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More "Naivete" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of silence in which Darrell studied the face before him; the same, yet not the same, as on that summer night. The childlike naivete, the charming piquancy, had given place to a sweet seriousness, but it was more tender, more womanly, ...
— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour
... languid sense of all its inmost fibres. Our cheerfulness ran over, and the mild, pensive clerk was so magnetized by it that he came and sat down with us. He presently confided to me, with infinite naivete and ingenuousness, that, judging from my personal appearance, he should not have thought me the writer that he in his generosity reckoned me to be. His conception, so far as I could reach it, involved a huge, uplifted forehead, embossed with protuberant ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... and repress the little evil that existed in the girl's soul. Mother and daughter had never been parted; thus Cecile had, what is more rare in young girls than is generally supposed, a purity of thought, a freshness of heart, and a naivete of nature, real, complete, ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac
... know what the "free agreement" of the bourgeois entrepreneur is, and we can only admire the "absolute" naivete of the man who sees in it the precursor of communism. It is exactly this Anarchic "arrangement" that must be got rid of in order that the producers may cease to be the ...
— Anarchism and Socialism • George Plechanoff
... quickly corrected at the sound of her voice, her frank ingenuousness, and her unmistakable youth. In the habit of being crushed by Miss Avondale's unrelenting superiority, he found himself apparently growing up beside this tall English girl, who had the naivete of a child. After a few commonplaces she suddenly turned her gray eyes on ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... grim satire. The Prudence opposite is said to be a portrait of the Pope's mother, Giovanna Gaetani. She resembles nothing more than a duenna of the type of Martha in Goethe's Faust. Here, again, the allegory would point a scathing sarcasm, if we did not remember the naivete of ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... downstairs was not asleep, she could hear him coughing. He is a queer, naive man, thought Nadya, and in all his dreams, in all those marvellous gardens and wonderful fountains one felt there was something absurd. But for some reason in his naivete, in this very absurdity there was something so beautiful that as soon as she thought of the possibility of going to the university, it sent a cold thrill through her heart and her bosom and flooded them with ...
— The Schoolmaster and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... sonorous as the songs of Homer and the sea. 'Ce poete est le moins naif qui se puisse rencontrer, et il se degage de son oeuvre un parfum de naivete rustique.' {0g} They are, what a German critic has called them, mythologischen genre-bilder, cabinet pictures in the manner called genre, full of pretty detail and domestic feeling. And this brings ...
— Theocritus, Bion and Moschus rendered into English Prose • Andrew Lang
... the idea in his mind and went on regarding her in the light of it with a pondering smile, turning it over and finding a lively pleasure in his curious acumen in such an unwonted direction. It was a very flower of emotional naivete, though a moment later he cast it from him as a weed, grown in idleness; and indeed it might have abashed him to say what concern it had in the mind of the Order of St. Barnabas. It was gratifying, nevertheless, to have his observation confirmed by the way in which Alicia leaned ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... summarized so briefly; its scattered chronicle must be sought in the minutes of trustees' meetings, where it modestly evades the public eye, in the academic formalities of presidents' reports and the journalistic naivete of college periodicals; in the diaries of early graduates; in newspaper clippings and magazine "write-ups"; in historical sketches to commemorate the decennial or the quarter-century; and from the lips of the pioneers,—teacher and student. For, in the words of the graduate ...
— The Story of Wellesley • Florence Converse
... the currents set in one direction, and we may sail from isle to isle over a sunny sea, dallying with the time, secure of a cloudless sky and of the greetings of innocence and love wheresoever the breeze may waft us. There is in truth a holy purity, an innocent naivete, a childlike grace and simplicity, a freshness, a fearlessness, an utter freedom from affectation, a yearning after all things truthful, lovely and of good report, in the productions of this early ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... dues which at a later date fall to the priest were without doubt originally ordinary offerings, and amongst these are found even wool and flax (Deut. xviii. 4; Hos. ii. 7, 11 [A.V. 5, 9] ). But it is quite in harmony with the naivete of antiquity that as to man so also to God that which is eatable is by preference offered; in this there was the additional advantage, that what God had caused to grow was thus rendered back to Him. In doing this, the regular form observed is that a meal ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... and rustic chalet to exhibit their candidates. The method of procedure is eminently French, of course, and eminently naive, as even the intrigues and machinations of Balzac's bourgeoisie, although intended as marvels of finesse, seem so often naivete itself to our blunter and less-plotting minds. The mothers and daughters, or chaperons and charges, walk slowly arm in arm up and down one side the jetty, facing the counter-current of young men and men not young who have not lost interest in feminine ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, August, 1885 • Various
... careful selection of the few grains of characteristic fact which I could find among Dietrich's lengthy professional reflections; but the chapter on which this scene is founded is remarkable enough to be given whole, and as I have a long-standing friendship for the good old monk, who is full of honest naivete and deep-hearted sympathy, and have no wish to disgust all my readers with him, I shall give it for the most part untranslated. In the meantime those who may be shocked at certain expressions in this poem, borrowed ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley
... lady had the grace of one born to the instrument. As she took the sticks in her hands and struck a chord upon the outstretched strings, her face assumed a new expression; so far, we must confess, there had been much "naivete" in it, now she felt at home; this ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... you know them! But it is that, Mr. Howard, which has interested me in your favor—you have so much naivete, and ignorance of the moral turpitude of the old world, that I feel convinced you never could be guilty of ...
— The Lumley Autograph • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... he took Corydon's point of view entirely. She was beautiful and good; her naivete and guilelessness were the essence of her charm and how preposterous it was to expect her to think about newspapers, or to be familiar with the price of beefsteaks! As for him—he was a blundering creature, dull and pragmatical; he was a great spiny monster that she had drawn up ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... language, the work, for the most part, not only reading like the production of a native, but of one familiar with the most intimate resources of idiomatic English. A very few exceptions to this remark in some portions of the dialogue, whose naivete atones for their inaccuracy, only present the general purity of the composition in a more striking light. We sincerely trust that the writer, who has been so happily distinguished in the field of literary research, will be induced, by the success of this volume, to continue her ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... lofty pleasure-dome, which is said to resemble Chambord, and which takes its place in a long line of villas, without so much as a turnip-field to give it an air of seclusion or security. In this vainglorious craving for discomfort there is a kind of naivete which is not without its pathos. One proud lady, whose husband, in the words of a dithyrambic guide-book, "made a fortune from a patent glove-hook," boasts that her mansion has a glass-room on the second floor. Another vain householder deems it sufficient to proclaim that he spent two million ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... much of naivete—it was the fashion among the schools and the lesser individuals to use this term in describing the work of anyone who sought to distinguish himself by eccentricity of means. It was often the term applied to bizarrerie—it was fashionable ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... my cap, and the colonel laughed as he lifted his wide straw hat. I guessed he laughed at a certain naivete in the girl's way of ...
— The Honour of the Flag • W. Clark Russell
... Those formal phrases, the very flower of small-town proprieties, and the flat commonplaces, nearly all hypocritical in their origin, became very funny, very engaging, when they were uttered in Lena's soft voice, with her caressing intonation and arch naivete. Nothing could be more diverting than to hear Lena, who was almost as candid as Nature, call a leg a "limb" or a house ...
— My Antonia • Willa Sibert Cather
... publisher smiled. Theodora's girlish naivete was refreshing to him. He liked her face and manner, and he was curious to see more of this young aspirant for fame, so he pushed ...
— Teddy: Her Book - A Story of Sweet Sixteen • Anna Chapin Ray
... of this plot. She besought the King to pardon the Constable,—a request which proves how great was her naivete. By royal command Richemont received back his ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... saw two exchanging glances, but then he threw in a jesting word and the thread was broken. He was playing for his life, and he played well, for he misled them with his cheerfulness and naivete, so that they could not tell whether he knew anything or not. He ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... an art which is genuinely characteristic of some section of the folk anywhere is to do what may be important and is sure to be interesting. But Mr. Tarkington no more displays the naivete of a true folk-novelist than he displays the serene vision that can lift a novelist above the accidents of his particular time and place. This Indianian constantly appears, by his allusions, to be a citizen of the world. He knows ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... were necessary for these pure-minded people, the modern revivalists of Shint[o] teach that all that is "of faith" now is to revere the gods, keep the heart pure, and follow its dictates.[17] The naivete of the representatives of Shint[o] at Chicago in A.D. 1893, was almost as great as that of the revivalists who wrote when Japan was a ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... impressed us as an innocent, simple, genuine young character, full of mother's milk. It was like the smell of early spring in the country to come in contact with you. Your honesty of nature, your sincerity in that absurd religion of yours, your general NAIVETE of mental and spiritual get-up, all pleased us a great deal. We thought you were going to be a ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... away, and the band being there, I stopped them and bade them tune up, and at the same time seizing the maid Wheedle, away we flew. We danced, we whirled, we twirled. Ale upon this! My head was lost. "Why don't it last for ever?" says I. "I wish it did," says she. The naivete enraptured me. "Oooo!" I cried, hugging her, and then, you know, there was no course open to a man of honour but to offer marriage and make a lady of her. I proposed: she accepted me, and here I am, eternally tied to ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... burning modern picture, "The Steel Workers," on the opposite wall. In the reception room of this building are seven delightful small panels by Charles J. Taylor, showing the early life of Pennsylvania villages. They are painted in the quaint style of old colonial decorations and have charm, humor, naivete and beauty ...
— The Sculpture and Mural Decorations of the Exposition • Stella G. S. Perry
... into his arms and devour with kisses this sweet specimen of womanly tenderness, frank inconsistency, naivete, and archness. ...
— A Perilous Secret • Charles Reade
... a woman is intriguing in its very naivete, and now as she stood before me, slim and graceful in her well-cut walking costume, a quick flicker of red flaming in her cheeks and her eyes alight with that sweet tantalizing look in which expectation and a hot pride were mingled, I wondered and felt ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... pp. 92-94: Scott, vol. vi. 343: Gauttier, vi. 376. The story is a replica of the Mock Caliph (vol. iv. 130) and the Tale of the First Lunatic (Suppl. vol. iv.); but I have retained it on account of the peculiar freshness and naivete of treatment which distinguishes it, also as a specimen of how extensively editors and scriveners ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... commercially, a good talking proposition. Deeper, it represented the urge of nationalism, which is one of the extraordinary phenomena of this remarkable war. The American, vague in his feeling of nationalism, refuses to take quite seriously agitation for the "unredeemed." Why, he asks with naivete, go to war for a few thousands of Italians ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... to judge where the naivete of the British Secretary of State ends and cynicism begins, for Sazonof could not have told to him more plainly than in these lines that all Russia's ostensible readiness for peace served no other purpose than to win time to complete the strategical ...
— 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
... Man and his Intellect-Depth and Naivete of his Faith-His Goodness, Extreme Modesty, and Love of Truth-Attitude in Regard to his Masters-His Correspondents ...
— Rashi • Maurice Liber
... esteem. Nothing interests him but the mechanics and the bureaucratic organization and the esprit de corps. Nor does he conceive that the current psychology of ruling and managing the earth will ever be modified. His simplicity, his naivete, his enthusiasms, his prejudices, his blindness, and his vanities are those of Stalky. And, after all, even the effect he aims at is not got. It is nearly got, but never quite. There is a tireless effort, ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... Mr. Caxton (with naivete).—"And how could it be otherwise, when he has been carrying all his fellow-creatures in his breeches' pockets? Now he has got rid of that dead weight, I should not be surprised if he swam ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... fatigue and excitement of the long formalities of the council, when the young queen rushed first of all to her mother's arms, there to indulge her feelings in a burst of tears, and then, with girlish naivete, claiming the exercise of her royal prerogative to procure for herself two ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various
... said one man, who was noted in the place for his outspokenness, which would have been brutal had it not been for his naivete—"I heard she wasn't ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... Lord St. George would not take him!" rejoined the good-hearted Sir Christopher, with forcible naivete. "No, no, Linden, we must not be so hard-hearted; we must forgive and forget;" and so saying, the baronet threw out his chest, with the conscious exultation of a man who has uttered a noble sentiment. The moral of this little history is that Lord St. George, having been pillaged "through ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... good-looking woman. Try to imagine yourself in that character at Klondyke five years ago. The place is teeming with gold. If you are content to leave the gold alone, as the wise leave flowers without plucking them, enjoying with perfect naivete its color and glitter and preciousness, no human being will ever be the worse for your knowledge of it; and whilst you remain in that frame of mind the golden age ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw
... through a difficult crisis. "We all know the Kaiser," says Mr. Fisher, "the most amazing and amusing figure on the great stage of politics. The outlines of his character are familiar to everybody, for his whole life is spent in the full glare of publicity. We know his impulsiveness, his naivete, his heady fits of wild passion, his spacious curiosity and quick grasp of detail, his portentous lack of humour and delicacy, his childish vanity and domineering will. A character so romantic, spontaneous, and robust must always be a favourite with the British people, who, were his ...
— The Healing of Nations and the Hidden Sources of Their Strife • Edward Carpenter
... naivete of Leblanc seems to have been mitigated by duplicity. He went on with the general pacification of the world as if the Balkan submission was made in absolute good faith, and he announced the disbandment of the force of aeroplanes that hitherto guarded the council at Brissago upon ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... times appropriated paper to the uses of typography. In the fifteenth century, that naive and vigorous age, names were given to the various formats as well as to the different sizes of type, names that bear the impress of the naivete of the times; and the various sheets came to be known by the different watermarks on their centres; the grapes, the figure of our Saviour, the crown, the shield, or the flower-pot, just as at a later day, the eagle of Napoleon's time gave the name to the "double-eagle" ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... affection for his hero, and was very proud of Sancho Panza. It would have been strange indeed if he had not been proud of the most humorous creation in all fiction. He was proud, too, of the popularity and success of the book, and beyond measure delightful is the naivete with which he shows his pride in a dozen passages in the Second Part. But it was not the success he coveted. In all probability he would have given all the success of "Don Quixote," nay, would ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... she met delighted in drawing her out—it was a pastime that took the lead at dinner-parties, to an extent which her hostess often thought preposterous—and she responded with naivete and vigour, perfectly aware that she was scoring all along the line. Upon many charming people she made the impression that she was a type of the most finished class of what they called 'English society ...
— The Pool in the Desert • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... because of this very limitation, it is much more alert to the variety and life of the human substance with which it deals. It does not take the whole of life for granted and it often reveals the fresh naivete of childhood in its discovery of life. When its sophistication is complete, it is the sophistication of English rather than of American literature, and is derivative rather than original, for the most part, ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... poems have not only a peculiar kind of interest for the student of English poetry, but are intrinsically delightful, and will reward a careful and frequent perusal. Full of naivete, piety, love, and knowledge of natural objects, and each expressing a single and generally a simple subject by means of minute and original pictorial touches, these sonnets have a place of their ...
— MacMillan & Co.'s General Catalogue of Works in the Departments of History, Biography, Travels, and Belles Lettres, December, 1869 • Unknown
... lies in his child-like and sincere naivete, in his unaffected interest in and picturesque view of nature and all that happens in nature. These qualities, it is true, are those pre-eminently of the "Works and Days": the literary values of the "Theogony" ...
— Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica • Homer and Hesiod
... of how Jim Hooker had personated him stopped short upon Clarence's lips. He could not bring himself now to add that revelation to the contempt of his small companion, which, in spite of its naivete, somewhat grated ...
— A Waif of the Plains • Bret Harte
... generally refreshing. His family accepts the situation with perfect naivete. I am welcomed as Doro's chum with all the good-will in ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... Republican Convention to do the jobbery of Boss Barnes. What is there left but to gasp and wonder whether the words of the intellect have anything to do with the facts of life? What insight into reality can a man possess who is capable of discussing politics and ignoring politicians? What kind of naivete was it that led this educator ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... in now and then, and chatted with her. Her sweet face and her naivete won Phoebe's heart; and one day, as happiness is apt to be communicative, she let out to her, in reply to a feeler or two as to whether she was quite alone, that she was engaged to be married to a gentleman. "But he is not rich, ma'am," said Phoebe plaintively; "he has had trouble: ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... you told him that," Morton replied primly, albeit he was hard put to it to prevent himself from chuckling aloud over the naivete ...
— Making People Happy • Thompson Buchanan
... purpose, her lips calm and scarlet, her eyes bright and hopeful. In fact, Joan had made her plans. She would wait till spring, partly to get back her full strength, partly to make further progress in her studies, but mostly in order not to hurt this hospitable Prosper Gael. The naivete of her gratitude, of her delicate consideration for his feelings, which continually triumphed over an instinctive fear, would have filled him with amusement, perhaps with compunction, had he been capable of understanding them. ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt
... is a pleasure to speak. Every woman who enjoyed the privilege of her friendship felt the magnetism and charm of a rare nature; while, with all her force and power, there was a childishness about her that impressed one with the idea that the naivete and innocence of childhood had never been wholly lost in the woman. I think it was in some measure owing to the fact that she was so near-sighted that there was a kind of appealing hesitancy about her movements that impelled ...
— Memories of Jane Cunningham Croly, "Jenny June" • Various
... moving pictures before. Here they are presented differently than in America. Some of the plays I've seen have the naivete and simplicity of a confession. Others interpret abnormal, psychopathic characters whose feelings and thoughts are expressed by the actors with a fine and vivid realism. There is the exultation of life, and the despair, the aggression and apathy, the frivolity and the revolt. The ...
— Trapped in 'Black Russia' - Letters June-November 1915 • Ruth Pierce
... fellow came down every evening in spite of his cross mamma, and learned to tipple wine like papa, to swear like Mr. Hattersley, and to have his own way like a man, and sent mamma to the devil when she tried to prevent him. To see such things done with the roguish naivete of that pretty little child, and hear such things spoken by that small infantile voice, was as peculiarly piquant and irresistibly droll to them as it was inexpressibly distressing and painful to me; ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... This naivete confused Mrs. Armine. For a moment it seemed to be pushing away her anger, to be drawing the sting from her curiosity. But then the childishness of this strange rival stirred up in her a more acrid bitterness than she had known till now. And the wondering touch became intolerable ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... with your nonsense. Mamma! . . . I'm sick and tired of listening to it! I like Miss Mela because she isn't a scarecrow like those others," saucily prattled Sophie and smiled with childish naivete at Niedzielska, who was ...
— The Comedienne • Wladyslaw Reymont
... polite little note. It was very short, and I tried not to make it too nice, and I said nothing at all about writing, only just remarked that it would be interesting to receive letters from India," said Bridgie, with a naivete which made Mademoiselle throw up her hands in delight. "He has written to me four times since then, and,"—her eyes began to dance, and a dimple danced mischievously in her cheek—"I enjoy writing to him so much that I answer them the very next day; but it would ...
— Pixie O'Shaughnessy • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... Institution, they meet on common ground in their admiration of the wax-work exhibition of Madame Tussaud; though the Khan, who was not sufficiently acquainted with the features of our public characters to judge of the likenesses, expresses his commendation only in general terms. But the Parsees, with the naivete of children, break out into absolute raptures at recognising the features of Lord Melbourne, "a good-humoured looking, kind English gentleman, with a countenance, perhaps, representing frankness and candour ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... the resignation of those destined for death, &c. He was a thoughtful man and unquestionably sensitive; but all that he said had the stamp of oriental thought, systematically arranged in advance and quite perfectly expressed at the moment, free from the immediate naivete ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various
... up, but they will be accidents, and will not affect the general tendency of the exhibitions nor the direction in which the Academy is striving to lead English art. Under the guidanceship of the Academy English art has lost all that charming naivete and simplicity which was so long its distinguishing mark. At an Academy banquet, anything but the most genial optimism would be out of place, and yet Sir Frederick Leighton could not but allude to the disintegrating influence of French ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... her studies, why, she did not know. But the whole thing seemed sham, spurious; spurious Gothic arches, spurious peace, spurious Latinity, spurious dignity of France, spurious naivete of Chaucer. It was a second-hand dealer's shop, and one bought an equipment for an examination. This was only a little side-show to the factories of the town. Gradually the perception stole into her. This was no religious retreat, no perception of pure learning. It was a little apprentice-shop ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... debtor for adventures on our own continent, narrated with naivete and vigor by a pen as direct and clear-cutting as the sword with which he shaved off the heads of the Turks, and for one of the few romances that illumine our ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... she needed him for a plaything. She spoke of Monteverde and their love with quiet cynicism, as if the doctor were her husband. She had to confide the secrets of her life to some one, with that imperious naivete that forces the guilty to confess. Little by little she let the master into the secret of her passion, telling him unblushingly of the most intimate details of their meetings, which were often in her own house. They took ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... this with the greatest naivete, so that her absolute faith in herself, her genius, and her mission, did not astonish him. The words seemed to flow naturally ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... shone in the Northman's face. He spoke to his companion, who made answer; then he replied with the naivete of a ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... on with all the eager naivete of a child, which Smoke found hard to reconcile with the full womanhood of her form ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... all speculation—simply as speculation—reaches its acme in the Essay on Bacon. The curious naivete with which Macaulay denounces all philosophy in that vigorous production excites a kind of perverse admiration. How can one refuse to admire the audacity which enables a man explicitly to identify philosophy with humbug? It is what ninety-nine men out of a hundred ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... it is here that the harshness of American and English society toward the erring woman (harshness which is not injustice, but half- justice only) contrasts visibly to our advantage over the bad naivete and lenity of the Italians. The carefully secluded Italian girl is accustomed to hear of things and speak of things which, with us, parents strive in every way to keep from their daughters' knowledge; and while her sense of delicacy is thus early blunted, while she is thus used to ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... The more he pondered upon his acquaintance with Jonathan Tinker, the more fascinating the erring mariner became, in his complex truth and falsehood, his delicately blended shades of artifice and naivete. He must, it was felt, have believed to a certain point in his own inventions: nay, starting with that groundwork of truth,—the fact that his wife was really dead, and that he had not seen his family for two years,—why should he not place implicit faith in all the fictions reared upon it? It ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various
... life; his style gain lucidity, impressiveness, incisiveness, pungency; but in the case of the poetical and the reflective writer it seems to me that something evaporates—some quite peculiar freshness, naivete, indiscreetness, which, can never be recaptured. Take a few typical instances. Coleridge lost the poetical gift altogether when he left his youth behind; Wordsworth wrote all his best poetry in a few early years; Milton lost his pure lyric gift. But the most ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... of sterling character and many heroic qualities. Miss Arnold belonged to the stage by birth, and from earliest youth had been attached to the theatre in some capacity. It is a most miserable fate for a child, but she knew of nothing better. She came before the public with a naivete that was touching, and played her little airs on the piano and sung her little songs and uttered her childish sentences always to the very best of her ability, putting up with the late hours and the hasty and often scanty meals ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... it," she confessed, with a naivete he could not but question, for he thought he saw a roguish gleam ...
— Adventure • Jack London
... granted that the most extravagant hopes of our most reckless dreamers are fulfilled, that England is crowded out of Egypt, Mesopotamia, Persia, and is involved in a long-lasting war with the native Indians. An impossibly large dose of political naivete is needed in order to make us believe that England would take this ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... him. His mind dwelt on her for a moment as he visioned her face with its bronze beauty, her dark, wild eyes flashing with apprehension for him, and as he did so his own eyes softened a little. He recalled the directness of her speech in their first conversation and smiled at the naivete of her estimate of himself. Then the smile died, leaving the absent, thoughtful look more pronounced, and in the same moment the vision of Miskodeed was obliterated by the vision of Helen Yardely—the woman of his own race, fair and ...
— A Mating in the Wilds • Ottwell Binns
... Lately, the director of one of these schools remarked with great satisfaction and still greater naivete: "This school is superior to all others of its kind in Europe, for nowhere else is what we teach taught in ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... For naivete that would be unusual in an unpaid attache of Legation, this sudden leap from his own to his opponent's ground, after two years and a half of dogged resistance, might have roused Palmerston to inhuman scorn, but instead of derision, well earned ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... which seems to indicate that to shine is not the aim of this young man, although his execution conquered difficulties the overcoming of which even here, in the home of pianoforte virtuosos, could not fail to cause astonishment; nay, with almost ironical naivete he takes it into his head to entertain a large audience with music as music. And lo, he succeeded in this. The unprejudiced public rewarded him with lavish applause. His touch, although neat and sure, has little of that brilliance by which our virtuosos announce themselves ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... the same token, did not escape the attention of the interviewer. Her appealing charm of face and figure was accentuated by her daintiness and a fleeting suggestion of naivete in poise and expression when she was amused. His first glance revealed to Haines that her eyes were gray, the gray that people say indicates the possessor to have those priceless qualities—the qualities that make the sweetest women true, that make the maiden's eyes in truth the windows ...
— A Gentleman from Mississippi • Thomas A. Wise
... of the Main Building with constantly gathering and dissolving little groups. These called out greetings to each other, and exchanged dolorous mutual condolences on their hard fate; all showing, with a helpless masculine naivete, their consciousness of the lovely, observant figure in the carriage below them. Of a different sort were the professors' wives, who occasionally drifted past on the path. Aunt Victoria might have been a blue-uniformed ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... a house! Pure as its master—yes, monseigneur, you are full of prudence and wisdom. Let us conceal the corruptions of the world from this innocent child, let us remove from her everything that can destroy her primitive naivete; this is why we choose this dwelling for her—a moral sanctuary, where the priestesses of virtue, and doubtless always under pretext of their ingenuousness, take the most ingenuous but least permitted ...
— The Regent's Daughter • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... evenings were much lightened by the gay chat of one of the party, who, with the excellent practical sense of mature experience, and the kindest heart, united a naivete and innocence such as I never saw in any other who had walked so long life's tangled path. Like a child, she was everywhere at home, and like a child, received and bestowed entertainment from all places, all ...
— Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 • S.M. Fuller
... evening dress? Where shall we sit? What time shall we get back? How are you going? What time must I be ready? Will you have dinner before you go or take sandwiches with you?"—how long the patter of questions would have run on it is hard to say, if the extreme naivete of the last one had not drowned them in universal laughter, and Isabel ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... the collections of Hakluyt and Purchas, this book of Raleigh's takes easily the foremost position. In comparison with the bluff and dull narratives of the other discoverers, whose chief charm is their naivete, the Discovery of Guiana has all the grace and fullness of deliberate composition, of fine literary art, and as it was the first excellent piece of sustained travellers' prose, so it remained long without a second in our literature. The brief examples which it has alone been possible ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... "divers times'' may have been an exaggeration. It probably was. Jean and her women would want to show there had been provocation. (In a ballad he is accused of having thrown a plate at dinner in her face.) But there is a naivete, a circumstantial air, about the "biting of her in the arm'' which gives it a sort of genuine ring. How one would like to come upon a contemporary writing which would throw light on the character of John Kincaid! Growing sympathy for Jean makes one wish it could ...
— She Stands Accused • Victor MacClure
... beautiful ode in his nineteenth idyl; but is very inferior, I think, to his original, in delicacy of point and naivete of expression. Spenser, in one of his smaller compositions, has sported more diffusely on the same subject. The poem to which I allude ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... dignity of bearing and address which won for them the admiration of women, and excited the jealousy of men. Vain and joyous, the host would have deemed himself wanting in courtesy to his guests, had he not evinced to them, which he did sometimes with a piquant naivete, the pride he felt in seeing himself surrounded by persons so illustrious, and partisans so noble, all striving through the splendor of the attire chosen to visit him, to show their high sense of the honor in which they ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... extract from a letter to the London and China Express, of 5th July 1875, part of which we have ventured to reproduce in italics, surpasses, both in fiction and naivete, anything it has ever been our lot to read on either side of this much-vexed question:—"The fact is, that this tremendous evil is utterly beyond the control of politicians, or even philanthropists. Nothing but the divine power of Christian life can cope with it, and though ...
— Chinese Sketches • Herbert A. Giles
... that Marivaux could prevail upon himself to draw a description or a reflection to an end, feeling, as he did, that there was always something left unsaid. His struggle with himself and his apology to the reader are sometimes quite amusing in their naivete. "Me voila au bout de ma reflexion," he says: "j'aurais pourtant grande envie d'y ajouter quelques mots pour la rendre complete: le voulez-vous bien? Oui, je vous en prie. Heureusement que mon defaut la-dessus n'a rien de nouveau ...
— A Selection from the Comedies of Marivaux • Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux
... bows of blue ribbon on the skirt and corsage, and a cluster of roses in her belt, she was as inconsistent and incongruous to the others as a fashion-plate would have been in the dry and dog-eared pages before them. Yet she carried it off with a demure mingling of the naivete of youth and the aplomb of a woman, and as she swept down the narrow aisle, burying a few small wondering heads in the overflow of her flounces, there was no doubt of her reception in the arch smile that dimpled her cheek. Dropping ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... the house with newspapers, and she never looked at them, never had the idea of looking at them, unless occasionally at the 'Signal' for an account of a wedding or a bazaar. In which case she would glance at the world for an instant with mild naivete, shocked by the horrible things that were apparently going on there, and in five minutes would forget all about it again. Here the whole of England, Ireland, and Scotland was at its front doors that night waiting for newsboys, and to ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... air had something very distinguished. The first time Guy saw her, he was strongly reminded both of Philip and of Mrs. Edmonstone, but not pleasingly. She seemed to be her aunt, without the softness and motherly affection, coupled with the touch of naivete that gave Mrs. Edmonstone her freshness, and loveableness; and her likeness to her brother included that decided, self-reliant air, which became him well enough, but which did not sit as appropriately ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... with the really guilty. Mr O'Connell twitted them with the obvious fact, that they gave no protection under their bill by day, although it was notorious that almost all the assassinations were then perpetrated. Mr Sidney Herbert is reported, with great naivete, and innocently enough, to have offered the following reasons for the omission:—"He could show from proofs before him, that the murders which were committed in broad day were, generally speaking, murders perpetrated against persons in the higher ranks of life; and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... his face show a boyish enthusiasm ... almost a naivete. "Maybe Mr. Panek has already told you about me. I'm looking for a chance to make a flock of credits ... and I'm not too particular ...
— Man of Many Minds • E. Everett Evans
... Rigou, without replying to this naivete, "go over to Gaubertin's to-morrow morning. Tell him that my fellow-mayor and I" (striking Soudry on the thigh) "will break bread with him at breakfast somewhere about midday. Tell him everything, so that we may all have thought it over before we meet, for now's the time to make ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... discovering his engine-turned repeater, and hearing its fascinating music: then the fanciful chain, the precious stones in golden robes, and last of all, the family pride described in true heraldic taste and naivete. Of ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... furthering the influence of the Church or the reputation of a saint—in general, by its relationship to matters of faith. Thus it happens that the chronicles of the monks and the lives of the saints, charming and interesting as they are in their naivete, their simplicity, their trustful credulity, and their pictures of a life and an attitude of mind so remote from ours, are filled with incidents given as facts that test the greatest faith, strain the most vivid imagination, and ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... as a new serving-maid. Such Artemisia was in name; but Cornelia, whose gratitude to Agias had known no bounds, took the little thing into her heart, and determined to devote herself to instructing an innocence that must not continue too long, despite its charming naivete. ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... else; indeed, I am not aware that it was ever published. But had it been we should rarely hear it. Like Locke's music to "Macbeth" it bears an unpleasant reputation; to include it in any concert programme would be to court disaster. An idle superstition, perhaps, but there is much naivete in the artistic temperament. ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... had the imprudence to laugh, with the result that the next moment two well- aimed bullets sang past his ears. Taking the hint, Borrow put spurs to his mule, and, followed by the terrified guide, soon outdistanced these official banditti. With great naivete he remarks, "Oh, may I live to see the day when soldiery will no longer be tolerated in any civilised, or ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... which Jack regarded the models, the draperies, and the studies on the walls. Certain it was that he was much more at his ease in the parlor, and when he and Sophy were once more alone at their meal, although he ate nothing, he had regained all his old naivete. Presently he leaned forward and placed his hand fraternally on her arm. Sophy looked up with ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... deadly instrument we discovered it to be loaded to the very muzzle, a mixture of pebbles, slugs, and bits of iron being crammed into the barrel over a charge of a couple of ounces of powder. On our inquiring why it was so heavily charged, the man told us with much naivete, that it was to kill nine men, illustrating the method by which this wholesale destruction was to be accomplished, by planting the butt on his hip and whirling the muzzle from right to left in a horizontal direction across us all, and telling us very pleasantly that if he were ...
— A Peep into Toorkisthhan • Rollo Burslem
... mentor and manager. The precocious worldliness of her mentality amused while it sometimes astonished him. This comparatively ignorant girl of eighteen had no hesitation in guiding the man of more mature years, and succeeded through her naivete rather than by force of character. The weakest of women can dominate the strongest ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... not a practical leader. His pamphlet published in German in 1854, entitled If I had half a million dollars, reveals the naivete of his mind. He wanted to find money, not to make it. The society soon became involved in a controversy in which Cabet's immediate following were outnumbered. The minority petulantly stopped working but continued to eat. "The majority decided that those who would ...
— Our Foreigners - A Chronicle of Americans in the Making • Samuel P. Orth
... of Chinese scholars know next to nothing about matters directly in the line of their studies, and in regard to which we should consider ignorance positively disgraceful. A venerable teacher remarked to the writer with a charming naivete that he had never understood the allusions in the Trimetrical Classic (which stands at the very threshold of Chinese study) until at the age of sixty he had an opportunity to read a Universal History prepared ...
— Sex and Society • William I. Thomas
... well. He had engaged in play with those celebrated gamesters, my Lords of Chesterfield and March; and they both bore testimony to his coolness, gallantry, and good breeding. At his books Harry was not brilliant certainly; but he could write as well as a great number of men of fashion; and the naivete of his ignorance amused the old lady. She had read books in her time, and could talk very well about them with bookish people: she had a relish for humour and delighted in Moliere and Mr. Fielding, but she loved the world ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... frankness of her friendship was undisturbed by overmuch knowledge of her own attractions, and the possibility of less contentment on his side did not occur to her. Feeling herself so much older, in reality, than he, she assumed with delicious naivete, the role of confidant and general adviser. What time she could spare from Benis and the great Book she bestowed most ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... Sir Simple Simon? How heartily we have laughed, White Heather and I, at your neat little ruses! It would pay you, by the way, to take White Heather into your house for six months to instruct you in the agreeable sport of amateur detectives. Your charming naivete quite moves our envy. So you actually imagined a man of my brains would condescend to anything so flat and stale as the silly and threadbare Old Master deception! And this in the so-called nineteenth century! O sancta simplicitas! When again ...
— An African Millionaire - Episodes in the Life of the Illustrious Colonel Clay • Grant Allen
... or twelve thousand crowns." Then she said with naivete "It was not a great sum to carry on a ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc Volume 2 • Mark Twain
... Fred inquired, but as he glanced in seeming naivete at his companion, something he saw in the latter's eye warned him, and suddenly Fred thought it would ...
— Ramsey Milholland • Booth Tarkington
... times. General Brant," she went on, turning explanatorily to Boompointer, "married my adopted mother in California—at Robles, a dear old place where I spent my earliest years. So, you see, we are sort of relations by marriage," she added, with delightful naivete. ...
— Clarence • Bret Harte
... that she herself had sent him away. And when he had left her she knew, as she knew now, that in her heart she did not want it. For she liked him—liked his society. She liked his care-free manner, his whimsical outlook upon her country, his many natural talents—his playing, and the naivete of his singing, while he often admitted that his voice hurt him, and so must hurt others. No, she had not wanted him to go away. And somehow it had never occurred to her that he would go for ever. But he was gone, and she could not resign herself. Yet there was no ...
— Bred of the Desert - A Horse and a Romance • Marcus Horton
... those impressions into a connected body of phenomena, and final interpretation of them as a whole are, have been, and always will be the marks of the enduring in all literature, whether poetry or prose." [Footnote: Lewis Worthington Smith, "The New Naivete," Atlantic, April, 1916.] To quote another critic: "A rock, a star, a lyre, a cataract, do not, except incidentally and indirectly, owe their command of our sympathies to the bare power of evoking ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... lobsters and clams were the staple articles of Boat Club suppers, and over savory messes of these, helped down with much whisky and water, Aladdin and Beau Larch made the evening spin. Aladdin, talking eagerly and with the naivete of a child, wondered why he had never liked this man so much before. And Larch told the somewhat abject story of his life three times with an introduction of much ...
— Aladdin O'Brien • Gouverneur Morris
... made you think of me, whom you never saw, to see another woman's profile," she retorted, with the faintest touch of asperity in her childlike voice. "But," she added, more gently and with a relapse into her adorable naivete, ...
— In a Hollow of the Hills • Bret Harte
... the man whose life I had saved by frightening him into exertion. After swallowing a glass of warm wine, well sugared, and spiced with tincture of cinnamon, he licked his lips, sucked the edges of his glass, and said: 'Thank ye, doctor; but for you I should have been dead,' with a naivete which I can never forget, and which even now mingles pleasing associations with the thoughts of those ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 452 - Volume 18, New Series, August 28, 1852 • Various
... work entirely without influence on the romanticists of 1830. Theophile Dondey, wrote a poem on Roland, and Gerard de Nerval (Labrunie) hunted up the old popular songs and folklore of Touraine and celebrated their naivete and truly national character. Attention was directed to the Renaissance group of poets who preceded the Louis XIV. writers—to Ronsard and "The Pleiade." Later the Old French Text Society was founded for the preservation and publication of mediaeval remains. But in general the innovating ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... to her face, which had an expression of naive sophistication, or of sophisticated naivete, not at all likely to mislead the mature; nor to her carriage, which, though slightly self-conscious, was modest enough, and not a bit too demure. It was due to her dress, which, after all, was not quite so simple, either ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller
... certainly," said Crawford, who had been laughing a little, spite of his low spirits, at the naivete of the relation. "It was modesty and not want of personal courage that drove you out ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... her departure. There was something irresistibly feminine about Lulu's flight. She herself seemed to appreciate this. If anybody looked at her, she exhibited her accomplishments with an eagerness that had a charming touch of naivete. She dipped and dove endlessly. She dealt in little darts and rushes, bird-like in their speed and grace. She never flew high, but, on her level, her activity ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... were present in sufficient numbers to animate the front steps of the Main Building with constantly gathering and dissolving little groups. These called out greetings to each other, and exchanged dolorous mutual condolences on their hard fate; all showing, with a helpless masculine naivete, their consciousness of the lovely, observant figure in the carriage below them. Of a different sort were the professors' wives, who occasionally drifted past on the path. Aunt Victoria might have been a blue-uniformed ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... her the thought of his engagement was as good or as bad as a chaperon. For Betty's innocence was deeply laid, and had survived the shock of all the waves that had beaten against it since her coming to Paris. It was more than innocence, it was a very honest, straightforward childish naivete. ...
— The Incomplete Amorist • E. Nesbit
... girl pleads with her father to make peace, with humorous naivete argues with the counsellors of state, tries to bribe the seers, and finally resorts to magic. When nothing avails, she secures Carme's aid. The lock is cut, the city falls, the girl is captured by Minos—in true Alexandrian technique the catastrophe comes with terrible speed—and she is led, not ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... you, in all Paris, would give me such a fee for such an affair?" Claparon said to him, with a false show of naivete. "You can sleep in peace; my ostensible purchaser is one of those men of honor who are too stupid to have ideas of your kind; he is a retired government employee; give him the money to make the purchase and he'll sign the counter-deed ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... amateur. Here, of course, we greatly desire the evidence of Robert Chambers. Spirits came to Swedenborg with a wind, but it was only strong enough to flutter papers; 'the cause of which,' as he remarks with naivete, 'I do not yet understand'. If Swedenborg had gone into a Medicine Lodge, no doubt, in that 'close place,' the phenomena would have been very much more remarkable. In 1853 Pere Arnaud visited the Nasquapees, and ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... on the victim's part. But the very iteration, the insistence on new explanations of this doctrine, show that the popular mind still clung to the old idea of demoniac interference. Occasionally the naivete with which the effect of a mantra is narrated is somewhat amusing, as, for instance, when the heroine Krishn[a] faints, and the by-standers "slowly" revive her "by the use of demon-dispelling mantras, rubbing, water, ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... our vital foreign assistance program. Your recent passage of the Foreign Assistance Act sent a signal to the world that America will not shrink from making the investments necessary for both peace and security. Our foreign policy must be rooted in realism, not naivete or self-delusion. ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Ronald Reagan • Ronald Reagan
... the following extract from a letter to the London and China Express, of 5th July 1875, part of which we have ventured to reproduce in italics, surpasses, both in fiction and naivete, anything it has ever been our lot to read on either side of this much-vexed question:—"The fact is, that this tremendous evil is utterly beyond the control of politicians, or even philanthropists. Nothing but the divine power of Christian ...
— Chinese Sketches • Herbert A. Giles
... popular melody at all, gave them the scholastic turn, either because they liked it, or because the habit was strong. The fact that Haydn gave it in its naive form, invented themes which in their deliberate naivete suggest folk-song and dance, hints at what his later music proves conclusively, that he found his inspiration as well as his raw ...
— Haydn • John F. Runciman
... the fascinating naivete of the Eastern woman, and Miska had all the suave grace, too, which belongs to the women of the Orient, so that many admiring glances followed her charming figure as she crossed the ...
— The Golden Scorpion • Sax Rohmer
... moment as he visioned her face with its bronze beauty, her dark, wild eyes flashing with apprehension for him, and as he did so his own eyes softened a little. He recalled the directness of her speech in their first conversation and smiled at the naivete of her estimate of himself. Then the smile died, leaving the absent, thoughtful look more pronounced, and in the same moment the vision of Miskodeed was obliterated by the vision of Helen Yardely—the woman of his own race, fair and softly-strong, and as different as well as could ...
— A Mating in the Wilds • Ottwell Binns
... we were all gathered together. Yank and I did the listening and Talbot the interpellating. Johnny swarmed all over himself like a pickpocket, and showed us everything he had in the way of history, manners, training, family, pride, naivete, expectations and hopes. He prided himself on being a calm, phlegmatic individual, unemotional and not easily excited, and he constantly took this attitude. It was a ...
— Gold • Stewart White
... fashion and made her figure very bad. The only pretty feature in her face was her eyes, which were indeed wonderful, being large and black, and instinct with such an extremely pleasing expression of mingled gravity and naivete that she was bound to attract attention. In everything she was simple and natural, so that, whereas Katenka always looked as though she were trying to be like some one else, Lubotshka looked people straight in the face, and sometimes fixed them so long with her splendid black eyes that she ...
— Boyhood • Leo Tolstoy
... characteristic fact which I could find among Dietrich's lengthy professional reflections; but the chapter on which this scene is founded is remarkable enough to be given whole, and as I have a long-standing friendship for the good old monk, who is full of honest naivete and deep-hearted sympathy, and have no wish to disgust all my readers with him, I shall give it for the most part untranslated. In the meantime those who may be shocked at certain expressions in this poem, borrowed from the Romish devotional school, may verify my language at ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley
... went on regarding her in the light of it with a pondering smile, turning it over and finding a lively pleasure in his curious acumen in such an unwonted direction. It was a very flower of emotional naivete, though a moment later he cast it from him as a weed, grown in idleness; and indeed it might have abashed him to say what concern it had in the mind of the Order of St. Barnabas. It was gratifying, nevertheless, to have his observation confirmed ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... go and laughed as heartily as she pleased. She had heard men say before, but always with more or less of a languishing air, inevitably ridiculous in a man, that they thought it about time they were getting married; but she could not remember anything to compare with Sam Turner's naivete in the statement. ...
— The Early Bird - A Business Man's Love Story • George Randolph Chester
... though religion was without foundation it was also without limit and promised a complete escape from earth into dizzy, unexplored altitudes. Then, too, Durtal was attracted to the Church by its intimate and ecstatic art, the splendour of its legends, and the radiant naivete of ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... of a more sophisticated class, Jean had at first taken her naivete for the height of subtlety. He was always expecting her to betray herself. But after that evening with her he changed. Just such simplicity had been his wife's. Sometimes Sara Lee reminded him of her—the upraising of her eyes or an ...
— The Amazing Interlude • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... when he realized that this girl could break the arm of any spaceport thug in the galaxy. She was a strange mixture of naivete and strength, unlike anyone he had ever met before. Once again he realized that he had to visit the planet that produced people ...
— Deathworld • Harry Harrison
... body. Since the opening of this session, all that he has said and done has proved his utter unfitness for the place he occupies. First, his imprudent answers to O'Connell, and the turn he gave to that affair. Then, in bringing forward his financial statement, the naivete with which he admitted that he had submitted to the clamour against the House Tax, and withdrawn it contrary to his own judgment; then the facility with which he gave in to O'Connell's motion about the Irish Judge, and threw over his colleagues and his party ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... freemasonry, and silence was effectually secured by priestly anathemas; men of science were as jealous of one another as they were of all other classes of society. If we wish to form a clear picture of this earliest stage of civilization, an age which represents at once the naivete of childhood and the suspicious reticence of senility, we must turn our eyes to the priest, on the one hand, claiming as his own all art and science, and commanding respect by his contemptuous silence; and, on the other hand, to the mechanic ...
— Forty Centuries of Ink • David N. Carvalho
... my father, gentlemen, who has killed him? Who can have killed him, if not I?' Do you hear, he asked us that, us, who had come to ask him that question! Do you hear that phrase uttered with such premature haste—'if not I'—the animal cunning, the naivete, the Karamazov impatience of it? 'I didn't kill him and you mustn't think I did! I wanted to kill him, gentlemen, I wanted to kill him,' he hastens to admit (he was in a hurry, in a terrible hurry), 'but still I am not guilty, it is not I murdered ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... which was a slipper of velvet, embroidered with gold or silver lace. Two or three great gold ornaments completed their costume. Add to this their sparkling black eyes, regular features, and an air of naivete—inseparable from Spanish girls, and you have some idea of the witchery of the belles ...
— Borneo and the Indian Archipelago - with drawings of costume and scenery • Frank S. Marryat
... it seemed as if a brave prospect of happiness was in store for the young queen. Her love for her husband, her delight in his affection, her pride in his accomplishments, together with her simplicity, innocence, and naivete, completely won his heart. These claims to his affection were, moreover, strengthened by the charms of her person. Lord Chesterfield, a man whom experience of the sex had made critical, writes that she "was exactly shaped, has lovely hands, excellent ...
— Royalty Restored - or, London under Charles II. • J. Fitzgerald Molloy
... friends. The utter frankness of her friendship was undisturbed by overmuch knowledge of her own attractions, and the possibility of less contentment on his side did not occur to her. Feeling herself so much older, in reality, than he, she assumed with delicious naivete, the role of confidant and general adviser. What time she could spare from Benis and the great Book she bestowed most ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... delicious in their naivete, might seem to have been extracted from the libretto of an opera, but that they lack the sympathising chorus, who should have stood at hand, ready to chime in with 'he,' 'she,' and 'they,' to the 'I,' 'you,' and 'we' of the ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... giving you good news of her. She is the coming sensation. They say she is very rich, but quite one of the people, you know: in fact, she makes no scruples of telling you her father was a blacksmith, I think, and takes the dear old man with her everywhere. FitzHarry raves about her, and says her naivete is something too delicious. She is regularly in with some of the best people already. Lady Dungeness has taken her up, and Northforeland is only waiting for your cousin's engagement to be able to go over decently. Shall I ask her to Buckenthorpe?—come, now, as an apology for my ...
— A Phyllis of the Sierras • Bret Harte
... only its efflorescence. The roots of evil lie deep below in the subsoil of instinct. Without expression, life would be much the same, only secret instead of articulate. The puritan shows a shocking naivete in thinking that he can reform life by destroying its utterance. Moreover, to express life implies a certain mastery over it, a power of detachment and reflection, which are fundamentally ethical and may lead to a new ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... prepared for a powerful and sympathetic personality, that curious mixture of naivete and hard sophistication, and she had ascribed her interest in him to curiosity in exploring what to her was a completely foreign type. In her own naivete it had never occurred to her that men outside her class were gentlemen as she understood the term, and she still supposed Clavering to be exceptional ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... the publication of the Brazilian Fishes, when I began to study the works of the older naturalists. Professor Dollinger had presented me with a copy of Rondelet, which was my delight for a long time. I was especially struck by the naivete of his narrative and the minuteness of his descriptions as well as by the fidelity of his woodcuts, some of which are to this day the best figures we have of the species they represent. His learning overwhelmed me; I would gladly have read, as he did, everything ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... have given the legend from various sources; but there is something quite untranslatable and perfectly beautiful in the naivete of the old Italian version. After describing the celestial music of the angels, the rejoicing of the liberated patriarchs, and the appearance of Christ, allegro, e bello e tutto lucido, it thus proceeds: "Quando ella lo vidde, gli ando incontro ella ancora con le braccia ...
— Legends of the Madonna • Mrs. Jameson
... le pria d'attendre un pen. "Mon maitre, lui dit-il, vient de faire un heritage et va donner force festins aux parents et aux amis; je ne saurais manquer d'engraisser pendant cette periode, et vous aurez alors plus de plaisir a me manger." Le loup eut la naivete de croire ce maitre hableur et le laissa partir. Quand il revint le chercher au jour convenu, il ne le trouva pas seul. Le ruse compere avait fait signe aux camarades des alentours: une meute entiere tomba sur la bete fauve et la mit ...
— French Conversation and Composition • Harry Vincent Wann
... out of her studies, why, she did not know. But the whole thing seemed sham, spurious; spurious Gothic arches, spurious peace, spurious Latinity, spurious dignity of France, spurious naivete of Chaucer. It was a second-hand dealer's shop, and one bought an equipment for an examination. This was only a little side-show to the factories of the town. Gradually the perception stole into her. ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... Herod scenes. Protestant influence was shown by the introduction of Luther's "Vom Himmel hoch," but the general character was very much that of the old mysteries, and the dialogue was full of quaint naivete.{27} ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles
... a moment of silence in which Darrell studied the face before him; the same, yet not the same, as on that summer night. The childlike naivete, the charming piquancy, had given place to a sweet seriousness, but it was more tender, more ...
— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour
... boast; but I think there are many women—beautiful, fascinating lazzaroni of the parlor and boudoir—who make their boast of elegant helplessness and utter incompetence for any of woman's duties with equal naivete. The Spartans made their slaves drunk, to teach their children the evils of intoxication; and it seems to be the policy of a large class in the South now to keep down and degrade the only working class they have, for the sake of teaching ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... with naivete, and Jack was consoled for the tyranny by which she was oppressed by seeing her go away in excellent spirits, and with her shawl wrapped so gracefully around her, and her travelling-bag carried as lightly as she carried ...
— Jack - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... du Royaume de Senegal, fait et compose par C. Jannequin, de retour en France, in 1659. Paris, 1645. 8vo.—This also is an interesting work, as depicting with great naivete and force the manners of the inhabitants, and affording some curious particulars respecting ...
— Robert Kerr's General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 18 • William Stevenson
... proprieties, and the flat commonplaces, nearly all hypocritical in their origin, became very funny, very engaging, when they were uttered in Lena's soft voice, with her caressing intonation and arch naivete. Nothing could be more diverting than to hear Lena, who was almost as candid as Nature, call a leg a "limb" or a ...
— My Antonia • Willa Sibert Cather
... to? Poor Gilbertine! This is not the bridal-day she expected." Then, with irresistible naivete, entirely in keeping with her fairy-like figure and girlish face, she added: "I think it was just horrid in the old woman to die the night before ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... hair, sparse and unkempt of growth, was as indeterminate and colorless as his complexion. It would seem that all the color of his frame had gone into his eyes, for they were startlingly blue. Also, they were laughing and merry eyes, within them much of the naivete and wonder of the child; and yet, in an unassertive way, they contained much of calm self-reliance and strength of purpose founded upon self-experience ...
— Moon-Face and Other Stories • Jack London
... artlessness &c adj.; nature, simplicity; innocence &c 946; bonhomie, naivete, abandon, candor, sincerity; singleness of purpose, singleness of heart; honesty &c 939; plain speaking; epanchement [Fr.]. rough diamond, matter of fact man; le palais de verite [Fr.]; enfant terrible [Fr.]. V. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... remarks might have constituted an impertinence; but a glance at Lord Deepmere's face would have satisfied you, as it apparently satisfied Madame de Cintre, that they constituted only a naivete. When his companions were seated, Newman, who was out of the conversation, occupied himself with observing the newcomer. Observation, however, as regards Lord Deepmere's person; had no great range. He was a small, meagre man, of some ...
— The American • Henry James
... the personal appearance of the Virgin always in accordance with a poor child's dreams—akin to some coloured figure in a missal, an ideal compounded of traditional beauty, gentleness, and politeness. And the same dreams showed themselves in the naivete of the means which were to be employed and of the object which was to be attained—the deliverance of nations, the building of churches, the processional pilgrimages of the faithful! Then, too, all the words which fell from Heaven resembled one another, calls for ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... relations had become firmly established, into a triangular conversation. They greeted her with cordiality, responded to her advances, talked to her with the tolerant and humorous shrewdness that lurked in their dim eyes, but it was always one at a time. If, with disarming naivete, she appealed to Stephen, Reuben turned into a graven image; and if she chaffed with Reuben, Stephen became as one who having eyes seeth not, and having ears heareth not. But she persisted with a zeal which, if not according to knowledge, was the result of a firm belief in the ...
— A Christmas Accident and Other Stories • Annie Eliot Trumbull
... died 1693, was actually a pupil of Rembrandt. His much prized and rare genre pictures treat very simple subjects, and consist seldom of more than two or three figures, generally of women. The naivete and homeliness of his feeling, with the addition sometimes of a trait of kindly humour; the admirable lighting, and a touch resembling Rembrandt in impasto and vigour, render his pictures very attractive. In the National Gallery, besides The Card Players, are The Cradle, ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... Fortress. It didn't bore her to listen, because she didn't have to answer; she had only to look at him and smile, and nod her head at him now and then as a sign of enthusiasm. She liked looking at him; she liked his young naivete and monomania; she liked his face and all his gestures, and the poise and movement of ...
— The Tree of Heaven • May Sinclair
... This supreme quality, this ability to make the complex simple, the power to subordinate the non-essential, gave to his conversation, to his lectures, to his writings, and in no less degree to his personality, a direct and charming naivete that at once challenged attention and compelled confidence ...
— The Law and the Word • Thomas Troward
... go to America, in all seriousness, and with empty hands ... Why, think, man, what it means to acquire land and foundation for a model state with empty hands. That was almost cr ... At all events it was unique in its naivete. ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume I • Gerhart Hauptmann
... to watch her approach and her departure. There was something irresistibly feminine about Lulu's flight. She herself seemed to appreciate this. If anybody looked at her, she exhibited her accomplishments with an eagerness that had a charming touch of naivete. She dipped and dove endlessly. She dealt in little darts and rushes, bird-like in their speed and grace. She never flew high, but, on her level, her activity ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... appeared to them both to lift her, like one of the old immortals, far above the level of the man whom she favoured with her passing converse. What in her words, as here presented only to the eye, may seem brusqueness or even forwardness, was so tempered, so toned, so fashioned by the naivete with which she spoke, that it sounded in his ears as the utterance of absolute condescension. As to her personal appearance, the lad might well have taken her for twenty, for she looked more of a woman than, tall and strongly built as he was, he looked of a man. She was rather tall, rather slender, ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... Cornelia, whose gratitude to Agias had known no bounds, took the little thing into her heart, and determined to devote herself to instructing an innocence that must not continue too long, despite its charming naivete. ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... uses of typography. In the fifteenth century, that naive and vigorous age, names were given to the various formats as well as to the different sizes of type, names that bear the impress of the naivete of the times; and the various sheets came to be known by the different watermarks on their centres; the grapes, the figure of our Saviour, the crown, the shield, or the flower-pot, just as at a later day, the eagle of Napoleon's time gave the name ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... goodness, been realized; and now, approaching the close of my seventy-third year, I have a most vivid remembrance of her, and the beautiful objects with which she was surrounded." Nay, more; he has elsewhere informed us, with some naivete, that the first few lines of his exquisite poem to his wife, She was a phantom of delight, were originally composed as a description of this Highland maid, who would seem almost to have formed for him ever afterwards a kind of type ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... humor, the action, the rhythm, or the mystery of the theme which appeals so strongly to critical little minds in each generation of childhood, and even to adult minds so fortunate as to have retained some of the refreshing naivete of early years? ...
— Mother Goose - The Original Volland Edition • Anonymous
... "Journal" is so obviously Viola, and though he is careful to refer to her as his wife, the book reminded people that they were said to have travelled together before they were married. Her figure moves through the grey Flemish cities and the grey Flemish landscape with an adorable innocence and naivete, a trifle slenderer and tenderer than the Viola I remember, who always had for me an air of energy and obstinacy and defiance, but for Jevons, perhaps, not more slender or more tender than the Viola he knew. You couldn't say she wasn't charming. The Canon couldn't ...
— The Belfry • May Sinclair
... when Burbage recited that same speech upon a bare platform; but I am not entirely sure that it has grown wiser. We theatre-goers have come to manhood and have put away childish things; but there was a sweetness about the naivete of childhood that we can never quite regain. No longer do we dream ourselves in a garden of springtide blossoms; we can only look upon canvas trees and paper flowers. No longer are we charmed away to that imagined spot where journeys end in lovers' meeting; we can ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... would talk to her soon and find out what was the matter. There was undoubtedly something the matter. His eyes stared at her furtively as she returned to her work. "There's something the matter," his thought cautioned him. Rachel resumed her talking. A naivete and freshness were in her voice. She was letting her tongue speak for her and laughing at the sound of the curious remarks ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... he beheld his Mission prosper, and he praised with enthusiasm the waters, the bananas, and the dairy-produce of the district. The sight of our instruments, our books, and our dried plants, drew from him a sarcastic smile; and he acknowledged, with the naivete peculiar to the inhabitants of those countries, that of all the enjoyments of life, without excepting sleep, none was comparable to the pleasure of eating good beef (carne de vaca): thus does sensuality obtain an ascendancy, where there is no ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... imitated this beautiful ode in his nineteenth idyl; but is very inferior, I think, to his original, in delicacy of point and naivete of expression. Spenser, in one of his smaller compositions, has sported more diffusely on the same subject. The poem to ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... Elizabeth, most of them now only remembered because they were reprinted in the collections of Hakluyt and Purchas, this book of Raleigh's takes easily the foremost position. In comparison with the bluff and dull narratives of the other discoverers, whose chief charm is their naivete, the Discovery of Guiana has all the grace and fullness of deliberate composition, of fine literary art, and as it was the first excellent piece of sustained travellers' prose, so it remained long without a second in our literature. The brief examples which ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... the grace of one born to the instrument. As she took the sticks in her hands and struck a chord upon the outstretched strings, her face assumed a new expression; so far, we must confess, there had been much "naivete" in it, now she felt at home; ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... English Dramatists for a 'Young Ladies' academy' here in England, might take it to be necessary to have better information than he could gather from an odd volume of an old review! And then, Mr. Lowell's naivete in showing his authority,—as if the Elizabethan poets lay mouldering in inaccessible manuscript somewhere below the lowest deep of Shakespeare's grave,—is curious beyond the rest! Altogether, the fact is an epigram on the surface-literature of America. As you say, their books do not suit ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... visitors go," replied the child earnestly. Then she added, with unmistakably sincere naivete, "I don't mind leaving you in the daytime, because we're used to it; but I was thinking it would make me homesick, grandpa, to go away in the evening and leave you in ...
— Jewel - A Chapter In Her Life • Clara Louise Burnham
... was rather pink about the gills. He wondered how much of the girl's naivete was natural and how much pose. On the whole, judging from her antecedents and environment, he decided that it was largely pose, but thought none the less of her for that. The artificial always interested ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... a bad example!" decided Danvers, with a stern eye that did not deceive anyone. He was amused at her naivete, and had no wish to ...
— A Man of Two Countries • Alice Harriman
... much lightened by the gay chat of one of the party, who, with the excellent practical sense of mature experience, and the kindest heart, united a naivete and innocence such as I never saw in any other who had walked so long life's tangled path. Like a child, she was everywhere at home, and like a child, received and bestowed entertainment from all ...
— Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 • S.M. Fuller
... of Forel several cases of pathological swindling have been reported at length.[20] It must be confessed that the success of much of the misrepresentation cited in these case histories seems to be as largely due to the naivete of the country folk as to the efforts of the swindlers themselves. Two of the cases were clearly insane and were detained for long periods in asylums after their study in the clinic. But even so, it is to be noted that one of ...
— Pathology of Lying, Etc. • William and Mary Healy
... lawyer, and I don't suppose you have forgotten all your law, if you are in the grocery business now." There was about the woman the very naivete of commonplacedness and offence. ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... of the naivete of the remark, the woodsman had seen something in Thorpe he liked. Such men become rather expert in the reading of character, and often in a log shanty you will hear opinions of a shrewdness to surprise you. He revised his first intention to let ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... is, but it comes out with delicious naivete in the working classes. Now, educated people like to read of scenes that are familiar to them, though I grant you that the picture must be idealised if you're to appeal to more than one in a thousand. The working classes detest anything that tries to represent their daily life. ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... it. Scenes are divided by slender Gothic columns, and other architectural features are tessellated floors and a sketchy sort of brick-work that appears wherever a limit-line is needed. It is the charming naivete of its drawing that delights. Border there is none, but its lack is never felt, for the pictures are of such interest that the eye needs no barrier to keep it from wandering. Whatever border is found is a varying structure of architecture and of lettering and of the happy flowers of Gothic times ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... stopped them and bade them tune up, and at the same time seizing the maid Wheedle, away we flew. We danced, we whirled, we twirled. Ale upon this! My head was lost. "Why don't it last for ever?" says I. "I wish it did," says she. The naivete enraptured me. "Oooo!" I cried, hugging her, and then, you know, there was no course open to a man of honour but to offer marriage and make a lady of her. I proposed: she accepted me, and here I am, eternally tied to this accurst insignia, if I'm to keep my ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... in the spring, certainly, and why? Because we feel. And because that man is a duffer who thinks the creative artist is allowed to feel. Every genuine and sincere artist smiles at the naivete of this bungler's error—sadly perhaps, but he does smile. For what one says must of course never be the first consideration, but the ingredients, indifferent in themselves, from which the esthetic product is to be put together with easy, calm mastery. If you care too much about what you ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... which bubbles up in the heart of youth who vaguely feels himself possessed of native energy, and knows not how to stir a hand or even formulate a wish. He was savage in manners, unprepossessing in appearance, and, as he himself has told us with pathetic naivete, unable to express the real gratitude he felt to the few who would willingly have extended friendship to him if he ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... be in doubt as to whether the naivete of the contributor is comical or tragical, but at all events he has no right to join in the discussion"—[Throwing down the paper.] Oh, that is contemptible! It is a ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... we find already outlined with surprising definiteness, and at the same time with an almost childlike naivete, a careless, mirth-provoking nonchalance, in the Carmina Vagorum. They remind us of the Italian lyrics which Lorenzo de' Medici and Poliziano wrote for the Florentine populace; and though in form and artistic intention they differ from the Latin verse ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various
... knew now, that in her heart she did not want it. For she liked him—liked his society. She liked his care-free manner, his whimsical outlook upon her country, his many natural talents—his playing, and the naivete of his singing, while he often admitted that his voice hurt him, and so must hurt others. No, she had not wanted him to go away. And somehow it had never occurred to her that he would go for ever. But he was gone, and she could not resign herself. Yet there was no calling him back. She ...
— Bred of the Desert - A Horse and a Romance • Marcus Horton
... phenomena and makes them the basis of its speculations. When we examine impartially the manuals of psychology that have been published by the most distinguished speculative philosophers and are still widely distributed, we are astonished at the naivete with which the authors raise their airy metaphysical speculations, regardless of the momentous embryological facts that completely refute them. Yet the science of evolution, in conjunction with the great advance of the comparative anatomy and physiology ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.2 • Ernst Haeckel
... no transgression," but utterly scouting the idea that formulated ethics were necessary for these pure-minded people, the modern revivalists of Shint[o] teach that all that is "of faith" now is to revere the gods, keep the heart pure, and follow its dictates.[17] The naivete of the representatives of Shint[o] at Chicago in A.D. 1893, was almost as great as that of the revivalists who wrote when ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... literatures. But, perhaps because of this very limitation, it is much more alert to the variety and life of the human substance with which it deals. It does not take the whole of life for granted and it often reveals the fresh naivete of childhood in its discovery of life. When its sophistication is complete, it is the sophistication of English rather than of American literature, and is derivative rather than original, for the most part, in its criticism of life. I would specifically ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... the inspiring spirit of an illustrious ancestry fans every noble spark within the human breast into speedier and more brilliant flame. In this sense the Roman aristocracy had been at all times hereditary; in fact, it had displayed its hereditary character with great naivete in the old custom of the senator taking his sons with him to the senate, and of the public magistrate decorating his sons, as it were by anticipation, with the insignia of the highest official honour—the purple border of the consular, and the golden amulet-case of the triumphator. But, while ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... know,—I loved him dearly, but papa sent him away. Then there was Dick, the groom; but he laughed at me, and I suffered misery!" and she struck a tragic French attitude. "There is to be company here to-morrow," she added, rattling on with childish naivete, "and papa's sweetheart— Blanche Marabout—is to be here. You know they say she is ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... full play; in talking to Virginia, his understanding was passive: he perceived that a large proportion of his intellectual powers, and of his knowledge, was absolutely useless to him in her company; and this did not raise her either in his love or esteem. Her simplicity and naivete, however, sometimes relieved him, after he had been fatigued by the extravagant gaiety and glare of her ladyship's manners; and he reflected that the coquetry which amused him in an acquaintance ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. III - Belinda • Maria Edgeworth
... translation rather than imitation and he would have abhorred the feeble new product, but this did not concern his successors— they were interested only in his technical principles. Moreover, in their naivete, they imagined they were improving on Jackson because their prints were counterfeit ...
— John Baptist Jackson - 18th-Century Master of the Color Woodcut • Jacob Kainen
... imagination of my reader. Suffice it to say, that the incident proved my friend. The ice of indifference was broken; and I was rewarded for my sleight-of-hand prowess by something more than smiles—by words of praise that rang melodiously in my ear— words of gratitude spoken with the free innocent naivete of childhood— revealing, on the part of her who gave utterance to them, ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... laughed. The fair Indian, astonished at the sensation her observation produced, looked down and resumed her air of naivete. ...
— Twenty Years After • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... impression he quickly corrected at the sound of her voice, her frank ingenuousness, and her unmistakable youth. In the habit of being crushed by Miss Avondale's unrelenting superiority, he found himself apparently growing up beside this tall English girl, who had the naivete of a child. After a few commonplaces she suddenly turned her gray eyes on ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... blame it, though all discuss it. And it is here that the harshness of American and English society toward the erring woman (harshness which is not injustice, but half- justice only) contrasts visibly to our advantage over the bad naivete and lenity of the Italians. The carefully secluded Italian girl is accustomed to hear of things and speak of things which, with us, parents strive in every way to keep from their daughters' knowledge; and while her sense of delicacy is thus early ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... on the astounding ignorance of the world, and especially of the world of industry, which is betrayed with so much naivete by this socialist of the Christian pulpit. He knows so little of the commonest facts of history that he looks upon steel as a ready-made product of nature, and all the mills of the steel trust as merely a means of monopolising knives, bridges, rails, and ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock
... first stage of the emotion's development are generally spontaneous, profuse, and unrestrained. There is an absence of shyness, of any sense of shame, of the feeling of self-consciousness. The children have as yet no notion of the meaning of sex. Their naivete in this regard has not been destroyed by the social suggestion that such actions are wrong and vulgar. They are natively happy and free in their ignorance. The individual differences among children are as great ...
— A Preliminary Study of the Emotion of Love between the Sexes • Sanford Bell
... infantile grade of intelligence, following the conversation while it is kept on the plane of an eight-year-old intellect, but incapable of grasping any real thought, and staring with the open-mouthed naivete ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... to gather into his arms and devour with kisses this sweet specimen of womanly tenderness, frank inconsistency, naivete, ...
— A Perilous Secret • Charles Reade
... what seemed their sympathetic presence. They were charmed to have invited his guileless confidence, to have evoked possibly all the simple poetry of his soul; it was what might have happened in Italy, only there so much naivete would have meant money; they looked at each other with rapture. and Basil answered warmly while the waiter flushed as at a personal compliment: "Yes, it 's a nice hotel; one of the best I ever saw, East or West, in Europe ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... Robbia soul,—through its purity and limpid candour, through its shining, sweetly wholesome homeliness, down to the crystal sincerity burning recessed in the shrine. It is the fashion to say of Angelico da Fiesole that his was a naivete which amounted to genius: a thin phrase, which may nevertheless pass to qualify the inspired miniaturist. The religiosity of the Della Robbia, while no less naive, is really far other. It is not Gothic at all, nor ascetic, nor mystic. It would be Latin, were it not blithe enough to be Greek. ...
— Earthwork Out Of Tuscany • Maurice Hewlett
... fierce stammering; while Louis deliberately continued a viva voce self-examination, with his own quaint naivete, betraying emotion only by the burning colour of ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. I) - or, The Clue of Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... taste for the unseen and the supernatural; and one effective incident here is the raising of Darius's ghost, and his prophecy of the disastrous battle of Plataea. But in the ghost's revelations there is a mixture of audacity and naivete, characteristic at once of the poet and the early youth of the drama. The dead Darius prophesies Plataea, but has not heard of Salamis; he gives a brief (and inaccurate) list of the Persian kings, which the queen and chorus, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... child would have behaved as he did on certain occasions. The grave naivete of his attitude to the whole spectacle of life was like the solemnity of a child who takes very seriously every movement of the game which he is playing. A child is solemn when it is pretending to be an engine-driver or a pilot, and Victor Hugo was ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... but as he glanced in seeming naivete at his companion, something he saw in the latter's eye warned him, and suddenly Fred thought it would ...
— Ramsey Milholland • Booth Tarkington
... contribution cannot be summarized so briefly; its scattered chronicle must be sought in the minutes of trustees' meetings, where it modestly evades the public eye, in the academic formalities of presidents' reports and the journalistic naivete of college periodicals; in the diaries of early graduates; in newspaper clippings and magazine "write-ups"; in historical sketches to commemorate the decennial or the quarter-century; and from the lips ...
— The Story of Wellesley • Florence Converse
... had saved by frightening him into exertion. After swallowing a glass of warm wine, well sugared, and spiced with tincture of cinnamon, he licked his lips, sucked the edges of his glass, and said: 'Thank ye, doctor; but for you I should have been dead,' with a naivete which I can never forget, and which even now mingles pleasing associations with the thoughts of those days ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 452 - Volume 18, New Series, August 28, 1852 • Various
... man of extraordinary mental powers, had but a narrow range of experience to base his theories upon, and lived too early to catch the genetic viewpoint. Hence there is a certain pedantic naivete in his constructions. No man with any modern psychological or historical training ought to be content to leave this extraordinary "categorical imperative" unexplained. It is quite possible to trace its origin and understand its function; ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... declare it is my belief that if Purcell had ever set the "Agnus Dei" (and I don't remember that he did) he would have drawn a frisky lamb and tried to paint its snow-white fleece; and this not because he lacked reverence, but because of his absolute religious naivete, and because this drawing and painting of outside objects (so to speak) in music was his one mode of expression. It should be clearly understood that word-painting is not descriptive music. Descriptive music ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... that the President's directive to all federal agencies to use their "good offices" to push for open housing in federally supported housing had not been followed in the Department of Defense. The Civil Rights Commission, in particular, painted a picture of a Defense Department alternating between naivete and indifference in connection with the special housing problems of black servicemen.[23-69] White House staffer Wofford later decided (p. 600) that the Secretary of Defense was dragging his feet on the subject of off-base housing, although ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... and in self-defense industries began to coalesce in enormous "trusts" and "combines" and monopolies. Capitalization of millions now ran into billions, finance became international in its scope and gargantuan in its proportions and ominousness, advertising grew from its original simplicity and naivete into a vast industry based on all that the most ingenious professors could tell of applied psychology, subsidizing artists, poets, men of letters, employing armies of men along a hundred different lines, expending millions annually in its operations, making the modern newspaper possible, and ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... done in this country—mere back-stitching, for example, or what looks like it, in yellow silk upon white linen; or the modest diaper, archaic, if you like, but inevitably characteristic, in which the naivete of the sampler seems always to linger; or again, the admirably simple work in Illustration 89. This last does not show so delicately in the photographic reproduction as it should, because, being in grey and yellow on white ...
— Art in Needlework - A Book about Embroidery • Lewis F. Day
... Mireio are charming in their naivete, they are unspoiled and unreflecting. They are children, and lacking in well-defined personality. They have no knowledge of anything beyond the customs and superstitions of the simple folk about them. Their religion, which is so ...
— Frederic Mistral - Poet and Leader in Provence • Charles Alfred Downer
... that of Godwin or even Morley. In no life that I have read are the mental characteristics of our poet so ably drawn,—"his practical good sense," his love of books, his still deeper love of nature, his naivete, the readiness of his description, the brightness of his imagery, the easy flow of his diction, the vividness with which he describes character; his inventiveness, his readiness of illustration, his musical rhythm, his gaiety and ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord
... your nonsense. Mamma! . . . I'm sick and tired of listening to it! I like Miss Mela because she isn't a scarecrow like those others," saucily prattled Sophie and smiled with childish naivete at Niedzielska, who ...
— The Comedienne • Wladyslaw Reymont
... their superiors; they make revenge on their masters by making a devil of the latter's god.—The good god, and the devil like him—both are abortions of decadence.—How can we be so tolerant of the naivete of Christian theologians as to join in their doctrine that the evolution of the concept of god from "the god of Israel," the god of a people, to the Christian god, the essence of all goodness, is to be described as progress?—But even Renan does this. ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... librarian is M. LANGLES:[28] an author of equal reputation with Monsieur Gail—but his strength lies in Oriental literature; and he presides more especially over the Persian, Arabic, and other Oriental MSS. To the naivete of M. Gail, he adds the peculiar vivacity and enthusiasm of his countrymen. To see him presiding in his chair (for he and M. Gail take alternate turns) and occupied in reading, you would think that a book worm could ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... idle boy lang syne; Who read Anacreon and drank wine, I early found Anacreon rhymes Were almost passionate sometimes— And by strange alchemy of brain His pleasures always turned to pain— His naivete to wild desire— His wit to love-his wine to fire— And so, being young and dipt in folly, I fell in ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... Now Martha's innocence, naivete, and exuberance rather pleased Lawrence. In fact, Martha was the only human being in all the world who had treated Lawrence with any kind of consideration that February morning, and all at once Lawrence felt his heart warm and go ...
— Second Book of Tales • Eugene Field
... popular ballad of "Bess, the Gawkie,"—a production which has been pronounced by Allan Cunningham "a song of original merit, lively without extravagance, and gay without grossness,—the simplicity elegant, and the naivete scarcely rivalled."[61] ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... responded the man, earnestly, though he was unable to keep from slightly smiling at the unconscious naivete of the question. "I would she could see it in a more befitting frame, to set it off. If thou 't but let me, I'd put it in the other setting. Then 't ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... it generally refreshing. His family accepts the situation with perfect naivete. I am welcomed as Doro's chum with all the good-will in ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... Germans, generally speaking. Schmucke was a great musical composer doomed to remain a music master, so utterly did his character lack the audacity which a musical genius needs if he is to push his way to the front. A German's naivete does not invariably last him through his life; in some cases it fails after a certain age; and even as a cultivator of the soil brings water from afar by means of irrigation channels, so, from the springs of his ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... of the reformer,—"I doubt," said a good fifteenth-century bishop to the ladies of England in their horned caps,—"I doubt the Devil sit not between those horns." We find it illustrated with admirable naivete in the tapestries which hang in the entrance corridor of the Belle ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... valued his lovely wife as he ought to have done. The striking her "divers times'' may have been an exaggeration. It probably was. Jean and her women would want to show there had been provocation. (In a ballad he is accused of having thrown a plate at dinner in her face.) But there is a naivete, a circumstantial air, about the "biting of her in the arm'' which gives it a sort of genuine ring. How one would like to come upon a contemporary writing which would throw light on the character of John Kincaid! Growing sympathy for Jean makes one wish it could ...
— She Stands Accused • Victor MacClure
... bride, sire, and indeed Esther was a lovely girl, who had but one fault—she did not love me. She had the naivete to tell me so, and indeed to confess that she ardently loved another, a poor clerk of her father's, who, when their love was discovered, a short time before, had been turned out of the house. They loved each other none the less glowingly for all this. I shrugged my shoulders, and recalled ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... then to talking of many things, as they rode toward Poetical, but inevitably they spoke chiefly of the great State of Missouri. On the subject of Missouri the boy talked, as old Bernique had talked, with expansive naivete. In his roamings he had ridden the State up and down, and had found much to love in it. "You'll like her, too, all righty," he told Bruce confidently, "whend you git broke to her." On one of youth's candid impulses to speak up for the life on the inside, the cherished desire, the gallant ideal, ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... the extreme naivete of Leblanc seems to have been mitigated by duplicity. He went on with the general pacification of the world as if the Balkan submission was made in absolute good faith, and he announced the disbandment of the force ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... the middle of the choir of this church, was violated and broken to pieces by the Calvinists, and its contents wantonly destroyed, towards the close of the sixteenth century. The account of the outrages then committed are given at length, and with great naivete, as well as feeling, by De Bourgueville,[47] who was present on the occasion; and they have lately been translated into English,[48] with the addition of some interesting details that accompanied the death and funeral of the monarch. Nearly a hundred years before that time, a cardinal, upon a visit ...
— Architectural Antiquities of Normandy • John Sell Cotman
... something older. At the porch we were met by Maude, her slight girlish figure rounded into the perfection of womanhood, the rich bloom of her cheek not quite as deep perhaps; but the sweet blue eyes met mine with all the old frankness, the charming naivete that had rendered her so much a favorite ...
— Scenes in Switzerland • American Tract Society
... Cold Place. Ait gan chu gan chat, gan leanbh, ait gan ghean, gan ghaire, a place without a dog, or cat, or child, a place without affection or laughter.... Had sainted Brendan come on Buenos Aires in winter on his voyage to Hy Brazil, and thought in his naivete that here was hell ...? ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... sat watching Montague, smiling at his naivete. "Where did you say this road was?" he asked. ...
— The Moneychangers • Upton Sinclair
... speak. Every woman who enjoyed the privilege of her friendship felt the magnetism and charm of a rare nature; while, with all her force and power, there was a childishness about her that impressed one with the idea that the naivete and innocence of childhood had never been wholly lost in the woman. I think it was in some measure owing to the fact that she was so near-sighted that there was a kind of appealing hesitancy about her movements that ...
— Memories of Jane Cunningham Croly, "Jenny June" • Various
... passages marred by archaisms and provincialisms. But I am at a loss to perceive how Burton's method of translation should be less applicable to the Arabian Nights than to the Lusiad. So far as I can judge, it is better suited to the naivete combined with stylistic subtlety of the former than to the smooth humanistic elegancies of ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... to talk, he questioned her about her tastes. She admitted, with pretty naivete, that she had hopes of social success and glory, and that she desired to have fine horses, which she knew almost as well as a horse-dealer, for a part of the farm at Roncieres was devoted to breeding; ...
— Strong as Death • Guy de Maupassant
... I admire the Duke. The readiness with which he has adopted the air of a debater, shows the man of genius. There is a gruff, husky sort of a downright Montaignish naivete about him, which is quaint, unusual, and tells. You plainly perceive that he is determined to be a civilian; and he is as offended if you drop a hint that he occasionally wears an uniform, as a servant on a holiday if you ...
— The Young Duke • Benjamin Disraeli
... at the lowest ebb, to go wandering about the world like Teufelsdroeckh, looking for a rest for the sole of his foot. And yet all the time, with incomparable naivete, ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... Johnson could, if he had chosen, have dispelled the darkness. When we find a number of educated gentlemen seriously enquiring as to the conditions of existence in the next world, we feel that they are sharing Boswell's naivete without his excuse. What can any human being outside a pulpit say upon such a subject which does not amount to a confession of his own ignorance, coupled, it may be, with more or less suggestion of shadowy hopes and fears? Have the secrets of the prison-house ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... at such times seemed to him the only sanity; these men used the powers that God had given them, were content with simple and unostentatious doings and interests, reached the higher vocation by their very naivete, and did not seek to fly on wings that were not meant to bear them. How sensible, Christopher told himself, was Ralph's ideal! God had made the world, so Ralph lived in it—a world in which great and small affairs were ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... Gentile world. To the educated and sceptical Athenian, as to the critical scholar of modern times, the physical resurrection of Jesus from the grave, and his ascent through the vaulted floor of heaven, might seem foolishness or naivete. But to the average Greek or Roman the conception presented no serious difficulty. The cosmical theories upon which the conception was founded were essentially the same among Jews and Gentiles, and indeed were but little modified until the establishment of the Copernican astronomy. ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... of Saint-Ursula. That is a subject which does not lack either interest or poesy. Saint-Ursula, virgin and martyr, was, as is generally believed, a daughter of prince of Great Britain. Becoming the abbess of a convent of unmarried women, who were called with popular naivete the Eleven Thousand Virgins, she was martyred by the Huns in the fifth century; later, she was patroness of the order of the Ursulines, to which she gave its name, and she was also patroness of the famous house of Sorbonne. An able artist like yourself ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac
... and you were so kind to me—gave me such nice egg-punch; see, there is a glass of it left over; it will do for my breakfast. I love cold punch, so you need not trouble to bring me any chocolate." With these words, the little maid sprang nimbly from the bed, ran with the naivete of an eight-year-old child to the table, where she settled herself in the corner of the sofa, drew her bare feet up under her, and proceeded to breakfast on ...
— The Nameless Castle • Maurus Jokai
... whose journals are worth the sifting; and the value of their eyes depends on the amount of individual character they took with them, and of the previous culture that had sharpened and tutored the faculty of observation. In our conscious age the frankness and naivete of the elder voyagers is impossible, and we are weary of those humorous confidences on the subject of fleas with which we are favored by some modern travellers, whose motto should be (slightly altered) from Horace,—Flea-bit, et toto cantabitur orbe. A naturalist self-sacrificing enough ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various
... Law under Niebuhr and Schlegel at Bonn. 'Our dear child,' writes Mrs. Austin to Mrs. Grote, 'is a great joy to us. She grows wonderfully, and is the happiest thing in the world. Her German is very pretty; she interprets for her father with great joy and naivete. God forbid that I should bring up a daughter here! But at her present age I am most glad to have her here, and to send her to a school where she learns—well, writing, arithmetic, geography, and, as a matter of course, German.' Lucie returned to ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... His naivete and confidence set her once more in a state between indulgent amusement and anger. Another man she would have laughed at straight in the face, but this simple belief in her goodness threw her out of her usual stride, and in the end she left him without answer, save that which he chose ...
— The Native Born - or, The Rajah's People • I. A. R. Wylie
... educated flattered girls in an age of luxury and a society of leisure. He noted that the water-colours on the walls of the room she sat in had mainly the quality of being naives, and reflected that naivete in art is like a zero in a number: its importance depends on the figure it is united with. Meanwhile, however, he had fallen in love with her. Before he went away, at any rate, he said to her: "I thought St. George was coming to see you to-day, ...
— The Lesson of the Master • Henry James
... or hotel door. I have seen a knot of men stop and stare at the ladies entering a motor-car, and on one occasion one of them wiped off the glass with his hand that he might see the better. It is not impertinence, it is merely bucolic naivete. The city in the evening is like a country fair, with its awkward gallantries, its brute curiosity, its unabashed expressions of affection by hands and lips, its ogling, coughing, and other peasant forms of flirtation. ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... amid joy or sorrow, the philosophic vein was ever evident. He more resembled Goldsmith than any man that I can compare him to: in his conversation, his apparent confusion of ideas ending with some felicitous phrase of genius, his naivete, his simplicity not untouched with a dash of sarcasm affecting innocence—one was often reminded of the gifted and interesting friend of Burke and Johnson. There was, however, one trait in which my father did not resemble Goldsmith: he had no vanity. Indeed, one of his few infirmities ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... it either," returned the iron-founder, with grave naivete. "And, yes, I guess she meant it. But that reminds me. She knew I was looking for you and she gave me a note—let me see, I've got it here somewhere; oh, yes, here it ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... matter as it is. This is a very unexpected interpretation, by which men of science have come to acknowledge the correctness of the common belief: they rehabilitate an opinion which philosophers have till now turned to ridicule, under the name of naive realism. All which proves that the naivete of some may be the ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... her naivete, and of the excellent advice she gave to others, there were, for several years, innumerable difficulties with regard to the Archduchess Magdalen's confessor, Father Hezcovaus. He was infirm in health, and needed much waiting upon, day and night. Moreover, he observed the rule as little as possible, ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... circumstances at court, would have made you famous," I said, pleased alike with her naivete ...
— The Touchstone of Fortune • Charles Major
... Place crossing. He always called her his "little girl," though she was by no means little in the ordinary acceptation of the word, being at least sixteen, and rather tall for her years. But there was a sort of freshness and naivete and youthfulness about her which made him use that adjective. She usually carried a pile of books in a strap, so he conjectured that she must be coming from school, and, ever since he had first seen her, she had worn the same rough blue serge dress, ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
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