"Childishness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... youth as childhood's an excuse for childishness. Youth, still, like childhood, but unlike maturity, can be lost in its emotions, absorbed in them to the exclusion of all else, abandoned to them with all else pitched away as a swimmer discards his every stitch and joyously plunges ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson
... than it had ever before worn. His thin cheeks became round; his delicate little hand, so spiritually fashioned to achieve fairy task-work, grew plumper than the hand of a thriving infant. His aspect had a childishness such as might have induced a stranger to pat him on the head—pausing, however, in the act, to wonder what manner of child was here. It was as if the spirit had gone out of him, leaving the body to flourish in a sort of vegetable existence. Not that Owen Warland was idiotic. ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... shoulders. "Why this is mere childishness," said he. "The marriage is a most suitable one, and it is my desire that it ...
— The Champdoce Mystery • Emile Gaboriau
... of an exceedingly small party located apparently a hundred miles from anywhere. Their nearest neighbours were a tribe of Indians, whose mixture of childishness and cunning shrewdness made them an interesting study. These gave little trouble; they had more or less accepted the fact that the white man was now in possession of the domains of their forefathers, and that their best course was to behave themselves. ...
— The Empire Annual for Girls, 1911 • Various
... childishness. You are trifling. I am astonished that you should speak in this way, after what you know ...
— The Living Link • James De Mille
... her beauty she became The cynosure of every eye. Shy, silent did the maid appear As in the timid forest deer, Even beneath her parents' roof Stood as estranged from all aloof, Nearest and dearest knew not how To fawn upon and love express; A child devoid of childishness To romp and play she ne'er would go: Oft staring through the window pane Would she ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... be like a child playing among awful forces—clever enough often to control them, to the amazement of himself and others, but never comprehending the force he used; often naughty; on the whole a well-intentioned child. But she could well see that childishness combined with power is a more difficult conception for the common mind than ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall
... the entries in their ledger. Think for a moment how the peasants speak in that play of Tolstoi's which I have called the only modern play in prose which contains poetry. They speak as Russians speak, with a certain childishness, in which they are more primitive than our more civilised peasants. But the speech comes from deeper than they are aware, it stumbles into a revelation of the soul. A drunken man in Tolstoi has more wisdom ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... more prevalent than among other classes of people. "The deaf and dumb," says Andral, "presents, in intelligence, character, and the development of his passions, certain modifications, which depend on his state of isolation in the midst of society. He remains habitually in a state of half childishness, is very credulous, but, like the savage, remains free from many of the prejudices acquired in society. In him the tender feelings are not deep; he appears susceptible neither of strong attachment nor of lively ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... Laurent brutally remarked to her, "I hope we shall sleep well to-night! There must be an end to this sort of childishness." ...
— Therese Raquin • Emile Zola
... This grown-up childishness, to which he felt so superior, exercised a peculiar and almost mesmeric effect on Soames, for he had never felt ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... of doors. Fires were everywhere, their glow, reflected brightly on the canvas of the 'flies,' giving a fantastic brilliance to the scene. Life stirred around him, jubilant, bounteous, pulsing life. The levity of the people was without limit. Their childishness astonished Done, but he lived to find this a characteristic of the diggers in all parts; even the roughest men in the roughest camps exhibited a schoolboy's love of horseplay and a great capacity for primitive happiness. It was ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... attentions, and thoughtfulness which a woman, after a certain age, no longer expects from her lover. He treated her as if she were a young girl, and begged her to give him a ring which she always wore, and which had been one of her confirmation presents. He put up with all the childishness and coquetry which was so ridiculous in the passion of this mother of a family, and he encouraged it all without a sign of impatience on his face or a shade of mockery in his voice. At the same time he made himself entirely master ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt
... that he has to ask aid from the animals. Sometimes he sympathizes with the people, and at others, out of pure spitefulness, he plays them malicious tricks that are worthy of a demon. He is a combination of strength, weakness, wisdom, folly, childishness, and malice. ...
— Blackfoot Lodge Tales • George Bird Grinnell
... and continued to be her chief care, a certain disappointment followed her first rapid success: she never could get them to take on the case-hardening needful for what she counted the final polish. They always retained a certain simplicity which she called childishness. It came in fact of childlikeness, but the lady was not child enough to distinguish the difference—as great as that between the back and the front of a head. As, then, the minister found him incapable of forming a style, though time soon proved ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... no patience with childishness in a man! I found it necessary to reprimand you. You'll probably know your place after this." He ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... said so impossible! Polly, at once so quaint and so captivating, when her words are perused upon the printed page, is so incapable of having her baby-prattle repeated by anybody else, without the imminent risk, the all but certainty, of its degenerating into mere childishness. It can scarcely be wondered, therefore, that "Barbox Brothers," though it actually was Read, and Read successfully, was hardly ever repeated. Everybody who has once looked into the story will bear in mind how, quite abruptly, almost ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... and as I may perhaps never be anybody's real bride, I insisted on my rights. This carrying on of the Gretna Green game rather scandalized good Mrs. James, but when she scolded me gently for my "childishness," Sir S. said, "Do let her be a child as long as she can. It would be well for every one of us if we kept something of our childhood all our lives. Just now I'm finding childhood gloriously contagious. I don't ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... them upon the walls of his chapels, as children do. An incomprehensible character of mind: in certain things, capable of upholding his rank; in some, rising above his position; in others, sinking below childishness." [Histoire universelle de F. A. de Thou, ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume IV. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... live in London know well enough that its streets are not paved with gold. If one had asked Christopher his opinion on that point, he would no doubt have laughed at the childishness of the question, yet he came up to London with all the confidence and certainty which the old childish belief could have inspired. He was coming to make his fortune. That went without saying. He was brim-full of belief in himself, ...
— Cruel Barbara Allen - From Coals Of Fire And Other Stories, Volume II. (of III.) • David Christie Murray
... chagrined at himself for his show of feeling. He was a silly, sentimental old fool, inflicting his childishness upon a gentlemanly young fellow who was too kind and sportsmanlike to show distaste or offense. But why should any one else be interested in his, Carrington R. Davies' feelings, or the fact that, twenty years before, he had ...
— Interference and Other Football Stories • Harold M. Sherman
... a barefoot little fellow, slim and hard as a nail. In his hand he carried an old-fashioned rifle almost as long as himself. There was a lingering look of childishness in his tanned, boyish face. His hands and feet were small and shapely as those of a girl. About him hung the stolid imperturbability of the Southern mountaineer. Times were when his blue eyes melted to tenderness ...
— A Man Four-Square • William MacLeod Raine
... hose, well saved, a world too wide For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice, Turning again toward childish treble, pipes And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all, That ends this strange eventful history, Is second childishness and mere oblivion, Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans ...
— Testimony of the Sonnets as to the Authorship of the Shakespearean Plays and Poems • Jesse Johnson
... worse things far than seeing a little child die! It is worse to see it change. To see the innocence pass from the eyes, and the childishness grow into wickedness, and to know, without being able to stop it, just what ...
— Things as They Are - Mission Work in Southern India • Amy Wilson-Carmichael
... was to be a special festa in connection with a local saint. Would the English ladies and gentlemen care to go? The patron himself had the contempt of an enlightened man for saints and festas, but he knew the curious attraction which such childishness ...
— The Third Miss Symons • Flora Macdonald Mayor
... returned, to go back at once to the hotel and reclaim the note, before Hugh could get it. Could anything have happened to her? Marishka wanted her—the sound of a voice, the touch of a feminine hand, her airs and graces—the foibles of a child perhaps, but intensely virile in their childishness and intensely human. It seemed that even Yeva was ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... We'd had a great misfortune, he said, and it was nobody's fault. We had lost a man we all liked and respected, and he felt that everybody in the ship ought to be sorry for the man's brother, who was left behind, and that it was rotten lubberly childishness, and unjust and unmanly and cowardly, to be playing schoolboy tricks with forks and spoons and pipes, and that sort of gear. He said it had got to stop right now, and that was all, and the men might go forward. And ...
— Man Overboard! • F(rancis) Marion Crawford
... Heath and to teach him, too. Sometimes when I look at him I feel it must be so. But what have I to teach? D'you know since—since—well, it makes me feel humble often. And yet I know that the greatest man needs help. Men are a sort of children. I've often been surprised by the childishness of really big men. Please tell me ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... borrowed from Spain, and turning on disguises, dark lanterns, and trap-doors to help or hinder the design of personages who were types, not of individual character, but of classes, as doctors, lawyers, lovers, and confidants. It was reserved for Moliere (1622-1673) to demolish all this childishness, and enthrone the true Thalia on the French stage. Like Shakspeare, he was both an author and an actor. The appearance of the "Precieuses Ridicules" was the first of the comedies in which the gifted poet assailed the follies of his age. The object of this satire was the system ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... the conceit, half-ashamed of his own childishness, and crossing the stream by some boulders, he brushed away the earth and weed from the top of the great stone. Then he retraced his steps and gathered a handful of bleached twigs that the winter floods had left stranded along the margin of the stream. These he ...
— Uncanny Tales • Various
... the aged Countess of Windsor was residing with her son in the palace of the Protectorate; we repaired to our accustomed abode near Hyde Park. Idris now for the first time for many years saw her mother, anxious to assure herself that the childishness of old age did not mingle with unforgotten pride, to make this high-born dame still so inveterate against me. Age and care had furrowed her cheeks, and bent her form; but her eye was still bright, her manners authoritative and unchanged; she received her daughter coldly, but displayed ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... that she was lost to him. Now, she saw it in his eyes, he did believe; and as the patient, hearing his sentence, gazes dumb and stricken, facing death, so he gazed at her, seeing irrevocability in her unmoved face. And, accepting his doom, sheer childishness overcame him. As Franklin the day before had felt, so he now felt, the intolerableness of his woe; and, as with Franklin, the waves closed over his head. Helen was so near him that it was but a stumbling step that brought her within his arms; but it was not with the lover's supplication ...
— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... no doubt. But remember that the savage is always a child. So, indeed, are millions, as well clothed, housed, and policed as ourselves—children from the cradle to the grave. But of them I do not talk; because, happily for the world, their childishness is so overlaid by the result of other men's manhood; by an atmosphere of civilisation and Christianity which they have accepted at second-hand as the conclusions of minds wiser than their own, ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... I am neither melancholy, nor morose, nor austere, nor distant, nor reserved, nor sullen. I am always cheerful, ready and eager to join in any merriment. I am not clouded with sadness, nor absent in mind, nor deficient in action. No; take me when I am most foolish at home and extend mirth into childishness; yet all the time I am shuddering at myself.' There spake the future author of the immortal sermons. There spake a mind and a heart that have deepened the minds and the hearts of Christian men ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... condition are such as we can justly blame others for; and, I repeat, many of them are such as no changes of institutions can quickly remedy. To discern between the evils that energy can remove and the evils that patience must bear, makes the difference between manliness and childishness, between good sense and folly. And more than that, without such discernment, seeing that we have grave duties toward our own body and the country at large, we can hardly escape acts of ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... Sandy saw that the girl was awake to the reality of things. Shock had shattered her childishness forever, but she was not afraid. Uncertainty and ignorance were there, but no sense of danger in the clear, ...
— A Son of the Hills • Harriet T. Comstock
... at Court, she treated in precisely the same way. Was it innocence or artfulness, this assumption of childish prudery? "She was a child," says Count Hamilton, "in all respects save playing with dolls"—a child who refused to grow into a woman, and yet, one shrewdly suspects that behind her childishness was a motive deeper than is usually associated with ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... in and about her pet's jetty for, Agatha sat silent, until slowly there grew a thoughtful shadow in her eyes, a forewarning of the gradual passing away of that childishness, which in her, from accidental circumstances, had lasted ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)
... surveyed her with silent attention. Catharine learned, by long acquaintance with this people, that an outward manifestation of surprise [FN: See Appendix L.] is considered a want of etiquette and good breeding, or rather a proof of weakness and childishness. The women, like other females, are certainly less disposed to repress this feeling of inquisitiveness than the men, and one of their great sources of amusement, when Catharine was among them, was examining ...
— Canadian Crusoes - A Tale of The Rice Lake Plains • Catharine Parr Traill
... so few people who can do anything to help one over Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. Brian was good at everything—charades, clumps, consequences, dumb crambo. And to think that he should be ill so long! What is his complaint, Ida?' asked Bessie, suddenly becoming earnest, after a lapse into childishness. ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... could not tell. However, as he had been indulging comparisons of life in Constantinople with life in Bielo-Osero, and longing for the holy quiet of the latter, he concluded he was homesick, and was ashamed. It was childishness! The Great Example had no home! And with that thought he struggled manfully to be a man forever ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... ride home in my Lord Sandwich's coach, but he must exclaim, with breathless gusto, "his noble, rich coach." When he is bound for a supper party, he anticipates a "glut of pleasure." When he has a new watch, "to see my childishness," says he, "I could not forbear carrying it in my hand and seeing what o'clock it was an hundred times." To go to Vauxhall, he says, and "to hear the nightingales and other birds, hear fiddles, ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... reached the Drive he alighted and walked slowly toward the Bivens palace. He had never been there before. He had always avoided the spot. He smiled now at the childishness of his attitude toward Nan. It seemed incredible that a sane man should taboo one of the most beautiful spots in the city, merely because a woman lived in the neighbourhood who once professed ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... and apparently forgetful of all peril. The grass-tops above this play rocked and rustled in a way that would certainly have attracted attention had there been any eyes to see. But the marsh-hawk was still hunting lazily at the other side of the field, and no tragedy followed the childishness. ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... sharpness was directed not to Miss Polly, but to herself—to her own incomprehensible childishness. The man interested her; already she had thought of him daily since she first came to the house; already she had begun to wonder about him, and she realized that she should wonder still more because of what Miss Polly had told her. When he had approached her in the yard, she had ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... utter no vindictive word, and yet he knew that every sentence he uttered contained a threat, a threat which at that time seemed to him to have no meaning. He felt ashamed of himself, too, and it seemed to him on reflection that he had been churlish even almost to childishness. And yet the words came to him in spite of himself, and he had flung them out eagerly, almost triumphantly. Even Mr. Bolitho felt a shiver pass through his body as Paul spoke. His speech seemed to contain ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking
... made a noise—perhaps merely an intaking of breath inaudible even to themselves but clear to the ears of Joan. She was on her feet, with bright, wild eyes glancing here and there. There was no suggestion of childishness in her, but a certain willingness to flee from a great danger or attack a weaker force. She stood alert, rather than frightened, with her head back as if she scented the wind to learn what approached. The ball of gray fur straightened ...
— The Seventh Man • Max Brand
... mimesis, in my eyes, is a piece of childishness. Were I not anxious to remain polite, I should say that it is sheer stupidity; and the word would express my meaning better. The variety of combinations in the domain of possible things is infinite. It is undeniable ...
— The Mason-bees • J. Henri Fabre
... have read his thoughts, for once more they smiled and in the smile was an amused twinkle. This time, though, it was also a smile of the lips, revealing a row of teeth so small and white that they accentuated her seeming of childishness. She must be about ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... man of candour and of true understanding is never hasty to condemn. He can censure an imperfection, or even a vice, without rage against the guilty party. In a word, they are the same folly, the same childishness, the same ill-breeding, and the same ill-nature, which raise all the clamours and uproars both in life and on the stage. The worst of men generally have the words rogue and villain most in their mouths, as the ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... spectacles on nose, and pouch on side; His youthful hose, well sav'd, a world too wide For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice Turning again tow'rd childish treble, pipes And whistles in his sound: Last Scene of all, That ends this strange eventful History, Is second childishness and meer oblivion, Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... contempt of the notice taken of Woodhouse, the poetical shoemaker[372]. He said, it was all vanity and childishness: and that such objects were, to those who patronised them, mere mirrours of their own superiority. "They had better (said he,) furnish the man with good implements for his trade, than raise subscriptions for his poems. He may make an excellent ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... dooms. Who labor all the livelong day; Who stand beside the roaring looms Nor ever turn their eyes away; Like parts of those machines of steel: Like wheels that whirl, like shuttles thrown; Without the power to dream or feel; With all of childishness. ...
— Selected Poems • William Francis Barnard
... seasons in the lives of most reading men when they rebel against the dust of libraries and kick against the pricks of these monstrously accumulated heaps of words. We all know 'the dark hour' when the vanity of learning and the childishness of merely literary things are brought home to us in such a way as almost to avail to put the pale student out of conceit with his books, and to make him turn from his best-loved authors as from a friend ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... 'Pavel,' he began, 'what childishness this is! Really! what's the matter with you to-day? God knows what nonsense you have got into your head, and you are crying. Upon my word, I believe you ...
— On the Eve • Ivan Turgenev
... suppressed laugh was audible, and the fisherman said as he returned: "You must pardon it in her, my honored guest, and perhaps many a naughty trick besides; but she means no harm by it. It is our foster-child, Undine, and she will not wean herself from this childishness, although she has already entered her eighteenth year. But, as I said, at heart she ...
— Undine - I • Friedrich de la Motte Fouque
... never change what the good God has once fashioned," said Malvina. She spoke very gravely. The childishness seemed to have fallen ...
— Malvina of Brittany • Jerome K. Jerome
... justly or unjustly, called superstition; and this therefore was not the answer that might have been expected of him. But he had begun with the symbolic and mystical in his reception of Annie, and perhaps there was something in the lovely childishness of her unconscious faith (while she all the time thought herself a dreadful unbeliever) that kept Thomas to the simplicities of the mystical part of his nature. Besides, Thomas's mind was a rendezvous for ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... possible that he might have been hanged. Most people would prefer to be run through with a rapier, and it was therefore clear that Stradella ought to be satisfied. As for such weakness as a qualm of conscience, Pignaver was as far above such childishness as the Bravi themselves. ...
— Stradella • F(rancis) Marion Crawford
... silence, and again the odd pathos, the childishness of the whole thing stirred Trix's heart. She said she understood, and she did understand more profoundly than Nicholas could possibly have conceived. In the few seconds of silence which followed, she reviewed those solitary years in an amazingly ...
— Antony Gray,—Gardener • Leslie Moore
... He always talks in a kind of affectionate tone about the former, and is now meditating a visit to Mrs. Fox at St. Anne's Hill, where he may see her surrounded with the busts, pictures, and recollections of her husband. He delights to dwell on the simplicity, gaiety, childishness, and profoundness of Fox. I asked him if he had ever known Pitt. He said that Pitt came to Rheims to learn French, and he was there at the same time on a visit to the Archbishop, his uncle (whom I remember at Hartwell,[5] a very old prelate with the tic-douloureux), ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... followed; but, just as his hand was on the knocker of the door, the Emperor came out. It was then already broad daylight, and the Prince informed him of our anxiety, and the reflections we had made upon his rashness. "What childishness!" said his Majesty; "what is there to fear? Wherever I am, am I not in my ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... of old age ceases when second childishness and oblivion begin; therefore we thanked God for His goodness in taking the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... tranced breath, Not vexing Thee in death, And Thou rememberest of what toys We made our joys, How weakly understood Thy great commanded good, Then, fatherly not less Than I whom Thou hast moulded from the clay, Thou'lt leave Thy wrath, and say, 'I will be sorry for their childishness.' ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... seems so sometimes, and I hope it is only her childishness—but it is so impossible to make any lasting impression on her. And I don't see how things are to improve with her. Rosalys was a perfect little woman at her age. Bridget thinks of nothing—I have seen it so much since we came here and during the bustle of the removal from London. She lives ...
— The Rectory Children • Mrs Molesworth
... her last quarrel, that supreme petty trouble which often explodes about nothing, but more often still on some occasion of a brutal fact or of a decisive proof. This cruel farewell to faith, to the childishness of love, to virtue even, is in a degree as capricious as life itself. Like life ...
— Petty Troubles of Married Life, Second Part • Honore de Balzac
... once occupied. Let them not lower their own dignity and that of the nation by any bandying of reproaches with the Executive. The cause which we all have at heart is vulgarized by any littleness or show of personal resentment in its representatives, and is of too serious import to admit of any childishness or trifling. Let there be no more foolish talk of impeachment for what is at best a poor infirmity of nature, and could only be raised into a harmful importance by being invested with the dignity ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... about until he found their nest. Climbing the tree he put the birdlings back where they belonged. After an hour Mr. Lincoln caught up with his companions, who laughed at him for what they called his "childishness." He answered them earnestly: ...
— The Story of Young Abraham Lincoln • Wayne Whipple
... Domenichino), the two large "Marines" in the Pitti Palace, attributed to Salvator, are, on the whole, the most vapid and vile examples of human want of understanding. In the folly of Claude there is still a gleam of grace and innocence; there is refreshment in his childishness, and tenderness in his inability. But the folly of Salvator is disgusting in its very nothingness: it is like the vacuity of a plague-room in an hospital, shut up in uncleansed silence, emptied of pain and motion, but not ...
— The Harbours of England • John Ruskin
... early morning, when with the approach of the sun a cold, uncomfortable sweat rises heavily from the earth and water, Jeanne had drawn one of the bearskins closely about her. Her head was bare. Her hair, glistening with damp, clung in heavy masses about her face. There was a bewitching childishness about her, a pathetic appeal to him in the forlorn little picture she made—so helpless, and yet so confident in him. Every energy in him leaped up in defiance of the revolution which for a few moments had stirred within him. And Jeanne, as though she had read the working of ...
— Flower of the North • James Oliver Curwood
... This pretty Childishness of Behaviour is one of the most refined Parts of Coquetry, and is not to be attained in Perfection, by Ladies that do not Travel for their Improvement. A natural and unconstrained Behaviour has something in it so agreeable, that it is no Wonder to see People endeavouring ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... though never questioning the wisdom of her clever sister's conclusions, dreaded the effect on the mother, whom she had been forbidden to call mamma. "At their age it was affecting an interesting childishness." ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... boy Benjamin, his sudden hot passion over, stood watching intently,—his face almost uncanny in its lack of childishness. ...
— Ben Blair - The Story of a Plainsman • Will Lillibridge
... thee today with all the Pandavas. For, O Krishna, the sons of Pandu also, who disregarding the claims of all these kings, have worshipped thee who art no king, deserve to be slain by me along with thee. Even this is my opinion, O Krishna, that they who from childishness have worshipped thee, as if thou deservest it, although thou art unworthy of worship, being only a slave and a wretch and no king, deserve to be slain by me.' Having said this, that tiger among kings stood there ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Part 2 • Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa
... treat her kindly: be to her what I ought to have been—a protector! Sir Willmott, I cannot live very long; say only that you will treat her kindly. Whatever I have shall be yours: you will be kind, will you not?" And he looked at Sir Willmott with an air of such perfect childishness, that the knight imagined his ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... nothing at all of women, hope to manage that self-willed, eager, independent girl? Why, why, why had she engaged herself to him? I fancied that very possibly there were qualities in him—his very childishness and helplessness—which, if they only irritated an Englishman, would attract a Russian. Lame dogs find a warm home in Russia. But did she know anything about him? Would she not, in a week, be irritated by his incapacity? And he—he—bless ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... what he is. Having, by dint of much pains and many prayers, obtained, as you hope, some beginnings of victory over the most wayward of wills, and the most unaccountably strange of mixed natures, with its intellectual sharpness and moral bluntness, its precocious knowingness and stereotyped childishness, its quickness to learn and slowness to unlearn, prepare for the next stage of your enterprise. Lay out your scheme of emigration, get the money where you can, that is to say, call it flown from heaven and wile it out of earthly pockets, anticipate all possible emergencies ...
— God's Answers - A Record Of Miss Annie Macpherson's Work at the - Home of Industry, Spitalfields, London, and in Canada • Clara M. S. Lowe
... even when written in the nineteenth, or to the fifteenth. The classical atmosphere of the French seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is totally absent. Those who care for the delicately poised balance of classical taste, for wit and brilliance of dialogue, will be disconcerted by childishness or fierce passion. It is an abrupt literature, but spontaneous and sincere, which has not been spoilt by formalism and scepticism, but which has not acquired, from a purely technical point of view, the perfection of the French. Having remained inarticulate during ...
— Belgium - From the Roman Invasion to the Present Day • Emile Cammaerts
... of childishness amused us greatly, creating a general laugh. This frivolity in the face of a court-martial was more than Wolfe could stand, so after one withering glance in our direction he turned his back on us and stalked majestically from the room. Luckily I had ...
— 'Brother Bosch', an Airman's Escape from Germany • Gerald Featherstone Knight
... Her childishness of manner did not seem at all incongruous to him. She was comfortably ageless so far as he was concerned, a drab figure with a pleasant voice who treated him as though he were a human being instead of a sick ogre. In some mysterious way her attitude ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke
... Praed's schoolboy attempts not left out, is a very considerable one. Leigh Hunt is himself entitled to a high place in the new school so far as mere priority goes, and to one not low in actual merit. He relates himself, more than once, with the childishness which is the good side of his Skimpolism, how not merely his literary friends but persons of quality had special favourites among the miscellaneous papers of the Indicator, like (he would certainly have used the parallel ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... tear with thunder the wide cheeks o' the air, And yet to charge thy sulphur with a bolt That should but rive an oak. Why dost not speak? Think'st thou it honorable for a nobleman Still to remember wrongs? Daughter, speak you: He cares not for your weeping. Speak thou, boy; Perhaps thy childishness may move him more Than can our reasons. There is no man in the world More bound to his mother; yet here he lets me prate Like one i' the stocks. Thou hast never in thy life Show'd thy dear mother any courtesy; When ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... "No childishness, Dorothea!" said Daniel quietly. "You must get your mind on higher things; and you ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... beguia, the eye, and beguitsa, to see; aitagana, towards the father: by adding tu, we form the verb aitaganatu, to go towards the father; ume-tasuna, soft and infantile ingenuity; umequeria, disagreeable childishness. ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... know England attributed it to the ignorance and childishness of the multitude. Those who thought that the shouts of the mob had any real meaning either hung down their heads in shame at the self-degradation of a great nation, or attributed them to fear. The latter was the general feeling. "Il faut," said all our lower classes, "que ces ...
— Correspondence & Conversations of Alexis de Tocqueville with Nassau William Senior from 1834 to 1859, Vol. 2 • Alexis de Tocqueville
... in Rubens's hands this and all kindred subjects are generally repulsive. The very early masters are prone to fix the attention upon some revolting detail of torture or too material and agonizing exhibition of physical suffering, but their stiff, hard outlines, absence of perspective and childishness of composition, with the element of the grotesque which is seldom absent, take the edge off their effect. Later, when art has advanced, and is capable of affecting us more deeply, refinement too has advanced: there is less simplicity, but merely painful detail is subordinated ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... glanced at her with a flash of anger. "Sometimes you count too much on my childishness, Barbara," he said resentfully, and went out of the door without ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... from myself that an incident like the last-named may smack of childishness to a certain austere type of northern Puritan. Childishness! But to go into this question of the relative hilarity and moroseness of religions would take us far afield; for aught I know it may, at bottom, ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... which I handed to him. I know the business now, and I have met a lot of publishers, so I was safe in resigning. I knew I could get another position in three days. He tore the resignation up, and said he wished I could outgrow my childishness. ...
— Sunny Slopes • Ethel Hueston
... at once from his seat and limped forward. His unprepossessing face looked as if he pulled his childishness together ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... difference between that "all but" finest and "finest" is an infinite one; and besides this, however the power of the performer, once attained, may be afterwards misdirected, in slavery to popular passion or childishness, and spend itself, at its sweetest, in idle melodies, cold and ephemeral (like Michael Angelo's snow statue in the other art), or else in vicious difficulty and miserable noise—crackling of thorns under the pot of public sensuality—still, ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... of the duel, seriously considered, there are many points to be urged. But the Mensur serves no good purpose whatever. It is childishness, and the fact of its being a cruel and brutal game makes it none the less childish. Wounds have no intrinsic value of their own; it is the cause that dignifies them, not their size. William Tell is rightly one ...
— Three Men on the Bummel • Jerome K. Jerome
... heard or read, a touching story; and here it is as I remember it. In the Faubourg Saint Antoine lives a community of women with whom the aged of the poor find shelter; those who have become infirm, or have dropped into helpless childishness, whether men or women, are received there without question or payment. There they are lodged, fed and ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... indulge me in a piece of childishness?' he said. 'In less than five minutes a London express goes by; I have often watched it here, and it amuses me. Would ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... of me, aren't you?" inquired his grandfather. "A man that you've seen all the politicians catering to the last day or so, and small enough to bandy insults with a snippet of a girl! Well, bub, there's a lot of childishness in human nature. It breaks out once in a while. Cuss a tack, and grin and bear an amputation! We'll let the girl alone. I don't seem to get in right when she is mentioned. But I wanted to have you tell me that you don't intend to marry ...
— The Ramrodders - A Novel • Holman Day
... Madonna in the Flight into Egypt. It is an ideal which occurs indeed elsewhere in many of his works, a face at once dark and delicate, the Italian cast of feature moulded with the softness and childishness of English beauty some half a century ago; but I have never seen the ideal so completely worked out by the master. The face may best be described as one of the purest and softest of Stothard's conceptions, executed with all the strength of Tintoret. The other women are all made inferior to this ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... when Caesar went to Egypt; but in Egypt sixteen is a riper age than it is in England. The childishness I have ascribed to her, as far as it is childishness of character and not lack of experience, is not a matter of years. It may be observed in our own climate at the present day in many women of fifty. It is a mistake to suppose that the difference between wisdom and folly has anything ...
— Caesar and Cleopatra • George Bernard Shaw
... a certain naivete, a certain childishness, in my words even as I uttered them. In my thoughts I saw God as three supernal men, seated on three supernal thrones, enshrined in some vague celestial portion of space which I denominated Heaven. Between Him and me there was an incalculable distance which He could ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King
... girl of to-day. I have got over all those absurd affectations of childishness which used to be thought feminine long ago. The gambols of the kitten were once thought the most attractive thing on earth, and they are very interesting: but for the full-grown cat to pretend that it is perfectly happy with a ball ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... since the friendly Powers accorded their recognition of the Chinese Republic and if we think we could afford to amuse ourselves with changes in the national fabric, we could not expect foreign powers to put up with such childishness. Internal strife is bound to invite foreign intervention and the end of the country will ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... labour took to running away, the fishery was wrecked. There are sixty miles of this island, you see, all in length like the Queen's Highway; the idea of pursuit in such a place was a piece of single-minded childishness, which one did not entertain. Two days later, I made a discovery; it came in upon me with a flash that Sullens had been unjustly punished from beginning to end, and the real culprit throughout had been Obsequiousness. The native who talks, like the woman who hesitates, is lost. You set him talking ...
— The Ebb-Tide - A Trio And Quartette • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... garrulous anxiety about the boxes which had been left behind on the deck of the schooner "Maria Jane," and could not by any possibility overtake them for three weeks to come. She was, in fact, so much of a child that she was in a state of eager delight at every new scene and person. Her childishness proved the best of claims upon every one's courtesy. Everybody was ready to help "that poor sweet old woman;" and she was so simply and touchingly grateful for the smallest kindness that everybody who had helped her once wanted to help her again. More than one of their fellow-travellers ...
— Mercy Philbrick's Choice • Helen Hunt Jackson
... sake, as well as to relieve his own heart, he casts the clear confession of his love into her grave. He is even jealous, over her dead body, of her brother's profession of love to her—as if any brother could love as he loved! This is foolish, no doubt, but human, and natural to a certain childishness in grief. 252. ...
— The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark - A Study with the Text of the Folio of 1623 • George MacDonald
... as she waited, and her eyes filled with tears; it was a soft, warm, round face, with coaxing, kissable lips, a smooth, low brow and the gentlest of hazel eyes: not a pretty face, excepting in its lovely childishness and its hints of womanly graces; some of the girls said she was homely. Marjorie thought herself that she was very homely; but she had comforted herself with, "God made my face, and he likes it this way." Some one says that God made the other features, ...
— Miss Prudence - A Story of Two Girls' Lives. • Jennie Maria (Drinkwater) Conklin
... box-hedges, the stiff little summer-houses, the fragments of old statues at the corners, and even the 'scherzi d'acqua,' which are little surprises of fine water-jets that unexpectedly send a shower of spray into the face of the unwary. There was always an element of childishness in the practical ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... Years pass away and the places are filled. Do you not know how small a thing disturbs literary composition? I ought to live in a tower a thousand feet above all the futilities of life, instead of being surrounded by caprices, disorder, and childishness." As he speaks he strikes a furious blow upon the table, and poor Charlotte, with the tears pouring from her eyes, gathers up the pens and papers that have flown about the room in ...
— Jack - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... frequently in the same man, on the other side of the Rhine, that anything less than all the quotations which we have given would have been insufficient to place before our readers a true idea of that character made up of artlessness and reason, childishness and strength, depression and enthusiasm, material details and poetic ideas, which renders Sand a man incomprehensible to us. We will now continue the portrait, which still wants ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... father, but now it was worse than before. He avoided her markedly, for the smile which so annoyed him still lighted her face whenever she saw him, and there was in it a reproachful sadness which was even more aggravating than its simple childishness ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 6 • Various
... something in this downright wisdom of childishness since Christ went (as we must believe) out of His way to lay such stress on it; and since our own hearts respond so readily when Vaughan or Wordsworth claim divinity for it. We cannot of course go the length of believing that the great, ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... is a misfortune, especially when hereditary and constitutional, as it is popularly believed to be in the Black-billed Bubo, and certainly was in Dr Johnson. In young masters and misses we can pardon any childishness; but we cannot pardon the antipathy to the owl entertained by the manly minds of grown-up English clodhoppers, ploughmen, and threshers. They keep terriers to kill rats and mice in barns, and they shoot the owls, any one of whom we ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... dangerous aspect of his power for us, and also his weakest point. This was the touch of something fanciful and imaginative; a certain grim childishness in the idea of making war on the British Empire; a certain disregard of risk; a bizarre illusion of his hate for the abhorred Saxon. That he risked his position by his connection with such a nest of scoundrels, there could be no doubt. It was he who had given ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... spectacles on nose, and pouch on side. His youthful hose well sav'd, a world too wide For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice Turning again towards childish treble, pipes. And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all That ends this strange eventful history, Is second childishness, and mere oblivion; Sans teeth, sans eyes, ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... back—her face wore merely the expectant expression of a summoned servant. The childishness of her behaviour ...
— Merely Mary Ann • Israel Zangwill
... himself their inferior, but only for a moment; then he remembered that they had not the vaguest idea of how an Egyptian camp was fortified. The thought gave him back his self-respect, and he wondered how it was possible that people could be so degraded as to find pleasure in such childishness. ...
— Married • August Strindberg
... and to become a judicial officer in the service of the Queen's Government. Some of his reminiscences, embodied in a volume entitled Old New Zealand, still form the best book which the Colony has been able to produce. Nowhere have the comedy and childishness of savage life been so delightfully portrayed. Nowhere else do we get such an insight into that strange medley of contradictions ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... different," he went on, his voice growing deeper, his utterance more measured. "It is futile to resent being reminded of that which, in point of fact, you never forget. It's childish for the pot to call the kettle black. And so I came to the conclusion, a few months ago, to put away all such childishness, and set myself to gain whatever advantage I could ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... didn't look round—because you didn't know I was there. I swore I wouldn't unless you looked round." He laughed as the childishness ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... lightly. "Ah! Miss Montfort, a bond of blood does not always mean a bond of sympathy. These dear people bore me, and I bore them. Believe me, it is reciprocal. But do you yourself never tire of this everlasting childishness, these jeux d'enfance, on the part of persons who, after all, ...
— The Merryweathers • Laura E. Richards
... historical records. The outcry which we sometimes hear against that scepticism which has resulted from later and more severe investigations into the nature of historical evidence, and the loss thereby sustained of many a popular tale, is—need we insist upon it?—mere childishness. It is never found that we lose any thing by truth, and certainly not here. The popular tale, legend, or myth, may be displaced entirely from the records of the past, (for what it contains, or may be supposed to contain, of fact or event;) but it remains with us in its true character ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... model of virtue or manliness. He loves idleness, he has little conception of right and wrong, and he is improvident to the last degree of childishness. He is a creature,—as some of our own people will do well to keep carefully in mind,—he is a creature just forcibly released from slavery. The havoc of war has filled his heart with confused longings, and his ears with confused ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... on the husks of learning. He is the infant reciting bore in second childishness. We wish in vain that it were in mere oblivion. From the ladies' tea-tables the Greek and Latin quoting bores were driven away long ago by the Guardian and the Spectator, and seldom now translate for the country gentlewomen. ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... but very trifling, and mere childishness? The message may be mine, it seems, if it be of a lofty character: it may not be mine if it be of a homely, ordinary kind!—I send a message by my Servant, and he delivers it faithfully: but whether it is to be called ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... the shivering Flora stamped, and beat her arms, and the lantern flared and sizzled, Alfred made their plans, which were simple to the point of childishness. "My own!" he said, when it was all arranged; then he held the lantern up and looked into her face, blushing and determined, with snowflakes gleaming on the curls that pushed out from under her big hood. ...
— Quaint Courtships • Howells & Alden, Editors
... day when Flambeau and Father Brown found themselves sitting in its gardens and drinking its beer. There had been not a little of war and wild justice there within living memory, as soon will be shown. But in merely looking at it one could not dismiss that impression of childishness which is the most charming side of Germany—those little pantomime, paternal monarchies in which a king seems as domestic as a cook. The German soldiers by the innumerable sentry-boxes looked strangely like German toys, and the clean-cut battlements of the castle, ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... my childishness. Sometimes I wondered at it myself. But the wound still smarted, and something stronger than I seemed to withhold me from again breaking the ice. Besides, those long lonely days, and those nights, almost as long in the retrospect, when I lay ...
— Love, The Fiddler • Lloyd Osbourne
... his heart, some faint satisfaction concerning Ivan's sex, mingled with a fancy, gained after one accidental interview, that nevertheless, considering his tastes and traits, Sophia's child should have been a girl. Later, as Ivan began to emerge a little from utter childishness, his father had resorted occasionally to his school-room to search the little dweller there for certain longed-for signs of temperament. Not finding them, he once more put his son away, this time furiously raging that he should have been given a Blashkov ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... day, and the next, were passed in similar labours; Ballantrae often deciding on our course by the spinning of a coin; and once, when I expostulated on this childishness, he had an odd remark that I never have forgotten. "I know no better way," said he, "to express my scorn of human reason." I think it was the third day that we found the body of a Christian, scalped and most abominably mangled, and lying in a pudder of his blood; the birds of the desert screaming ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. XII (of 25) - The Master of Ballantrae • Robert Louis Stevenson
... shoulders. Connie was standing, looking down, one hand on her chair. The afternoon had darkened; he could see only her white brow, and the wealth of her hair which the small head carried so lightly. Her childishness, her nearness, made his heart beat. Suddenly ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... poet has died young in the breast of the most stolid. It may be contended, rather, that this (somewhat minor) bard in almost every case survives, and is the spice of life to his possessor. Justice is not done to the versatility and the unplumbed childishness of man's imagination. His life from without may seem but a rude mound of mud; there will be some golden chamber at the heart of it, in which he dwells delighted; and for as dark as his pathway seems to the observer, he will have some kind of a ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... imputes to Priam and the Trojans. Pausanias, upon the same ground and by the same mode of reasoning, pronounced that the Trojan horse must have been, in point of fact, a battering-engine, because to admit the literal narrative would be to impute utter childishness to the defenders of the city. And Mr. Payne Knight rejects Helen altogether as the real cause of the Trojan war, though she may have been the pretext of it; for he thinks that neither the Greeks nor the Trojans could have been so mad and silly as to endure ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... Unconsciousness is childishness in art, and leads to vagueness of meaning, to the perpetuation of personal idiosyncrasies; and while a larger consciousness may be induced from the mind side, positive and overwhelming inspiration will be needed to overcome habitual limitations. A musician must love music itself, as ...
— Expressive Voice Culture - Including the Emerson System • Jessie Eldridge Southwick
... lived always with grown people, and seldom had had any thing to do with children. I was very small for my age, and a strange mixture of childishness and maturity; and, having the appearance of being absorbed in my own affairs, no one ever noticed me much, or seemed to think it better that I should not listen to the conversation. In spite of considerable curiosity, I followed an ...
— An Arrow in a Sunbeam - and Other Tales • Various
... the childishness of the fancy. It savoured of the old lay-sister, Mary Antony, playing with her peas and confiding in her robin. Moreover the Bishop never did anything with his eyes shut. He would have slept with them open, had not ...
— The White Ladies of Worcester - A Romance of the Twelfth Century • Florence L. Barclay
... official matters are, in comparison with Frankfort, changed from thorns to roses; whether they will ever blossom is, indeed, uncertain. The aggravations of the Diet and the palace venom look from here like childishness. If we do not wantonly make ourselves disagreeable, we are welcome here. Whenever the carriages are called here, and "Prusku passlanika" ("Prussian carriage") is cried out among those waiting, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... had been long in our hands; commissioners were announced to right the wrongs of the land question, and two high officials, a chief justice and a president, to guide policy and administer law in Samoa. Their coming was expected with an impatience, with a childishness of trust, that can hardly be exaggerated. Months passed, these angel-deliverers still delayed to arrive, and the impatience of the natives became changed to an ominous irritation. They have had much experience of being deceived, and they began to think ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... certainly. It was all sheer nonsense,—words without any meaning in them. But Mary liked it. She decidedly would not have liked it had it ever occurred to her that the man was flirting with her. It was the very childishness of the thing that pleased her,—the contrast to conversation at Manor Cross, where no childish word was ever spoken. And though she was by no means prepared to flirt with Captain De Baron, still she found in him something of the realisation of her dreams. There was the combination ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope
... not. They suppose it possible that these parades or field-days may be repeated. But let us consider. Already it impresses a character of childishness on these gatherings of peasants; and it is a feeling which begins to resound throughout Ireland, that there is absolutely no business to be transacted—not even any forms to be gone through—and, therefore, no rational object by which such parades can be redeemed ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... figures of men writhing in a thousand contortions. These interesting objects were accumulated by one of the last of the Khans, who would shut himself up every day in this room in order to admire them. "Such childishness," as Madame de Hell remarks, "so common among the Orientals, would induce us to form an unfavourable opinion of their intelligence, were it not redeemed by their innate love of beauty and their genuine poetic sentiment. We may forgive the Khans the strange devices on their walls in consideration ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... prosecute the war, from the temporary expedients we adopted for carrying it on. We were continually expecting to see their credit exhausted, and they were looking to see our currency fail; and thus, between their watching us, and we them, the hopes of both have been deceived, and the childishness of the expectation has served ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... with the perspective required for such consolation, neither the agencies of destruction nor those of obstruction preserve the same heroic proportions which they are wont to assume in their day. They seem to be engaged in a sort of by-play, and wear an unmistakable aspect of childishness. Lo! Mankind has been a long time on his way, and endures hardily the prospect of endless leagues to go. He is the Patient Plodder, symbol of mature intelligence. And he has in his company two small boys who exhibit an incorrigible {5} naughtiness. The one of these is called ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... after mingling again with the high-born city belles, and to beg of her to take him in Cameron's stead—him who had loved her so long, ever since he first knew what it was to love, and who would cherish her so tenderly, loving her the more because of the childishness which some men might despise. But Morris had kept silence, and, as weeks went by, there came insensibly into his heart a hope, or rather conviction, that Cameron had forgotten the little girl who might in time turn to him, gladdening his home just as she did every spot ...
— Family Pride - Or, Purified by Suffering • Mary J. Holmes
... of her youth or childishness, as you suppose. She was one of those natures that are born with a great capacity for suffering, and she had begun to find it out early; and it was from the depths of unhappiness that she came out into clear and peaceful sunshine; ...
— A Red Wallflower • Susan Warner
... spirit, could not but perceive how impersonal was her justice; but, contrasted with the dead flat of conventional tolerance, her candor certainly looked rugged and sharp. The frivolous were annoyed at her contempt of their childishness, the ostentatious piqued at her insensibility to their show, and the decent scared lest they should be stripped of their shams; partisans were vexed by her spurning their leaders; and professional sneerers,—civil in public to those whom in private they slandered,—could ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... the negation of will, calmness, and disinterestedness, an aesthetic study of the world, detachment from life, the renunciation of all desire, solitary meditation, disdain of the crowd, and indifference to all that the vulgar covet. He approves all my defects, my childishness, my aversion to practical life, my antipathy to the utilitarians, my distrust of all desire. In a word, he flatters all my instincts; he caresses ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... into an opinion,—(and I am sure I said as much) that my father was a gentleman altogether as odd and whimsical in fifty other opinions. In truth, there was not a stage in the life of man, from the very first act of his begetting,—down to the lean and slippered pantaloon in his second childishness, but he had some favourite notion to himself, springing out of it, as sceptical, and as far out of the high-way of thinking, as these two which have ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... I am pretty!" she whispered to her mirror. "Glad, glad!" Then with a laugh at her own childishness she "touched wood" to propitiate the jealous fates and ran down stairs to hide herself in the duskiest corner ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... woman, and this may be so to very strong natures, but, so far as I have seen, the women who obtain extraordinary empire over men are those with a certain virility in their character and passions. If with this virility they combine a fragility or childishness of appearance which appeals to a man in another way at the same time, they ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... walked swiftly on, till only faint sounds came to him from the riverside. In the letter he had written to Hylda, which was the turning-point of all for her, he had spoken of these "key-thoughts." With all the childishness he showed at times, he had wisely felt his way into spheres where life had depth and meaning. The desert had justified him to himself and before the spirits of departed peoples, who wandered over the sands, until at last they became sand also, and were blown ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... and he would have considered it a personal disgrace to be mixed up with the men then in power. He thought, therefore, that he could best serve his country by keeping himself in reserve. He realised the futility of small concessions, and the childishness of agitating to obtain them. He was the only strong royalist who understood how far reform must go when it once began—farther towards democracy than his own sympathies would have carried him. If you want to use a mill-stream ...
— Cavour • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... office under us had done so at the peril of their lives. We had all had an excellent opportunity to come to know the Filipinos. Their dignity of bearing, their courtesy, their friendly hospitality, their love of imposing functions, and of fiestas and display, their childishness and irresponsibility in many matters, their passion for gambling, for litigation and for political intrigue, even the loves and the hatreds of some of them, had been spread before us like an open book. ...
— The Philippines: Past and Present (vol. 1 of 2) • Dean C. Worcester
... she spoke—the beautiful oval of the face, the white brow, the general graciousness of line, so feminine, in truth!—so appealing. The darkness hid away all that shewed the "female franzy." Distress of mind—distress for his trumpery wound?—had shaken her, brought her back to youth and childishness? Again he felt a ...
— Delia Blanchflower • Mrs. Humphry Ward |
