"Puerile" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... stage, where the actual appearance of a demon is apt to excite emotions rather ludicrous than terrific. Accordingly, that of Dryden failed in the representation. The circumstance, upon which the destruction of the wizard turns, is rather puerile; but there are many similar fables in ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... freles navires pour venir s'asseoir au foyer de la nationalite Corse, des hommes graves tels que Boswel et Volney obeissaient sans doute a un sentiment bien plus eleve qu' au besoin vulgaire d'une puerile curiosite.' Histoire de Pascal Paoli, par A. Arrighi, i. 231. By every Corsican of any education the name of Boswell is known and honoured. One of them told me that it was in Boswell's pages that Paoli still lived for them. He informed me also of a family ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... York; and an unusual number of amateur scholars from various parts of the Union. There were several papers of remarkable value, among which that of Mr. Squier, our Charge d'Affaires for Central America, was perhaps at this period of the most general interest. Others were puerile, and as unfit in subject as in ability for presentation in such an assembly. It is to be regretted that the Association does not adopt the only protection against such discreditable annoyances, by insisting upon the submission of everything ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... government, for the purpose of retaining their supremacy over the province, have not only connived at those irregularities, but have always enjoined that the public sanction should be given to their puerile shows, and their pageant, pompous processions by the attendance of the civil and military officers upon them, and by desecrating the Lord's day with martial music, &c. In this particular affair, the executive officers of the Provincial Government are fully ...
— Awful Disclosures - Containing, Also, Many Incidents Never before Published • Maria Monk
... thought of a historian who suppresses Jeanne's trial because he finds it inconvenient? Jean Chartier was extremely weak-minded and trivial; he seems to believe in the magic of Catherine's sword and in Jeanne's loss of power when she broke it;[16] he records the most puerile of fables. Nevertheless it is interesting to note that the official chronicler of the Kings of France, writing about 1450, ascribes to the Maid an important share in the delivery of Orleans, in the conquest of fortresses ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... of obtaining objects that have belonged to celebrated people may be, and often is, considered puerile; but confess to the weakness, and the contemplation of the little memorials I have named awakens recollections in my mind fraught ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... he pronounced, looking fixedly at his companion, "seen a more amateurish piece of work than the arrangement of this so-called debauch. It seems pitiable, Mr. Wingate, that a man with brains like yours should have sought to deceive in so puerile a fashion." ...
— The Profiteers • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... had asked for a postponement of discussion, in order to examine the bill, and then, in the interval, had sent out their indictment of the author. It was certainly unworthy of him to taunt them with having desecrated the Sabbath day by writing their plea. The charge was not only puerile but amusing, when one considers how Douglas himself was ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... land, heavy-laden with the puerile details of daily living, fling off your shrouding cares, and lift your worn faces that you may see with a broad outlook how full-fruited is the vineyard in which you are toiling; the thorns are irritating; the glebe is rough; your spirit faints in the heat of the toilsome day. Look up! the ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... the French spirit. I do not believe that there ever was a Frenchman since the seventeenth century (unless perchance it was Gerard de Nerval, and he was not quite sane), who could put his hand on his heart and deny that the little stars seemed to him puerile and conceited. ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... this, entering aged six, and leaving the passage aged sixteen, a cruel young monster filled with rebellion and immorality, not educated at all, but full of the sense of vague failures, having in common with those of my years, all the levels of puerile understanding, stung with patronage and competitive strife, designed to smother that which was ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... had not attended medical classes and walked the hospitals without undergoing the influences of the unbelief prevailing in those regions, where, on the strength of a little knowledge of the human frame, cartloads of puerile ignorance and anile vulgarity, not to mention obscenity, are uttered in the name of truth by men who know nothing whatever of the things that belong to the deeper nature believed in by the devout and simple, and professed also by many who are perhaps yet farther from a knowledge of its ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... his head. "I know when I'm beaten." He'd been going to suggest that the Brainchild was a training ship, from Snookums' "learning" periods, but that seemed rather obvious and puerile now. ...
— Unwise Child • Gordon Randall Garrett
... French bourgeois Republic have condemned Grave to prison, and his book, "La Societe Mourante et l'Anarchie" to destruction. The bourgeois men of letters declare this puerile book a profound work, and its author a man ...
— Anarchism and Socialism • George Plechanoff
... was at the time in the mountains of Virginia on a vacation. The idea of any sane human being organizing a secret association to liberate the slaves of the South by a general insurrection was too absurd for belief—too puerile for attention. The letter ...
— The Man in Gray • Thomas Dixon
... behind them were the Russians with bright and mystical eyes; the English, with heads uncovered, intoning songs of religious gravity; the Greeks and Roumanians of aquiline profile; the Scandinavians, white and red; the North Americans, with the noisiness of a somewhat puerile enthusiasm; the Hebrews without a country, friends of the nation of socialistic revolutions; the Italians, as spirited as a choir of heroic tenors; the Spanish and South Americans, tireless in their huzzas. They were students and apprentices who were completing their courses in the schools ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... between the "Enterprise" and the "Tripoli" alone saved the first year of the war from being entirely puerile. Certain it is that the distinguished naval officers who accompanied the fleet to the Mediterranean were so hedged about with political red tape, that they were powerless to take a step in defence of the honor of their ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 1 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... gives a puerile interpretation of Papesifu as signifying "the kingdom of the 800 wives," and says it was called so because the Prince maintained that establishment. This may be an indication that there were popular stories about the numerous wives of the King of Laos, such as Polo had heard; but the interpretation ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... Leonella, Antonia's aunt, seem like a pantomime character, who has inadvertently stepped into a melodrama, but the caricature is amusing by its very crudity. She writes in red ink to express "the blushes of her cheek," when she sends a message of encouragement to the Conde d'Ossori. This and other puerile jests are more tolerable than Lewis's attempts to depict passion or describe character. Bold, flaunting splashes of colour, strongly marked, passionate faces, exaggerated gestures start from every page, and his style is as extravagant as his imagery. Sometimes he uses a short, staccato ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... heroes and engineers—also the land of mystery, the abode of intrigue, the cockpit of puerile nationalism, and the soul of all things topsy-turvy and contrary. It is a land for a brave soldier, a skilful engineer, or the tourist in ...
— The Kangaroo Marines • R. W. Campbell
... condemnation by Harvard University of my 'philosophical pretensions.'" Except for that one phrase, "professional warning," in Dr. Royce's attack, this appeal would never have been written, or the least notice taken of his intrinsically puerile "criticisms." When Mr. Herbert Spencer, whom I have more than once publicly criticised, can yet magnanimously write to me of this very book, "I do not see any probability that it will change my beliefs, yet I rejoice ...
— A Public Appeal for Redress to the Corporation and Overseers of Harvard University - Professor Royce's Libel • Francis Ellingwood Abbot
... secret wish that the clergy might be permitted to manage the wealth of the faithful, for the benefit of the poor. The most sublime representations of the attributes and laws of the Deity were sullied by an idle mixture of metaphysical subtleties, puerile rites, and fictitious miracles: and they expatiated, with the most fervent zeal, on the religious merit of hating the adversaries, and obeying the ministers of the church. When the public peace was distracted by heresy and schism, the sacred orators sounded the trumpet ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... my dear, she must needs fall in love with this man, this Catholic! Catholicism at its best—worse luck! No mean or puerile type, with all its fetishisms and unreasons on its head—no!—a type sprung from the finest English blood, disciplined by heroic memories, by the persecution and hardships of the Penal Laws. What happens? Why, of course the girl's imagination goes over! Her father in her—her temperament—stand ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... of the "Theatrum Poetarum," in assigning it to Greene, followed either some tradition of the time or his own whim; but he is not a trustworthy authority; and his article on Greene is assuredly as puerile and absurd a performance as could ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... part of the puerile and pedantic system which they call a Constitution cannot be laid open without discovering the utter insufficiency and mischief of every other part with which it comes in contact, or that bears any the remotest relation to it. You cannot propose a remedy for the incompetence of the crown, without ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... hear the clamour of the people without seeing the person, of the candidate. On him whom they adjudged to have been most applauded the election fell. A mode of election open to every species of fraud, and justly condemned by Aristotle as frivolous and puerile [131]. Once elected, the senator retained his dignity for life: he was even removed from all responsibility to the people. That Mueller should consider this an admirable institution, "a splendid monument of early Grecian ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... does not smother the accents of human sympathy; and before proceeding any further, I hope your Honor will appoint some counsel to confer with and advise the prisoner. Her isolation appeals to every noble instinct of manhood, and it were indeed puerile tribute to our lamented General Darrington, to bring his granddaughter before this tribunal, without the aid and defence of legal advisers. Justice itself would not be welcome to me, if unjustly won. My friend, Mr. Hazelton, who ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... transcribe for you, Gentlemen, what a good Dutch citizen, to whom I lent it, thought of it. "It is scarce possible for me," said he, "to paint the vexation with which I have read the resolve adopted by the majority. A document at once puerile, jesuitical, and made unintelligible, as I think, from design, to conceal the palpaple contradictions and absurdities of which it is full. I can compare it to nothing better than to a serpent, which hides its ugly head under the tortuous folds of its horrible body. The protest, on the contrary, ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. IX • Various
... evidence that the menace was thoroughly understood, for the whole day shift was toiling at the ice, chopping it, thawing it, shoveling it away, although its tremendous thickness made their efforts seem puerile. Everywhere there was manifested a frantic haste, a grim, strained eagerness that was full of ...
— The Iron Trail • Rex Beach
... and preparing for the work of the day by trusting the watching to those on duty, as they would be trusted in turn when similarly on guard. How often were such incidents repeated, night and day, through campaign after campaign, till they became so familiar that it seems almost puerile to mention them! ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V2 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... decidedly eccentric. Gray Kidds is one of those individuals whose peculiarity it is never to have been a boy. Kidds at fifteen had whiskers as voluminous as he now has at six-and-twenty, and as he gambolled heavily amongst his more puerile schoolfellows, visitors to the playground used to ask the assistant masters who that man was playing with the boys. They evidently had an uneasy notion that a private lunatic asylum formed a branch of the educational establishment, ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... the sanguinary English criminal code with death in every line—why is it not reformed, I say? 'Twould be well if our legislators, instead of their puerile and frothy declamations against revolutionary principles and the ambition of Napoleon, would occupy themselves seriously with this subject. But then the lawyers would all oppose the simplification of our Code. They find by experience that a complicated one, obstructed by customs, statutes and acts ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... and Him crucified' is presented in a new, striking, and matter-of-fact light. The style is simple, without being puerile, and the reasoning is of that truthful, persuasive kind that 'comes from the heart, and reaches the ...
— The Life of Trust: Being a Narrative of the Lord's Dealings With George Mueller • George Mueller
... the wood-nymphs decided not to go into the water home; instead, they implored the water-nymphs to come forth from their liquid residence. But the water-nymphs refused. The dryads tried to lure them with gestures and dances. It was all dreadfully puerile, ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... la Mediterranee sur de freles navires pour venir s'asseoir au foyer de la nationalite Corse, des hommes graves tels que Boswel et Volney obeissaient sans doute a un sentiment bien plus eleve qu'au besoin vulgaire d'une puerile curiosite' ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... adventure in penny papers which only boys read, and he determined sportively to compete with their unknown authors. "Treasure Island" came out in such a periodical, with the emphatic woodcuts which adorn them. It is said that the puerile public was not greatly stirred. A story is a story, and they rather preferred the regular purveyors. The very faint archaism of the style may have alienated them. But, when "Treasure Island" appeared as a real book, then every one who had a smack of youth left was a boy again for some happy ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... break its force. Women are told from their infancy, and taught by the example of their mothers, that a little knowledge of human weakness, justly termed cunning, softness of temper, OUTWARD obedience, and a scrupulous attention to a puerile kind of propriety, will obtain for them the protection of man; and should they be beautiful, every thing else is needless, for at least twenty ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... president who had disposed of his gaiters in the way just mentioned drew them out instead of his handkerchief and smeared his face over with mud. The Pope is said to have been much amused at this mistake. If this anecdote should be thought too puerile to be repeated here, I may observe that it afforded no small merriment to Bonaparte, who made Michot the actor relate it to the Empress at Paris one evening after a ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... the unexpected issue of that contest, will long be remembered by every man who was educated at Dr. Swishtail's famous school. The latter Youth (who used to be called Heigh-ho Dobbin, Gee-ho Dobbin, and by many other names indicative of puerile contempt) was the quietest, the clumsiest, and, as it seemed, the dullest of all Dr. Swishtail's young gentlemen. His parent was a grocer in the city: and it was bruited abroad that he was admitted into Dr. Swishtail's academy upon what are called "mutual principles"—that ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... eunuchs would appear to be an unusual tendency to put on fat, a notably greater length of the legs, absence of hair in the sexual and secondary sexual regions, a less degree of pigmentation, as noted both in the castrated negro and the white man, a puerile larynx and puerile voice. In character they are usually described as gentle, conciliatory, ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... expression to be apprehended by the lowest capacities, and, (what is considered as a victory in the art) an happy conjunction of utility and pleasure."[024] Hence Quintilian recommends them, as singularly useful, and as admirably adapted, to the puerile age; as a just gradation between the language of the nurse and the preceptor, and as furnishing maxims of prudence and virtue, at a time when the speculative principles of philosophy are too difficult to be understood. Hence also having been introduced by most ...
— An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, Particularly the African • Thomas Clarkson
... ethical process and the cosmic process, but, like every one of his contemporaries, he employed the facts of animal and vegetable life to point a moral or to help out a sermon. The arguments he used appear to us puerile in their old-world dress, and yet similar ones are to be heard to-day in every pulpit where a smattering of science is used to eke out a poverty of theology. And, to be fair, such reasoning is not confined to pulpits. Even so eminent a writer as Mr Edward ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... us least. They doubtless signify no end of profound things, yet to us they seem both exotic and puerile. We go back to the tiny dancers, tired to sleepiness, who sit on a sofa waiting to be called. Poor babies! Or to the plate entitled Douleur. Or to the portraits of sweet English misses—as did Constantin Guys, Legrand has caught the precise English note—or any ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... generous and distracted trio. The opening of the third act, between Elvira and her brother Alvaro, is not at all young-ladyish, and has some strong turns of feeling. The end of the play, with the stabbing of the Princess and the accusation of Agnes by Elvira, is puerile, but was doubtless welcome to a sentimental audience. It is a bad play, but not at all ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... lamentations over this work of the abolitionists, and your intimation that the South will never consent to give up her slaves, until the impossibility, of paying her "twelve hundred millions of dollars" for them, shall have been accomplished? Puerile and insulting as is your proposition to the abolitionists to raise "twelve hundred millions of dollars" for the purchase of the slaves, it is nevertheless instructive; inasmuch as it shows, that, in your judgment, the ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... liberator and reformer in respect to what had gone before. Let us take, for example, the doctrine of metempsychosis, or, as it is commonly called, the "transmigration of souls." No doubt, there is a great deal connected with this doctrine in the Buddhist books that cannot but appear to us puerile and shocking; but still, we do not well, we do not justly, if, as do so many, we fasten such strange fancies on Buddha, or on Buddhism, as though it were from these that they sprang. So far from Sakya-muni ...
— Religion in Japan • George A. Cobbold, B.A.
... truth. To be sure he had apologized, but Wunpost himself had said that it was only to gain a share in the mine—and how lamentably had Wunpost failed, after all his windy boasts, when it came to a conflict with Judson Eells. He had weakened like a schoolboy, all his arguments had been puerile; and even her husband, who was far from censorious, had stated that the whole affair was badly handled. And now here he was, after a secret conference with her daughter, suddenly bursting into vehement protestations and hinting at ...
— Wunpost • Dane Coolidge
... 2, No. 10. Some of the apocryphal works also, worthless as they are for instruction in the doctrines and duties of Christianity, throw much light on the religious spirit, tendencies, and heretical sects of the times to which they belong. Others of these writings are unutterably absurd and puerile, worthy of notice only as showing the type of the puerilities current in the age ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... and men too. But it is thought rather puerile to give very much time to it; men should have graver interests. It was undignified and unpleasant for the samurai to play conspicuously ill, and impossible for them to play so constantly as to keep hand and eye ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... connexion with, the expenditures of the States, it may even be said to be extra-constitutional. It is formally requesting that which the Secretary of State had no official right to request. There was no harm in the proceeding, but it would be undignified, puerile, and unusual, for so grave a functionary to take it, without a commensurate object. Lest this construction should be put on his course, the Secretary has had the precaution to explain his own motives. He tells the different governors, in substance, that ...
— A Residence in France - With An Excursion Up The Rhine, And A Second Visit To Switzerland • J. Fenimore Cooper
... transoceanic celebrities and Eleanor Roosevelt. There they competed on alternate forums with literate gardeners and stuttering horticultural amateurs. Stolon, rhizome and culm became words replacing crankshaft and piston in the popular vocabulary; the puerile reports Gootes fabricated under my name as the man responsible for the phenomenon were syndicated in newspapers from coast to coast, and a query as to rates was ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... did not begin while we spun gaily from Arles to Aigues Mortes, through pleasant if sometimes puerile-seeming country (puerile only because we hadn't its history dropping from our fingers' ends); but there was time, between coming in sight of the huge, gray-brown towers and driving in through the fortified gateway, for me to take that great ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... but one faith; many beings and becomings, but all emanating from one Paternity, cohering through one Presence, and converging to one Perfection, in Him who is the Author and Former and Finisher of all things which exist. Let no man therefore ridicule a myth as puerile if it be an aid to belief in that commonweal of humanity for which the Founder of the purest religion was a witness and a martyr. We have sought out the man in the moon mainly because it was one out of many scattered stories which, as Max Mueller nobly ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... elegance of our architecture. Our manners likewise are little calculated to excite their approval and imitation. Not to insist on the licentiousness that has at times been imputed to our communities; the pleasures of the table; emulation in wine; boisterous mirth; juvenile frolics, and puerile amusements, which do not pass without serious, perhaps contemptuous, animadversion—setting these aside it appears to me that even our best models are but ill adapted for the imitation of a rude, incurious, and unambitious people. Their senses, not their reason, should ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... enter into the army from the puerile vanity of wearing a red coat and an epaulette; nor to save himself the trouble of pursuing his studies; nor because he thought the army a good lounge, or a happy escape from parental control; nor yet did he consider the military profession as a mercenary speculation, in which he was to ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. VII - Patronage • Maria Edgeworth
... Pirckheimer. In his later years Irenicus became a Lutheran and displayed some dignity in refusing to sacrifice his convictions to worldly interests; but at this time he was enthusiastic and heady, and as a result his work is an uncritical jumble. 'Puerile and silly' Erasmus called it, when he saw some of the proof-sheets at Spires in 1518. 'A most unfortunate book', wrote Beatus Rhenanus in 1525, 'without style and without judgement.' To Aventinus in 1531 it was 'an ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... from Normal Science in this—they are alike objectless, purposeless, puerile, frivolous. They lead on to no grand results; and therefore the world does not heed, and true sages have not cultivated them. But sure I am, that of all I saw or heard, a man, human as myself, was the remote originator; and I believe unconsciously to himself ...
— The Best Ghost Stories • Various
... Leonard and Gertrude is very crude. Everywhere is visible the rough hand of the painter, a strong, untiring hand, painting an eternal image, of which this in paper and print is the merest sketch.... Read it and see how puerile it is, how too obvious are its moralities. Read it a second time, and note how earnest it is, how exact and accurate are its peasant scenes. Read it yet again, and recognize in it the outpouring of a rare soul, working, pleading, ready to ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... but with a pleasure in which there is some touch of bitterness, because they alone can see these faults: unacknowledged borrowings, inexact references, mutilated names and texts, second-hand quotations, worthless hypotheses, imprudent assertions, puerile generalisations, and, in the enunciation of the most false or the most debatable opinions, an air ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois
... requisite that the former should await for some time the audience which the latter accorded. I am sure that when the peace with Frederick was agitated, the face of Louis XV was not more grave and serious than during this puerile debate about etiquette. The duc de Choiseul, who had the control of foreign affairs, was in the apartment to receive his Danish majesty, with his colleagues, the duc de Praslin, the comte de Saint-Florentin (whom I have called by anticipation duc de la Vrilliere), M. Bertin, ...
— "Written by Herself" • Baron Etienne Leon Lamothe-Langon
... sense of failure crushed him. How weak and puerile the eloquence of words or the beat of the human heart against that mysterious force gleaming at him through Van Meter's ...
— The One Woman • Thomas Dixon
... married to the substance of the writing that no one of taste can find fault with it. For Browne (to come to the third point mentioned above), though he never descends or diverges—whichever word may be preferred—to the extravagant and occasionally puerile conceits which even such writers as Fuller and Glanville cannot resist, has a quaintness at least equal to theirs. In no great writer is the unforeseen so constantly happening. Everyone who has written on him ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... spirit so powerful as that of King Shudraka could not be confined within the strait-jacket of the minute, and sometimes puerile, rules of the technical works. In the very title of the drama, he has disregarded the rule[11] that the name of a drama of invention should be formed by compounding the names of heroine and hero.[12] Again, the books prescribe[13] that the hero shall appear in every act; yet Charudatta does not appear ...
— The Little Clay Cart - Mrcchakatika • (Attributed To) King Shudraka
... (stomachari) that such absurdities were forced upon the Emperor, the best of princes." (C. R. 2, 252.) Again: Although the Emperor's verdict was very stern and terrible, "still, the Confutation being a composition so very puerile, a most remarkable congratulation followed its reading. No book of Faber's is so childish but that this Confutation is still more childish." (253.) In another letter he remarked that, according to the Confutation, in which the doctrine ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... that, so far as changing the religion or creed of his family went, was altogether beyond his power. He had his choice between living an alien and a heretic, despised by his own family; and joining a church whose teachings he considered puerile and inefficacious, and the atmosphere of which was now exceedingly disagreeable to him. His wife showed herself so much more devoted to the church than to her husband, that his love for her soon faded away, and he made a fearful resolve to leave Montreal, and ...
— The Mysteries of Montreal - Being Recollections of a Female Physician • Charlotte Fuhrer
... that the coming of the Wise Men—the Magi—was in accordance with the astrological signs, of the interpretation of which they were adepts and masters. When this truth is known, how puerile and petty seems the myth of the "traveling star" of the commonly accepted exoteric version? And the pictures of the Wise Men being led by a moving heavenly body, traveling across the skies and at last standing still over the cottage ...
— Mystic Christianity • Yogi Ramacharaka
... doctrine had thus expanded along particular lines of thought, without equally affecting others. He is a kind of Spinoza-Mather; he combines, that is, the logical keenness of the great metaphysician with the puerile superstitions of the New England divine; he sees God in all nature, and yet believes in the degrading supernaturalism of the Salem witches. The object of his faith, in short, is the 'infinite Jehovah' (vi. ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... were written long after the event, and came to be nothing more than legends laden with details often utterly puerile or devoid of proof. The martyrs of Lyons in the second century wrote, so to speak, their own history; for it was their comrades, eye-witnesses of their sufferings and their virtue, who gave an account of them in a long letter addressed to their friends ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... The passages of the Epistles, which were formerly felt to be so objectionable, are yet to be found here in all their unmitigated folly. Ignatius is still the same anti-evangelical formalist, the same puerile boaster, the same dreaming mystic, and the same crazy fanatic. These are weighty charges, and yet they can be substantiated. But we must enter into details, that we may fairly exhibit the spirit, and expose the ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... manner in which the Sulaco ladies smothered their faces with pearl powder till they looked like white plaster casts with beautiful living eyes, the peculiar gossip of the town, and the continuous political changes, the constant "saving of the country," which to his wife seemed a puerile and bloodthirsty game of murder and rapine played with terrible earnestness by depraved children. In the early days of her Costaguana life, the little lady used to clench her hands with exasperation at not being able to take the public affairs of the country as seriously as the incidental ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... increasing scorn of a childishness that sought to vary by quarrels the monotony of their imprisonment. Hadn't the girl learned yet that she—Lila Allan, president of the junior literary society—was not to be provoked into any undignified dispute by puerile taunts? ...
— Beatrice Leigh at College - A Story for Girls • Julia Augusta Schwartz
... an amount of truth, and is so full of absurd pictures of the grotesque deformity of AEsop, of wondrous apocryphal stories, of lying legends, and gross anachronisms, that it is now universally condemned as false, puerile, and unauthentic. It is given up in the present day, by general consent, as unworthy of the ...
— Aesop's Fables - A New Revised Version From Original Sources • Aesop
... Saint Germain, and was more like the people with whom she pictured the former Nettie Wincher as living in privileged intimacy. The Duchess was, indeed, more amiable and accessible than Undine's conception of a Duchess, and displayed a curiosity as great as her daughter's, and much more puerile, concerning her new friend's history and habits. But through her mild prattle, and in spite of her limited perceptions. Undine felt in her the same clear impenetrable barrier that she ran against occasionally in the Princess; ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... arrival there, found some pretence or another to get introduced to my nurse, and took a violent liking to the little, puny, wailing piece of mortality, myself. I was about this time so exceedingly small, that though at the risk of being puerile, I cannot help recording that Joseph Brandon immersed me, all excepting my head, in a quart pot. No one but a Joe Brandon, or a top sawyer, could have had so filthy an idea. I have never been told whether the pot contained ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... Here is one calls it a 'questionable measure.' Bah, there is no strength in that. This one is better; it calls it 'highway robbery.' That sounds something like. But now this one seems satisfied to call it an 'iniquitous scheme'. 'Iniquitous' does not exasperate anybody; it is weak—puerile. The ignorant will imagine it to be intended for a compliment. But this other one—the one I read last—has the true ring: 'This vile, dirty effort to rob the public treasury, by the kites and vultures ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner
... ill-gained as it was unbecomingly exhibited. M. d'Epernon, with an absence of tact as astonishing as it was lamentable in a man whose ambition was unbounded, and who had no party to support his pretensions against the Princes of the Blood, lent himself meanwhile by his puerile and headstrong folly to their enmity, by affecting to brave it; and after a sharp altercation with M. de Soissons, who did not conceal his intention of insulting him whenever and wherever they might meet, the infatuated ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 2 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... was as though time had left him behind. The younger Holland shook its head over the old gentleman of the past century, with his antagonism for the poetry of the day and his rage against Shakespeare and the latter's "puerile" 'King Lear.' For to Bilderdijk even more than to Voltaire, Shakespeare was an abomination. Then in 1830 he received the severest blow of his life: Katherina Wilhelmina died. This happened in Haarlem, whither ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... eyes of the fair. Readers of modern French fiction are aware that the heroes of those edifying tales invariably wear the mustache "hardiment retroussee," which habit doubtless adds a subtle charm to their singularly puerile and fatuous conversation imperceptible ...
— Dross • Henry Seton Merriman
... no aptitude for merchantry. Not only is their sense of the bindingness of a bargain imperfect, but they are apt in business to behave in a puerile manner, to close an arrangement out of mere impatience, to be grossly undiplomatic, to be victimised by their vanity, to believe what they ought not to believe, to discredit what is patently true, ...
— The Author's Craft • Arnold Bennett
... Rutli never joked, except in a ponderous fashion with many involved sentences, I should have thought he was taking a good-humored rise out of me. But it was not funny. I am afraid I dismissed it from my mind as a revelation of something weak and puerile, quite inconsistent with his practical common sense and strong simplicity, and wished he had not alluded to it. I never asked him to tell me the story. It was a year later, and only when he had invited me to come to the opening of a new hotel, erected by him at a mountain spa of great resort, ...
— Stories in Light and Shadow • Bret Harte
... Effingham, like any other problem. In ordinary times, extraordinary men seldom become prominent, power passing into the hands of clever managers. Now, the very vanity, and the petty desires, that betray themselves in glittering uniforms, puerile affectations, and feeble imitations of other systems, probably induce more than half of those who fill the foreign missions to apply for them, and it is no more than we ought to expect that the ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... here, who listens and will answer you; and you believed, for you were not of an age to inquire. Since then, you have discarded these baubles of your childhood, to conceive a less feminine and less puerile God, than this God of the Christian tabernacles; but the first dazzling glare has not departed from your eyes; the real light that you have thought to see has been blended, unknown to yourself, with that false brightness which fascinated you on your entrance into life; you have ...
— Raphael - Pages Of The Book Of Life At Twenty • Alphonse de Lamartine
... St. John is to the left, and the mother of Christ to the right of the cross; and each of these figures is about four inches high. The drawing and execution of these three figures, are barbarously puerile. To the left of St. John is a singular appearance of the upper part of another plate, running at right angles with the principal, and composed also in the form of the upper portion of a gothic window. ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Three • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... on the evening of the 19th, and does not speak of seeing Washington until the following morning. On the strength of this omission one or two of St. Clair's apologists have striven to represent the whole account of Washington's wrath as apocryphal; but the attempt is puerile; the relation comes from an eyewitness who had no possible motive to distort the facts. The Secretary of War, Knox, was certain to inform Washington of the disaster the very evening he heard of it; and whether he sent Denny, or another messenger, ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Four - Louisiana and the Northwest, 1791-1807 • Theodore Roosevelt
... extremely puerile stories of the nursery, often (as in the German ones) interlaced with rhymes. The following, from the banks of the Avon, sounds like an echo from a ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 196, July 30, 1853 • Various
... like a professor, for I was past-master in the science. I had a bitter tongue. How deeply I regret it, God only knows. I have often made an awful fool of myself at conferences, at public meetings, etc.; I have often done silly and puerile things, what the French call betises; I think of them without shame. But the sharp, acrid things I have said, and the few harsh things I have done, fill me with confusion. There's the benefit of a diary. It is an examination of ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... well as queer-shaped and colored bowlders lying on the vari-colored sands, that are not found elsewhere. The waving of the water gives a mottled effect surpassing the most delicate and richly-shaded marbles and onyxes. Watered-silks of the most perfect manufacture are but childish and puerile attempts at reproduction, and finest Turkish shawls, Bokhara rugs or Arab sheiks' dearest-prized Prayer Carpets are but glimmering suggestions of what the Master ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... Lohengrin? This cheap Italian music, sugar-coated in its sensuousness, the awful borrowings from Weber, Marschner, Beethoven, and Gluck—and the story! It is called "mystic." Why? Because it is not, I suppose. What puerile trumpery is that refusal of a man to reveal his name! And Elsa! Why not Lot's wife, whose curiosity turned her ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... reasons." He was speaking peremptorily now and with all the weight of a master mind. "And you are not the woman to be satisfied with anything puerile. There is something back of all this; something you have not imparted. What is ...
— Dark Hollow • Anna Katharine Green
... Napoleon was dead, a Bourbon reigned in France, and Freycinet was the servant of the monarchy to which he owed the command of the expedition of 1817. The suppression of Napoleon's name and the record of his actions from Peron's text, was a puerile piece ...
— Terre Napoleon - A history of French explorations and projects in Australia • Ernest Scott
... (literary) robbery. Whilst as a Briton! Bless us, 'twould take time To picture Homo in his guise Britannic. Here he is making a fine art of crime, There he is fussing in a Puritan panic; Here with MCMUCK he plays the prurient spy, And there with OSCAR in a paroxysm Of puerile paradox spreads to Cultchaw's eye The fopperies of "Artistic Hedonism"! Oh, EVANS, noting Man (not Tertiary) In Church or State, the Studio or the Tavern, One wonders—not was he contemporary With Danish Kjoekkenmoeddings or Kent's Cavern,— ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99, September 13, 1890 • Various
... to his agreement, but seemingly without any intention or desire to yield me satisfaction on the subject under discussion; for, after a great deal of conversation, consisting on his part of trifling evasion and puerile excuses for withholding his assent to the measure, though at the same time professing the most implicit submission to your wishes, I found myself without any other resource than the one of employing that exclusive authority with which I consider your instructions to vest me. ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XII. (of XII.) • Edmund Burke
... most of the tales which offended it, but has not succeeded in discarding them all."(1) Just as the poets of the Rig-Veda prefer to avoid the more offensive traditions about Indra and Tvashtri, so Homer succeeds in avoiding the more grotesque and puerile tales about his own gods.(2) The period of actual apology comes later. Pindar declines, as we have seen, to accuse a god of cannibalism. The Satapatha Brahmana invents a new story about the slaying of Visvarupa. ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... believe the most of us ministers, going about amongst the various communities, could say the same thing. But in the face of a cultivated England laughing at your creed of Jesus, the Christ, the Lord; and in the face of a strange and puerile recrudescence of sacerdotalism and sacramentarianism, which shoves a priest and a rite into the place where Christ should stand, it becomes us Nonconformists who believe that we know a more excellent way to stand shoulder to shoulder, and show that the unities that ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... remarks fewer; some portraits would have been left out, others drawn, and all better finished. I should then have attempted more frequently to expose meanness to contempt, and treachery to abhorrence; should have lashed more severely incorrigible vice, and oftener held out to ridicule puerile vanity and outrageous ambition. In short, I should then have studied more to please than to instruct, by addressing myself seldomer to the reason ...
— Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud, Complete - Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London • Lewis Goldsmith
... sides, minus his evil sides, remained forever. Logically stated, this means that man's goal is the world; this world meaning earth carried to a state higher and with elimination of its evils is the state they call heaven. This theory, on the face of it, is absurd and puerile because it cannot be. There cannot be good without evil, or evil without good. To live in a world where there is all good and no evil, is what Sanskrit logicians call a 'dream ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... characteristics of that "fast-running nation" which is "indivertible in aim," and incredulous of the existence of the unattainable. His dominant failing was a self-dependence, which, in a weaker nature, would have degenerated into self-sufficiency, but just stopped short of that complacent, puerile egotism, which narrows the mind, and rears its own opinions upon a judgment-seat to pronounce verdicts upon the rest of the world. He never doubted his ability to scale any height upon which he fixed his eyes; he laughed at obstacles; he did not believe in impossibilities; ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... and leader of a troop of brilliant but giddy young nobles. The Bastille was captured by the Parlement, and the university promised its support and a subsidy. Thus arose the civil war of the Fronde, one of the most extraordinary contests in history, whose name is derived from the puerile street fights with slings, of the printers' devils and schoolboys of Paris. The incidents of the war read like scenes in a comic opera. A hundred thousand armed citizens were besieged by eight thousand soldiers. The evolution ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... puerile and fanciful," said Miss Gale; "but, for that very reason, they don't infect animals with trigamy. Novels are much ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... passage where the rebel angels cast cannon, make gunpowder, and mow the good angels down in rows, is incredibly puerile and ridiculous. The hateful materialism of the whole thing is patent. I wish that the English Church could have an Index, and put Paradise Lost upon it, and allow no one to read it until he had reached years ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... the mean and cruel wretches who were her judges, had the littleness to endeavour at mortifying, by divesting her of her ornaments, and covering her with the most loathsome rags. But a mind tortured to madness by the sufferings of her country, was not likely to be shaken by such puerile malice; and, when interrogated under this disguise, she still preserved the same firmness, mingled with contempt, which she had displayed when first apprehended. No accusation, nor even implication, of ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... seems to me so empty, so unreal, so puerile. I am bored to death with it. Do you think this is real?" He waved his arms impatiently about him. "It is all a sham and a fraud. I am nothing—nobody. I am a puppet on a hired stage, playing to amuse—not myself!—the ...
— Gordon Keith • Thomas Nelson Page
... man," said the other, "and much too hot-headed to listen to reason. Surely we ought to love truth above our puerile prejudices. We do not make nature, but she is already such as she is, spread out before us, for us to watch her ways and learn ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... contrary, it be itself matter, then spirit acts upon it; and, finally, if it be a compound of the two, then it affords still stronger evidence of reciprocal effects, which are decisive of the whole question in dispute. We are conscious, however, that this reasoning is almost puerile; for laws are mere abstractions, and not actual entities. They indicate the mode in which causes produce effects; in other words, they are signs of the intention and purpose with which the Great Spirit carries ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... what he calls his "necessary acts," or his "great deeds," he is a vulgar, commonplace personage, puerile, theatrical, and vain. Those persons who are invited to St. Cloud, in the summer, receive with the invitation an order to bring a morning toilette and an evening toilette. He loves finery, display, feathers, embroidery, tinsel and spangles, big words, and grand ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... mingled with urgent incentives to the adoption of a virtuous career;—all, in themselves, both unexceptionable and praiseworthy, but, nevertheless, having a strange sound in the ears of those who recognized them as the utterances of one whose conversation was always flippant and puerile, and whose daily life, in the enormity and uninterrupted persistency of its profligacy, rendered him the acknowledged leader of all that was most disreputable ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... calumniator, or one who bears false witness against his neighbor? I do not believe that any man in the United States (or, at least, I have never heard of any) teaches that, if a person only is baptized and receives the Lord's Supper, [he] is safe exclusive of repentance. What a puerile conduct some men manifest in trying to prove that the doctrine with which Mr. Shober has charged me is erroneous, when no man nor class of men contend for it! They are all the while fighting their own shadows. If the reader will take the trouble to read my book ...
— American Lutheranism - Volume 1: Early History of American Lutheranism and The Tennessee Synod • Friedrich Bente
... disclaimed all ideas about a revolution. They had come to consider calmly a decision by the Union Parliament to invade German South West Africa; but while he was speaking, some one produced a flag of the old Free State Republic, and General Kemp rebuked the person for this puerile action. Whether the rebuke was due to the fact that the Boers had not yet then made up their minds to rebel, or because Maritz's plans with the Germans on the south-western frontier had not yet matured, we do not know. Anyway, ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... of the Mother of God should be decked with this worldly symbol, as a reward for services rendered, will be obscure only to those who fail to appreciate the earthly-tangible complexion of southern religion. Puerility is its key-note. The Italian is either puerile or adult; the Englishman remains ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... impenetrable complacency, his peasant-like delight in petty vices, his capacity for hiding the harsh face of reality behind the cloak of romanticism, his general innocence and childishness. But she never envies him his puerile ego; she never envies him ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... was—in complete violation of his capacities—to play just badly enough to be beaten towards the end of the round after an exciting match. It required a good deal of cleverness and self-control to accomplish this, for Lord Ashbridge was a notably puerile performer, but he generally managed it with tact and success, by dint of missing absurdly easy putts, and (here his skill came in) by pulling and slicing his ball into far-distant bunkers. Throughout the game it was his business ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... or bad, sublime or silly, are equally Myths, it may be urged. Very well; but one set, the loftier set, is fitter to survive, and does survive, in what we still commonly call Religion; while the other set, the puerile set of statements, is fairly near to extinction, and is usually called Mythology. One set has been the root of a goodly tree: the other set is being lopped off, like ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... ANTHONY (SUSAN.) SUSIE prophesied then, it will be remembered, that the fair oratress would yet live to be President of the United States and Canadas. Miss LOGAN, with her customary modesty, declined to view the mysterious future in that puerile light, gracefully suggesting, amid a brilliant outburst of puns, metaphors and amusing anecdotes, that SUSIE distorted the facts. Miss ANTHONY, under a mistaken impression that this referred to her peculiar mode of keeping accounts, offered, with a wild shriek of despair ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 25, September 17, 1870 • Various
... love; and so to judge, also, if they be otherwise, still rendering ourselves to reason, notwithstanding the inclination of nature. 'Tis oft-times quite otherwise; and, most commonly, we find ourselves more taken with the running up and down, the games, and puerile simplicities of our children, than we do, afterwards, with their most complete actions; as if we had loved them for our sport, like monkeys, and not as men; and some there are, who are very liberal ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... of certain blue dishes she had desired the week before her sudden death; and one night, driven by an insane impulse to expiate his blindness, he walked to town, bought them, and placed them in a foolish order about her grave. It was a puerile, crazy deed, but no one smiled, not even the little children who heard of it next day, on the way home from school, and went trudging up there to see. To their stirring minds it seemed a strange departure from the comfortable order of things, chiefly because their elders stood about ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... more demagogical. He declares that the only interests affected will be those of bankers and capitalists, but that manufacturers will see prosperity restored to them. Some of his arguments seem almost puerile, as when he says, "If gold has been hoarded through timidity or malignity, the issue of paper will show that gold is not necessary, and it will then come forth." But, as a whole, the speech was brilliant; it was often interrupted by applause; ...
— Fiat Money Inflation in France - How It Came, What It Brought, and How It Ended • Andrew Dickson White
... wild, ferocious face of some robber chief—some fierce yet fascinating hero of Sir Walter Scott's—peering at me from behind them. This feeling at length became so acute, that, in a panic of fear—ridiculous, puerile fear, I forcibly withdrew my gaze and concentrated it abstractedly on the ground at my feet. I then listened, and in the rustling of a leaf, the humming of some night insect, the whizzing of a bat, the whispering of the wind as it moaned softly past me, I fancied—nay, ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... sword of the finest English steel, my snuff-box set with brilliants, my cross set with diamonds, my buckles set with the same stones, were altogether worth more than fifty thousand crowns. This ostentation, though puerile in itself, yet had a purpose, for I wished M. de Bragadin to know that I did not cut a bad figure in the world; and I wished the proud magistrates who had made me quit my native land to learn that I had lost nothing, and could laugh ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... renders the inhabitants of little towns prying and censorious. Idleness, rather than ill-nature, gives birth to scandal, and to the observation of little incidents which narrows the mind. It is frequently only the fear of being talked of which produces that puerile scrupulosity about trifles incompatible with an enlarged plan of usefulness, and with the basis of all moral principles—respect for the virtues which are not merely ...
— Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark • Mary Wollstonecraft
... not directly answered the Executive who had pointed out that many lives could have been saved if the Nipe had been killed six years ago. There was no use in fighting back on such puerile terms. ...
— Anything You Can Do ... • Gordon Randall Garrett
... period, to discover an individual who refused to see, in any one of the specialities around him, the direct interference of a spirit or demon. In our own country, men of science are rather to blame for a too detailed, a puerile and injudicious, manner of treating this great argument, than for ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... fool. He had imagined that he could control himself, and practise the moderation that other men practised when they chose. The puerile restraint annoyed him; his implied inability to master himself humiliated him, the more so because, secretly, he was horribly afraid in the remote depths of ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... ill of your Jewish landlord, whom you wish you could wrap in that rug and throw overboard. He certainly meant well. That formula of card and messenger is so convenient and so cheap. Withal, is he not too busy, think you, to come up to the dock for the puerile, prosaic purpose of shaking hands and saying ta-ta? If you can not consider the matter in this light, try to forget it. One must not be too visceral at the hour of departure. Behold, your skyscrapers and your Statue of Liberty are now receding from view; and your landlord ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... of adventure, either the rich bounty of lyrical styles or the naive, touching crudity of the Christian drama. The seventeenth century turned disdainfully away from the monuments of national genius discovered by it; finding them sometimes shocking in their rudeness, sometimes puerile in their refinements. These unfortunate exhumations, indeed, only serve to strengthen its cult for a simple, correct beauty, the models of which are found in Greece and Rome. Why dream of penetrating the darkness of our origin? Contemporary ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... say, Thompson let himself out. No puerile repetition; no slovenly, slipshod work there. It was the performance of a born orator and poet, and one who, like Timothy, had known the Scriptures from a child—a long, involved litany of seething ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... entered so largely into the fabric and conduct of the political institutions of the people, their mythology, that is, the traditionary legends by which they affected to unfold the mysteries of the universe, was exceedingly mean and puerile. Scarce one of their traditions—except the beautiful one respecting the founders of their royal dynasty—is worthy of note, or throws much light on their own antiquities, or the primitive history of man. Among the traditions of importance is one of the deluge, ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... have something of the same high-raised tone and prophetic spirit. Chaucer is another prime favourite of his, and he has been at the pains to modernize some of the Canterbury Tales. Those persons who look upon Mr. Wordsworth as a merely puerile writer, must be rather at a loss to account for his strong predilection for such geniuses as Dante and Michael Angelo. We do not think our author has any very cordial sympathy with Shakspeare. How should he? ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... philosophy, held to puerile doctrines concerning the motions and nature of the stars, which it is useless to repeat. His addition to science, if he made any, was in treating the magnitudes and distances of the planets. He constructed geographical charts, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume III • John Lord
... in the closeness of his carriage. He hesitated as to what he should do, unwilling to return to Unorna and acknowledge himself vanquished, yet finding it hard to resist his desire to try every means, no matter how little reasonable, how evidently useless, how puerile and revolting to his sounder sense. The street behind him led directly towards Unorna's house. Had he found himself in a more remote quarter, he might have come to another and a wiser conclusion. Being so near ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... first pages you see that the author is deficient in every mental preparation to accomplish the aim of his novel. He not only has not the slightest understanding of the new positive philosophy, but even of the old ideal systems his knowledge is merely superficial and puerile. You could laugh at the heroes of the novel alone as you read their silly and 'hashy' discussions on the young generation had not the novel as a whole been founded on ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... as usual, a puerile revenge in the form of a burlesque. "A vast number" of them assembled at the Coffee House in King Street, and chose selectmen and an orator, "who deliver'd an oration from the balcony to a crowd of ...
— The Siege of Boston • Allen French
... of 1628 fills over forty pages. Calderon follows the narrative very closely, but in one noticeable incident he greatly improves upon his predecessor. This is in the celebrated skeleton scene of the third act. The corresponding scene in Montalvan's story is puerile enough. In Montalvan Luis Enius has no interview with the skeleton, so powerfully described by Calderon. His conversion is effected by a floating piece of paper which had eluded his grasp for two nights, but which he seized on the third, and examined by a mysterious ...
— The Purgatory of St. Patrick • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... strain of liberal, enlightened sentiment, an ingenious and original cast of thought, and a painstaking lucidity of style which leaves the writer's meaning even prosaically plain. There is a good deal of absurd and even puerile exegesis in its pages, which makes you wonder how so much sentimentality can co-exist with so much ability; but the book is vitiated for all purposes beyond mere literary entertainment by one grand defect, which is the guarded theologic obscurity the writer keeps up, or the attempt he makes to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... a list of fifty-four Articles, containing instructions to the clergy of his diocess of Canterbury, some of which are too ludicrous and puerile to excite any other sentiment than ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... science; but in times past many physicists dissociated themselves from studies which they looked upon as unreal word-squabbles, and sometimes not unreasonably abstained from joining in discussions which seemed to them idle and of rather puerile subtlety. They had seen the ruin of most of the systems built up a priori by daring philosophers, and deemed it more prudent to listen to the advice given by Kirchhoff and "to substitute the description of facts for a sham explanation ...
— The New Physics and Its Evolution • Lucien Poincare
... of July 31st—no number, sheets of different sizes. All these observations mean nothing, unless it is that a person without anything to do or to think occupies herself with puerile things. Indeed, I should do very wrong not to profit by all your lessons, and to persist in the error of believing in friendship, and regarding it as a good; no, no; I renounce my errors, and am absolutely persuaded that of all illusions ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... One old lady looked like Martha Washington, but the men all looked "as if they had a screw loose somewhere." They believe that the sun and moon and all the starry hosts of heaven revolve on the inside of this hollow sphere. All our astronomy goes by the board. They look upon it as puerile and contemptible. The founder of the sect had said he would rise from the dead to confirm its truth. His disciples kept his body till the Board of Health obliged them to ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... trick, suppose you take a canvas and see whether YOU can do it? There are brushes, palettes, and gallipots full of paint and varnish. Have you tried, my dear sir—you who set up to be a connoisseur? Have you tried? I have—and many a day. And the end of the day's labor? O dismal conclusion! Is this puerile niggling, this feeble scrawl, this impotent rubbish, all you can produce—you, who but now found Rubens commonplace and vulgar, and were pointing out the tricks of his mystery? Pardon, O great chief, magnificent master and ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... as a Cowboy, 1930. A blatant farrago of lies, included in this list because of its supreme worthlessness. However, some judges might regard the debilitated and puerile lying in The Autobiography of Frank Tarbeaux, as told to Donald H. Clarke, New York, 1930, ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie
... is mere personal gossip about Prince Edward and the battle of Lewes, or about George IV. and the Brighton Pavilion. Not, of course, that there is not real national history here as elsewhere; but it is hard to disentangle from the puerile personalities of historians generally. Nevertheless, some brief attempt to reconstruct the main facts in the subsequent history of Sussex must still be undertaken. The part which Sussex bore passively in the actual Conquest is itself typical of the new relations. England was ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... prohibition of Mejnour, and he found himself gazing too often, with perturbed and daring curiosity, upon the key of the forbidden chamber. He began to feel indignant at a trial of constancy which he deemed frivolous and puerile. What nursery tales of Bluebeard and his closet were revived to daunt and terrify him! How could the mere walls of a chamber, in which he had so often securely pursued his labours, start into living danger? If haunted, it could be but by those delusions which Mejnour had taught ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... bear to hear of us, pray tell him; but he knows it already, and can put it in better language than any man. I hear that he does not like to be told that he may get better; nor is it to be wondered at, considering his firm persuasion that he shall not survive. He can only regard it as a puerile thing, and an insinuation that he shall die. But if his persuasion should happen to be no longer so strong, or if he can now put up with attempts to console him, of what I have said a thousand times, and ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... Experience has since explained to us the results of introducing bloodshed into such quarrels. The laws which recognize war are and were acknowledged. But when A kills B because he thinks B to have done evil. A can no longer complain of murder. And Cicero's criticism is somewhat puerile. "And thou, boy," Antony had said in addressing Octavian—"Et te, puer!" "You shall find him to be a man by-and-by," says Cicero. Antony's Latin is not Ciceronian. "Utrum sit elegantius," he asks, putting some further ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope
... things are all impossible except in a dream. You perceive that they are pure and puerile insanities, the silly creations of an imagination that is not conscious of its freaks—in a word, that they are a dream, and you the maker of it. The dream-marks are all present; you should have recognized ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... This puerile dogma was asserted ostensibly in the interest of Slavery, in order to get rid of the power of Congress over that subject; but the real source of it was the cowardice of those invertebrate and timorous politicians ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... small an amount of truth, and is so full of absurd pictures of the grotesque deformity of Aesop, of wondrous apocryphal stories, of lying legends, and gross anachronisms, that it is now universally condemned as false, puerile, and unauthentic.[101] It is given up in the present day, by general consent, as unworthy of the slightest ...
— Aesop's Fables • Aesop
... proud astonishment to fury. He seemed to realize that this new world, so different from the old sweet, green one, was a world of enemies, every soul against him, and he was ready to fight them all to the death. He neither pawed the sand nor bellowed, for these are puerile betrayals of temper to which the noblest bulls do not descend. Like a tornado he swept across the ring, killed a horse with a single thrust, sent the picador crashing against the barrera; and quick as a wild cat, strong as ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson |
