"Naive" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... amazed at his bravery, although she felt that there was a sort of indelicacy and naive grossness about it ...
— The Public vs. M. Gustave Flaubert • Various
... very pretty," said she, stopping at a sort of /naive/ point; "but it is a pity that it is not destined for a real purpose."— "That were indeed very desirable," I cried; "and, oh! how happy must he be, who receives from a girl he infinitely loves, such an assurance of her affection."—"There ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... was not yet blasee and hackneyed enough to take no pleasure in the court thus paid to her, and the admiration so universally shown her, nor even to omit doing her part to win them. But, while she was naive and innocent at heart, she required of her husband that these trifling outside coquetries should not disquiet him nor render him distrustful, and that he should repose the most unshaken confidence in her. ...
— Queen Hortense - A Life Picture of the Napoleonic Era • L. Muhlbach
... of course; he was merely conducting an experiment. There are many areas of knowledge in which he is as naive ...
— Unwise Child • Gordon Randall Garrett
... really nervous, the laugh and merry-making that followed her naive remark must certainly have dispelled the quakes, for presently she was shaking with laughter ...
— The Girl Scouts at Sea Crest - The Wig Wag Rescue • Lillian Garis
... de gloire, couleur des reines!" I heard him murmur. He thrust the sleeve under his chin and closed his eyes. His loud, rapid breathing was the only sound in the room. If Cressida brushed back his hair or touched his hand, he looked up long enough to give her a smile of utter adoration, naive and uninquiring, as if he were smiling at a dream or ...
— Youth and the Bright Medusa • Willa Cather
... thoughts. But ere long we both perceived that the letters of our dear girl were more constrained and formal than before. It was as if she was writing now rather to comply with a sense of duty than to give vent to the light-hearted gaiety and naive enjoyment which breathed in every line of her earlier communications. So at least it seemed to us, and again the old suspicion presented itself to my mind, and I feared that all was not ...
— The Lost Stradivarius • John Meade Falkner
... oriental mats and costly rugs of fur. The choicest tapestries which the looms of Arras could furnish draped the walls, whereon the battles of Judas Maccabaeus were set forth, with the Jewish warriors in plate of proof, with crest and lance and banderole, as the naive artists of the day were wont to depict them. A few rich settles and bancals, choicely carved and decorated with glazed leather hangings of the sort termed or basane, completed the furniture of the apartment, save that at one side of the dais there stood a lofty perch, upon which a cast ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... abaat th' "atrocities," aw fancied misen England an him Turkey an her a poor Bulgarian, an aw determined awr wodn't see a poor inoffensive young woman ill-treated bi a brute like that, soa just as he wor gettin' ready to strike her daan into th' eearth, aw stept behund him an planted mi naive at th' back ov his ear, an he rolled ovver like a skittle pin. Just as he fell awd an idea 'at awd been struck wi leetnin or else ther wor an eearthquake, for a summat dropped onto mi heead wi sich a foorce 'at aw saw some oth grandest fireworks awd ivver seen, an aw sat ...
— Yorksher Puddin' - A Collection of the Most Popular Dialect Stories from the - Pen of John Hartley • John Hartley
... pleasure to observe. She began by expressing her delight at their thoughtfulness in supplying the wash tub. When the machine began to move she clapped her hands in childish glee. From glee to wonderment her mood changed as they spun along the park roads. A hundred naive questions were asked about the objects unfamiliar to a lady whose habitat was at the bottom of a big pond. Edwin answered faithfully, and had his reward in his enjoyment of her artlessness and winsomeness. Occasionally Tom looked round ...
— The Mermaid of Druid Lake and Other Stories • Charles Weathers Bump
... glimpse of that awful winter. His naive words are, "Chie-ke-nayelle, a Slavi from Fort Norman, was a winning fellow, handsome, gracious, the possessor of a happy countenance. On his features played always a smile of contentment and innocence. In his youth he had eaten of human flesh during the terrible famine ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... human method of approach into a charter for existence and non-existence, and their point of view becomes the creative power. When the idealist studies astronomy, does he learn anything about the stars that God made? Far from him so naive a thought! His astronomy consists of two activities of his own (and he is very fond of activity): star-gazing and calculation. When he has become quite proficient he knows all about star-gazing and calculation; but he knows nothing of any stars that God made; ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... gaunt appearance by his descent from Pocahontas. If all these men were a little like becalmed ships, there was certainly one man whose sails were full. Three or four doors off, on our side of the road, lived a decorative artist in all the naive confidence of popular ideals and the public approval. He was our daily comedy. 'I myself and Sir Frederick Leighton are the greatest decorative artists of the age,' was among his sayings, & a great lych-gate, bought from some country church-yard, reared its thatched roof, meant to shelter ...
— Four Years • William Butler Yeats
... she to be naive in a theatre? She knew well that such things were done everywhere, and they must exist in the life of the baron. And, if they must exist, then let them be open, for mysteries—Oh! she preferred anything to masks and mysteries. ...
— The Argonauts • Eliza Orzeszko (AKA Orzeszkowa)
... most obvious type of consciousness of self is found in individuals who seek mere social conspicuousness, who spend no inconsiderable part of their energy in deliberate display. The child says with naive frankness, "See how high I can jump." Many adults find more conspicuous or subtle ways of saying the same thing. One need only to take a ride in a bus or street car to find the certain symptoms of self-display. ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... claims that the Vedic hymns illustrate the natural workings of the human mind in the period of its infancy. In the Vedas, these writers consider, we are able to watch the process by which the earliest men rose to the belief in gods, and the naive and simple methods by which man's first intercourse with gods was carried on. The undoubted antiquity of these pieces favours this view; the Rigveda is admitted on all hands to be the earliest part of Indian ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... the youth's naive references to Edward Thatcher's political ambitions. Thatcher was known as a wealthy "sport," and Dan had resented his meddling in politics. But this was startling news—that Thatcher was measuring himself for a ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... maid curls, most absurd; but beneath this one could see a large, calm brow, cut by two deep lines, two wrinkles of long sadness, then two blue eyes, large and tender, so timid, so bashful, so humble, two beautiful eyes which had kept the expression of naive wonder of a young girl, of youthful sensations, and also of sorrow, which had softened ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... expose, manifest, evince. Shrink, flinch, wince, blench, quail. Shun, avoid, eschew. Shy, bashful, diffident, modest, coy, timid, shrinking. Sign, omen, auspice, portent, prognostic, augury, foretoken, adumbration, presage, indication. Simple, innocent, artless, unsophisticated, naive. Skilful, skilled, expert, adept, apt, proficient, adroit, dexterous, deft, clever, ingenious. Skin, hide, pelt, fell. Sleepy, drowsy, slumberous, somnolent, sluggish, torpid, dull, lethargic. Slovenly, slatternly, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... and thither the ladies find their way. Violet charms them all; even the baby stretches out his hands to come to her. They talk of Cecil, and Mrs. Latimer, by some magic known to herself, draws out of Violet a deliciously naive confession of that romantic episode when ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... nothing but herrings and oatcakes. She hated to think of things hungry, things in pain. She even felt a great, inarticulate pity for her father. For all his striding autocracy and high-handedness there was something naive and childish about him that clutched at her heart. He was like Ben Grief, alone and bare when the ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... would have been dead against the whole thing. The objections raised from the military side would have been quite sufficient to dispel any doubts that the sailors had left on the subject. As for that naive theory that we might draw back in the middle of the naval operations supposing that the business went awry, of which I do not remember hearing at the time—— Pooh! We could hardly, left to ourselves, have been such flats as to ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... the naive simplicity of the suggestion. He did not detect the guile at first. But it dawned on him presently and he smiled more. She had said she was not going to visit ...
— The Watchers of the Plains - A Tale of the Western Prairies • Ridgewell Cullum
... pretty wife, and paid her their court with soldierly gallantry. She had a little triumph, which flushed her spirits and made her eyes sparkle. George was proud of her popularity, and pleased with the manner (which was very gay and graceful, though naive and a little timid) with which she received the gentlemen's attentions, and answered their compliments. And he in his uniform—how much handsomer he was than any man in the room! She felt that he was affectionately watching her, and ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... begun under such unfavourable auspices, though the value of concessions, to the observance of which nothing constrained the Sultan, seems problematical, and was certainly less than the ambassador, in his naive vanity, hastened ...
— De Orbe Novo, Volume 1 (of 2) - The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D'Anghera • Trans. by Francis Augustus MacNutt
... or rather also," flung back the stout girl. "I must take all the cracks and the chuckles and presently some naive little freshie will amble along and ask me if I happen to be one of the soap bubbles she just blew off her penny pipe," and the pneumatic cheeks puffed out in ...
— Jane Allen: Junior • Edith Bancroft
... at the beginning of Leo XIII's pontificate. At that epoch certain naive elements in the Eternal City tried to initiate anti-Jesuit politics inside the Church. Liberals and Ultramontanists struggled in the darkness, in the periodicals, and ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... again upon the street, we stray down into one of the shops,—a shop local and naive, a veritable French country-store. We have noticed the hemp-soled sandals worn by many of the mountaineers, and incline to test them for the approaching excursion to Gavarnie. The dark-eyed little proprietor ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... and arrange his ideas, was a vexation to the poor merchant. He was here like an irritable traveller, who knocks at a gate, which makes as if it opens, without letting him in. Emilia's naive confidence he read as stupidity. It brought on a fresh access of the nervous fever lurking in him, and he cried, jumping from his seat: "Well, you can't have him, and there's an end. You must give up—confound! why! do you expect to have everything you want at starting? There, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... which in the case of so consummate an artist does not matter (unless to the solemn and naive mind), Maupassant of all writers of fiction demands least forgiveness from his readers. He does not require forgiveness because he is ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... me was your honest and naive confession of the joy your heart felt at hearing her admired! It is, indeed, most extraordinary that a certain person who has great taste—would he had as much nature!—should not see her with very different ...
— George Selwyn: His Letters and His Life • E. S. Roscoe and Helen Clergue
... The naive bush simile pleased Ned a little and he laughed, but soon relapsed again into silence. Then Nellie spoke of "Paddy's Market," one of the sights of Sydney, which she would like him to see. Accordingly they strolled to his hotel, where he put on a clean shirt and a collar and a ...
— The Workingman's Paradise - An Australian Labour Novel • John Miller
... smile. He writes to instruct the world and to satisfy himself. Grim humour sometimes flashes out, as when he tells the story of the Order of Homer, which he founded. How different from Goldoni's naive account of his little ovation in the ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... eradicate from the minds of his German countrymen the same tendency to underestimate the honesty of American business men, says (and let me say that neither my opinion, nor the form in which it is expressed, was borrowed from him): "It is naive to suppose that the economic strength of America has been built up through underhanded competition, without respect to law or justice, and impelled by nothing but a barbarous and purely material ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... ingenious venom of scandalous inventions. It seems they had all offended him in some way, and in return he had found them all out. He muttered darkly; he laughed sardonically; he crushed them one after another; but of his chief, Massy, he babbled with an envious and naive admiration. Clever scoundrel! Don't meet the likes of him every day. Just look at him. Ha! Great! Ship of his own. Wouldn't catch him going wrong. No fear—the beast! And Massy, after listening with a gratified smile to these ...
— End of the Tether • Joseph Conrad
... had reached the point where that circumstance could no longer be ignored. The avowal that the child had passed beyond his control would have had more bitterness in it, were it not for the fact that her naive self-sufficiency touched his sense of humor, while her dainty ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King
... "Vastly naive and original;—though the character of the age is sometimes impressed upon his productions. For the first three odes, ere the school of Pope was extinct, he was a compiler of ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... had known it all along from the very beginning! O father! can he be—do you think—can he be an Angel in disguise? And, to be sure, I patted him, and thought he was only a dog!" As the boy, an awed expression in his lifted blue eyes, gave utterance to this naive idea, I glanced at St. Aubyn's face, and saw that, though his lips smiled, his eyes were grave and full of grateful wonder. He turned towards the peasants grouped around us, and in their own ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... the eye in the study of such a dry-as-dust subject as psychology, because three of its fixed principles are: "Experience is the process of becoming expert by experiment," "One finds a measure of truth in the naive realism of Common Sense;" and "Action and Reaction ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy
... rough work, but the broiling sun had raised big blisters on my arms and throat which were very painful. When we got back to camp, Dorothea laved the burns for me with cool milk. Ah! she was very pretty; and, what 'blackguard' Heine, as Carlyle dubs him, would have called 'naive schmutzig.' When we parted next morning I thought with a sigh that before the autumn was over, she would be in the seraglio of Mr. Brigham Young; who, Artemus Ward used to say, was 'the most ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... slender, easy, perfectly-shaped; her walk that of a goddess upon the clouds: with such qualifications she pleased supremely. Grace accompanied her every step, and shone through her manners and her most ordinary conversation. An air always simple and natural, often naive, but seasoned with wit-this with the ease peculiar to her, charmed all who approached her, and communicated itself to them. She wished to please even the most useless and the most ordinary persons, and yet without making an effort to do so. You were tempted to believe her wholly and solely ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... Manley.[20] Opposite the title-page Roberts, the publisher, advertised "The Masqueraders," "The Fatal Secret," and "The Surprise" as by the same author. One of Mrs. Haywood's favorite quotations, used by her later as a motto for the third volume of "The Female Spectator," stands with naive appropriateness on ...
— The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood • George Frisbie Whicher
... they congregated there to receive, in the glorious unity of a common humanity, Him whom the heavens cannot contain—the Son of God. They did not think, they felt; they could not reason, but they heard the church. Naive, simple, and trusting souls, with the Virgin to smile upon them, and the saints to ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... belfry, tapering from a square tower into a delicately modelled spire. To complete and accentuate the note of the picturesque, the superstructure was held in its place by rude modern beams, propping the tower with a naive disregard of decorative embellishment. We knew it at once as the quaint and famous Belfry ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... always delightful—a mixture of self-repressed idolatry and busily naive belief in a thorough understanding between them to exclude Selwyn ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... from one of Joffre's aides. Joffre, by the way, is the quietest, sweetest, most naive, and babylike individual I ever met. All of the women, as well as the men, are in love with him. When he met Nancy, at a garden party, he kissed her on both cheeks. Nancy, as you may imagine, was ecstatically delighted. This simple, grave, kindly soldier sat in ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... naive explanation of her audacity when we finally did meet. "I am a Jewess," she said, "and therefore not so bound down by conventions. You see, we of the Jewish race were suppressed so long that now we have our freedom reaction ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... truthful, artless, impartial, simple, unbiased, fair, ingenuous, sincere, unprejudiced, frank, innocent, straightforward, unreserved, guileless, naive, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... among parrots, that they imitate more or less perfectly. The treatise of Temple is in its scientific value about equal to an essay written by the pupils of the middle classes of our colleges.... The essay of Goodwin on the Mosaic cosmogony displays the naive assurance of one who receives the modern critical science from the second or tenth hand. The editor [Hengstenberg] asked the now deceased Andreas Wagner, a distinguished professor of natural sciences at the University of Munich, to subject this treatise to an examination from ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... girl to tell me much of her life in Nebraska; of her friends and their amusements. Hers had been the usual story of any fresh wholesome girl. The social life in a small town had limited her experiences, but had kept her deliciously naive and sweet. ...
— The Lady and Sada San - A Sequel to The Lady of the Decoration • Frances Little
... punishment of secret amours—that is, infringements on their property rights—are often the most liberal in lending their wives. As Bonwick tells us (72), they felt honored if white men paid attention to them. A circumstance which seems to have puzzled some naive writers: that Australians and Africans have been known to show less "jealousy" of whites than of their own countrymen, finds an easy explanation in the greater ability of the white man to pay for the husband's complaisance. In some cases, in the absence of a fine, the husband takes his revenge ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... back and forth many times between them since Forsythe wrote that first love-letter. He found a whimsical pleasure in her deep devotion and naive readiness to follow as far as he cared to lead her. He realized that, young as she was, she was no innocent, which made the acquaintance all the more interesting. He, meantime, idled away a few months on the Pacific ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill
... literary art was developed. The solemnity of their matter gave rise to a further danger; it demanded some relief, and that relief was secured by the juxtaposition of comic scenes beside scenes of gravest import. Such comedy was occasionally not without grace—a passage of pastoral, a song, a naive piece of gaiety; but buffoonery or vulgar riot was more to the taste of the populace. It was pushed to the furthest limit, until in 1548 the Parlement of Paris thought fit to interdict the performance of sacred ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... people were sorry for him, in spite of the repulsion he inspired. It is quite possible that both versions were true, that he rejoiced at his release, and at the same time wept for her who released him. As a general rule, people, even the wicked, are much more naive and simple-hearted than we suppose. And we ourselves ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... interrupted by the arrival of the very person in question, who was announced by the housemaid, and was ushered in. She was a handsome, florid, healthy-looking girl, awkward and naive in her manner, and apparently not overwise; there was more of the dove than of the ...
— Mr. Midshipman Easy • Captain Frederick Marryat
... pronounced the name of Laurent. Then she enlarged with a flood of words on the propriety and advantages of such an union. She poured out her mind, repeating aloud all she had been thinking during the evening, depicting with naive egotism, the picture of her final days of happiness, between her two dear children. Therese, resigned and docile, listened to her with bowed head, ready to give satisfaction to her ...
— Therese Raquin • Emile Zola
... our stroll for an hour, for although I did not anticipate any pleasure or profit from continuing the acquaintance, there was yet a certain attraction in his simplicity of manner and in his naive faith in the value of my influence on his fortunes. Before we parted he expressed again his ability to get me something to do, but I did not credit his statement enough to correct the impression that ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 5 • Various
... delightful people they are. As a boy of fifteen, I remember meeting, on a seaside front, a member of a troupe then appearing called The Boy Guardsmen. He was a sweet child. Fourteen years old he was, and he gave me cigarettes, and he drank rum and stout, and was one of the most naive and cleanly simple youths I ever met. He had an angelic trust in the good of everything and everybody. He worshipped me because I bought him a book he wanted. He believed that the ladies appearing in the same bill at his hall were angels. He loved ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... stir—I mean people will be asking questions; and then you know how a pseudonym whets curiosity—they will certainly find out—and they will talk all the more then. That ought to do the book some good. And then you understand, Mr. Moore," continued this remarkably naive person, "if your friend happened to know any of the reviewers, and could suggest how some little polite attention might be paid them, there would be nothing wrong in that, would there? I am told that they are quite gentlemen nowadays—they go everywhere—and—and ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... September, 1897, Arthur Hoeber wrote: "There were shown at the Society of American Artists in New York, in the Spring of 1896, some statuettes of graceful young womanhood, essentially modern in conception, singularly naive in treatment, refined, and withal intensely personal.... While the disclosure is by no means novel, Miss Potter makes us aware that in the daily prosaic life about us there are possibilities conventional ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... superfluous digressions, heaping up reflexion and information that have no bearing on the main subject. They will recognise, if they think over it, that the causes of this leaning are bad taste, a kind of naive vanity, sometimes a disordered mind." Again: "The faults of historic works intended for the general public ... are the results of the insufficient preparation of the bad literary training of the popularisers." What an admirable criticism there is too ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois
... doubt the truth of these records, naive as are some of the descriptions. Unquestionably the Wokou were a terrible scourge to the Chinese on ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... Perhaps action halted a little to allow of rather too much display of pidgin-English and (I suppose) authentic elementary Chinese and comic reliefs which filled the spaces between the salient episodes of the slender and naive plot. I couldn't help wondering how Jack Stacey, whom we left at 10.45 in a horrible stupor, shut away in a gilded alcove of Wang Fu's opium den, could appear at 11.30 at Lady Handley's in immaculate evening dress and with entirely unruffled hair, having in the meantime cut down ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, December 8, 1920 • Various
... give the fullest recognition to the delicacy and sincerity of imagist verse, to its magical skill in seeming to open new doors of sense experience by merely shutting the old doors of memory, to its naive courage in rediscovering the formula of "Back to Nature." [Footnote: See the discussion of imagist verse in chap. III.] Like "free verse," it has widened the field of expression, although its advocates have sometimes forgotten that thousands of ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... once taken place, the whole Anglo-Saxon name attached itself to the Roman ritual. Among the motives for this change those which corresponded to the naive materialistic superstition of the time may have been the most influential, yet there were other motives also which touched the very essence of the matter. Men wished to belong to the great Church Communion which then in still unbroken freedom comprehended the most distant nations.[6] They preferred ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... and fancies. Conversations with the Twin Sailors filled many of the pages; accounts of Paul's "adventures" occupied others. Sometimes it seemed impossible that a child of eleven should have written them, then would come an expression so boyish and naive that Miss Trevor laughed delightedly over it. When she finished the book and closed it she found Stephen Kane at her elbow. He removed his pipe and nodded at ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... to set forth thus clearly her own liberality of standard. She sometimes suspected Miss Buchanan of thinking her naive. But Miss Buchanan now looked a little puzzled, as if it were not this at all that she had meant, and said presently that perhaps it was the women's faces—the well-dressed women. 'I don't mind the poor ones so much; they often look too sharp, but they often look kind and frightfully ...
— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... part admirably, showing that a young girl, however simple and naive, has the instinct of dissimulation, which only requires opportunity ...
— The Regent's Daughter • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... and there is, at least, one which I think my readers may have seen, 'The Bearing of the Cross,' in which the blessed Saviour sinks under his burden. In the series of the Life of the Virgin there is a 'Repose in Egypt,' which has a naive homeliness in its grace and serenity. The woodcut represents a courtyard with a dwelling built in the ruins of an ancient palace. The Virgin sits spinning with a distaff and spindle beside the Holy Child's cradle, by which beautiful angels worship. Joseph is busy at his ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... cavaliers, who had listened to this curious conversation in silence, now laughed loudly at this naive reply of ...
— Queen Hortense - A Life Picture of the Napoleonic Era • L. Muhlbach
... living room was mostly rose color. It was like an unhealthy and bloated boudoir. And yet there was nothing sybaritic or uncleanly in the sight of this paunchy, middle-aged man sinking into the rosy-cushioned luxury of his ridiculous home. It was a frank and naive indulgence of long-starved senses, and there was in it a great resemblance to the rolling-eyed ecstasy of a school-boy smacking his lips over ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... hair, so sweetly rumpled from her pillows, "Look, Grandy, look at me! I am wearing Maman's hat —she told me I could wear it when I came to the House in the Woods! Do you think it looks well on me?" Her naive vanity almost broke their hearts. "Do you, Grandy? ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke
... the various guns were invented is perhaps naive, but nevertheless interesting: "Although the main intent of the inventors of this machine [artillery] was to fire and offend the enemy from both near and afar, since this offense must be in diverse ways it so ...
— Artillery Through the Ages - A Short Illustrated History of Cannon, Emphasizing Types Used in America • Albert Manucy
... fancy to this pale-blooded hypochondriac, and made no secret of the fact that she regarded him as her especial property. Nothing is so flattering to the vanity as the preference of a child, that naive, spontaneous affection to which it is impossible to impute mercenary motives. And Joel had responded by becoming Celia's abject slave. He ignored the other children for the most part, seldom betraying, ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... of folly and inconsistency in others!... She is not to be comprehended on an acquaintance of three days. Years must go to the understanding of her. She did not understand herself. She was not even acquainted with herself. Why! She was naive enough to be puzzled because she felt older than her mother and younger than her beautiful girlish ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... among her own child's guests. Joanna and Ellen were pretty children, in a well-groomed, bright-eyed sort of way, and would have been popular even without the added distinction of their ready French and German and Italian, their charming manners, their naive references to other countries and peoples, and their ...
— The Rich Mrs. Burgoyne • Kathleen Norris
... the purposes of the historian they are merely tendencies which combine to define the general trend of historical change. The logical motive, which has everywhere guided science in formulating its conceptions, is here revealed in its most naive and elementary form. Natural science invariably seeks to describe change in terms of process, that is to say, in terms of interaction of tendencies. These tendencies are what ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... hesitation that was almost naive. She smiled, and there was apology in her smile, though none in her voice, as ...
— The Circular Study • Anna Katharine Green
... smiling at the boy's amazement. There was a subtle sympathy between these two that surprised me, for Ruth Schuyler was fastidious in her choice of friends. But he amused her, and he was never really impertinent—merely naive and unconventional. ...
— Vicky Van • Carolyn Wells
... installed in our glorious Cathedral, amid the joyous carillons of its bells! Can you not still see the Angels hovering over the Virgin, and the Golden Calf, flower-wreathed, and the Flight into Egypt, on that naive donkey, and "the Flying Dutchman," tugged by a horse, and the gilded galley rowed in make-believe by little children in their Sunday clothes, catching crabs in air, and the incongruous camels bestridden by Arab sheikhs with African pages, and the Persians on ponies, and the Crusaders in their ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... to these naive expressions of tenderness with an interest that was mingled with astonishment. The farmer's wife called a servant to help set the table; and at Moser's invitation, the young man approached the brushwood fire which ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... Youth (east end) - Edith Woodman Burroughs Snugly placed inside the abutting walls, east of the Tower of Jewels. Naive in character and simple in treatment, without any further symbolical meaning than that suggested by the name. Motif in side panels, ...
— The Art of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... have appeared naive and undevious. The fact was that his passion for truth-probing and his worship of the undiscovered loveliness of life had obscured whatever self-consciousness had been born in him. Meeting him for the first time was ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... man, thin, close-lipped, with high cheekbones, and long nose, a man utterly unlike his daughter save for the wide-open, all-seeing eyes, smiled at the naive correction; with that smile some enchanter's wand mirrored Cynthia in her father's face. Even Simmonds, who had seen no semblance of a smile in the features of the chilly, skeptical man by whom he was dragged out of bed at ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... that our music alternated with conversations on divers topics. Whenever I and Seraphina began to get too absorbed in sentimental dreams and vague aspirations, the Lady Adelheid, though now hardly young enough to be so naive and droll as she once was, yet intervened with all sorts of merry and somewhat chaotic nonsense. From several hints she let fall, I soon discovered that the Baroness really had something preying upon ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... The tyrannical man, the monster, the Black Man, find a place here like the Lestrigons and the Cyclops of Homer only to inspire horror by contrast with softer manners; they are almost what the wicked man is in the naive imagination of a child brought up by a mother in the ideas of a gentle and pious morality. The primitive man of Teutonism is revolting by his purposeless brutality, by a love of evil that only gives him skill ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... of Anita's earnest naive personality. Or was he a very clever scoundrel, with irony lurking in his soft voice, and a chuckle that he ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, March 1930 • Various
... venture to say with Philo Judaeus, "The good man seeks the day for the sake of the day, and the light for the light's sake; and he labours to acquire what is good for the sake of the good itself, and not of anything else." So far for the egotism, naive and unconscious, of Christianity, whose burden is, "Do good to escape Hell ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... One of those lightning glances passed between his eyes and hers which are the freemasonry of noble spirits,—and, by a sudden impulse, they approached each other. He took both her outstretched hands, looked down into her face with a look full of admiration, and a sort of naive wonder,—then, as if her inspired silence had been a voice to him, he laid his hand on ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... interest you at last!" said Miss Melhuish, in naive triumph. "Yes—burglars! But don't speak so loud. It's supposed to be kept a great secret. I really oughtn't to tell ...
— The Amateur Cracksman • E. W. Hornung
... sophisticated, nervous, product of a society perhaps not quite as free and Nietzschean as it deemed itself, but yet cultivated and illuminated and refined, it nevertheless seemed exuberantly sound. The sweet, broad, diatonic idiom, the humor, the sleepy Bavarian accent, the pert, naive, little folk-tunes it employed, the tranquil, touching, childlike tones, the close of "Tod und Verklaerung," with its wondrous unfolding of corolla upon corolla, were refreshing indeed after all the burning chromaticism of Wagner, the ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... the Grahams wanted to laugh at this naive proposal, but good feeling and good manners alike forbade. She thanked Miss Bean for her kind offer, and explained that she was only spending her school vacation at Hartley Farm; that her time was fully occupied, ...
— Queen Hildegarde • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
... With naive sincerity he believed that what he had done on the spur of the moment had been the only thing ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert W. Chambers
... embraces, when the occasion arose to help the young ladies enter a boat or jump out on shore; from the tender odour of maiden apparel, warmed by the sun; from the feminine cries of coquettish fright on the river; from the sight of feminine figures, negligently half-reclining with a naive immodesty on the green grass around the samovar—from all these innocent liberties, which are so usual and unavoidable on picnics, country outings and river excursions, when within man, in the infinite depth of his soul, secretly awakens from the care-free contact with earth, grasses, ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... to hers with the same extraordinarily naive glance. When Colina frowned under it he literally dragged them away, but in spite ...
— The Fur Bringers - A Story of the Canadian Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... the agriculturists who cultivated the fields and gave them the water for which they never ceased to thirst. No hint is given of those fishermen of the Persian Gulf who lived entirely, according to Herodotus, upon dried fish ground to powder and made into a kind of cake.[120] The naive, picturesque, and anecdotic illustrations of common life, which are so plentiful in Egypt, are almost completely wanting to ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... most gloriously when most surrounded. His pride was centred on her; it was centred, however, on the brilliant returns of her actual presence—a presence which was never too far removed in flesh or spirit to deprive him of a certain naive assumption of ownership. That she should continue all the dear, familiar fascinations beyond his sight or touch, in a far-away land, with David Cannon as a daily companion, was another matter. Not that he was jealous of David. No one man stood out as a rival. But ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... adverse evidence and delighting in the American pageant with a gusto rarely modified by the exercise of any critical intelligence. Morally he has been strenuous and eager; intellectually he has been naive and belated. Whether he has been writing what was avowedly romance or what was intended to be sober criticism he has been always the romancer first and ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... fashionable attributes, are appropriate enough in a daughter of the gods. When she loves, it is without any airs and graces. She has not an atom of self-consciousness; she cannot premeditate; she loves because she must, rather than because she will, because it is the condition of her life. Some of the naive remarks she has to utter, might in clumsy lips seem coarse. Miss Anderson delivered them with consummate grace and innocence, but her fine smile, her bright sparkling eye, proved sufficiently, that the innocence was not stupidity. The first long speech ...
— Mary Anderson • J. M. Farrar
... last evening with twelve big brass cannon and three regiments of foot-soldiers, and if he was to try to go through the gap of the mountain they would shoot all the cannon off right in the gap, and kill all his horses and men. The general smiled at my naive answer, and said I had a strange idea of war if I thought so many men would be killed at once, and added that I would not be a very brave soldier. I replied that many times I had felt like going into the Confederate army, but my rheumatism kept ...
— Three Years in the Federal Cavalry • Willard Glazier
... the poetry of motion and envied the senseless confection. Eve at the age of five minutes must have been a ringer for Miss Ada Lowery at nineteen or twenty. I was introduced, and a gum-drop suffered neglect while she conveyed to me a naive interest, such as a puppy dog (a prize winner) might bestow upon a crawling beetle ...
— Options • O. Henry
... she said to herself, too good to be true—certainly more than she deserved. Among her unmerited blessings she quaintly placed being herself, but this was the less naive in that she placed among her blessings nearly everything of which she was conscious in her world. Her world at this time was not a large one, and every element in it seemed to her ideal. Her loving, indulgent father, who always had a smile for her as he looked up over his newspaper ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... including "Nelly Gwynn". Next are two rooms, one leading from the other, given to German and Flemish pictures and to miniatures, both of which are interesting. In the first are more Duerers, and that alone would make it a desirable resort. Here is a "Virgin and Child"—No. 851—very naive and homely, and the beautiful portrait of his father—No. 766—-a symphony of brown and green. Less attractive works from the same hand are the "Apostle Philip"—No. 777—and "S. Giacomo Maggiore," an old ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... naive earnestness, coupled with a diffidence apparently so genuine, that Mr. Burns could not but be favorably impressed by it. In fact, the idea of a general assistant had never before occurred to him. He reflected a ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... a greyhound bounding along in front of the equipage driven at a trot by two midget postilions in white breeches. Others, dreaming on sofas with an open letter, gazed at the moon through a slightly open window half draped by a black curtain. The naive ones, a tear on their cheeks, were kissing doves through the bars of a Gothic cage, or, smiling, their heads on one side, were plucking the leaves of a marguerite with their taper fingers, that curved at the tips like peaked shoes. And you, too, were there, Sultans with long pipes ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... not a single rude word; I soon learn that he has another family. Then he invites me to his daughter's wedding; he prays, makes a genuflection, and says: "I still preserve religious feeling; I am a believer." And when in his presence people speak of education, of women, he has a naive expression, exactly as if he did not understand. When he makes a speech in Court, his face looks as ...
— Note-Book of Anton Chekhov • Anton Pavlovich Chekhov
... to stifle this naive utterance, but it would not be repressed, and Aunt Sophy had to rise to the occasion as best she could, with rather a grim face, she rose from her seat upon the sofa and advanced towards her brother's wife, holding out a ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... acknowledged the curious introduction, and then broke in rather breathlessly: "There, Doctor, I shall leave you with royalty; do not let your republican ignorance forget her proper title. Mr. Arnold, Mrs. Merrill is beckoning to us; will you come?" and with a naive, superbly impish look at Ruth, she drew Arnold away before he could murmur ...
— Other Things Being Equal • Emma Wolf
... the farmers' organization and is sufficient for him and has no need of affiliating itself with the affairs of the village; that the farmers should develop their own cooperative stores and selling agencies so that they can be economically independent of the "parasitic" trader of the village. Such a naive point of view has a certain logical simplicity which is based on the presupposition that conflict is inevitable and that justice and equity can be secured only through dominance. The same line of reasoning finds no solution of the problem of capital ...
— The Farmer and His Community • Dwight Sanderson
... confidence. He remembered her smile, an affair of milk-white teeth in an ivory-white face, and her frank attack: "Forgive me if I'm trespassing. They told me there was a right of way." He remembered her charming diffidence, the naive reverence for his "grounds" which had compelled him to escort her personally through them; her attitudes of admiration as the Manor burst on her from its bay in the beech trees; the interest she had shown in its date and architecture; and how, spinning out the agreeable interview, ...
— Mr. Waddington of Wyck • May Sinclair
... greatest beauty, the most marvellous and transcendent beauty, you ever saw. And that, M. Daniel Champcey, is her smallest attraction. When she opens her lips, the charms of her mind, beauty and her mind, and remember her admirable ingenuousness, her naive freshness, and all the treasures of her chaste ...
— The Clique of Gold • Emile Gaboriau
... Hans Andersen, a gentle soul in a homely exterior, which attracted the snubs and neglect which "patient merit of the unworthy takes," on some such occasion was once heard to murmur: "And yet I am the greatest man now in the world!" It was very naive of him to say so, even in a whisper, probably wrung from him only in self-defence, but perhaps he might have thought it, in solemn silence—and—not been so very wrong! It may have been part of the very transparency of ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various
... of the origin of modesty has been advanced. The naive assumption that men were ashamed because they were naked, and clothed themselves to hide their nakedness, is not tenable in face of the large mass of evidence that many of the natural races are naked, and not ashamed ...
— Sex and Society • William I. Thomas
... all the world a more plain-spoken attempt to contrive an automatic governor—a machine which would preserve its balance without the need of taking human nature into account? What other explanation is there for the naive faith of the Fathers in the "symmetry" of executive, legislature, and judiciary; in the fantastic attempts to circumvent human folly by balancing it with vetoes and checks? No insight into the evident fact that power upsets all mechanical foresight and gravitates toward the natural ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... government at Innsbruck, where he lived in his old simple mode of life, proclaimed some excellent laws, and convoked a national assembly. The Emperor of Austria sent him a golden chain and three thousand ducats. He received them with no show of pride, and returned the following naive answer: "Sirs, I thank you. I have no news for you to-day. I have, it is true, three couriers on the road, the Watscher-Hiesele, the Sixten-Seppele, and the Memmele-Franz, and the Schwanz ought long to have been here. I expect the rascal ...
— Historical Tales, Vol 5 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality, German • Charles Morris
... the importance of a knowledge of social customs is widely felt is proved by the pathetic letters addressed to the editors of women's magazines and departments, asking for information to enlighten ignorance. Such letters range from the naive inquiry of the unsophisticated girl as to whether it is "proper" to allow her "gentleman friend" to kiss her good night, up to the plaint of the novice who doesn't know how to make her spoons and forks come out even at a dinner-party. Here in America, ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... slowly towards the hills. Then a small party came up and informed Major Beatson, that in the next village was a troop-horse, which had been captured in the fighting in the Swat Valley. This admission, that the Mamunds had been implicated in the attack on the Malakand, was sufficiently naive. The cavalry rode on to the village. The horse was not to be found, but the officious informers from the first village eagerly pointed out where it had been stabled. In consequence of this information, and to stimulate the tribesmen to ...
— The Story of the Malakand Field Force • Sir Winston S. Churchill
... mouth and grasped the tail of the jaguar. First to give in was the cat. He let go and let out a squall. But the turtle started to crawl off, got going strong, and dragged the jaguar into the sea and drowned him. With naive earnestness Copple assured his mute listeners that he could show them the exact spot in Sonora where ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... she was singularly naive, at times. He watched her digest the idea, sitting up on the hay, her chin cupped in her two hands, straws in her hair. Her eyes were swollen and her nose red, and his handkerchief was now almost as wet as her own. "I thought I was an ...
— The Camerons of Highboro • Beth B. Gilchrist
... truly; but one may admire Christ and yet not love Him. There are many who at some "hard saying" refuse to walk with Him. Thousands who have a keen appreciation of "loaves and fishes" shrink from "leaving all" and following Jesus. A great concourse is drawn and held spell-bound by a naive, graceful, eloquent, artless preacher who uses "lilies," and the "grass of the field," and the "sower" of seed, and the "sparrow" in the air to enforce his truth. But one may be interested, and ...
— The Heart-Cry of Jesus • Byron J. Rees
... country, the number of deaths among the inhabitants exceeding the births by several hundreds every year. I was once speaking with a Swede about these facts, which he seemed inclined to doubt. "But," said I, "they are derived from your own statistics." "Well," he answered, with a naive attempt to find some compensating good, "you must at least admit that the Swedish statistics are as exact as ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... Fenton and others: but that Dr. Symmons, in his Life of Milton (p. 133.), should transform La Tina into a wine-press, is ludicrously amusing. La Tina is the rustic mistress to whom the sonnets are supposed to be addressed; and every one knows that rusticale and contadinesca is that naive and pleasing rustic style in which the Florentine poets delighted, from the expressive nature of the patois of the Tuscan peasantry; and it might have been said of Malatesti's sonnets, as of another ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 204, September 24, 1853 • Various
... the Queen's own sitting-room, beautiful with pictures and richly-bound books—the pretty difficulty about her finding some of Mendelssohn's own songs to sing to him, since her music was packed up and taken away to Claremont—her naive confession that she had been "so frightened" at singing before the master,—all are chronicled with not less zest and affection than the graceful gift of a valuable ring "as a remembrance" to the artist from the Queen, through Prince Albert. ...
— Great Britain and Her Queen • Anne E. Keeling
... strong advisers, and that the military ideal of administration was the proper one. He was faithful but undiscriminating in his friendships and frequently chose as his associates men of vulgar tastes and low motives; and he showed a naive love of money and an undisguised admiration for rich men such as Gould and Fisk. His appointees were often incompetent friends or relatives, and his cynical attitude toward civil service reform lost him the support of influential men. When ...
— The Sequel of Appomattox - A Chronicle of the Reunion of the States, Volume 32 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Walter Lynwood Fleming
... They are more naive than the children who are in process of being well-educated; more independent and also more dependent. They feel more keenly any separation from those they love; they cry lustily if their mother disappears only for an hour or two; and nevertheless they can fend ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... Every naive and laboured line of the stilted letter touched and amused and also flattered Neeland; for no young man is entirely insensible to a young girl's gratitude. An agreeable warmth suffused him; it pleased him to remember ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... This naive extract from the records of the First Church of Windsor, Connecticut, will show the way in which the question of "singing by rule" was often settled in the churches, and it also gives a very amusing glimpse of the colonial manner ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... naive songs, our people long remembered the valley in which the chieftain parted from his comrades. Our fathers called it the Valley of Farewells; our children so will call it should our songs endure through another generation—should not our language, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... compose some Ritualistic epigrams to say to Mr. Smith to-night. How delightfully rustic we all are! So naive! I am going to order dinner, and add up ...
— The Green Carnation • Robert Smythe Hichens
... an amiable, naive and impressionable young gentleman underwent a week of amateur convictship in one of our jails, and came forth tremulous with indignation and astonishment; though, obviously and inevitably, he did not ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... bravery and contempt of death. The Malays have considerable originality in versification. The pantoum is particularly theirs—a form arising from their habits of improvisation and competitive versifying. They have also the epic or sjair, generally a pure romance, with much naive simplicity and natural feeling. And finally, they have the popular song, ...
— Malayan Literature • Various Authors
... original, and very interesting; and once he brought down the house with laughter and applause by explaining the mental process which prevented him from appreciating a joke until after all others had done so. This naive confession ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns |
