"Naive" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... made by the English in France. Philippe Millet's En Liaison avec les Anglais gives in a series of delightful pictures portraits of British types from the French angle. There can be little doubt that the British quality, genial naive, plucky and generous, has won for itself a real affection in France wherever it has had a chance ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells
... the naive wonder of an inexperienced man. Having paid this tribute to his superior knowledge, he regained his previous air of grave perception. "I reckon she ain't none of them. But I'm keepin' you from your work. Good-by. My name's Bowers—Jim Bowers, of Mendocino. ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... often have appeared naive and undevious. The fact was that his passion for truth-probing and his worship of the undiscovered loveliness of life had obscured whatever self-consciousness had been born in him. Meeting him for the first time was like entering another ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... recalled to the throne of Poland?" asks Marie, and the naive question reveals that many years of banishment have not quenched in the hearts of the exiles the hope of a return ...
— A Versailles Christmas-Tide • Mary Stuart Boyd
... brotherhood. As they have formulated their own morals by laying the greatest stress upon the largest morality, so if they could found their own schools, it is doubtful whether they would be of the mechanic institute type. Courses of study arranged by a group of workingmen are most naive in their breadth and generality. They will select the history of the world in preference to that of any period or nation. The "wonders of science" or "the story of evolution" will attract workingmen to a lecture when zooelogy or chemistry ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... the will of Caesar and through thy error, through thy ignorance of the law of nations," said Petronius, with emphasis. "Thou art a naive man, Tigellinus; but even thou wilt not assert that she burnt Rome, and if thou wert to do so, ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... spire during the Whitsun fair, to which Francis Price, in a naive description, attributes much damage to the leadwork of the roofs, has only ceased in recent times, some sixty or seventy years ago. Arnold, a watchmaker, wound up his watch while leaning actually against the vane. When a lad, during a royal visit, stood on his head on the capstone, George III. ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Salisbury - A Description of its Fabric and a Brief History of the See of Sarum • Gleeson White
... her—I like her exceedingly,' she said to herself; 'I have never met a more interesting person: she is so naive and winning in her manner. I feel I shall soon love her; and yet all the time I see her faults so plainly. She is terribly unpractical, and manages as badly as possible. Edith Bryce was right when she said that. And she is foolish with regard to her eldest son—no mother ought ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... inquiring suspicious glances of the Squire. The others dispersed according to their pleasure—Mr Waters joining the party up-stairs, while Mr Proctor followed Jack Wentworth and Wodehouse to the door with naive natural curiosity. When the excellent man recollected that he was listening to private conversation, and met Wodehouse's look of sulky insolence, he turned back again, much fluttered and disturbed. He had an interest in the matter, though the two in whose hands it now lay were the ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... worn away, he found Telly a most charming companion. She not only loved the ocean that in a way had been her playmate since childhood, but she had an artist's eye for all its beauties. How many features, new to Albert, she called to his attention, and how her naive observations, so fresh and delightful, each and all interested him, need not be quoted. It was an entirely new experience to him, and the four hours' pull in and out of the island coves and around isolated ledges where Uncle Terry set his ...
— Uncle Terry - A Story of the Maine Coast • Charles Clark Munn
... hunting in strange places; and at last, in a dingy East-side employment-office, he came upon his Schatz. She was buxom and hearty, and fairly oozed good-nature at every pore; she had only been a week in the country, and was evidently naive enough for any purpose whatever. She had no golden hair like Dorothea, but was swarthy—her German was complicated with a Hungarian accent, and with strange words that one had not come upon in Goethe and Freitag, and could ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... life for a King. No wrong found him indifferent; and he used his pen not only for the democracy which might reward him, but for animals, slaves and women. Poverty never left him, yet he made fortunes with his pen, and gave them to the cause he served. A naive vanity was his only fault as a man. It was his fate to escape the gallows in England and the guillotine in France. He deserved them both; in that age there was no higher praise. A better democrat never wore the ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... was just to get rid of Carson.... His insufferable familiarity! The penalty for my having been a naive kiddy, hungry for friendship, once. And now, good n—. Oh, Mouse, he says my eyes—even with this green kimono on— Come here, dear. tell me what color my ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis
... building of a fortress on the top of the bluff. It is one of the pleasantest towns on the river. The houses are all roofed with tiles, and are mostly of substantial architecture. The inhabitants, at least at the time of my first visit, were naive in their ways, kind and sociable. Scarcely any palm-thatched huts are to be seen, for very few Indians now reside here. It was one of the early settlements of the Portuguese, and the better class of the population consists ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... the claim of the specialist that I would repudiate. People are too apt to suppose that in order to discuss morals a man must have exceptional moral gifts. I would dispute that naive supposition. I am an ingenuous enquirer with, I think, some capacity for religious feeling, but neither a prophet nor a saint. On the whole I should be inclined to classify myself as a bad man rather than a good; not indeed as any sort of picturesque ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... of the People" might be taken on the question of Home Rule. The very idea filled the Liberals with dismay. Speaking at Edinburgh on the 2nd of December, Mr. Lloyd George, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, made the curiously naive admission, for a "democratic" politician, that the Referendum would amount to "a prohibitive tariff against Liberalism." A few days earlier at Reading (November 29th) his Chief sought to turn the edge of this disconcerting proposal by asking whether ...
— Ulster's Stand For Union • Ronald McNeill
... euphony and felicity of her phrasing, which was certainly her own. Whether she spoke from conviction or not, one thing seemed indisputable: the atmosphere surrounding the books and authors she named had a genuine fascination for her. There was a naive sincerity in her rhetoric, and her delivery and gestures had a rhythm that seemed to be akin to the rhythm of ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... amours—that is, infringements on their property rights—are often the most liberal in lending their wives. As Bonwick tells us (72), they felt honored if white men paid attention to them. A circumstance which seems to have puzzled some naive writers: that Australians and Africans have been known to show less "jealousy" of whites than of their own countrymen, finds an easy explanation in the greater ability of the white man to pay for the husband's complaisance. In some cases, in the absence of ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... of having left in this world a child whose heart and mind were so well moulded that he could outwit a man of forty. Who would have expected to have found a heart of bronze, a brain of steel, beneath external traits as seductive as ever the old painters, those naive artists, had given to the serpent in the terrestrial paradise? Nor was that all. In addition, the good-natured prelate had procured for the child of his choice certain acquaintances in the best Parisian society, which might equal in value, in the young man's ...
— The Girl with the Golden Eyes • Honore de Balzac
... to doubt the truth of these records, naive as are some of the descriptions. Unquestionably the Wokou were a terrible scourge to the ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... superstitions, his credulity and mistakes; Plato, with all his blunders in elementary logic; Homer, with all his naive ignorance of science and the wide world; Dante, despite his cramped outlook; Milton, in spite of his perverse theologizing—these and their like are, and will always be, literature. No matter if Carlyle's ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... grass of the meadow dwelt bobolinks and meadow larks; from the pasture rose the silver threadlike song of the savanna sparrow and the martial note of the kingbird. Occasionally I had a call from a family of flickers, or golden-wings, from the woods beyond the pasture; the four young ones naive and imperative in their manners, bowing vehemently, with emphatic "peauk" that seemed to demand the reason of my presence in their world; while the more experienced elders uttered their low "ka-ka-ka," whether of warning to the young or of ...
— Upon The Tree-Tops • Olive Thorne Miller
... advanced to her, holding out his hand simply—for he was a simple and honest man. Her response to this was spontaneous. The warmth of her fingers invaded him. Her eyes were full of questioning. He gave a hearty sign of admiration. She flushed with pleasure, but made a naive, protesting gesture. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... at the former place, he had determined to take a trip (his first) to Europe in this ship; having, as he said, already visited every state in the Union, and seen all that was to be seen there. He described to me, in a very naive and original manner, his sensations on passing by Tarifa, which was the first walled town he had ever seen. I related to him the history of that place, to which he listened with great attention. He made divers attempts to learn from me who I was; all of ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... does not work. There is no justice in exchanging a German eye and a French. French eyes see beauty in everything. To the German eye the sense of beauty has been denied. You cannot compare a beast and a man. In the old days, when there were wolves, it was the custom of the naive people of those days to torture a wolf if they caught one. They put him to death with the same refinements which were requisitioned for human criminals. This meant nothing to the wolf. The mere fact that he had been caught was what tortured him. And so I think it will be with ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy
... How soon people will say the same of us! At all events, the man called himself "Master" and his school was a school and not an "Institute." It is no advance to call things by other than their right names. In his school boys and girls sat together indiscriminately, according to the naive custom of those days. They learned, or might learn, Reading, Writing, Arithmetic, National History, Psalmody, Sewing, Knitting, and Religion. These were the order of the day, but if anyone distinguished himself by a show of talent, diligence or good behavior, that one received ...
— Walter Pieterse - A Story of Holland • Multatuli
... envoy call at the Foreign Office six times last week? His explanation, offered to an inquiring Pressman, that he had lost an umbrella, was naive, to say the least. I must not betray what I know, but I may hint that KING FERDINAND of Bulgaria is famous for the devious ways in which ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 9, 1917 • Various
... me," she said, very deliberately, letting her eyes droop; then she looked up again suddenly and continued, with a certain naive expression of disappointment gathering in her face. "I have been too free with you. Father Beret told me not to forget my dignity when in your company. He told me you might misunderstand me. I don't care; I shall not fence with ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... Groener talked freely, speaking with a slight Belgian accent, but fluently enough. He seemed to have a naive spirit of drollery, and he related quite amusingly an experience of his ...
— Through the Wall • Cleveland Moffett
... been prejudiced otherwise than in favour of the Lady Alice Egerton; but she is, nevertheless, careful to take the first opportunity of informing them, with much earnest protestation, of her quite remarkable purity and virtue, implying as it were a naive surprise at having arrived unsullied at the perilous age of thirteen. The stilted affectation of this self-conscious innocence is perhaps less evident in the scene in which we should most readily look for it—that, namely, in which the Lady defends herself from the ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... other forms thus reduced to angularity argues, of course, no affectation of quaintness on the part of the worker, but was the unavoidable outcome of her way of work. There is a pronounced and early limit to art of this rather naive kind, but that there is art in some of the very simplest and most modest peasant work built up on those lines no artist will deny. The art in it is usually in proportion to its modesty. Nothing is more futile than to put it to anything ...
— Art in Needlework - A Book about Embroidery • Lewis F. Day
... evince. Shrink, flinch, wince, blench, quail. Shun, avoid, eschew. Shy, bashful, diffident, modest, coy, timid, shrinking. Sign, omen, auspice, portent, prognostic, augury, foretoken, adumbration, presage, indication. Simple, innocent, artless, unsophisticated, naive. Skilful, skilled, expert, adept, apt, proficient, adroit, dexterous, deft, clever, ingenious. Skin, hide, pelt, fell. Sleepy, drowsy, slumberous, somnolent, sluggish, torpid, dull, lethargic. Slovenly, slatternly, dowdy, frowsy, blowzy. Sly, crafty, cunning, subtle, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... striking passages in Darwin's naive 'autobiography and letters' which indicate the beginnings of his ambition for literary distinction. It must always be borne in mind in reading this autobiography, however, that it was not intended by Darwin for publication, but only for the ...
— The Coming of Evolution - The Story of a Great Revolution in Science • John W. (John Wesley) Judd
... said that Browne attained to any great generalizations regarding embryogeny on the basis of his rather naive experiments, but they are indicative of the effects of the "new learning" in one area of biology. Actually, Browne appears more comfortable in the search for patterns conforming to the quincunx, as in The Garden of Cyrus, and although he may well have been ...
— Medical Investigation in Seventeenth Century England - Papers Read at a Clark Library Seminar, October 14, 1967 • Charles W. Bodemer
... afraid I've said something shocking!" she exclaimed in a delightfully naive manner, "and I did mean to be so good and decorous. I'm sure I'll need ...
— His Lordship's Leopard - A Truthful Narration of Some Impossible Facts • David Dwight Wells
... of the tracks; beside it stood the one-story palace of sin of which one, who shall, for the purposes of this story, be known as Bill Williams, was the owner, and one who shall be known as Jess Hogue, the evil genius. South of the track a comical, naive Swede named Johnny Nelson kept a store when he was not courting Katie, the hired girl in Mrs. McGeeney's boarding-house next door, or gambling away his receipts under Hogue's crafty guidance. Directly to the east, on the brink of the river, the ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn
... contemporary of Udal was Richard Mulcaster, head-master of St. Paul's school, and afterward of Merchant Taylors', concerning whom we have, from delightful old Fuller, this quaint and naive description: ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... possible starting-point has been suggested. It is no great feat for a naive imagination to suppose the President of the Swiss Confederation or the President of the United States—for each of these two systems is an exemplary and encouraging instance of the possibility of the pacific ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... is carried to a still further development. I am prepared to be told that the whole philosophy is horribly immoral; perhaps it is; but the play, certainly, is not. It is vastly amusing, its naughtiness is so naive, so tactfully frank, that even the American daughter might take her mother to see it, without fear of corrupting the innocence of age. "On peut tres bien vivre sans etre la plus heureuse des femmes": that is one of the morals of the piece; and, the more you think over questions of conduct, ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... let's start off with a reservation like that, Miss Copley. You made a naive, but very wise, remark this afternoon when you said you might just as well tell me something, especially as I was bound to find it out anyway. Stick to that maxim. It will save ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... had not been so very sick, Lone would have laughed at her naive method of identifying the spot. But he was too sorry for her to be amused at the vagaries of her sick brain. He did not believe anything she had said, except that she had been coming to the ranch and had left her bag under a bush beside the road. It should not be difficult to find it, if he followed ...
— Sawtooth Ranch • B. M. Bower
... spoke to her their voices softened to an undernote of tenderness never used among themselves. She had won her way steadily to every girl's heart. They had marveled at her invariable sweetness of temper; they had laughed at her quaint, naive sayings, and, most of all, they had loved her for the warm, grateful heart that found room and to spare for ...
— Lucile Triumphant • Elizabeth M. Duffield
... readily picture the impatience and even scorn of many intellectuals and pseudo-intellectuals. Because of its emphasis on the religious nature of the universe and on the spiritual power of the individual, it may seem to them naive. Because of its consistent condemnation of Mammon, of materialism and the economic-sociological interpretation of life, it may seem to them old-fashioned. Actually, the book is highly sophisticated and is more novel to-day than the day it was written because ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King
... girl with a puzzled frown as she brought her banjo in from another room and sat down with it. She relaxed the severity of her stare a little as Molly played one wild air after another, singing some of them with an evidence of training in her naive effectiveness. There were some Mexican songs which she had learned in a late visit to their country, and some Creole melodies caught up in a winter's sojourn to Louisiana. The elder sister accompanied her on the piano, not with the hard, resolute proficiency which one might have expected of Eunice ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... Public speakers dwell upon the glories of former times. The churches seek to revive the spirit of the Middle Ages. In schools there is immense interest in history, archaeology, and the classics. The age yearns to lose itself in the past, and delights in genre pictures of the naive olden time, or of life in remote valleys untouched by the breath of progress. No one has heart to probe the next decade, to ask, "Where shall we be in ten years,—in fifty years?" The outlook is bounded ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... this unguarded and naive conclusion of Mary's self-reproaches. "Yes," said he, eagerly; "let us go there again ...
— A Perilous Secret • Charles Reade
... a pointlessly clever young man, without, I suspect, ever trying to understand anything. My daughter knew him from childhood. I am a busy man, and I confess that their engagement was a complete surprise to me. I wish their reasons for that step had been more naive. But simplicity was out of fashion in their set. From a worldly point of view he seems to have been a mere baby. Of course, now, I am assured that he is the victim of his noble confidence in the rectitude of his kind. But that's mere idealising of a sad reality. For my part I will tell ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... character is never more effectually concealed than in their correspondence. But it is not so with Sterne. The careless, slipshod letters which Madame de Medalle "pitchforked" into the book-market, rather than edited, are highly valuable as pieces of autobiography. They are easy, naive, and natural, rich in simple self-disclosure in almost every page; and if they have more to tell us about the man than the writer, they are yet not wanting in instructive hints as to Sterne's methods of composition and ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... she go?" asked Mrs. Blackwell in naive surprise, looking at him with a counterpart of the eyes we had seen in the picture. "I hope you don't ...
— The Ear in the Wall • Arthur B. Reeve
... naive and communicative, unlike himself. And he knew he was being unlike himself, he knew that he was not in proper control of himself, ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... untouched, and untroubled freshness of her cheek and chin, and the forward droop of her slender neck, she appeared a girl of fifteen; in her developed figure and the maturer drapery of her full skirts she seemed a woman; in her combination of naive recklessness and perfect understanding of her person she was both. In spite of a few school-books that jauntily swung from a strap in her gloved hand, she bore no resemblance to a pupil; in her pretty gown of dotted muslin with bows of blue ribbon on the skirt and corsage, ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... threw his arms behind his head, leaning back on them, Flaxman saw the eyes darken and the naive boyish mouth contract, and knew that under all these brave words there ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... could look that nice," she said with a candor at once pathetic and naive. "I've been wishing he wouldn't come, but now I ...
— Betty Gordon in Washington • Alice B. Emerson
... all delightfully naive and fanciful, this elfin-world, where the impossible does not strike one as incongruous, and the England of 1648 seems ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... violent fancy to this pale-blooded hypochondriac, and made no secret of the fact that she regarded him as her especial property. Nothing is so flattering to the vanity as the preference of a child, that naive, spontaneous affection to which it is impossible to impute mercenary motives. And Joel had responded by becoming Celia's abject slave. He ignored the other children for the most part, seldom betraying, unless perhaps by an ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... however had once taken place, the whole Anglo-Saxon name attached itself to the Roman ritual. Among the motives for this change those which corresponded to the naive materialistic superstition of the time may have been the most influential, yet there were other motives also which touched the very essence of the matter. Men wished to belong to the great Church Communion which then in still unbroken freedom ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... being essential to the artist's temperament. The painting which emerged there at the close of the sixteenth century embodied religion and culture, both of a base alloy. The Christianity of the age was not naive, simple, sincere, and popular, like that of the thirteenth century; but hysterical, dogmatic, hypocritical, and sacerdotal. It was not Christianity indeed, but Catholicism galvanized by terror into reactionary movement. The culture of the age was on the wane. Men had long lost their first clean ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... do very well, Alvin, though of course not half so well as Mike, for nobody can do that," was the naive argument ...
— The Launch Boys' Adventures in Northern Waters • Edward S. Ellis
... makes his divisions as they present themselves at first thought, and rather from a practical than from a logical point of view. The analytic Frenchman prefers dichotomy, while trichotomy corresponds to the synthetic, systematic character of German thinking; and Kant's naive delight, because in each class the third category unites its two predecessors, has been often experienced by many of his countrymen at the ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... "Danger!" The naive question angered the cowboy. "Oh, no we ain't in any danger, not a bit in the world. We're just as safe as if we was sittin' on a keg of powder with the fuse lit. There's nothin' in the world can hurt us except this little ...
— Prairie Flowers • James B. Hendryx
... could be less the romantic, blubbering over the sorrows of his own Werthers. No novelist could have smaller likeness to the brummagem emotion-squeezers of the Kipling type, with their playhouse fustian and their naive ethical cocksureness. The thing that sets off Conrad from these facile fellows, and from the shallow pseudo-realists who so often coalesce with them and become indistinguishable from them, is precisely his quality of irony, and that irony is no more than a proof of the greater maturity of ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... although quite en regle for the Holy Magdalen, was, we thought, singularly inappropriate for Cupid. Stopping in at Schaus' a day or two later, I inquired of young Mr. Schaus, to whose taste we had left the selection of the frames, his reason for this extraordinary innovation. His reply was as naive as unexpected: ...
— The Story of a Summer - Or, Journal Leaves from Chappaqua • Cecilia Cleveland
... that seemed a little forced, and at mention of her departure a subtle change had come over her face. O'Neil realized that she had matured markedly since his last meeting with her; there was no longer quite the same effect of naive girlishness. ...
— The Iron Trail • Rex Beach
... this, astute as Morano, and simple as his naive mind. The clothing for which Rodriguez searched the plain vainly was ready to hand. No disguise was effective against la Garda, they had too many suspicions, their skill was to discover disguises. But in the moment ...
— Don Rodriguez - Chronicles of Shadow Valley • Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Baron, Dunsany
... naive figure standing on the pedestal is Youth, the United States, the child that has come from old ...
— Palaces and Courts of the Exposition • Juliet James
... on strategic arms limitations and in other areas will have far greater chance for success if both sides enter them motivated by mutual self-interest rather than naive sentimentality. ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... started out with such naive assurance to succeed, and—he had failed so utterly, so hopelessly, with not even a spectacular crash to make the failing picturesque. He had done the best that was in him, and even now that it was over ...
— The Long Shadow • B. M. Bower
... or institutions in the United States which the Englishman would necessarily take for granted, because they are precisely the same as those to which he has been accustomed at home. Writing for a German public, the Professor draws morals from American life which delight an English reader by their naive and elementary superfluousness. In all unconsciousness, Professor Muensterberg has written a most valuable essay on the essential kinship of the British and American peoples as ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... was generally not a wit, but a naive blockhead, who believed all that was said, and was therefore a butt for jests. He only placed a letter in Cercas' hand, and disappeared. When Cercas had read the letter, she changed colour ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... years of peaceful married life. The prince liked early hours and country pleasures, and the Queen, like a loyal wife, not merely consented to his tastes, but made them absolutely her own. Before she had been married a year, she made the naive pretty confession that 'formerly I was too happy to go to London and wretched to leave it, and now, since the blessed hour of my marriage, and still more since the summer, I dislike and am unhappy to leave the country, and would be content and happy never to go to town;' ...
— Queen Victoria • Anonymous
... them both, when they're nice; and I'm sorry for them both when they're not." And she added, with a naive air of confidence: "But I think I like young men better than either, as ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... type of Schubert's music is the melodic. This we find in the pianoforte sonatas quite as plainly as in the songs themselves. In the minuet and march on the present program the melodic ideas are the main thing. Charmingly naive are the little waltzes upon the present list. Beautifully simple, delightfully symmetrical, their simplicity relieved by short modulations into neighboring keys, it is not possible to find elsewhere compositions so short, so simple, and yet so beautiful. In spite of their brevity ...
— The Masters and their Music - A series of illustrative programs with biographical, - esthetical, and critical annotations • W. S. B. Mathews
... course a regular tradition among novelists in the United States to weigh the "settlements" in a balance and to represent them as lacking the hardy virtues of the backwoods. Mrs. Austin goes beyond this naive process. Whether she deals with the actual frontier—as in Isidro or Lost Borders or The Ford—or with more crowded, more complex regions—as in The Woman of Genius or 26 Jayne Street—she keeps her particular frontier in mind not as an entity or a dogma ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... Note(p.93)—There is something wondrous naive in a lover who, when asked by his mistress to sing a song in her honour, breaks out into versical praises of her parts. But even the classical Arab authors did not disdain such themes. See in Al-Hariri (Ass. of Mayyafarikin) where Abu ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 8 • Richard F. Burton
... years that had stripped his head; he found his eyes clear enough to see distinctly his young companion, who, following the injunctions of the Lady of Azay, regaled him well with glance and gesture, believing there could be no danger near so old a fellow, in such wise that Blanche—naive and nice as she was in contradistinction to the girls of Touraine, who are as wide-awake as a spring morning—permitted the good man first to kiss her hand, and afterwards her neck, rather low-down; at least so said the archbishop who married them the week after; and ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 1 • Honore de Balzac
... We recall a naive query by the publisher of a magazine, at a musicale in Gotham. Our hostess, an accomplished pianist, had played a Chopin Fantasia, and the magazine man was expressing his qualified enjoyment. "What I can't understand," said he, "is why the tune quits just when it's running along nicely." This phenomenon, ...
— The So-called Human Race • Bert Leston Taylor
... to conquer the naive instincts of that crowd. In a moment they gave him their compassion, jocularly, contemptuously, or surlily; and at first it took the shape of a blanket thrown at him as he stood there with the white ...
— The Nigger Of The "Narcissus" - A Tale Of The Forecastle • Joseph Conrad
... quiver, dart, and wings; Now, proud in power, he sees her eyes Dilate with beautiful surprise; But most, though fraught with perturbation. His weapons claim her admiration, And with an archness most bewitching (Her naive simplicity enriching), She wonders where a maid might buy than, And begs to be allow'd ...
— Poems (1828) • Thomas Gent
... greatly to the reader's sympathies. It was the old, old story of the gallant who woos and rides away, leaving the maiden to weep. The poetry was poor, and at another time its conventionality would have excited only my ridicule. But, reading it in conjunction with the quaint, naive notes scattered about its margins, I felt no inclination to jeer. These hackneyed stories that we laugh at are deep profundities to the many who find in them some shadow of their own sorrows, and she—for it was a woman's handwriting—to whom this book belonged had ...
— Sketches in Lavender, Blue and Green • Jerome K. Jerome
... art was developed. The solemnity of their matter gave rise to a further danger; it demanded some relief, and that relief was secured by the juxtaposition of comic scenes beside scenes of gravest import. Such comedy was occasionally not without grace—a passage of pastoral, a song, a naive piece of gaiety; but buffoonery or vulgar riot was more to the taste of the populace. It was pushed to the furthest limit, until in 1548 the Parlement of Paris thought fit to interdict the performance of sacred dramas which had lost the sense of reverence and even of ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... not poet enough—nor the eighteenth century naive enough—to create a legend in sober earnest. But the fact that he throws "Rule, Britannia" eight centuries back to the time of Alfred the Great, before whom this glorious pageant of his country's future is prophetically unrolled, serves to illustrate the ...
— Chosen Peoples • Israel Zangwill
... that day our adventureless adventurer had reached Bayley's Four- Corners, where he found provender for himself and Mary at what had formerly been a tavern, in the naive stage-coach epoch. It was the sole house in the neighborhood, and was occupied by the ex-landlord, one Tobias Sewell, who had turned farmer. On finishing his cigar after dinner, Lynde put the saddle on Mary, and started forward again. It is hardly correct to say forward, for ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... and weeks that followed the devout and passionate fancy of a few mourning Galileans begat the exquisite fable of the Resurrection. How natural—and amid all its falseness—how true, is that naive and contradictory story! The rapidity with which it spread is a measure of many things. It is, above all, a measure of the greatness of Jesus, of the force with which he had drawn to himself the hearts ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... came the turn of the naive, trusting, and amorous Verka. For a long time already she had been in love with a semi-military man, who called himself a civic clerk in the military department. His name was Dilectorsky. In their relations Verka was the adoring party; while he, like an important idol, condescendingly ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... human thought rests, which seeks not the truth, but verisimilitude, the appearance of truth—that is, the harmony between that which is seen and that which is conceived, based on the strict laws of logical reasoning. And instead of rejoicing, I exclaimed in an outburst of naive, juvenile despair: "Where, then, is the truth? Where is the truth in this world of phantoms and falsehood?" (See my "Diary of a Prisoner" of ...
— The Crushed Flower and Other Stories • Leonid Andreyev
... invaluable Samliv med Ibsen (1906) of Johan Paulsen. This last-mentioned writer aspires, in measure, to be Ibsen's Boswell, and his book is a series of chapters reminiscent of the dramatist's talk and manners, chiefly during those central years of his life which he spent in Germany. It is a trivial, naive and rather thin production, but it has something of the true Boswellian touch, and builds up ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... of imaginative apprehension has no bounds. From the naive self-reflection of his boyish dreams he passes on to visions which embrace a continually fuller measure of life, until he forestalls the sublime Dantesque conception of a poetry vast and deep as humanity, where every soul will stand forth revealed in its ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... little stir—I mean people will be asking questions; and then you know how a pseudonym whets curiosity—they will certainly find out—and they will talk all the more then. That ought to do the book some good. And then you understand, Mr. Moore," continued this remarkably naive person, "if your friend happened to know any of the reviewers, and could suggest how some little polite attention might be paid them, there would be nothing wrong in that, would there? I am told that they are quite gentlemen nowadays—they go everywhere—and—and ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... on, slowly, his eyes upon her, "But she knows that you are not one of those others and has requested that you do her the grace to call upon her. I assured her that you would, for I know that you are kind, and also," with an air of naive pride which Arlee found admirable in him, "it is not all the world who is invited to the home of our—our haut-monde, you understand?... And then it will interest you to see how our ladies live in that seclusion which is so droll to you. Confess you ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley
... came back, she sat opposite to him to see him. His naive look of joy was very sweet to her. His eyes were dark blue, showing the fibrils, like a purple-veined flower at twilight, and somehow, mysteriously, joy seemed to quiver in the iris. Helena appreciated him, feature by feature. She liked ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... quite naive: "Inasmuch as the Indians of this country had no use for the enema, why should we ...
— Intestinal Ills • Alcinous Burton Jamison
... Breakfast was a hurried affair, while both she and Susie were absent from the midday dinner. The shy, fluttering glances which he occasionally surprised from her, the look of mutual appreciation which sometimes passed between them at a quaint bit of philosophy or naive remark, started his pulses dancing and set the whole world singing a wordless song ...
— 'Me-Smith' • Caroline Lockhart
... good weather. The colonel had several times invited Miss Laura to drive with him, and had taken her once; but she was often obliged to stay with her mother. Graciella could always be had, and the colonel, who did not like to drive alone, found her a vivacious companion, whose naive comments upon life were very amusing to a seasoned man of the world. She was as pretty, too, as a picture, and the colonel had always admired beauty—with a ...
— The Colonel's Dream • Charles W. Chesnutt
... tell us that Monsieur Bergeret made some naive remark, or the Abbe Jerome Coignard uttered some unctuous sally, in so large and deliberate and courtly a way that the mere "he said" or "he began" falls upon us like a papal benediction or like the ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... 1897, Arthur Hoeber wrote: "There were shown at the Society of American Artists in New York, in the Spring of 1896, some statuettes of graceful young womanhood, essentially modern in conception, singularly naive in treatment, refined, and withal intensely personal.... While the disclosure is by no means novel, Miss Potter makes us aware that in the daily prosaic life about us there are possibilities conventional yet attractive, simple, but containing much of suggestion, ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... quietly, with an almost comical effect of good nature and contentment. The fourth advances slowly, browsing. In each composition the ground is indicated, not only beneath the men and animals, but above them, wherever the design affords room. It is an example of the same naive perspective which seems to have been employed in the Tirynthian bull-fresco (Fig. 30). The men, too, are of the same build here as there, and the bulls have similarly curving horns. There are several trees ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell
... has often been censured by the fastidiousness of his native critics, as bas and du style familier. This does not offend the foreigner, who is often struck by its simplicity and vigour. Moliere preferred the most popular and naive expressions, as well as the most natural incidents, to a degree which startled the morbid delicacy of fashion and fashionable critics. He had frequent occasions to resist their petty remonstrances; and whenever Moliere introduced an incident, or ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... persians the heathens worshipped as gods existed, and that they were men and women false and powerful, Saxo plainly believes. He has not Snorre's appreciation of the humorous side of the mythology. He is ironic and scornful, but without the kindly, naive fun of ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... organizations. Many of the old unions were reorganized, and numerous local amalgamations took place. Most of the organizations now took the form of secret societies whose initiations were marked with naive formalism and whose routines were directed by a group of officers with royal titles and fortified by signs, passwords, and ritual. Some of these orders decorated the faithful with high-sounding degrees. ...
— The Armies of Labor - Volume 40 in The Chronicles Of America Series • Samuel P. Orth
... of my experiments, however, I did not insist on rapid and naive judgments; but by a close observation of the subject as he was about to make a judgment I could tell quite plainly which judgments were spontaneous and which were deliberate. By keeping track of these with a system of marks, I was able to collect them ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... to do! What am I to do! ...' Her eyes filled with tears. 'I thought him so kind ... and here ...' Varia wiped her eyes, cleared her throat, and sat up. 'It seems such a little while ago,' she went on: 'he was reading to me out of Pushkin, sitting with me on this bench....' Varia's naive communicativeness touched me. I listened in silence to her confessions; my soul was slowly filled with a bitter, torturing bliss; I could not take my eyes off that pale face, those long, wet eyelashes, ...
— The Diary of a Superfluous Man and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... around it. Every one in the settlement is a Roman Catholic. Never did I receive such a welcome; the people are so friendly and unspoiled. The priest is a Frenchman, sensible, hearty, full of humour and love for his people. Both his ideas and his manner of expressing them are naive and appealing. I had been told that in his sermons he admonished certain members of his flock by name for their shortcomings. When I questioned him about this he gave me the following explanation: "You see, miss, when I die I shall stand before the Lord and my people will be ...
— Le Petit Nord - or, Annals of a Labrador Harbour • Anne Elizabeth Caldwell (MacClanahan) Grenfell and Katie Spalding
... and so on and so on, till it was all buzzing through thirty benevolent and officious heads. And thirty benevolently-officious wills were striving to plant each one its own particular scheme of benevolence. And Alvina, naive and pathetic, egged them all on in their strife, without even knowing what she was doing. One thing only was certain. Some obstinate will in her own self absolutely refused to have her mind made up. She would not have her mind made up for her, and she would not make it up for herself. ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... The naive compliment seemed to ease the strain in the situation. Lady O'Gara laughed. She had sometimes said that she laughed when she felt like to die with trouble. People had taken it for an exaggerated statement. What cause could Mary O'Gara have to ...
— Love of Brothers • Katharine Tynan
... far unfounded, that, naive in my selfishness, as in my reliance on him, I still continued to tell him everything, and in return constantly sought his help when philological or mathematical difficulties which I could not solve ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... and the restoration of the Mission Chapel, and together they had commended Clarence from the level of their superior passionless reserve and years. Clarence felt hopelessly young and hopelessly lonely; the naive prattle of the young girls beside him appeared infantine. In his abstraction, he heard Mrs. Peyton allude to the beauty of the night, and propose that after coffee and chocolate the ladies should put on their wraps and go with her to the old ...
— Susy, A Story of the Plains • Bret Harte
... people as the Germans should be masters of lyric poetry is but natural,—every longing, every impression, every impulse gushes into song; and in 'Des Knaben Wunderhorn' we hear the tuneful voices of a naive race, singing what they have seen or dreamed or felt during three hundred years. The work is dedicated to Goethe, who wrote an almost enthusiastic review of it for the Literary Gazette of Jena. "Every lover ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... over on the lake-slope at the timber edge, a graceful, boyish figure in scarlet and white wool moved swiftly over the drifts with all the naive delight of a child with a brand ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert W. Chambers
... no longer. Yet he had promised to be at the station. He had made his arrangements to go, and had received from his publisher the price of Les Blandices. Paul Vence had brought him one evening to Madame Martin's house. He had been sweet, polished, full of witty gayety and naive joy. She had promised herself much pleasure in travelling with a man of genius, original, picturesquely ugly, with an amusing simplicity; like a child prematurely old and abandoned, full of vices, yet with a certain ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... you think?" said he, laughing, albeit his heart was not merry at the moment; but Diana's question was naive. ...
— Diana • Susan Warner
... her oil soaked gingham dress, she made demand upon this staunch bank of known probity, for principal and interest in the matter of the one great good turn she had one before she had ever known of Scout Harris. It never occurred to her as she looked with frank expectancy at Mr. Jensen that her naive request was quite preposterous. ...
— Pee-wee Harris • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... chasing, and polishing. The technical processes are interestingly described by the writers of the old treatises on divers arts. In the earliest of these, by the monk Theophilus, in the eleventh century, we have most graphic accounts of processes very similar to those now in use. The naive monastic instructor, in his preface, exhorts his followers to honesty and zeal in their good works. "Skilful in the arts let no one glorify himself," say Theophilus, "as if received from himself, and not from elsewhere; but let him be thankful humbly in the ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... gloriously when most surrounded. His pride was centred on her; it was centred, however, on the brilliant returns of her actual presence—a presence which was never too far removed in flesh or spirit to deprive him of a certain naive assumption of ownership. That she should continue all the dear, familiar fascinations beyond his sight or touch, in a far-away land, with David Cannon as a daily companion, was another matter. Not that he was jealous of David. No one man stood out as a rival. ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... been regulated by law, and its sanctions have (as is usual upon most occasions when oppression has been legalized) been made to fall most heavily upon the poor." The committee continued with the following comments which were naive in the extreme considering that for generations all law had been made by and for the propertied interests: "It is a singular fact that the smallest sums advanced have always been chargeable with the highest ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... I once observed, in a hut, a small fragment of the skin of a newly killed kid; the wolf had devoured the beast, and the shepherd was keeping this corpus delicti to prove to his superior, the agent, that he was innocent of the murder. There was something naive in his honesty—as if a shepherd could not eat a kid as well as any wolf, and keep a portion of its skin! The agent, no doubt, would hand it on to his lord, by way of confirmation and verification. Another time I saw ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... painting Millet sought neither grace nor beauty, but expression. That he regarded neither of these first two qualities as intrinsically unworthy, we may infer from the grace of the Sower, and the naive beauty of the Shepherdess and the Woman Sewing. But that expression was of paramount interest to him we see clearly in the Angelus and the Man with the Hoe. The leading characteristic of his art is strength, and he distrusted the ordinary ...
— Jean Francois Millet • Estelle M. Hurll
... Ratignolles'. Monsieur and Madame Ratignolle made much of the Colonel, installing him as the guest of honor and engaging him at once to dine with them the following Sunday, or any day which he might select. Madame coquetted with him in the most captivating and naive manner, with eyes, gestures, and a profusion of compliments, till the Colonel's old head felt thirty years younger on his padded shoulders. Edna marveled, not comprehending. She herself was almost devoid ...
— The Awakening and Selected Short Stories • Kate Chopin
... see one-tenth of the beauties and interesting objects of Rome. He wanted to get me home, he said, to have me all to himself, and to see me safely installed as the mistress of Grassdale Manor, just as single-minded, as naive, and piquante as I was; and as if I had been some frail butterfly, he expressed himself fearful of rubbing the silver off my wings by bringing me into contact with society, especially that of Paris and Rome; and, more-over, he did ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... in which Dora, Nan, Bess, and several of the boys took part, made a good background for the humble figure of the old woman in her widow's bonnet, rusty shawl, big umbrella, and basket. Her naive astonishment, as she surveys the spectacle, feels the curtains, and smooths her old gloves during the moment she remains unseen, was very good; but Josie's unaffected start when she sees her, and the cry: 'Why, ...
— Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... other hand, and it took less intuition to know it, was not only greatly welcome to Margaret, but to all the others—from the gardener up to the senator. Manners' distinction of manner, his wellbred, easy ways, his charmingly enunciative and gracious voice, together with his naive and simple nature, went far with people's hearts. Aladdin bitterly conceded every advantage to his rival except that of mind. To this, for he knew even in his humble moments that he himself had it, he clung tenaciously. Mrs. Brackett, with a sneaking admiration ...
— Aladdin O'Brien • Gouverneur Morris |
