldly-wise. One little girl, however, though her dress was as torn and soiled as that of any of the other dwellers in the filthy street, had a pretty childish face. She was a bright-looking little one, with matted brown hair hanging in tangled curls that had never known a brush, and a pair of sweet dark eyes looking out trustfully into the uninviting world around her. She stood a little apart ...
— Harper's Young People, June 1, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various

... he might study its little face in dismay or fright, as in making it laugh, that he might observe its method of manifesting pleasure. He read the construction of child-nature in the unreserved expressions of childish emotions as he provoked or evoked them. Thus he grew to know children as few have known them, and his exceptional gift of writing for and about them was the result of deliberate study rather than of personal sympathy. That his own ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson

... beautiful and attractive beyond description, lovingly embraced me, and then He asked, 'Wilt thou be mine?' I answered, 'yes,' and having thus received my consent, He re- ascended in our sight to heaven. When I awoke, my soul was so ravished with joy at this unspeakable favour, that in my childish simplicity, I detailed the wonderful particulars to all who would listen to me. The sweet words of our Blessed Lord remained ever indelibly engraven on my memory, and so completely did they absorb my attention, that although I saw His sacred Humanity, I afterwards retained no ...
— The Life of the Venerable Mother Mary of the Incarnation • "A Religious of the Ursuline Community"

... Court, the fables which are tacked to every important scene are drowned in diffuse morals; besides, they are quite distinct from the dialogue, instead of being interwoven with it, like the fable of Menenius Agrippa in Shakespeare; and modern manners do not suit with this childish mode of instruction. In the Mercure Galant all sorts of out-of-the-way beings bring their petitions to the writer of a weekly paper. This thought and many of the most entertaining details have, ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black

... The childish delight with which poor "Margaret" contemplates the trinkets presented by her lover; the baleful ascendency acquired over her by her female companion; and her rapid descent in the path of evil when, as is ever the case, the commission of one sin entails so many, render this drama a very effective ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner

... to the subject I was upon. What can be more childish than to assert that there are no such creatures as are generated in the Red Sea or in India? The most curious inquirer cannot arrive at the knowledge of all those creatures which inhabit the earth, sea, fens, and rivers; and shall we deny the existence of them because we never ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero

... Janes's cunning little boy, the next one to the baby, did you?" asked Ann Bray, turning round quickly at last, and going cheerfully on with the conversation. "Now, hush, Mandy, dear; they'll think you're childish! He's a dear, friendly little creatur', an' likes to stay with us a good deal, though we feel's if it 't was too cold for him, now we are waitin' to ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett

... Peterborough, the most learned man there is on the subject of religion, who, with his word, will prepare you for your salvation, which you risk to our great grief and that of our august queen, by all the papistical follies, abominations, and childish nonsense which keep Catholics away from the holy word of God and the knowledge of ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... overloading their stomachs with foods of many kinds and meat especially. Apparently it was beyond their comprehension that nature commanded them to improve their physiques for the benefit of coming generations. Men who professed to be athletes when they were past the age of thirty were considered childish, while the exponents of physical culture were generally looked upon as cranks. Eating, drinking and smoking were adapted as the best modes of recreation, while fishing and shooting pigeons, quail, squirrels and other harmless living things were regarded as good, healthy ...
— Born Again • Alfred Lawson

... social manifestations. They saw that holiday crowd that gathered here on the day of the burning and some of those hot human ashes fell in their innocent faces. What happened here that day will be talked over by them in their childish sports. Let us give to them a fitting conclusion to the recital. We have made it possible for them to say that the deed was done. Let us avoid contributing to their hardness of heart, by causing them to say that ...
— The Hindered Hand - or, The Reign of the Repressionist • Sutton E. Griggs

... her handmaids did the Queen Of Heaven hold converse, and of many such, But Paris, while they talked, gave up the ghost On Ida: never Helen saw him more. Loud wailed the Nymphs around him; for they still Remembered how their nursling wont to lisp His childish prattle, compassed with their smiles. And with them mourned the neatherds light of foot, Sorrowful-hearted; ...
— The Fall of Troy • Smyrnaeus Quintus

... gives her a high claim to gratitude. Every one of her chief works has been a separate venture in some new field, always daring, always successful, always valuable. Her "Juvenile Miscellany" was the delight of all American childhood, when childish books were few. Her "Hobomok" was one of the very first attempts to make this country the scene of historical fiction. In the freshness of literary success, she did not hesitate to sacrifice all her newly won popularity, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various

... government of which is the sole prerogative of God, and this is strengthened by the hope of passing through time in idleness, luxury, and honour, under the false pretence of apostolic descent transmitted through ceremonies worse than childish. In our Lord's days there was union among his disciples, as there must be under his personal reign in the New Jerusalem. But in the times of the apostles the disciples were divided-one was of Paul-another of Apollos, and others of Cephas. The Holy ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan

... fact that, in this neighborhood, an eagle should be chained for a plaything. When a child, I used often to stand at a window from which I could see an eagle chained in the balcony of a museum. The people used to poke at it with sticks, and my childish heart would swell with indignation as I saw their insults, and the mien with which they were borne by the monarch-bird. Its eye was dull, and its plumage soiled and shabby, yet, in its form and attitude, all the king was visible, though sorrowful and dethroned. I never saw another of the ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli

... stepped demurely out of the room. In the corridor, however, a change come over her small childish face. Her blue eyes became full of angry flame and she clenched her baby hand and shook it in the direction ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade

... to all the lines of her form. Her hair was indeed black, jet black, waving back from her forehead in a line of curving and beautiful irregularity. Her skin was clear and dark. There were deep circles under her eyes, making them look unnaturally large, pathetically weary. In repose her face was childish and sadly serious. When she smiled she looked older and pert, but ...
— The Great God Success • John Graham (David Graham Phillips)

... the earth began to stir and crack to some distance around the stem. She gave another pull, but relaxed her hold, fancying that there was a rumbling sound right beneath her feet. Did the roots extend down into some enchanted cavern? Then, laughing at herself for so childish a notion, she made another effort; up came the shrub, and Proserpina staggered back, holding the stem triumphantly in her hand, and gazing at the deep hole which its roots had ...
— Myths That Every Child Should Know - A Selection Of The Classic Myths Of All Times For Young People • Various

... turned again to the count, who was watching the young Amelia with a mixture of astonishment and anger. She had been represented at the Swedish court as a model of gentleness, amiability, and grace; he found her rude and contradictory, fitful and childish. The Princess Ulrica soon led the thoughts of the count in another direction, and managed to retain him at her side by her piquant and intellectual conversation; she brought every power of her mind into action; she was gracious in the extreme; ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach

... first built houses for shelter. They lived through a span of life that was longer than our span, but it was not long enough to give wisdom to them. Children were brought up at their mothers' sides for a hundred years, playing at childish things. And when they came to years beyond a hundred they quarreled with one another, and wronged one another, and did not know enough to give reverence to the immortal gods. Then, by the will of Zeus, the Silver Race passed away as the Golden Race had passed ...
— The Golden Fleece and the Heroes who Lived Before Achilles • Padraic Colum

... St. Paul says, as we ought to treat our children. His wrath was revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men. All wilful disobedience and actual sin he punished, often with terrible severity; but not their childish mistakes and dreams about how this world was made; just as we should not punish the fancies of our children. The times of that ignorance, says St. Paul, he winked at till Christ came, and then he commanded all men ...
— Discipline and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley

... measles. Their aunts had been so long unaccustomed to children's ailments, that perhaps they may have exaggerated the danger; still, even the family doctor looked grave and talked about 'Indian constitutions,' 'no stamina,' etc., etc., and the old house that had so lately rung with childish voices and laughter now lay hushed and silent in the ...
— Bulbs and Blossoms • Amy Le Feuvre

... good humour. Her fair complexion had changed for the worse; there were lines in her white forehead, and all her movements had grown nervous and irritable. But her expression as she stood by her husband was one of anxious though rather childish affection. ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... female aristocrat behind a post-office counter, or of passing a shop where we owe money. As for blushing or hanging back, or even looking awkward, when faced with any such simple, everyday acts, the idea of conduct so childish would not occur to us. We behave naturally under all circumstances—for why should a sane man behave otherwise? Priam Farll was different. To call the world's attention visually to the fact of his own existence was anguish to him. But in a letter he could be absolutely brazen. ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett

... and the spot where he lies is still regarded by the Non-conformists with a feeling which seems scarcely in harmony with the stern spirit of their theology. Many Puritans, to whom the respect paid by Roman Catholics to the relics and tombs of saints seemed childish or sinful, are said to have begged with their dying breath that their coffins might be placed as near as possible to the coffin of the author of the ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller

... human heart. The notes are numerous and lengthy, constituting a quarter to a third of the book, but are replete with padding, pointless babble and occasional puerile inaccuracies. They are largely attempts to explain and to moralize upon Yorick's emotions,—averbose, childish, witless commentary. The Wortregister contains fourteen pages in double columns of explanations, in general differing very little from the kind of information given in the notes. The Allgemeine Litteratur Zeitung[30] devotes a long review chiefly to the ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer

... Grey Lady had passed a life of much suffering before she came to Sempringham; for silent as she was concerning the details of that life, Isabel had never tried to conceal the fact that it had been one of suffering. And the child's childish idea was the old notion of poetical justice—of the good being rewarded, and the evil punished, openly and unmistakably, in this world; a state of affairs frequently to be found in novels, but only now and then in reality. ...
— The Well in the Desert - An Old Legend of the House of Arundel • Emily Sarah Holt

... like Titian, the boy Raphael used the juice of flowers with which to paint pictures of his childish fancies, but we do know that very early he became greatly interested in his father's studio and went in regularly to assist. Now, it must be remembered that, at this time, when a boy, wishing to learn ...
— Great Artists, Vol 1. - Raphael, Rubens, Murillo, and Durer • Jennie Ellis Keysor

... along with the gesture, if but for a moment, the emotion to which that gesture corresponds. In our marionettes, then, we get personified gesture, and the gesture, like all other forms of emotion, generalised. The appeal in what seems to you these childish manoeuvres is to a finer, because to a more intimately poetic, sense of things than the merely rationalistic appeal of very modern plays. If at times we laugh, it is with wonder at seeing humanity so gay, ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons

... reasonableness of the request and stayed: but they had their hands full, for old Rouget gave way to childish lamentations, which were only quieted by Philippe's repeating over and ...
— The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac

... set was grown utterly blind whenever I happened to walk on the same side of the way, and that I might as well have been buried a century. I was absurd enough to be indignant; for nothing can be more childish than any delicacy when a man cannot bet on the rubber. But one morning a knock came to my attic-door which startled me by its professional vigour. An attorney entered. I had now nothing to fear, for the man whom no one will trust cannot well be ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 12, Issue 337, October 25, 1828. • Various

... followed Correggio, and "Il Moro" copied Titian, not to indicate others; and they were one and all pedantic imitators, who added to the exaggerations of the Italian style a certain German coarseness, the result of which was a bastard style of painting, still inferior to the first, childish, stiff in design, crude in color, and completely wanting in chiaroscuro, but not, at least, a servile imitation, and becoming, as it were, a faint prelude to the true Dutch art that was ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various

... us have an inner feeling that some matters are too small, too trivial to take to God. We will take the great things, the serious things to Him and find the help needed. But it seems childish almost to be bothering the great God about trifling details, we are apt to think. We are even annoyed with ourselves to think that we have allowed such petty things to make us lose our balance and control. We want to underscore and italicize this fact: if a thing is ...
— Quiet Talks on Service • S. D. Gordon

... of this early reading upon his childish mind was given by Lincoln himself many years afterwards. While on his way to Washington to assume the duties of the Presidency he passed through Trenton, New Jersey, and in a speech made in the Senate Chamber at that place ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne

... engineers complete their bridges, generals conduct their battles, in a state of dancing excitement, foaming recondite technicalities at the lips. I suppose that sort of thing works up the reader, but so far as it professes to represent reality, I am convinced it is all childish nonsense, schoolboys of fifteen, girls of eighteen, and literary men all their lives, may have these squealing fits, but my own experience is that most exciting scenes are not exciting, and most of the urgent moments in life are ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells

... conclusion, rush to a conclusion; think the moon is made of green cheese; take for granted, grasp the shadow for the substance; catch at straws, grasp at straws. impose upon &c. (deceive) 545. Adj. credulous, gullible; easily deceived &c. 545; simple, green, soft, childish, silly, stupid; easily convinced; over-credulous, over confident, over trustful; infatuated, superstitious; confiding &c. (believing) 484. Phr. the wish the father to the thought; credo quia impossibile [Lat][Tertullian]; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... was by no means certain. I was sure, however, that, should he receive it, under no circumstances would he turn it over to anyone hostile to myself. When I wrote the words: "Dear George," my feeling was much like that of a child who sends a letter to Santa Claus after his childish faith has been shaken. Like the skeptical child, I felt there was nothing to lose, but everything to gain. "Yours" fully expressed such affection for relatives as I was then capable of—for the belief that I had disgraced, perhaps destroyed, my family prompted ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers

... healthy, childish creature had, in deep privacy, cried a little, and was pathetically glad to feel that the Osborns were to be near her, and that she would have Hester to think of and take ...
— Emily Fox-Seton - Being The Making of a Marchioness and The Methods of Lady Walderhurst • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... much a baby as one of twelve inches. Thirdly, we may graft our flower of romance on a European stem, and enjoy ourselves as much as the European novelists do, and with as clear a conscience. We are stealing that which enriches us and does not impoverish them. It is silly and childish to make the boundaries of the America of the mind coincide with those of the United States. We need not dispute about free trade and protection here; literature is not commerce, nor is it politics. America is not a petty nationality, like France, England, ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne

... he saw the ancient road through the forest, and, at the sight of walls and buildings of stone, he exhibited a childish delight. "This is an island worthy of being the home of a great chief," he declared. "In the big wigwam of stone (the fort) the Little Tiger will rest in peace when not on the hunt, and the squaws shall make of this dirt of black, great fields of yams and waving corn. It is good, that ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely

... sweetness brooded, broken now and again by the bell-like sound of childish laughter here and there. The birds were holding high carnival in the trees, and the bees humming drowsy little tunes to pretend they were ...
— The City of Fire • Grace Livingston Hill

... would say, "Dirty and sooty as I am I have a great deal of fun in me. Indeed, what would May-day be but for me?" Studious little boys of the free-school, all green grasshopper-looking, walked about as boys knowing something of Latin. Here and there went a couple of them in childish loving way, with their arms about each other's necks. Matrons and shy young maidens sat upon the door-steps near. Many a merry laugh filled up the interludes of music. And when evening came softly down upon us, the band finished with "God save the Queen," the little circle of those ...
— Friends in Council (First Series) • Sir Arthur Helps

... total remoulding. Every day came like the discharge of a great double-shotted gun. It could not but be that, humble as his walk was, and his years so few, his fevered mind should leap into the questions of the hour like a naked boy into the surf. He made mistakes, sometimes in a childish, sometimes in an older way, some against most worthy things. But withal he managed to keep the main direction of truth, after his own young way of thinking and telling it. He had no such power to formulate his large conclusions ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable

... penalty she could inflict for his misdeeds. It seemed petty when she considered the matter, and there was nothing petty about Hazel Weir. If the chance ever offered, she would make him suffer, but in the meantime there was no use in being childish. ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair

... notice the softening, nor did the little heart-shaped face, with its low widow's-peak, its straight, short nose, and its pointed little chin, made almost childish by the deep cleft which cut through its obvious effort to look mature and determined, fail to please him any more acutely than on the other days of the one short week he had been privileged at intervals to ...
— Murder at Bridge • Anne Austin

... discourses, mere chatter, I either make drowsy, unmeaning answers, unbecoming a child, and ridiculous, or more foolishly and rudely still, maintain an obstinate silence. I have a pensive way that withdraws me into myself, and, with that, a heavy and childish ignorance of many very ordinary things, by which two qualities I have earned this, that men may truly relate five or six as ridiculous tales of me as of ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne

... consequently hated adjutants too. He tried to write a series of special articles on the shortcomings of our artillery, but had not the remotest idea of exposition and never finished a single article; he continued, however, covering large sheets of grey paper with his large, awkward, childish handwriting. Markelov was a man obstinate and fearless to desperation, never forgiving or forgetting, with a constant sense of injury done to himself and to all the oppressed, and prepared for anything. His limited mind was for ever knocking ...
— Virgin Soil • Ivan S. Turgenev

... horses had been left huddled by a squad of the enemy who had gone in with the charge on post and for these the Fire Eater made. No one seemed to notice the lone runner until a small herds-boy spied him, and though he raised his childish treble it made no impression. The Fire Eater picked up a dropped pony-whip and leading two ponies out of the bunch, mounted and lashed away. He passed the screaming boy within killing distance, but ...
— The Way of an Indian • Frederic Remington

... hope, having already racked my brain until it seemed to reel, and all to no purpose; but it would have been childish to have refused the request. I therefore began by telling them how that I had retired on the preceding night with my mind full of the subject; how I had lain tossing restlessly, hour after hour, striving to think out some arrangement ...
— The Cruise of the "Esmeralda" • Harry Collingwood

... his Science of Language, Mueller speaks of the early poets who "strove in their childish way to pierce beyond the limits of this finite world." Approvingly cited, SBE. ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins

... Ridiculous. For people of the weakest parts are most commonly overborn with these fooleries; which, together with the great difficulty of their being prudently managed, must needs occasion them, for the most part, to be very trifling and childish. ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe

... my friend; for no kind of accident threw you in my way. That best of men, Virgil, long ago, and after him, Varius, told you what I was. When first I came into your presence, I spoke a few words in a broken manner (for childish bashfulness hindered me from speaking more); I did not tell you that I was the issue of an illustrious father: I did not [pretend] that I rode about the country on a Satureian horse, but plainly what I really was; you answer (as your ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace

... They played at being lovers with childish glee. In stammering accents they would have revived the passion which had once throbbed and died there. But it was like a first effort at learning a lesson. They knew not how to kiss each other's lips, but sought each other's cheeks, ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola

... whenever and wherever Chellalu saw her Attai, she immediately began to perform "Prick it and nick it" with great enthusiasm. But after she could walk, Chellalu would have nothing more to do with such childish things. "Show us Edward Rajah!" the older children would say; and instead of standing up with a regal dignity and crowning her curls with the appropriate gesture, Chellalu would merely look surprised. ...
— Lotus Buds • Amy Carmichael



Words linked to "Childish" :   childishness, infantile, immature



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