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More "Naive" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... hoping that it would not be with the airs of Lucia and Traviata that she would become famous. As if in answer, the child began to hum the celebrated waltz, a moment after a beautiful Ave Maria, composed by a Fleming at the end of the fifteenth century, a quick, sobbing rhythm, expressive of naive petulance at delay in the Virgin's intercession. Mr. Innes called it natural music—music which the modern Church abhorred and shamefully ostracised; and the conversation turned on the incurably bad taste and the musical misdeeds of a certain priest, Father Gordon, whom Mr. ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... consisted principally of French provincial girls, sent to Paris to finish their education. Some of them Erica liked exceedingly; every one of them was to her a curious and interesting study. She liked to hear them talk about their home life, and, above all things, to hear their simple, naive remarks about religion. Of course she was on her honor not to enter into discussions with them, and they regarded all English as heretics, and did not trouble themselves to distinguish between the different grades. But there was nothing to prevent her from observing and listening, ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... the heart, Celia had taken a 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, ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... Jackson had been seriously doubted. As it was, he lost many votes through a report that he had been guilty of saying that "he was as strong for Jackson as any reasonable man should be." The Governor himself, in his naive account of the canvass, acknowledges the damaging nature of this accusation, and comforts himself with quoting an indiscretion of Kinney's, who opposed a projected canal on the ground that "it would flood ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay
... This naive suggestion did not affect him as much as the fact that this fair young girl had confessed herself his friend. He did not look at Myrtle now; he stared straight ahead, at the wall paper, and his brow was furrowed as ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces and Uncle John • Edith Van Dyne
... instinctively that he was going to have to keep the number of his immediate associates small. They were going to have to know his secret, and no man is so naive as not to realize that while one person can keep a secret, it becomes twice as hard for two and from that point on the likelihood fades in ...
— The Common Man • Guy McCord (AKA Dallas McCord Reynolds)
... from the unconscious, naive folk-song type of Haydn, we find highly wrought instrumental melodies; although such was his inborn spontaneity of expression that we are never aware of the labor expended. His works are quite as clear as those of Haydn, but they show a more conscious ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... epigrams to say to Mr. Smith to-night. How delightfully rustic we all are! So naive! I am going to order dinner, and add up the household ...
— The Green Carnation • Robert Smythe Hichens
... the ancient law. But it 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 • Militia of Mercy
... 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 ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... there fell on him a great temptation: Why should he not cut St. Guthlac's throat, and instal himself in his cell, that he might have the honour and glory of sainthood? But St. Guthlac perceived the inward temptation (which is told with the naive honesty of those half-savage times), and rebuked the offender into confession, and all went ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley
... fancies. Conversations with the Twin Sailors filled many of the pages; accounts of Paul's "adventures" occupied others. Sometimes it seemed impossible that a child of eleven should have written them, then would come an expression so boyish and naive that Miss Trevor laughed delightedly over it. When she finished the book and closed it she found Stephen Kane at her elbow. He removed his pipe and ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... falseness of her position in the midst of a court noted for its gallantry contributed much, no doubt, to draw a veil of melancholy over a face where the charms and the vivacity of love must have shone in earlier days. Obliged to repress the naive impulses and emotions of a woman when she simply feels them instead of reflecting about them, passion was still virgin in the depths of her heart. Her principal attraction came, in fact, from this innate youth, which sometimes, however, played her false, and gave to her ideas ...
— The Recruit • Honore de Balzac
... 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 ...
— Queen Victoria • Anonymous
... to allow this theory to "have its day, as all things have." How far Schiller penetrated its arena we cannot say, but he wrote several essays, imbued in its spirit, upon aesthetic subjects; notably, "Grace and Dignity," "Naive and Sentimental Poetry," and "Letters on the Aesthetic ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... devotion, an exquisite loyalty. The tyrannical man, the monster, the Black Man, find a place here like the Lestrigons and the Cyclops of Homer only to inspire horror by contrast with softer manners; they are almost what the wicked man is in the naive imagination of a child brought up by a mother in the ideas of a gentle and pious morality. The primitive man of Teutonism is revolting by his purposeless brutality, by a love of evil that only gives him skill ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... halt in front of it, and two hundred pairs of eyes, brimful with simple faith and simple trust, gazed in reverence on the naive wax figure behind the grating, within its throne of rough stone and whitewash. It was dressed in blue calico spangled with tinsel, and had a crown on its head made of gilt paper and a veil of coarse tarlatan. Two china pots containing artificial flowers were placed on ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... wild letters in which a young man points a pistol at a refusal, letters full of boyish casuistry and the incoherent reasoning of an idealist; a delicious tissue of words embroidered here and there by the naive utterances that women love so well—unconscious revelations of the ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... at the present time is in a state of chaos owing to this double origin. Its external motives—the expression of love and fear, etc.—are too material and naive for the abstract ideas of the future. In the search for more subtle expression, our modern reformers have looked to the past for help. Isadora Duncan has forged a link between the Greek dancing and that of the future. In this she is working on parallel lines to the painters who are looking ...
— Concerning the Spiritual in Art • Wassily Kandinsky
... into the Union till September 9, 1850, and yet that the first session of its State Legislature had met, legislated, and adjourned by April 22, 1850, some appreciation may be had of the speed limit—if there was a limit. The record of the naive self-sufficiency of that Legislature is ...
— California, Romantic and Resourceful • John F. Davis
... story is as old as human speech,—and perhaps even antedates it. A naive acceptance of the supernatural was unquestionably one of the primal attributes of human intelligence. The ghost story may thus quite conceivably be the first form of tale ever invented. It makes its appearance ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various
... become a collaborator. In such a way he must have planned with Mansfield over Brummell; thus he may have worked with Julia Marlowe, telling her some of the romantic incidents he had drawn from his mother's own Maryland love story for "Barbara Frietchie." In the same naive spirit, he consulted, by letter, with Arthur Byron for his "stardom" in "Major Andre"—which waned so ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: The Moth and the Flame • Clyde Fitch
... look had passed from her face; so also had the world-wise expression. There was something in her present naive frankness that prevented it ...
— The Gentle Art of Cooking Wives • Elizabeth Strong Worthington
... priests had resolved to take against Jesus was quite in conformity with the established law. The procedure against the "corrupter" (mesith), who sought to injure the purity of religion, is explained in the Talmud, with details, the naive impudence of which provokes a smile. A judicial ambush is there made an essential part of the examination of criminals. When a man was accused of being a "corrupter," two witnesses were suborned who were concealed behind a partition. ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... good sense. Without vailing the character of the voluptuous queen, or concealing the poetical aspects of her romantic history, he delineates the events in her life, for which she is now chiefly remembered, with a naive simplicity that becomes piquant from its apparent artlessness. Nor does he indulge, to any disagreeable excess, in the superfluous moralizing which a less shrewd writer would have deemed essential to the effect. He leaves the story to assert its ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... 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
... these had arisen by natural laws from a primitive unformed material was known to the Greeks, was developed by the Romans, and even received the approval of early Christian Fathers, who wrote long before the idea had been invented that the naive legends of the Old Testament were an authoritative and literal account of the origin of the world. After a long interval, in which scientific thought was stifled by theological dogmatism, the theory of evolution, particularly in its application to animals, ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... weight and grossness of material bodies. And thus our philosopher is punished in the sinning part; his contempt of the earthly has led him into an abuse of abstract reasoning, and this abuse has made him the dupe of a very naive physical metaphor. ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... Chinon, and it was urged that it, a male fief, was not capable of alienation. Philip was not inclined to accept this reason as final and the negotiations hung fire, much to the distress of the Duchess of Bourbon, who feared a breach between her husband and brother. Naive are the phrases in one of her letters ...
— Charles the Bold - Last Duke Of Burgundy, 1433-1477 • Ruth Putnam
... touched, as our forefathers must have been, at the recital of the boundless suffering and the overwhelming concatenation of sin and expiation in the lives of the Recken and Frauen of the Nibelungen Legend. That naive singer has remained nameless and unknown, who about the end of the 12th century wrote down this legend in poetic form, thus preserving forever our most precious relic of Germanic Folksepic. A powerful story it is of sin and suffering: ...
— Legends of the Rhine • Wilhelm Ruland
... their savings to invest with Granger. And Granger turned the receipts over to the great masters of his company, minus his large commission. Granger was only one tentacle of the company, one machine for extracting money from naive, land-hungry citizens. The powerful, cunning men—or man—behind it ...
— The Plunderer • Henry Oyen
... new books, and new people are always a joy to me," she said, in a glow of naive enthusiasm. And then she blushed slightly lest he should discover a personal application in the last-named, or even in the ...
— Pearl of Pearl Island • John Oxenham
... again at intervals, finding her naive love and humble adoration and obedience very pleasant; and, meeting her once at a peasant's fair, he jestingly yielded to the burlesque solicitations of a mountebank in a white mitre, paid a small fee, and went through an absurd ceremony of ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... at me attentively; he is very naive, in reality. Then, very slowly, he put one hand in his pocket and drew out the whole bundle of money. It looked ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... Meanwhile great changes were made in labor 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 societies adopted fantastic names such as "The Supreme Mechanical Order of the Sun," "The ...
— The Armies of Labor - Volume 40 in The Chronicles Of America Series • Samuel P. Orth
... 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 common propriety. They ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... that always looked a little sleepy under their long lashes, kept straying about the cheerful rooms with naive admiration. Presently she drew on her cotton gloves. 'I guess I must ...
— My Antonia • Willa Cather
... earliest form, a spontaneous and instinctive endeavor to shape the facts of the world to meet the needs of the imagination, the cravings of the heart. It involves a free, poetic dealing with realities in accordance with the law of mental growth; it is the naive activity of the young imagination of the race, untrammelled by the necessity of ...
— Fairy Tales Every Child Should Know • Various
... time to 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 ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... 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 think ...
— The Ear in the Wall • Arthur B. Reeve
... marvellous resemblance this acute and unscrupulous womanhood bore to Lady Holme's, even through all its obvious difference from hers. All her little mannerisms of voice, look, manner and movement, were there but turned towards commonness, even towards a naive but very self-conscious impropriety. Had she been a public performer instead of merely a woman of the world, the whole audience must have at once recognised the imitation. As it was, her many friends in the house noticed it, and during the short progress of ...
— The Woman With The Fan • Robert Hichens
... all morning. When he was called in to dinner, he saw at once that Tighe had laid his spell upon her. She was again the sullen, resentful girl of yesterday. Suspicion filmed her eyes. The eager light of faith in him that had quickened them while she listened for his answers to her naive questions about the great world ...
— The Sheriff's Son • William MacLeod Raine
... me," panted the boy breathlessly, and quite innocent of this naive way of expressing himself, for it never occurred to him how pitifully small his chances of escape had been in pitting himself, a mere lad, against nearly a hundred of the active warriors ...
— The Peril Finders • George Manville Fenn
... Camber, smiling in her naive way, "we only have one servant, except Ah Tsong, her name is Mrs. Powis. She is visiting her daughter who is married. We made the poor old ...
— Bat Wing • Sax Rohmer
... In this naive history we learn to look at life from the Esquimaux point of view. Mr. Hall's sympathetic nature fitted him for this difficult task; and having accomplished it well, he is enabled, by his vivid descriptions, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... exercise. Dick felt something of his old tenderness return to this wholesome, pretty girl at his side; perhaps he betrayed it in his voice, or in an unconscious lingering by her bridle-rein, but she accepted it with a naive reserve which he naturally attributed to the effect of his own previous preoccupation. He bore it so gently, however, that it awakened her interest, and, possibly, her pique. Her reserve relaxed, and by the time they returned to the hacienda they ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... fully proved that the artists, as a class, have never been false to religion. From the poets of the dark ages sprang a literature strange and marvellous, but full of naive faith, and bearing striking witness to the activity of the human spirit even in those dim centuries: I mean the literature of 'visions and legends.' And to estimate the importance of these consolatory creations aright, we must remember ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... perceived that the letters of our dear girl were more constrained and formal than before. It was as if she was writing now rather to comply with a sense of duty than to give vent to the light-hearted gaiety and naive enjoyment which breathed in every line of her earlier communications. So at least it seemed to us, and again the old suspicion presented itself to my mind, and I feared that all was not ...
— The Lost Stradivarius • John Meade Falkner
... tyranny that followed. Cooking is a weird mystery to me. As for Bill and the Kid, courtesy forbids detailed comment. The Kid had been uniformly successful in disguising the most familiar articles of diet; and Bill was perhaps least unsuccessful in the making of flapjacks. According to his naive statement, he had discovered the trick of mixing the batter while manufacturing photographer's mounting paste. His statement was never questioned. My only criticism on his flapjacks was simply that he left ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... name recalls the delightful story of "Rab and his Friends" in "Horae Subsicivae," with its naive description of a very original "tyke" of a doggie—a biography which had so lived in my recollection that when a queer little fluffy dumpling of a puppy was given me I could not help giving it the old familiar name, little knowing how aptly true the name would prove ...
— Wild Nature Won By Kindness • Elizabeth Brightwen
... 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 ...
— Medical Investigation in Seventeenth Century England - Papers Read at a Clark Library Seminar, October 14, 1967 • Charles W. Bodemer
... had played her part admirably, showing that a young girl, however simple and naive, has the instinct of dissimulation, which only requires opportunity to ...
— The Regent's Daughter • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... or so Japanese officers passed through Kiev, too. They were bound for the front, escorting their guns and ammunition. How curious they looked beside the big, naive Russians. They were like porcelain figurines with impenetrable, yellow faces, mask-like, and tiny hands and feet. What a finished product they appear, and yet they go to the front and observe the latest methods of warfare and multiply their merchant ...
— Trapped in 'Black Russia' - Letters June-November 1915 • Ruth Pierce
... in the case of so consummate an artist does not matter (unless to the solemn and naive mind), Maupassant of all writers of fiction demands least forgiveness from his readers. He does not require forgiveness because he is ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... "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 old Mizoo, an' it wouldn't ...
— Prairie Flowers • James B. Hendryx
... found something to interest you at last!" said Miss Melhuish, in naive triumph. "Yes—burglars! But don't speak so loud. It's supposed to be kept a great secret. I really oughtn't to tell ...
— The Amateur Cracksman • E. W. Hornung
... the girl to tell me much of her life in Nebraska; of her friends and their amusements. Hers had been the usual story of any fresh wholesome girl. The social life in a small town had limited her experiences, but had kept her deliciously naive and sweet. ...
— The Lady and Sada San - A Sequel to The Lady of the Decoration • Frances Little
... 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 retrospective ...
— Chosen Peoples • Israel Zangwill
... another glimpse of that awful winter. His naive words are, "Chie-ke-nayelle, a Slavi from Fort Norman, was a winning fellow, handsome, gracious, the possessor of a happy countenance. On his features played always a smile of contentment and ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... you can 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
... with a duet ("Schelm! halt fest") in which Agatha's fear and anxiety are charmingly contrasted with the lightsome and cheery nature of Annchen, her attendant, and this in turn is followed by a naive and coquettish arietta ("Kommt ein schlanker Bursch gegangen") sung by the latter. Annchen departs, and Agatha, opening her window and letting the moonlight flood the room, sings the famous scena and prayer, ...
— The Standard Operas (12th edition) • George P. Upton
... valley, and at once breasted the couloir leading to the Col, where we had them well in sight. They found the ascent much "harder on the collar" than they expected: fortunately the sole of the huge gutter yielded a trickle of water. The upper part was, to their naive surprise, mere climbing on all fours; and they reached the summit, visible from our halting-place, in two hours. Here they also were summarily stopped by perpendicular rocks on either side, and by the deep gorge or crevasse, shedding seawards ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 2 • Richard Burton
... the paper. "'Tis a posy, and fairly enough writ." He read the lines, blushing like a girl. They were very naive, and ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... she prefers it, Wisdom. "Only that?" says wicked Doris; but Clarice helps him from replying to the scoffer by going on to ask whether the fruit of Wisdom is not happiness? "And, Madame, the making others happy." "Dear me," says naive Lucinde, half under her breath, "I must be a philosophe, for I have been told a hundred times that it only depended on myself to be happy by making others happy." There is more wickedness from Doris; but Ariste, with a contemptuous smile, ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... about God. The contemporary sermon on Deity minimizes or leaves out divine transcendence; thus it starves one fundamental impulse in man—the need and desire to look up. Instead of this transcendence modern preaching emphasizes immanence, often to a naive and ludicrous degree. God is the being who is like us. Under the influence of that monistic idealism, which is a derived philosophy of the humanistic impulse, preaching lays all the emphasis upon divine immanence in sharpest ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... took the train for the next station, Tambak. No European had ever done such a thing before apparently, and there was quite a fuss at the station to find a first or even a second-class ticket. And during the search the railway officials displayed the most naive curiosity, and questioned the traveller without restraint. Arrived at Tambak X. descended, and immediately the station-master hurried forward and politely assured him that he had made a mistake, since Gombong, the large town, was the next station but one. He obviously could not ...
— From Jungle to Java - The Trivial Impressions of a Short Excursion to Netherlands India • Arthur Keyser
... further thoroughly discusses Entente's plans for passage through Belgium, Calais, and England. France doubtful protectors, Barnardiston's insinuations relative Flushing question, both perfidious and naive postulates dressing plan of battle against threatening Franco-British invasion ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War from the Beginning to March 1915, Vol 1, No. 2 - Who Began the War, and Why? • Various
... impossible to be offended with such charming self- complacency,—the naive conceit of the man was as harmless as the delight of a fair girl who has made her first conquest, and Theos smiling, kept the flowers. By this time the surrounding throng had broken up into little knots and groups,—all ill-humor on the part of the populace ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... reference to the early annals of human speech." Among the Algonquins the sun-god Michabo was represented as a hare, his name being compounded of michi, "great," and wabos, "a hare"; yet wabos also meant "white," so that the god was doubtless originally called simply "the Great White One." The same naive process has made bears of the Arkadians, whose name, like that of the Lykians, merely signified that they were "children of light"; and the metamorphosis of Kallisto, mother of Arkas, into a bear, and of Lykaon into a wolf, rests apparently ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske
... Seth smiled at the naive simplicity of the suggestion. He did not detect the guile at first. But it dawned on him presently and he smiled more. She had said she was not going to ...
— The Watchers of the Plains - A Tale of the Western Prairies • Ridgewell Cullum
... 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, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... a story from one of Joffre's aides. Joffre, by the way, is the quietest, sweetest, most naive, and babylike individual I ever met. All of the women, as well as the men, are in love with him. When he met Nancy, at a garden party, he kissed her on both cheeks. Nancy, as you may imagine, was ecstatically ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... 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
... 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 ...
— Through the Wall • Cleveland Moffett
... of the primates is the character of their self-consciousness. This useful faculty, that can probe so-deep, has one naive defect—it relies too readily on its own findings. It doesn't suspect enough its own unconfessed predilections. It assumes that it can be completely impartial—but isn't. To instance an obvious way in which it will betray them: beings that are intensely self-conscious and aware of ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day Jr.
... itself is hardly as novel as its contemporary advocates appear to maintain; and free verse goes back far in our English speech and song. But the new generation believes that it has made a discovery in reverting to sensations rather than thought, to the naive reproduction of retinal and muscular impressions, as if this were the ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... of the days of the Spanish explorers in their themes, the Aztec myth of El Dorado, and the fabled Fountain of Youth, sought by Ponce de Leon. In their way, these are the loveliest fountains on the Exposition grounds, though they differ so from all the rest that comparison is not easy. The naive conception of the Fountain of Youth and the realistic strength of that of El Dorado lead visitors back to them again and again. They are hidden fountains, as their prototypes were hidden. Each terminates one of the two open colonnades with a central ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... these divisions included several courts, and the whole was disposed around a principal court, the court of honor. The entire assemblage of edifices was nothing more than one vast ground-floor. "The design followed in the arrangement of these composite dwellings," it has been said, is almost naive in its simplicity: the plan is merely divided into as many right parallelograms as there are services to be provided for, and these rectangles are so disposed as to touch along one side or at one of the angles, but they never interfere with or command one another; they are contiguous or adjacent ...
— The American Architect and Building News, Vol. 27, No. 733, January 11, 1890 • Various
... no note of time." These Sicilian expressions are replaced in Tuscany by the similar one: Il tempo delle novelle passa presto ("Time passes quickly in stories"). Sometimes the narrator will bring himself or herself into the story in a very naive manner; as, for example, when a name is wanted. So in telling a Sicilian story which is another version of "The Fair Angiola" given in our text, the narrator, Gna Sabbedda, continues: "The old woman ...
— Italian Popular Tales • Thomas Frederick Crane
... or 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 ...
— Art in Needlework - A Book about Embroidery • Lewis F. Day
... a measure of Anita's earnest naive personality. Or was he a very clever scoundrel, with irony lurking in his soft voice, and a chuckle that he could ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, March 1930 • Various
... French have had to pay the same penalty as other ill managed Democracies; Bankruptcies direct or indirect with galloping inflation and enormous devaluations with as a consequence impoverishment of naive depositors and credulous pension fund participants, wars for which France was badly prepared with millions of dead and prisoners and with occupation of France as a result. The culprits, the elected politicians, have either died ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... at him in the half-lit room with very flattering admiration.... Seen thus, with her scarlet lips a little parted—disclosing pearls,—and with her naive dark eyes aglow, she was quite incredibly pretty and caressable. She had almost forgotten until now that this stalwart soldier, too, was in love with her. But now her spirits were rising venturously, and she knew that she liked Ned Musgrave. He ...
— The Line of Love - Dizain des Mariages • James Branch Cabell
... 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
... naive to assume that an increase of black cadets from four to nine would stir much interest when other statistics suggested that black officers had a limited future in the service. As Secretary Royall pointed out, even if the total number of black ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... again, or rather also," flung back the stout girl. "I must take all the cracks and the chuckles and presently some naive little freshie will amble along and ask me if I happen to be one of the soap bubbles she just blew off her penny pipe," and the pneumatic cheeks puffed out in ...
— Jane Allen: Junior • Edith Bancroft
... and handed me a card with courtesy. It was quite refreshing to meet such a man in Paris in 1869—so naive, so unassuming, so free from that aggressive self-esteem which characterized Frenchmen before the war. Since I had arrived in the capital under the circumstances that amused John Turner so consumedly, I had been tempted ...
— Dross • Henry Seton Merriman
... nervous, product of a society perhaps not quite as free and Nietzschean as it deemed itself, but yet cultivated and illuminated and refined, it nevertheless seemed exuberantly sound. The sweet, broad, diatonic idiom, the humor, the sleepy Bavarian accent, the pert, naive, little folk-tunes it employed, the tranquil, touching, childlike tones, the close of "Tod und Verklaerung," with its wondrous unfolding of corolla upon corolla, were refreshing indeed after all the burning chromaticism of Wagner, the sultry air ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... If traditional folkways are subjected to rational or ethical examination they are no longer naive and unconscious. It may then be found that they are gross, absurd, or inexpedient. They may still be preserved by conventionalization. Conventionalization creates a set of conditions under which a thing may be ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... Charleston and Gibraltar, and the yellow fever having just broken out 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; ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... abruptly halted in her naive speech, as if she had come face to face with something she had not ...
— Tharon of Lost Valley • Vingie E. Roe
... forceful, frank, naive. She was impressed by his nearness; but Lane saw that it was the fact of his being a soldier with a record, not his mere physical propinquity that affected her. She seemed both bold and shy. But she did not show any ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... rather not," he decided quietly. "I know you mean to be kind but that sort of thing—well, I don't think I understand it. Besides," he added with a sudden naive relief, as he clutched at a fugitive but plausible thought, "if I did you would not believe the things which I have been ...
— The Tempting of Tavernake • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... at the boy's amazement. There was a subtle sympathy between these two that surprised me, for Ruth Schuyler was fastidious in her choice of friends. But he amused her, and he was never really impertinent—merely naive and unconventional. ...
— Vicky Van • Carolyn Wells
... in order to get—what had he sought?—a silly, ugly, great house, a temper-destroying motor-car, a number of disrespectful, abject servants; thwarted intrigues for a party-fund baronetcy as the crest of his life, perhaps. You cannot imagine the littleness of those former times; their naive, queer absurdities! And for the first time in my existence I thought of these things without bitterness. In the former days I had seen wickedness, I had seen tragedy, but now I saw only the extraordinary ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... This singularly naive give-and-take fashion of asking a favour of a God recalls the old Scotch epitaph cited ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... whereupon, Apollo angrily aroused the pretended sleeper, and charged him with the theft; but the child stoutly denied all knowledge of it, and so cleverly did he play his part, that he even inquired in the most naive manner what sort of animals cows were. Apollo threatened to throw him into Tartarus if he would not confess the truth, but all to no purpose. At last, he seized the babe in his arms, and brought him into the presence of his august father, who was seated in the council chamber of the gods. ...
— Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome • E.M. Berens
... now that I have had the pleasure of meeting you, I will see you safe for at least part of your way home," he said, passing by her naive query "Why an honor?" as a thing to be answered only by that smile ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... intimate ways in which economic and political rights are inextricably entangled together. It made one realize afresh that only a President who kept himself innocent of any knowledge of secret treaties during the war, could be naive enough to believe that the promise to return complete sovereignty retaining only economic rights is a satisfactory solution. It threw fresh light upon the contention that at most and at worst Japan had only taken over German rights, and that since we had acquiesced ...
— China, Japan and the U.S.A. - Present-Day Conditions in the Far East and Their Bearing - on the Washington Conference • John Dewey
... pleasant good-night as she left the dining-room, and was delighted with her naive expressions of admiration and appreciation of his ...
— Patty in Paris • Carolyn Wells
... about noon, when there was a long discussion of the points at issue. Workman after workman came to the platform and gave his view. Some of the speeches were a little naive, as when one soldier said that Comrades Lenin and Trotsky had often before pointed out difficult roads, and that whenever they had been followed they had shown the way to victory, and that therefore, though there was much in the Central Committee's theses that was hard to ...
— The Crisis in Russia - 1920 • Arthur Ransome
... much to love in you!" and she made her heart's confession with a perfectly naive candour. "I daresay you don't see it yourself, ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... right sat David Lloyd George, with thick gray hair and snapping Celtic eyes. Alert and magnetic, he was on the edge of his chair, questioning and interrupting. Frankly ignorant of the details of continental geography and politics, naive in his inquiries, he possessed the capacity for acquiring effective information at lightning speed. Unfortunately he was not over-critical and the source of his information was not invariably the highest authority; he was prone to accept the views of journalists rather than those ...
— Woodrow Wilson and the World War - A Chronicle of Our Own Times. • Charles Seymour
... whole rose, in beautiful symmetrical lines, a wooden belfry, tapering from a square tower into a delicately modelled spire. To complete and accentuate the note of the picturesque, the superstructure was held in its place by rude modern beams, propping the tower with a naive disregard of decorative embellishment. We knew it at once as the quaint and ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... am of my presence of mind! "Hallo," I said instantly in a loud and naive tone, "somebody's breaking your windows, Schomberg. Would you please tell one of your boys to bring out here a pack of cards and a couple of lights? And ...
— Falk • Joseph Conrad
... at night in her dressing-gown (her beautiful hair, released from its ribbons, streaming down her neck and shoulders), and comes most unexpectedly upon him. He is young. The senior, over whose face "a smile flickers for a moment" when the heroine says something naive, and whom she (entirely misunderstanding her feelings) thinks she hates, smokes unostentatiously; but though a little inclined to quiet "chaff," he is a man of deep feeling. By and by he will open out and gather her up in his arms. The scorner's chair is filled. I see him, shadow-like, ...
— My Lady Nicotine - A Study in Smoke • J. M. Barrie
... secret," Keith laughed. "Tell you later. Fire away!" He tasted the soup, while Jenny looked at five little letter biscuits in her own plate. She spelt them out E T K I H—KEITH. He watched her, enjoying the spectacle of the naive mind in action as the light darted into her face. "I've got JENNY," he said, embarrassed. She craned, and read the letters with open eyes of marvel. They both beamed afresh ...
— Nocturne • Frank Swinnerton
... strangers, would be pleased on these occasions to put on a little winning graciousness, giving her hand with the air of a small princess to any one soliciting the honour of a dance; and she was seldom without some tall partner, attracted by her gentillesse and naive prattle—a moustached Austrian or Prussian officer, perhaps, in white or blue uniform, or one of her counts or barons, with a bit of ribbon dangling from his button-hole; or, if all else failed, there was always her father, who was ever ready to indulge her in any of her fancies, ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... half-smiling, half-tender reproach at him. "You know who I mean, Bob. And I'm not going to have him put in danger on our account," she added with naive dogmatism. ...
— Gunsight Pass - How Oil Came to the Cattle Country and Brought a New West • William MacLeod Raine
... days 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
... him, without having encountered the keen 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 ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... to the young heart, for it is full of nature and love and fortunate happenings. What could be more charming than the spirit in which the hero throws away the vegetables in his garden and puts in flowers? What more naive than his spyings, his fiddlings? The strength of the story lies in the fact that while its head is in the clouds, its feet are on the ground. There is no sentimentalizing, no breaking down of class distinctions; the good-for-nothing marries his lady-love, ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... seaside front, a member of a troupe then appearing called The Boy Guardsmen. He was a sweet child. Fourteen years old he was, and he gave me cigarettes, and he drank rum and stout, and was one of the most naive and cleanly simple youths I ever met. He had an angelic trust in the good of everything and everybody. He worshipped me because I bought him a book he wanted. He believed that the ladies appearing in the same bill at his hall ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... 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 me time and ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... about the old man, and Ryder had small difficulty in drawing nearer the circle. A green-turbaned Arab, with the profile of a Washington and the naive eyes of youth, whispered to him courteously that it was the tale of the Third Kaland, and the Prince Azib was in the palace of the forty damsels who were farewelling him, as they were to depart, according to custom, ...
— The Fortieth Door • Mary Hastings Bradley
... such a short time ago that he was taking his first stumbling steps along the dim hallways of language. I have been turning back to the journal I began shortly after his birth and kept up for so long, the naive journal of a young mother registering her wonder at the unfolding mysteries of life. It became less minute and less meticulous, I notice, as the years slipped past, and after the advent of Poppsy and Pee-Wee the entries seem a bit hurried and often incoherent. But I have dutifully noted how ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... result of negotiations begun under such unfavourable auspices, though the value of concessions, to the observance of which nothing constrained the Sultan, seems problematical, and was certainly less than the ambassador, in his naive vanity, hastened to assume ...
— De Orbe Novo, Volume 1 (of 2) - The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D'Anghera • Trans. by Francis Augustus MacNutt
... Rachel now became inquisitive, calculating, It seemed to be saying: "One day I may be able to make use of this piece of goods." But there was a certain careless good-humour in it, too. What he saw was a naive young maid, with agreeable features, and a fine, fresh complexion, and rather reddish hair. (He did not approve of the colour of the hair.) He found pleasure in regarding her, and in the perception that he had abashed her. Yes, he liked to see her timid and downcast before him. He was an old ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... Herbert was perplexed. Between young ladies whose naive exuberance impelled them to throw handkerchiefs at his window and young ladies whose equally naive modesty demanded the withdrawal from his bedroom of a chair on which they had once sat, his lot seemed to have fallen in a troubled locality. Yet a day or two later he heard Cherry ...
— The Heritage of Dedlow Marsh and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... him with naive incredulity and surprise. It would have been a challenge to be kissed from any other woman, but Leam, with her fire and passion and personal reticence all in one, had no thought of offering such a challenge, still less of submitting to ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various
... had caught a Tartar! Outside at the end of the corridor, in full view, but out of earshot, of Narayan Singh, Yussuf Dakmar made a proposal to Jeremy that was almost perfect in its naive obliquity. There was nothing original or even unusual about it, except the circumstances, time and place. Green-goods men and blue-sky stock salesmen, race-course touts and sure-thing politicians get away with the same proposition in the U.S. every day of the week, and pocket millions by it. Only, ...
— Affair in Araby • Talbot Mundy
... attitude than with D'Enrico's or Giacomo Ferro's. Still there are only four figures out of the eleven that are mere otiose supers, and taking the work as a whole it leaves a pleasant impression as being throughout naive and homely, and sometimes, which is of less ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler
... this naive utterance, but it would not be repressed, and Aunt Sophy had to rise to the occasion as best she could, with rather a grim face, she rose from her seat upon the sofa and advanced towards her brother's wife, holding out ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... 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
... I am an ambassador from God Almighty. I am sent here to save the Emperor. He is a good man; he is followed up by bad men who seek his life; I can save him; I will be his cup-bearer; I WILL DRIVE HIS TEAM." This latter conception of the Emperor's means of locomotion struck me as naive, especially in view of the fact that near my house was an immense structure filled with magnificent horses for the Emperor and court—a veritable equine palace. "Yes," said my visitor; "I will drive the Emperor's team. I want you to introduce me to him immediately." My answer was that ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... of the Prussian state to conserve human energy for the strength and the enrichment of the Empire. Whatever was good for the Empire was good, it was assumed, for the people. The humanitarians in the United States who tried to introduce labor legislation in their own country accepted this naive philosophy of the German people, which had been so skilfully developed by Prussian statesmen, without appreciating that its result was enervating. Our prevailing political philosophy, however, that workers and capitalists understand their ...
— Creative Impulse in Industry - A Proposition for Educators • Helen Marot
... see in them the young student conscientiously writing his first review—writing it at inordinate length, as young reviewers are apt to do, and treating the subject ab ovo in a grave, pontifical way, which is a little naive and inexperienced indeed, but still promising, as all seriousness of work and purpose is promising. All that is individual in it is first of all the strong Christian feeling which much of it shows, and secondly, the tone of melancholy which already ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... cooking stove and drew off her woolen mittens. She folded a hand on her cheek, forcing the cheek out of drawing by her hand's pressure. There was always about her gestures a curious nakedness—indeed, about her face and hands. They were naive, perfectly likely to reveal themselves in their current awkwardness and ugliness of momentary expression which, by its very frankness, made a new law as it broke an ...
— Christmas - A Story • Zona Gale
... the woods, loudly calling her name and making naive promises to the night, if she would only come back. They collided with each other and, tripping over roots, measured their lengths ...
— The Huntress • Hulbert Footner
... times merely the vision of an hour and lost again—who realizes in their eyes the dream at once of what they could wish to be and of what they would like to love: chaste ardors and troublesome, of the future, formed of mixing currents. The big brother was aware of this naive homage and was flattered by it. Not so long ago he had tried to read the heart of the little brother, and explain things to him with discretion; for, although more robust, like him he was molded of that fine clay which, among ...
— Pierre and Luce • Romain Rolland
... still some hint of the child in the naive nobility of her youth. Joyce Seldon would have had no doubts about what to think of this alien society where an honest man could be a thief and his friend stand ready to excuse him. Moya found it ...
— The Highgrader • William MacLeod Raine
... 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, wily, artful, politic, designing. ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... The contemporary sermon on Deity minimizes or leaves out divine transcendence; thus it starves one fundamental impulse in man—the need and desire to look up. Instead of this transcendence modern preaching emphasizes immanence, often to a naive and ludicrous degree. God is the being who is like us. Under the influence of that monistic idealism, which is a derived philosophy of the humanistic impulse, preaching lays all the emphasis upon divine immanence in sharpest contrast ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... house is American Indian. The brilliant and strikingly designed Navajo blankets may be used for both rugs and couch covers, or hung up as wall-ornaments. Moqui basketware serves equally well for useful purposes, such as scrap-baskets, and for ornamentation. The pottery of the Pueblo Indians, being naive and primitive in design, is much more intimate and therefore appropriate than the Japanese bric-a-brac which ...
— Practical Suggestions for Mother and Housewife • Marion Mills Miller
... towards poor Mary; but that for once he had found that kind of thing almost as amusing as women seemed to do. The young girl with her half-Indian nature, and wholly Canadian—ultra Canadian—bringing up, was so bright, simple, and naive, that she was worth watching. Her wonderful beauty, and the unconscious grace of her father's people, kept her from ever appearing countrified or awkward; her simplicity was that of a lovely child, and was in no way discordant with the higher nature she had shown in the bitter ...
— A Canadian Heroine - A Novel, Volume 3 (of 3) • Mrs. Harry Coghill
... neighbor. Profoundly individual, and profoundly attached to his ideas, like all Anglo-Saxons, and in fact like all who have acquired the Protestant habit of free inquiry, he nevertheless had for the Church a docility almost naive and infantile; and this was because he recognized in her the authority and the action of the ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... comradely obliging embraces, when the occasion arose to help the young ladies enter a boat or jump out on shore; from the tender odour of maiden apparel, warmed by the sun; from the feminine cries of coquettish fright on the river; from the sight of feminine figures, negligently half-reclining with a naive immodesty on the green grass around the samovar—from all these innocent liberties, which are so usual and unavoidable on picnics, country outings and river excursions, when within man, in the infinite depth of his soul, secretly awakens from the care-free contact with ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... with a naive remembrance only of the chivalry of this idyllic indiscretion, "when I look at you I can understand how a knight ...
— The Flaw in the Sapphire • Charles M. Snyder
... 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
... of weeks!" Evans was shocked. "You are naive indeed, young man, to think anything of this magnitude can even be started in such a short time as that. And yes, there are dozens of matters—hundreds—that should be discussed before I can ...
— The Galaxy Primes • Edward Elmer Smith
... met at the station by a tall gentleman in uniform and gold-laced hat, how he was invited to enter a carriage, and how great was his astonishment when the 'officer' preferred standing in the open air behind to accompanying him inside. After this naive debut he showed tact. Mr. Dean wished to know if anything could be done towards advancing the interesting guest in his 'profession'—not trade. We talk of an English school-master, but a mulatto or a negro becomes a 'professor.' ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... of material bodies. And thus our philosopher is punished in the sinning part; his contempt of the earthly has led him into an abuse of abstract reasoning, and this abuse has made him the dupe of a very naive physical metaphor. ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... with a careless gallantry his first compliments, he entered into so animated a conversation, interspersed with so many naive yet palpably just observations on the characters present, that perhaps he had never appeared to more brilliant advantage. At length, as the music was about to recommence, Mauleverer, with a careless glance at Lucy's partner, said, ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... that the letters of our dear girl were more constrained and formal than before. It was as if she was writing now rather to comply with a sense of duty than to give vent to the light-hearted gaiety and naive enjoyment which breathed in every line of her earlier communications. So at least it seemed to us, and again the old suspicion presented itself to my mind, and I feared that all was not ...
— The Lost Stradivarius • John Meade Falkner
... italicized, the book is not without some claim to attention, as affording a naive specimen of the current astronomical notions of the time. One of these assumed, that the "gravitating power" extended but a short distance from the earth's surface, and, accordingly, we find our voyager "carried insensibly around ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... of Uncle Wilhelm's silly wife—popular and dashing young fellows reading blithely the purple path to destruction. Even Keith's naive mind had discovered which way they were headed, although his thoughts of them ...
— The Soul of a Child • Edwin Bjorkman
... knowledge of good and evil, or, if she prefers it, Wisdom. "Only that?" says wicked Doris; but Clarice helps him from replying to the scoffer by going on to ask whether the fruit of Wisdom is not happiness? "And, Madame, the making others happy." "Dear me," says naive Lucinde, half under her breath, "I must be a philosophe, for I have been told a hundred times that it only depended on myself to be happy by making others happy." There is more wickedness from Doris; ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... shook hands, and then perceived that she had not been intended to show amusement. Cartoner had merely made a rather naive statement in his low monotone. She thought him a little odd, and glanced at him again. She changed color slightly as she turned towards a chair. He was quite grave ...
— The Vultures • Henry Seton Merriman
... out his mind pretty resolutely on all subjects which moved or interested him; and Clive, his son, and his honest chum, Mr. Binnie, who had a great deal more reading and much keener intelligence than the Colonel, were amused often at his naive opinion about men, or books, or morals. Mr. Clive had a very fine natural sense of humour, which played perpetually round his father's simple philosophy with kind and smiling comments. Between this pair of friends the superiority of wit lay, almost from the very first, on ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... dignity, but to the most rudimentary aesthetic and moral comfort. For all the really useful things which men take seriously because they increase wealth and power, because they save time and overcome distance; all these "useful" things have the naive and colossal ugliness of rudimentary animals, or of abortions, of everything hurried untimely into existence: machines, sheds, bridges, trams, motor-cars: not one line corrected, not one angle smoothed, for the sake of the eye, of the nerves of the spectator. And all of it, both decorative ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... a youthful vivacity, in her manner, which saved it from the charge of conceit; she spoke with a naive earnestness pleasantly relieved by the smile in her grey eyes and by something in the pose of her head which suggested a ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... Moreover, I shudder to think of what might happen if Lisa were to walk in unexpectedly. And for the rest, all this to-do over nameless delights and unspeakable caresses and other anonymous antics seems rather naive. My ears are beset by eloquent gray hairs which plead at closer quarters than does that fibbing little tongue of yours. And ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... 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 ...
— Don Rodriguez - Chronicles of Shadow Valley • Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Baron, Dunsany
... the fact that she was an actress,—a real, live, famous actress, whose photographs made shop windows beautiful,—come right out of my boy's fairyland of the theatre, actually to sit eating and drinking, quite in a real way, at my side. This, no doubt, will seem pathetically naive to most modern young men, who in this respect begin where I leave off. An actress! Great heavens! an actress is the first step to a knowledge of life. Besides, actresses off the stage are either brainless ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne
... to his hotel with his brain in a whirl. That girl with the sweet, steady eyes and naive, fearless manner, the product of a gambling-house and associate of its habitues? The thought filled him with repugnance akin to horror. He was in no sense a prig, but although this was his first venture below the Rio Grande, he had ...
— The Fifth Ace • Douglas Grant
... where languid chancellors fingered their golden chains and exchanged witty epigrams with big-wigged, snuff-taking cavaliers:—when they attempted to house these strange ideas in their unsophisticated brains, they must have stared at one another with a naive perplexity which slowly broadened their tanned and bearded visages into contagious grins. They looked at their hearty, clear-eyed wives, and watched the gambols of their sturdy children, and shook their heads, and turned to their work ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... also expressed great relief at the naive confession of the head chieftain. All the same, however, not one of them was ...
— The Land of Mystery • Edward S. Ellis
... forward and, taking the girl's hand, led her into a smaller adjoining room, where sat the Sister Superior at breakfast. The latter greeted the child gently and bade her be seated at the table. Carmen dropped into a chair and sat staring in naive wonder. ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... inferior position or the preoccupation of their labor, never indulged in any gallantry toward her, and he himself, in his revulsion of feeling against the whole sex, had scarcely noticed that she was good-looking. But this naive exhibition of preference could not be overlooked, either by his companions, who smiled cynically across the table, or by himself, from whose morbid fancy it struck an ignoble suggestion. Ah, well! the girl was pretty—the daughter of his employer, ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... femininity. Her glance was as direct and trustful as that of a young man yet unspoiled by the world's wise lessons. And it was intrepid, but in this intrepidity there was nothing aggressive. A naive yet thoughtful assurance is a better definition. She had reflected already (in Russia the young begin to think early), but she had never known deception as yet because obviously she had never yet fallen under the sway ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... He developed into 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. ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... of the Over-man, is as naive and as bold as a child—or as a genius. In the vehement passions of the magnanimous, compassionate hero in tatters, in the aristocracy of his soul, and in his constant thirst for Freedom, Gorky sees the rebellious and irreconcilable spirit of man, of future man,—in these he sees ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky
... vomiting all the time, and thus afflicted with incurable evils, in the midst of a sea which appears without end, the state of my health bad, the sufferings of my brothers very great, and no hope of being saved, we became most miserable." Such is the naive exposition of his woes, by H. R. H. Najaf Kooli Mirza; but Kerim Khan appears, both physically and morally, to have been made of different metal. Ere he had been two days on board we find him remarking—"I ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... them, the boldest and the most brainy, wishing to show that she is not a stranger to social polish and subtlety, kept slapping me on the hand and saying, "Oh, you wretch!" though her face still retained its scared expression. I taught her to say to her partners, "How naive you are!" ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... "This love of fame and naive delight in the glorification of his own person are further proofs that the Emperor Max was the true child of his age. No one was so akin to him in this respect as the painter of his choice, Albert Duerer." This last is a reference to those strutting, finely-dressed portraits of the artist which ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... for expounding it to you at large. Indeed I think that she herself did not enlighten me fully. There must have been things not fit for a man to hear. But shortly, and as far as my bewilderment allowed me to grasp its naive atrociousness, it was something like this: that no consideration, no delicacy, no tenderness, no scruples should stand in the way of a woman (who by the mere fact of her sex was the predestined victim of conditions created by men's ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... hand we can see the birth of a key modern mythology. On the other, there is a body of almost naive evidence in this text unpolluted by that very mythology. The case studies are real. The witnesses were highly reliable. These cases are ...
— The Flying Saucers are Real • Donald Keyhoe
... 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 not scruple ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... occurred in her own experience. Hence she may be regarded as a pioneer in the realistic field, and this historical fact adds to her positive importance. For many years she was the most popular of Spanish writers, and the sensation caused by her death at Seville on the 7th of April 1877 proved that her naive truthfulness still attracted readers who were interested in records ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... inconsistency in others!... She is not to be comprehended on an acquaintance of three days. Years must go to the understanding of her. She did not understand herself. She was not even acquainted with herself. Why! She was naive enough to be puzzled because she felt older than her mother and younger than her beautiful ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... not wholly devoid of a naive egoism, Batouch poured forth gently and melodiously as they walked through the twilight in the tunnel. And Domini was quite content to listen. The strange names the poet mentioned, his liquid pronunciation of them, his allusions to wild events that had happened ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... deliverer. Papageno is a bird-catcher by trade and in the service of the Queen of Night—a happy-go-lucky, talkative fellow, whose thoughts do not go beyond creature comforts. He publishes his nature (and incidentally illustrates what has been said above about the naive character of some of the music of the opera) by trolling a ditty with an ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... capacity of playgoer, as indeed in almost every other capacity, Pepys presents himself to readers of his naive diary as the incarnation, or the microcosm, of the average man. No other writer has pictured with the same lifelike precision and simplicity the average playgoer's sensations of pleasure or pain. Of the play and its performers Pepys records exactly what he thinks or ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... over her was imperative. He had reached the point where that circumstance could no longer be ignored. The avowal that the child had passed beyond his control would have had more bitterness in it, were it not for the fact that her naive self-sufficiency touched his sense of humor, while her dainty beauty wakened ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King
... 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 will drive them away. The "outlines of literature" or "the ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... percentage always will, Ann." Lord hoped he sounded reassuring, but he felt anything but reassured himself. Not because of what she said. These naive, altogether delightful people were harmless. But could the charming simplicity of their lives survive the impact of civilization? It was this world that was in danger, not by any stretch of ...
— Impact • Irving E. Cox
... can know the joy which she felt when she found one to whom she could speak them. It is something of a drop to pass from Solomon's wisdom to the list of the splendours of his household, and the effect which these produced on the queen; but the whole account of Solomon's reign is marked by the same naive blending of wisdom and material wealth. In those days, outward prosperity was the sign of divine favour. But even in those days they knew that wisdom was 'better than rubies.' The two elements were both at their height in Solomon's reign, and the lower of them finally got uppermost, and ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... not only 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 scoundrel or ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... origin, noticed in the social world are the direct or indirect result of imitation in all its forms,—custom, fashion, sympathy, obedience, instruction, education, naive or deliberate imitation. Hence the excellence of that modern method which explains doctrines or institutions by their history. This tendency can only be generalized. Great inventors and great geniuses do sometimes stumble upon the same thing together, but ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... marred only by the introduction of superstitious practices, such as the conjuring up of evil demons, was well adapted to stamp itself on the child's mind, and its naive symbolism was bound to make a profound impression upon his imagination. Pagan antiquity knew of nothing so delicate and at the same time so elevated in sentiment. Pindar, and Horace after him, conceived the fancy that the bees of Hymettus alighted on the child's brow and dropped rich ...
— Rashi • Maurice Liber
... completely as I had done, until the sound of that lady's name, and the sight of her big black eyes, recalled it to me, and set me thinking of the sunny spring afternoon on which my sister Anne and I journeyed from Verona to Venice, and of her naive exclamations of delight on finding herself in a real gondola, gliding smoothly down the Grand Canal. My sister Anne is by some years my senior. She is what might be called an old lady now, and she certainly ...
— Stories By English Authors: Italy • Various
... light of luminous gold, with the scent of locusts eddying about, and the mirage-like show of Venice sleeping softly over beyond—was not quite clear. Perhaps because his companion seemed so careless and unfamiliar with the monitions of strenuous living; perhaps because her face was brilliant and naive—some spontaneous thing of nature, unmarked ...
— Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories • Robert Herrick
... villagers with nothing but herrings and oatcakes. She hated to think of things hungry, things in pain. She even felt a great, inarticulate pity for her father. For all his striding autocracy and high-handedness there was something naive and childish about him that clutched at her heart. He was like Ben Grief, alone and bare ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... satisfactory theory of the origin of modesty has been advanced. The naive assumption that men were ashamed because they were naked, and clothed themselves to hide their nakedness, is not tenable in face of the large mass of evidence that many of the natural races are naked, and not ashamed of their ...
— Sex and Society • William I. Thomas
... war-profits first. Mr. CHAMBERLAIN objected to widening the scope of the inquiry on the ground that it would take too long, and also that uncertainty would promote extravagance and discourage saving. And, despite Lieut.-Commander KENWORTHY'S naive suggestion that we should restore credit by making a bonfire of paper-money—he did not say whose—the House ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, February 25th, 1920 • Various
... informs the reader that there was a chapter on the subject, but that it has been lost. Chinese scholars, when taxed with the barrenness of later ages in every branch of science, are wont to make the naive reply, "Yes, and no wonder—how could it be otherwise when the Sage's chapter on that subject ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... fancy, and the heroic spirit of the Master seemed very near to her. It all meant pulsating life and hope that was deathless; and the thought that the man who did the work had turned to dust three centuries ago, never occurred to this naive, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... an hour in a first antechamber. As he was very naive, he began a conversation with a servant, who was very fond of telling all he knew of his master. "He must be mightily rich," said Ornik, "to have this crowd of pages and flunkeys whom I see running about ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... an extraordinary and ingenious venom of scandalous inventions. It seems they had all offended him in some way, and in return he had found them all out. He muttered darkly; he laughed sardonically; he crushed them one after another; but of his chief, Massy, he babbled with an envious and naive admiration. Clever scoundrel! Don't meet the likes of him every day. Just look at him. Ha! Great! Ship of his own. Wouldn't catch him going wrong. No fear—the beast! And Massy, after listening with a ...
— End of the Tether • Joseph Conrad
... dexterous hands; school-teachers wrecked their savings to invest with Granger. And Granger turned the receipts over to the great masters of his company, minus his large commission. Granger was only one tentacle of the company, one machine for extracting money from naive, land-hungry citizens. The powerful, cunning men—or man—behind it ...
— The Plunderer • Henry Oyen
... rather some special motive, which led to the establishment of a city there. Even the legend betrays its sense of the strangeness of the fact: the story of the foundation of Rome by refugees from Alba under the leadership of the sons of an Alban prince, Romulus and Remus, is nothing but a naive attempt of primitive quasi-history to explain the singular circumstance of the place having arisen on a site so unfavourable, and to connect at the same time the origin of Rome with the general metropolis ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... The communal life is the loneliest of all, because "yet thou hast not known me." The world comes next in loneliness, but it is big, and with a big soul of its own. The family life is almost naive in its misunderstanding—no one listens, they just ...
— My War Experiences in Two Continents • Sarah Macnaughtan
... her own relations so rich, and Phil never knew where the money was coming from for to-morrow's tobacco. Why couldn't they do something for him? But they were so selfish. Why couldn't they build country-houses? She had all that naive dogmatism which is so pathetic, and sometimes achieves such great results. Bosinney, to whom she turned in her discomfiture, was talking to Irene, and a chill fell on June's spirit. Her eyes grew steady with anger, like old Jolyon's when his will ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... endearing diminutives. By a series of suffixes to the names of human beings, birds, fishes, trees, plants, stones, metals, and even actions, events, and feelings, diminutives are obtained, which by their form, present the names so made in different colors; they become more naive, more childlike, eventually more roguish, or humorous, or pungent. These traits can scarcely be rendered in English; for, as Robert Ferguson remarks: "The English language is not strong in diminutives, and therefore it lacks some of the most effective ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... smiled and shook his head. In its way it was a handsome head in the fair, clean-shaven American style, with shining blond hair. He had very broad shoulders, and a very thin waist, and that naive worldliness of air so captivating in ...
— The Limit • Ada Leverson
... more than to be read; he preferred the Pont Neuf to Parnassus; he was patriotic as well as romantic, and humorous as well as humane. Translations of poetry as a rule are merely misrepresentations, but the muse of Beranger is so simple and naive that she can wear our English dress with ease and grace, and Mr. Toynbee has kept much of the mirth and music of the original. Here and there, undoubtedly, the translation could be improved upon; 'rapiers' for instance is an abominable rhyme to 'forefathers'; ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... the letters with naive envy. "You are pals with the fat-fed capitalists. They will see that you get something easy, and one of these days you will marry one of their daughters. Then you will join the bank ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... story of a Yorkshire Gipsy, a prosperous horse-dealer, who, becoming wealthy, came up to town, and, amongst other sights, was shown a goldsmith's window. His sole remark was that the man must be a big thief indeed to have so many spoons and watches all at once. The expression of opinion was as naive and artless as that of Blucher, when observing that London was a magnificent city 'for to sack.' Mr. Smith's benevolent intentions speak for themselves. But if he hopes to make the Gipsy ever other than a ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... any examination of the influence of printing on the Renaissance it is necessary to remind ourselves that the intellectual life of the ancient and the mediaeval world was built upon the written word. There is a naive view in which ancient literature is conceived as existing chiefly in the autograph manuscripts and original documents of a few great centers to which all ambitious students must have resort. A very little ...
— Printing and the Renaissance - A paper read before the Fortnightly Club of Rochester, New York • John Rothwell Slater
... part, I confess that I have merely heard the name." This naive admission was not long since made by a well-known French writer in discussing the subject of a prize-essay, "Upon the Philosophy of Maimonides," announced by the academie universitaire of Paris. What short memories the French have for the names of foreign scholars! ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... as "Mad"—professed a wider intellectual scope; less given to the melting mood than Barbara, less naive in her enthusiasms, she took for her province aesthetic criticism in its totality, and shone rather in censure than in laudation. French she read passably; German she had talked so much of studying that it was her belief she had acquired it; Greek and Latin were beyond ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... without speaking, perhaps, for hours. Riding back the next day to meet the women and children, we still brooded, or we discussed this "if," that "if," and yet others. But after we had once opened it all to them,—and when we had once answered the children's horribly naive questions as best we could,—we very seldom spoke to each other of it again. It was too hateful, all of it, to talk about. I went round to Tom Coram's office one day, and told him all I knew. He saw it was dreadful to me, and, with his eyes full, just squeezed ...
— The Brick Moon, et. al. • Edward Everett Hale
... at the naive simplicity of the suggestion. He did not detect the guile at first. But it dawned on him presently and he smiled more. She had said she was not going to ...
— The Watchers of the Plains - A Tale of the Western Prairies • Ridgewell Cullum
... light on his quest. Added to this, the fair, mild-mannered man was an intelligent talker on the rare occasions when he spoke at any length; though for the most part he contented himself with regretting in his dismal way the existing state of commerce in South America, and asking naive questions which exposed his ignorance on many subjects. The conversation of the three public-school men who knew the world of London, and still spoke its language and discussed its news, who knew moreover their friends' stories and jokes, and had stayed in a dozen country ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... Century Magazine, September, 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, waiting ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... than six hundred years ago, a group of unpretentious patriots, ignored by the great world, signed a document which formed these lands into a loose Confederation. By this act they laid the foundation upon which the Swiss state was afterward reared. In their naive, but prophetic, faith, the contracting parties called this agreement a perpetual pact; and they set forth, in the Latin, legal phraseology of the day, that, seeing the malice of the times, they found it necessary to take an oath to defend one another against outsiders, and ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume VI • Various
... 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 ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley
... 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 Zayd laments the impotency ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 8 • Richard F. Burton
... 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 think ...
— The Ear in the Wall • Arthur B. Reeve
... easily, softly. "My good friend, if I did that, I'd lose your friendship." He opened his lips to remonstrate, but suddenly caught the undercurrent of the naive remark. ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... first portion of this book, I can 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 ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King
... back and forth many times between them since Forsythe wrote that first love-letter. He found a whimsical pleasure in her deep devotion and naive readiness to follow as far as he cared to lead her. He realized that, young as she was, she was no innocent, which made the acquaintance all the more interesting. He, meantime, idled away a few months on the Pacific coast, making mild love to a rich California girl and considering ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill
... Keith laughed. "Tell you later. Fire away!" He tasted the soup, while Jenny looked at five little letter biscuits in her own plate. She spelt them out E T K I H—KEITH. He watched her, enjoying the spectacle of the naive mind in action as the light darted into her face. "I've got JENNY," he said, embarrassed. She craned, and read the letters with open eyes of marvel. They both beamed ...
— Nocturne • Frank Swinnerton
... The visitor walked through the entry with his portfolio to get into the trap, and at that moment Zhmuhin's wife, pale, and it seemed paler than the day before, with tear-stained eyes, looked at him intently without blinking, with the naive expression of a little girl, and it was evident from her dejected face that she was envying him his freedom—oh, with what joy she would have gone away from there! —and she wanted to say something to him, most likely to ask advice about her children. And what a pitiable figure she was! ...
— The Horse-Stealers and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... One of the earliest literary works of the period, however, was uninfluenced by these social and moral problems, being rather a very complete expression of the naive medieval delight in romantic marvels. This is the highly entertaining 'Voyage and Travels of Sir John Mandeville.' This clever book was actually written at Liege, in what is now Belgium, sometime before the year 1370, and in the French ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... Innocent XI. to favour the pretensions of the Duke d'Anjou, 141; she aspires to govern Spain, 142; manoeuvres to secure the post of camerara-mayor, 142; the art and caution with which she negotiates with the Marechale de Noailles, 143; the astute programme traced by her for de Torcy, 145; naive expression of delight at her success, 146; sets forth regally equipped to conduct the Princess of Savoy to her husband, 148; enters upon her militant career at an advanced age, 148; entirely possessed by her painstaking ambition, 149; enters upon her ...
— Political Women, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... Montefiore to the place; he scratched the panel softly and Juana opened to him. Montefiore entered, palpitating, but he recognized in the expression of the girl's face complete ignorance of her peril, a sort of naive curiosity, and an innocent admiration. He stopped short, arrested for a moment by the sacredness of the picture which ...
— Juana • Honore de Balzac
... the Senate Chamber the accused, almost without exception, gave the impression of persons cleverly simulating naive innocence. It was not a mere coincidence that two-thirds ...
— The Case of Edith Cavell - A Study of the Rights of Non-Combatants • James M. Beck
... fiddle for the dance of the heavenly bodies; but the sprouting blade of grass is a riddle and will always remain one. You would therefore be perfectly right in laughing at Newton if he wanted to "play the naive child" and declare that the falling apple had inspired him with the idea of the system of gravitation, whereas it may very well have given him the impetus which started him to reflect upon the subject. On the other hand, you would wrong ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... Anthony's annoyance paraded him circuitously to a table for two at the far side of the room. Reaching it she again considered. Would she sit on the right or on the left? Her beautiful eyes and lips were very grave as she made her choice, and Anthony thought again how naive was her every gesture; she took all the things of life for hers to choose from and apportion, as though she were continually picking out presents for herself from ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... begun under such unfavourable auspices, though the value of concessions, to the observance of which nothing constrained the Sultan, seems problematical, and was certainly less than the ambassador, in his naive vanity, hastened to ...
— De Orbe Novo, Volume 1 (of 2) - The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D'Anghera • Trans. by Francis Augustus MacNutt
... hence, more appearance of solidity is required at the top, and less at the foot, than true proportions would admit. It is all done so unostentatiously that one might look for hours at the figure without noticing the license. Not that I should advise you to imitate this naive way out of a difficulty. The childlike simplicity of its treatment succeeds where conscious effort ...
— Wood-Carving - Design and Workmanship • George Jack
... left in equal difficulties held the line beyond Courcelette with his scattered men against thirteen counter-attacks that night; how he had to go from point to point establishing his posts in the dark, and his repeated "'I golly!" of wonder at how he had managed to hold on, with its ring of naive unrealization of the humor of being knocked over by a shell and finding, "'I golly!" that he had not been hurt! They had not enlisted freely, the French-Canadians, but those who had proved that if the war emotion had taken hold of them as it had of the rest ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... 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 ...
— Le Petit Nord - or, Annals of a Labrador Harbour • Anne Elizabeth Caldwell (MacClanahan) Grenfell and Katie Spalding
... the monotony of my fare came during April when my friend Bashford invited me to visit him in Portland. I accepted his invitation with naive precipitation and furbished up my wardrobe as best I could, feeling that even the wife of a clergyman might not welcome a visitor with fringed ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... Thoughts had swept through his mind since the previous Saturday night. He saw her now from a different point of view. He still found her attractive-compellingly so. There was something exquisitely naive about her, an innocence that was precious. In all the sordid side of life that he had seen—that was his daily portion to see, for the journalism of a free lance can be sordid indeed—he found her fresh. That had been ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... tone, her irritation increasing every moment. This irritation was not diminished when she beheld the captain, enchanted with the gypsy, and, most of all, with himself, execute a pirouette on his heel, repeating with coarse, naive, ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... Greeks, then, do not give passion, do not give character, do not give refined or naive beauty. But you may think that the absence of these is intended to give dignity to the gods and nymphs; and that their calm faces would be found, if you long observed them, instinct with some expression of divine mystery ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... Besides, these cutting criticisms followed close on the strong admiration expressed by his friends, by all the society in which he was then moving, and by a mother who idolized him! These verses, though not yet the highest expression of his genius, were certainly full of charming tenderness, grace, and naive sensibility; moreover, they had been given to the public in such a modest way by a man so young that he might almost be called a child! If he were not conscious of his great superiority, of which he ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... is always a younger generation but it is not always articulate. The war may not have changed the face of the world, but it changed the faces of very many young men. Faces of naive enthusiasm and an innocent expectancy were not particularly noticeable in the years 1918 to 1922. The sombreness, the abruptness, the savage mood evident in the writings of such men as Barbusse and Siegfried Sassoon were abandoned. Confronted with the riddle of ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... was half Saxon and his father probably fully Norman, Gerald, with a true instinct, described himself as a "Welshman." His frank vanity, so naive as to be void of offence, his easy acceptance of everything which Providence had bestowed on him, his incorrigible belief that all the world took as much interest in himself and all that appealed to him as he did himself, the readiness with which he adapted himself to all sorts ...
— The Itinerary of Archibishop Baldwin through Wales • Giraldus Cambrensis
... words of one rhyme and four of another, will understand the presence of forced lines, an intrusion that one must needs suffer in even "The Faerie Queene." These padded lines are a serious blemish to the poem, but the introduction of naive and familiar expressions is one of its charms, as when the Pearl, protesting like Piccarda in Paradise[1] that among beatified spirits there can be no rivalry, exclaims: "The ...
— The Pearl • Sophie Jewett
... Anarchists at heart, plotting to let loose the torch of red revolution over this fair land. We have clearly showed their nefarious purpose to overthrow the Statue of Liberty and set up in its place the Dictatorship of the Walking Delegate. But, evil as we thought them, we were naive enough to give them credit for an elemental sense of decency. Even though they had no respect for the works of man, we thought at least they would spare the works of God, the most sacred symbols of divine revelation to suffering humanity. But yesterday there occurred ...
— They Call Me Carpenter • Upton Sinclair
... her to escape to a warmer climate from fog-ridden Liverpool, she went with my sisters to Lisbon, where the O'Sullivans were by that time established, and spent several months with them, and saw all the splendors of the naive but brilliant little court of Dom Pedro V. She brought home a portfolio of etchings presented to her, and done by his youthful Majesty; which indicate that his throne, little as he cared for it, preserved him from the mortification ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... dreaming for years: a journey with her brother, with all anxiety for the future left behind, dear mother Nature?... What was the matter with her? She was annoyed with herself, and forced herself to admire and share her brother's naive delight. ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... depicted the scene with wonderful skill and exquisite poetic feeling, but the essence of Goethe's scene, which lies entirely in its unconscious innocence, is gone in this highly wrought artificial presentation. It is the difference between nature and art, between the naive, pure-minded maiden and the actress painted and decorated ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... opera—it is a sacred revelation; and just as the seed of Aaron alone could serve as priests in the sacred rites of the temple at Jerusalem, so only the seed of Wagner can serve as priests—that is to say, as chief directing priests—when "Parsifal" is played. Thus declare the naive dwellers in Villa Wahnfried, modestly forgetting the missing link in the chain of argument which should prove them alone to be the people qualified to perform "Parsifal"; and I regret to observe the support they receive from a number of Englishmen ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... general impression 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
... "Food! Coffee! Do you think I am starving?" she asked, with a savage little laugh. "I have as much money as I want—more than you are ever likely to have, mademoiselle. You are very naive, mon enfant. You invite me into your room—Lettice Campion invites Cora Walcott into her room!—where nobody knows us, nobody could trace us—and you quietly ask me to eat and drink! Eat and drink in this house? It is so likely! How am I to tell, for example, if your coffee is not poisoned? You ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... from the few of her words handed down to us, in the early days of her mission the young prophetess spoke alternately two different languages. Her speech seemed to flow from two distinct sources. The one ingenuous, candid, naive, concise, rustically simple, unconsciously arch, sometimes rough, alike chivalrous and holy, generally bearing on the inheritance and the anointing of the Dauphin and the confounding of the English. This was the language of her Voices, her own, her soul's ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... were certainly naive enough. Since no known human agency could have transported the Indians across the Atlantic or the Pacific, their presence in America was accounted for by certain of the old writers as a particular work of the devil. Thus Cotton Mather, the famous Puritan clergyman of early New England, ...
— The Dawn of Canadian History: A Chronicle of Aboriginal Canada • Stephen Leacock
... his bravery, although she felt that there was a sort of indelicacy and naive grossness ...
— The Public vs. M. Gustave Flaubert • Various
... coarse and simple-minded and naive, but reproduction is her main point and she never misses it. Her prejudice against dead things is immutable. If a man objects to this prejudice against dead things, his only way of making himself count is to die. Nature uses such men over again, makes them into something more worth while, ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... head. "This is too small a room for us. Even if I trusted you, I couldn't allow you at this naive young world." ...
— Question of Comfort • Les Collins
... The naive bush simile pleased Ned a little and he laughed, but soon relapsed again into silence. Then Nellie spoke of "Paddy's Market," one of the sights of Sydney, which she would like him to see. Accordingly they strolled to his hotel, where he put on a ...
— The Workingman's Paradise - An Australian Labour Novel • John Miller
... inspired. It is quite possible that both versions were true, that he rejoiced at his release, and at the same time wept for her who released him. As a general rule, people, even the wicked, are much more naive and simple-hearted than we suppose. ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... greatest beauty, the most marvellous and transcendent beauty, you ever saw. And that, M. Daniel Champcey, is her smallest attraction. When she opens her lips, the charms of her mind, beauty and her mind, and remember her admirable ingenuousness, her naive freshness, and all the treasures of her ...
— The Clique of Gold • Emile Gaboriau
... human speech." Among the Algonquins the sun-god Michabo was represented as a hare, his name being compounded of michi, "great," and wabos, "a hare"; yet wabos also meant "white," so that the god was doubtless originally called simply "the Great White One." The same naive process has made bears of the Arkadians, whose name, like that of the Lykians, merely signified that they were "children of light"; and the metamorphosis of Kallisto, mother of Arkas, into a bear, and of Lykaon into a wolf, rests apparently upon no other ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske
... him in the half-lit room with very flattering admiration.... Seen thus, with her scarlet lips a little parted—disclosing pearls,—and with her naive dark eyes aglow, she was quite incredibly pretty and caressable. She had almost forgotten until now that this stalwart soldier, too, was in love with her. But now her spirits were rising venturously, and she knew that she liked Ned Musgrave. He had sensible notions; ...
— The Line of Love - Dizain des Mariages • James Branch Cabell
... University, he implied rather by his actions than by any outward expressions that he regarded his worthy country relations as zealots, absented himself from Rosenkranz and long family graces, and spoke compassionately of his relatives as being "very naive;" and these simple, unsophisticated people in their turn, though staggered by this spirit of quiet innovation and rebellion in their midst, made their minds easy on the score that a man of the world, such as he was, and honorably providing for himself, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... under the Austrian yoke and the Austrian scourge, never call the Austrians by this name; they call them always Croatians, knowing well that the Croatians and the Slavs who constituted Austria were our fiercest taskmasters and most cruel executioners. It is naive to think that the ineradicable characteristics and tendencies of peoples can be modified by a change of name and ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... A naive confidence that the political upheaval meant regeneration and inaugurated a reign of justice and happiness pervaded France in the first period of the Revolution, and found a striking expression in the ceremonies of the universal "Federation" in the Champ-de-Mars ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... it is true, but also a great capacity for devotion, an exquisite loyalty. The tyrannical man, the monster, the Black Man, find a place here like the Lestrigons and the Cyclops of Homer only to inspire horror by contrast with softer manners; they are almost what the wicked man is in the naive imagination of a child brought up by a mother in the ideas of a gentle and pious morality. The primitive man of Teutonism is revolting by his purposeless brutality, by a love of evil that only gives him skill and strength in the service of hatred and injury. The Cymric ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... girl's general frank bearing, undoubtedly a point rather indicating to the police possible truth in her statements, was the detail in which the alleged events were given. The signed statement coming from an apparently naive girl of 15 would seem in its clearness and coherency to bear the earmarks of truth. We always regarded this case as one of our interesting examples showing the unreliability of girl witnesses, especially those who have had unfortunate experiences, even though merely mental, ...
— Pathology of Lying, Etc. • William and Mary Healy
... and bloodthirsty "doctrinaire," Henry VIII., be the means of a brilliant and lasting success to St. Saens, who richly deserves it; but in the matter of serious opera the public has reached that blase point which is explained in the words of Ronge, a naive ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 2: "From Rome to the End" • Franz Liszt; letters collected by La Mara and translated
... a helpless dependent, reasserted for male advantage in our own day. One cannot believe that it is necessary to rebut that accusation. It is necessary, however, to examine somewhat the words "economic dependence" and "economic independence" which are employed with such naive antithesis in this controversy. ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... never arrested or expelled him, since he was there before my eyes. But how and why did he get so far from the scene of his sea adventure was an interesting question. And I put it to him with most naive indiscretion which did not shock him visibly. He told me that the ship being only stranded, not sunk, the contraband cargo aboard was doubtless in good condition. The French custom-house men were guarding the wreck. If their vigilance could be—h'm—removed ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... cause, of mental growth or development. Education merely turns inherent mental powers to good account; it makes very little change in those powers themselves. To suppose that a father can, by study, raise his innate level of intelligence and transmit it at the new level to his son, is a naive idea which finds no warrant in the known ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... with the ever-varying intellectual pleasures of the court without sacrificing in the least her strong, inborn sense of honor and propriety. On this very account, perhaps, she was the leader of a certain naive opposition, and her correspondence gives many a hint of the courage and independence with which she could defend her sound principles and firm opinions, and could attack her adversary in his weakest spot, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... course four years ago he wasn't quite so well known as he is now. Well, to resume and go on. It was into this house, this masculine paradise ruled over by Pete and Dong Ling in the kitchen, that Billy's naive request ...
— Miss Billy's Decision • Eleanor H. Porter
... quite naive: "Inasmuch as the Indians of this country had no use for the enema, why should we resort ...
— Intestinal Ills • Alcinous Burton Jamison
... exploits of the Romans), a collection of short didactic stories, not however solely Roman, written in the Latin tongue, probably towards the close of the 13th century, the authorship of which is uncertain, though it is generally recognised as of English origin; the stories are characterised by naive simplicity, and have served as materials for many notable literary productions; thus Shakespeare owes to this work the plot of Pericles and the incidents of the caskets and the pound of flesh in the "Merchant of Venice," Parnell his "Hermit," Byron his "Three ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... shrugged his shoulders at Pierre's childish words. He put on the air of one who finds it impossible to reply to such nonsense, but it would in fact have been difficult to give any other answer than the one Prince Andrew gave to this naive question. ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... Hence, too, the first group approved of Philips' efforts to create a fresh and simple pastoral manner. As a poet, Purney moved sharply away from the classical pastoral by curiously blending an entirely original subject matter with a sentimentalized realism and a naive, diffuse expression; and as a critic he pointed in the direction of Shenstone and Allan Ramsay by emphasizing the tender, admitting the use of earthy realism in the manner of Gay, and recommending for pastoral such "inimitably ...
— A Full Enquiry into the Nature of the Pastoral (1717) • Thomas Purney
... moreover, be fully proved that the artists, as a class, have never been false to religion. From the poets of the dark ages sprang a literature strange and marvellous, but full of naive faith, and bearing striking witness to the activity of the human spirit even in those dim centuries: I mean the literature of 'visions and legends.' And to estimate the importance of these consolatory creations ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... scene, we could see—last word of this antithesis—the white figures of the young girls of the sisterhood, kneeling on the chairs nearest the coffin of their companion, and who undoubtedly were beseeching God, in their naive and original prayers, to grant her the paradise of their dreams: a pretty paradise in the Jesuitical style, all in carved and gilded wood, and many-colored marble, where one could see at the end a tableau in a transparent light; the ...
— Ten Tales • Francois Coppee
... is the most naive form of the mystery story. It may contain a certain element of the supernatural—be tinged with mysticism—but its motive and the revelation thereof must be frankly materialistic—of the earth, earthy. In this respect it is very closely allied to the detective story. The model riddle ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery - Riddle Stories • Various
... a naive teleological point of view. He firmly believed "that the wise Author of nature had not created a single hair without a definite purpose." He succeeded in demonstrating a number of beautiful adaptations in flowers for ensuring pollination; ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... in Henriette's description of the sights and scenes and Louise's just as eager listening. Then at the stops the young women would get out and stretch their weary limbs whereof they suddenly became aware as the motion ceased. They were the only passengers, with unlimited time for the naive confidences which girlhood loves. ...
— Orphans of the Storm • Henry MacMahon
... 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 ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... the simple truth. He took the ship to a port where he expected to be confirmed in his temporary command from lack of a qualified master to put over his head. Whereas Singapore, he surmised justly, would be full of qualified men. But his naive reasoning forgot to take into account the telegraph cable reposing on the bottom of the very Gulf up which he had turned that ship which he imagined himself to have saved from destruction. Hence the bitter flavour of our interview. I tasted it more and more distinctly—and ...
— The Shadow-Line - A Confession • Joseph Conrad
... compare this landscape roll with the MS of Marco Polo, illuminated about a century later, from which the scene of the embarkation at Venice has been taken; the one is so obviously the work of a highly developed and the other of an almost naive and childish civilization. ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power
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