"Childishness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... wondering at his childishness, and yet conscious that her own nerves, too, were ever so slightly on edge. She would not look at him, for fear that the meeting of eyes might hint at more than she meant. She threw her head back on her chair ...
— The Necromancers • Robert Hugh Benson
... this time. The tale of Mr. Miacca, in which "little Tommy couldn't always be good and one day went round the corner," is a giant tale which could be used with young children because it is full of delightful humor. Because of the simplicity of Tommy's language and his sweet childishness it appeals to the child's desire to identify himself with the character. Tommy is so clever and inventive and his lively surprises so brimful of fun that the final effect is ...
— A Study of Fairy Tales • Laura F. Kready
... innocence, her enthusiasm, her childishness were too apparent for him to take her words for more than they ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... inspiration; nor yet day by day, after lunch, as I read aloud my morning's work to the family. It seemed to me original as sin; it seemed to belong to me like my right eye. I had counted on one boy, I found I had two in my audience. My father caught fire at once with all the romance and childishness of his original nature. His own stories, that every night of his life he put himself to sleep with, dealt perpetually with ships, roadside inns, robbers, old sailors, and commercial travellers before ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... ready, to Sir Ivor's great delight. He was fond of his pretty wife, and proud of her, I believe; but when once she was away from the whirl and bustle of the London that she loved, it was a relief to him, I fancy, to pursue his work alone, unhampered by her restless and querulous childishness. ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... 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 himself if he had known it ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... my boy," said the Phoenix smugly. "He was up at the crack of dawn, toiling with typical stupidity in full sight on the slope below. He was making a blind of green branches to hide in while he spies on me. (Really, the childishness of his efforts! To think for a minute he could fool me with such tricks!) Well, I waited until he had gone down the slope to cut more greenery, and when his back was turned, I slipped down to the blind ...
— David and the Phoenix • Edward Ormondroyd
... fatherly protection had developed in myself towards him. How could he, who knew 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
... who smiled encouragement upon her. While these things were taking place in the gallery, Madame de Maintenon, in despair, her eyes full of tears, had to make an effort not to weep. With that wit of which she is so proud, she should have been the first to laugh at this piece of childishness, which was not particularly new. The embarrassment, the torture in which I saw her, filled me with a strong desire to laugh. It was noticed; it was held a crime; and his Majesty himself was kind enough to scold ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... What valuable time we are losing by his childishness! Time is too precious to fritter away ...
— Adrift in the Wilds - or, The Adventures of Two Shipwrecked Boys • Edward S. Ellis
... 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 of the heroes of the world; but what should we think of the members of a club of fathers, ...
— Three Men on the Bummel • Jerome K. Jerome
... practice; but to tell farmers that personal religion will take the place of a scientific agriculture, or the master of an unseaworthy ship that the practice of good morals will bring his craft to shore, would be no greater childishness than the priests and moralists of your day committed in assuring a world beggared by a crazy economic system that the secret of plenty was good works and personal piety. History gives a bitter chapter to these blind ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy
... 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, that they do all manner of reasonable ...
— Scientific Essays and Lectures • Charles Kingsley
... lives, Petrie, to the national childishness of the Chinese! A race of ancestor worshippers is capable of anything, and Dr. Fu-Manchu, the dreadful being who has rained terror upon Europe, stands in imminent peril of disgrace for ...
— The Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... The childishness of the speech went to Allan's heart. He was conscious of keeping a very tight rein on himself as he answered, "Do not say that. I can understand a little of what you must feel. But does it mean that I may speak now and tell you that only ...
— Mr. Pat's Little Girl - A Story of the Arden Foresters • Mary F. Leonard
... 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
... feeling, which seem to transform us for the time into a different sort of being from that with which we are usually conscious of identity. A kind of feverish determination to be happy took possession of me, a careless disregard of the future, a sort of impassioned levity, of reckless childishness. I walked up and down my room with restless excitement; I longed now to return to London, to have my marriage declared, to be congratulated, to be talked to, to enter on a new state of things, and efface as much as possible, from my life and from ...
— Ellen Middleton—A Tale • Georgiana Fullerton
... pore beggars that's died o' thirst an' hardship in the back country—all o' them a dash sight better men nor Burke knowed how to be—where's theyre statutes? Don't talk rubbage to me. Why, there was no end to that feller's childishness. Before he leaves Bray at Cooper's Creek, he drors out—what do you think?— well, he drors out a plan o' forti—(adj.)—fications, like they got in ole wore-out countries; an' Bray had to keep his fellers workin' an' cursin' at this thing till the time come for them to clear. An' mind ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... 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 fatal ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... 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
... was abominable, but her utter childishness palliated it. How was Tudor going to treat the matter? ...
— The Safety Curtain, and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... mind. He had known for years that he had not loved miladi as a man could love, but he also questioned whether such a light, frivolous nature could have appreciated the strong, earnest affection. Her great effort to keep herself young had led to a meretricious childishness. She had a vain, narrow soul, and this had dwarfed it still more. Many a night he had watched over her, pained by her passionate beseeching that he would not let her die, her awesome terror of death. He felt God had been merciful not to allow her to suffer that last rending pain. He ...
— A Little Girl in Old Quebec • Amanda Millie Douglas
... her arguments to him; standing before him, halting in her speech a little, but entreating him with eyes as straight as they were modest. Her very childishness appealed against her arguments. ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... creature lived his life, drinking, fighting, toiling, blaspheming, and dwelling in rank darkness. He often spoke of "Gord," and his burly childishness tickled me infinitely. I liked Jim; he was such a Man when one compared him with our sharps and noodles; but I never expected to see him fairly distance me in the race towards respectability. I am still a Loafer; Jim is a most ...
— The Chequers - Being the Natural History of a Public-House, Set Forth in - a Loafer's Diary • James Runciman
... wherein the men of those days thought they saw a perfection of art, which to their minds was different in kind, and not in degree only, from the ruder suggestive art of their own fathers: this perfection they were ambitious to imitate, this alone seemed to be art to them, the rest was childishness: so wonderful was their energy, their success so great, that no doubt to commonplace minds among them, though surely not to the great masters, that perfection seemed to be gained: and, perfection being gained, what are you to do?—you can go no further, you must aim at standing still—which ...
— Hopes and Fears for Art • William Morris
... class of 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 ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... mean little barber's with a pole above his lettered door he went in to be shaved. And a few steps further on he sat down at the crumb-littered counter of a little baker's shop to have some tea. It pleased him almost to childishness to find how easily he could listen and even talk to the oiled and crimpy little barber, and to the pretty, consumptive-looking, print-dressed baker's wife. Whatever his face might now be conniving at, the Arthur Lawford of last week could never ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... childishness, callousness, and considerateness struck him as one of the most revealing she had made. He laughed icily. "Our laws only allow of divorce for one cause and I advise you not to seek freedom for yourself—or for me—by disgracing ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... this passed away. Then he loved her for her childishness and for her strangeness to him, for the wonder of her soul which was different from his soul, and which made him genuine when he would be false. And she loved him for the way he sat loosely in a chair, or for the way he came through a door with his face open and eager. She loved his ringing, eager ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... 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 ...
— The Harbours of England • John Ruskin
... look round—because you didn't know I was there. I swore I wouldn't unless you looked round." He laughed as the childishness of ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... is glad this temptation is broke too, and that he is fortified from it by this weakness. The next door of death sads him not, but he expects it calmly as his turn in nature; and fears more his recoiling back to childishness than dust. All men look on him as a common father, and on old age, for his sake, as a reverent thing. His very presence and face puts vice out of countenance, and makes it an indecorum in a vicious man. He practises his experience on youth ...
— Microcosmography - or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters • John Earle
... quite French childishness. I get off and walk through the midst of a hedge of smiling, kind faces of sailors, who ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... Mackhai. "You young idiots, you don't know what you've done,—you do not, Kenneth. As for you, you young viper, are you as cunning as you are high, or is this childishness and—" ...
— Three Boys - or the Chiefs of the Clan Mackhai • George Manville Fenn
... 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 ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... Without doubt, she had had a very narrow escape. Her anger seemed to be the result of nerves upset and mortified vanity; she wished to show Mrs. Abbott that she could drive—the explanation of the whole matter. Harvey was vexed at such a piece of childishness; irritated, too, by the outbreak of temper with which Alma had replied to his very natural alarm. Of course, he would say nothing more; it would be interesting to await the outcome of his wife's mature reflection ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... conspiracy against his own king, 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 you must let ...
— Cavour • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... well understand that, too. 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
... the artist adored his wife. Hortense and Wenceslas abandoned themselves to the happy childishness of a legitimate and unbounded passion. Hortense was the first to release her husband from his labors, proud to triumph over her rival, his Art. And, indeed, a woman's caresses scare away the Muse, and break down the sturdy, ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... loved that was worth giving. Her eyes fell upon her old doll, the companion of so many years. She laughed a happy little laugh. She had grown up. The doll was only a doll now. But she kissed it, because she loved it still. And she put it carefully away in a drawer, lest the sight of a childishness offend the lord ...
— IT and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... please him exceedingly." A hog's harslett is "a piece of meat he loves." He cannot 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, and there a harp and here a Jew's trump, ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... two hundred dollars! In God's name, why did he not borrow it, ask me for it? thought poor Jamie. He must have known it would be at once discovered. And mixed curiously with Jamie's dismay was a business man's contempt for the childishness of the theft. And yet they ...
— Pirate Gold • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... the odd sing-song in which he spoke, and no less at that strange trick of dropping out the letter "h." To be sure, I had heard Ransome; but he had taken his ways from all sorts of people, and spoke so imperfectly at the best, that I set down the most of it to childishness. My surprise was all the greater to hear that manner of speaking in the mouth of a grown man; and indeed I have never grown used to it; nor yet altogether with the English grammar, as perhaps a very critical eye might here and there spy out even ...
— Kidnapped • Robert Louis Stevenson
... dignity which seemed to surmount her usual childishness, "Barry, if a man wants a woman to believe in him, he's got to make himself worthy ...
— Contrary Mary • Temple Bailey
... tearing noise on the other side of the fence, and a head arose above it, followed by the figure of a boy. It was a queer, wasted, tiny figure, with one shoulder higher than the other. The face was pinched and weird-looking, with that strange mixture of childishness and age that is seen in the countenances of the unfortunate little ones who are called out too early into the battle of life. A long, claw-like arm reached out, and a finger pointed at the object in ...
— Treasure Valley • Marian Keith
... in his admixture of childish simplicity and varied knowledge. None, indeed, could resist his gracious humor and old-world courtesies. The old man could be simple and ingenuous, too; but only when it pleased him so to be; and it was not the second childishness of age, for his intellect remained keen and moved far more swiftly than any at Chadlands. But he was modest and loved a jest. The hand of time had indeed touched him, and sometimes his memory broke down and he faltered with a verbal difficulty; ...
— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts
... set of fellows enough, to outward seeming, but how shall a European judge them fairly? Stevenson says in one of his Essays, "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, ...
— Morocco • S.L. Bensusan
... nose a little at the exotic smell. Madame Beattie was swarthy and strong-featured with a soft wrinkled skin unnatural from over-cherishing. She had bright, humorously satirical eyes; and her mouth was large. Therefore you were surprised at her slight lisp, a curious childishness which Esther had always considered pure affectation. She had forgotten it in these later years, but now the sound of it awakened all the distaste and curiosity she had felt of old. She had always believed if Aunt Patricia ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... and terrors she had left outside, the new kind of tears she had shed, the love she had begun to feel for her parents, and the trust she had begun to place in the wise woman, it seemed to her as if her soul had grown larger of a sudden, and she had left the days of her childishness and naughtiness far behind her. People are so ready to think themselves changed when it is only their mood that is changed! Those who are good-tempered because it is a fine day, will be ill-tempered when it rains: their selves are just ...
— A Double Story • George MacDonald
... unconscious of his presence. She prattled on to the unresponsive Geeka. Then the old man coughed. With a start the child glanced quickly up over her shoulder. Korak could see her full face now. It was very beautiful in its sweet and innocent childishness—all soft and lovely curves. He could see her great, dark eyes. He looked for the happy love light that would follow recognition; but it did not come. Instead, terror, stark, paralyzing terror, was mirrored in her eyes, ...
— The Son of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... 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 ...
— Interference and Other Football Stories • Harold M. Sherman
... again at the glittering eyes, and the thought flashed through his mind, as it had done more than once before, that he had to do with a madman. An inspired genius, perhaps, but mad, nevertheless. Pachmann knew that there was about madness a certain childishness, and he ...
— The Destroyer - A Tale of International Intrigue • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... 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 ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... is a singular mixture of precocity and childishness. She is nine years old and so large that one would think her twelve. She plays dolls with passion, and she is as LITERARY as you or I, meanwhile learning her own language which ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... 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
... evil is, that what in the debauchee is condemned, as suicide, is lauded in the devotee, as saintship. The delirium tremens of the drunkard conveys scarcely a sterner moral lesson than the second childishness of the pure and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... something wanting—exactly what he 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 done ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... it was quite 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 ...
— Stradella • F(rancis) Marion Crawford
... literary resignation 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
... must be 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 ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... the dupe of Mosca the knavish confederate of Vol'pone (2 syl.). He is an old man, with seeing and hearing faint, and understanding dulled to childishness, yet he wishes to live ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... but she was unaffectedly frightened at finding herself in such close proximity with this very oppressively handsome young man; and without pausing to reflect on the silliness and childishness of the act, she flew away as rapidly as a startled bird. It seemed as if all the reminiscences of her childhood pressed home upon her in the space of a few moments. Just as she had been arrested years before, when ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... discussed immortal problems as they would have discussed 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 in his cups ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... child), still the entire accomplishment of music is only in the union of both. For the 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 attainment of this ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... have presentiments which refuse to be shaken off. I am not so old that age can have weakened my powers and reduced me to childishness, I cannot even say what I am afraid of, but separation is painful and causes an involuntary terror. Strange, is it not? Formerly, I used to leave my wife for months together, when she was young and my son only, an infant; I loved her passionately, yet I could go with ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - DERUES • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... child we often forget that the child will some time outgrow his childishness. We must consider not only what is the best kind of behavior for a child, but what kinds of habits it is best for a child to develop in view of his some day becoming an adult human being. We want men and women to develop into free agents, that is, ...
— Your Child: Today and Tomorrow • Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg
... The door closed after Jane. She came close to him, irresolute. What could she say? She thought, with the heat of childishness, that she would give the blood out of her body, drop by drop, to comfort him. She wished that she had gone on and married him. "But I cannot say that I love him." This was a matter for life and death—even Kitty's ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... 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
... said Pamela, "but it's the same with us older children. Apart from sin altogether, it must be hard for God to pardon our childishness ... But about the Miss Watsons—d'you think I might ...
— Penny Plain • Anna Buchan (writing as O. Douglas)
... over the sick boy, holding a glass of water to his lips; and as she looked round, Mr. Smith thought he had never seen a face so strangely and sadly altered as hers. It had lost nearly all its childishness—it looked so old, and womanly, with a weight of care in it that was pitiable to see; and yet, with all this, it was so calm and still, so composed, that any one would have imagined that her one thought was how to nurse her patient. And so it ...
— The Boy Artist. - A Tale for the Young • F.M. S.
... This grown-up childishness, to which he felt so superior, exercised a peculiar and almost mesmeric effect on Soames, for he had never felt anything ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... in the way of play or by dialogue. It would add to the simple letters and names the contemplation of the object itself, or at least of its representation by pictures; and in this direction, in the conversation-literature which it prepared for children, it sometimes fell into childishness. It performed a great service when it gave to the body its due, and introduced simple, natural dress, bathing, gymnastics, pedestrian excursions, and a hardening against the influences of wind and ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... childishness, but I SHOULD like my child to see what his mother was when she brought him into the world, that sad world in which he has been ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... to that night when we sat together by a window overlooking the ocean, veiled in a haze of moonlit pearl, and, dimly seen near shore, a boat was floating, like some mystic barge, as we said, in our happy childishness, waiting to take us to the Land East of the Sun and West of the Moon? Ah! how was it we lingered and lingered till the boat was no more there, and it was too late? Perhaps it was that we seemed to be already there, as you turned and placed your hand in mine and said: "My life is in your hand." ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... 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
... expressed great approbation, that her scholars, at this solemn place, showed no sort of childishness, notwithstanding their tender age; but behaved with decency and devotion ...
— The Governess - The Little Female Academy • Sarah Fielding
... with childishness in a man! I found it necessary to reprimand you. You'll probably know your place after this." ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... slay 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 roaring in anger. And after Sisupala had ceased, Krishna addressing all the ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Part 2 • Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa
... is no 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 sounds of rights and privileges: ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... hoods and all manner of disguises made out of pieces of old embroidery and Oriental stuffs and furs; and very soon this rabble of masquers had become, so to speak, completely drunk with its own amusement—with the childishness, and, if I may say so, the barbarism, the vulgarity underlying the majority even of well-bred English men and women—Mr. Oke himself doing the mountebank like a schoolboy ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... my life put together—I believe that my very character took on some change in those hours, as metal is changed if you throw it on to the fire. I felt for the first time that I was a woman, with all the childishness burnt out of me; and I was glad, for I might have to do battle with those who were older ...
— Secret History Revealed By Lady Peggy O'Malley • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... of, and respectful to, Miss Sally. Strange indeed if he had not noticed—although always in his resigned fashion—the dull green stagnation of the life around him, or when not accepting it as part of his trouble he had not chafed at the arrested youth and senile childishness of the people. Stranger still if he had not at times been startled to hear the outgrown superstitions and follies of his youth voiced again by grown-up men, and perhaps strangest of all if he had not vaguely accepted it all as the hereditary curse of that barbarism ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... 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. When the ...
— The Empire Annual for Girls, 1911 • Various
... (agitatedly). Ida, this is mere childishness; your weakness 200 Infects me, to my shame: but as all feelings Of yours are common to me, it affects me. Prithee, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... has to be the light of most holy faith. But the saints say that faith without works is dead, so our faith might be neither living nor holy, but dead. Therefore we need to exert ourselves virtuously all the time, and leave our childishness and vanities, and not behave any longer like worldly girls, but like faithful brides consecrated to Christ crucified; in this way we shall have a lamp, ...
— Letters of Catherine Benincasa • Catherine Benincasa
... will,' replied Rosa, in a tone of affectionate childishness that went straight and true to her heart; 'I will be as good a friend as such a mite of a thing can be to such a noble creature as you. And be a friend to me, please; I don't understand myself: and I want a friend who can understand me, ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... for childishness, She cries at them for carelessness Who see her going loverless Yet sing and chatter Just as when he was not a ghost, Nor ever ask her what she has lost Or what ...
— Last Poems • Edward Thomas
... epidemic of childishness is apparent in the streets. Wagons pass, laden with gilded drums, wooden horses, playthings by the score. In the manufacturing districts, from top to bottom of the five-story buildings, former palaces of the Marais, where the shops have ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... same thing as binding yourself to apply their theories and to imitate their activity, under an entirely heterogeneous set of circumstances, in a different country, and in a society with wholly dissimilar requirements. That is the argument if we straighten it out. The childishness of any such contention is so obvious, that I should be ashamed of reproducing it, were it not that this very contention has made its appearance at my expense several times a month for the last two years in all sorts ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... 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 jesting of ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... to the young man, be it said he had ample cause for resentment, and whatever of childishness he displayed was but natural, for true balance of character is the result of experience, and as yet he had barely ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... 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 it ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... against yours? And yet I too had some fine ideas in my head. Don't laugh at me, dear Reinhold; but, look you, I thought what a grand thing it would be to model Rose's lovely figure and cast it in the finest silver. But that's all childishness, whilst you—you—Oh! how sweetly she smiles upon you, and how delightfully you have brought out all her beauty. O Reinhold! Reinhold! you happy, happy fellow! Ay, and it has all come about as you said long ago. We have both striven ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... anticipate much pleasant intercourse with our young friends. We thank them heartily for the favors already received, which from their genuine childishness we know have come direct from their own little hearts and hands. Our paper is received by children who live in all parts of this country, in England, Germany, France, South America, Cuba, and Mexico; and we would ...
— Harper's Young People, January 6, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... at 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 ...
— Uncanny Tales • Various
... 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 ...
— Mercy Philbrick's Choice • Helen Hunt Jackson
... figure undeveloped, the feet and hands extremely small. But what arrested him was, so to speak, the embodied contradiction of the personality—as between the wild intelligence of the eyes and the extreme youth, almost childishness, ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... I haven't. She really did. Do you know, she and I quite altered after the War began? She lost all her old silliness and inefficiency—or at any rate only retained enough of the old childishness to make her endearing. And I really grew to love her. I quite forgot you. Yes: I ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... 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. It is a fact that except for the inhabitants ...
— The Philippines: Past and Present (vol. 1 of 2) • Dean C. Worcester
... to let the Table of Lessons be regarded as suggestive and not mandatory. The half-way recognition of this principle in the new Lectionary, in which such a freedom is allowed, provided the Lesson taken be one of those appointed for "some day in the same week," seems open to a suspicion of childishness. ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington
... 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 calamities of such magnitude "for one ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... do when she was absent, though they 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 the difference of ...
— Canadian Crusoes - A Tale of The Rice Lake Plains • Catharine Parr Traill
... greatest Object pity hath, is Age, When it returns to Childishness again, As this Old Woman doth; and though we say, That Age is Honourable, we only mean, When Gravity and Wisdom are its marks, And not gray hairs, and froward peevishness, As ten for one, are known by to be Old, And though we see this true, ...
— The Fatal Jealousie (1673) • Henry Nevil Payne
... 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 ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope
... simplicity of Shelley's technique—much more really simple than the conscious "childishness" exquisite though that is, of a Blake or Verlaine—lends itself so wonderfully to the expression of youth's eternal sorrow. His best lyrics use words that fall into their places with the "dying fall" of an actual fit of sobbing. And they are so naturally chosen, his images ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... and, having sense enough to discover her defects, she set about correcting them, in which she succeeded so as to excite general surprise. Thus she continued until her death, and often expressed regret that she had led so irregular a life. She used to excuse herself by saying it was mere childishness, and that she had little to thank those young ladies for who had given her such bad advice and set her such bad examples. She publicly manifested her contempt for them, and prevailed on the King not to invite them to Marly ...
— The Memoirs of the Louis XIV. and The Regency, Complete • Elizabeth-Charlotte, Duchesse d'Orleans
... run other people's feelings to cover, and try to find their cause, without mental and moral development; all this analysis lessened very visibly Edith's childishness; also, it made her rather rudely cold to Eleanor, whose effort to reinstate herself in the glories of the little girl's imagination only resulted in still another and entirely new feeling ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... to be interpolated in The Ring after The Valkyries before the allegory can tell the whole story, and that the first of these interpolated dramas will be much more like a revised Rienzi than like Siegfried. If anyone doubts the extent to which Wagner's eyes had been opened to the administrative-childishness and romantic conceit of the heroes of the revolutionary generation that served its apprenticeship on the barricades of 1848-9, and perished on those of 1870 under Thiers' mitrailleuses, let him read Eine Kapitulation, ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw
... dignity with pure childishness is a unique subject for art, and one which few have had the genius to portray. Two great painters are famous in history for their remarkable success in this line of work,—Van Dyck, of Belgium, ...
— Child-life in Art • Estelle M. Hurll
... different from ours, and contrasts occur so 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 a ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... have not written anything in my diary, and thought I never should return to this childishness. Yet it is not childishness, but converse with my own self, with this real divine self which lives in every man. All this time that I slept there was no one for me to converse with. I was awakened by an extraordinary ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... woman's countenance can only consist in that majestic peace, which is founded in the memory of happy and useful years,—full of sweet records; and from the joining of this with that yet more majestic childishness, which is still full of change and promise;—opening always—modest at once, and bright, with hope of better things to be won, and to be bestowed. There is no old age where there is still ...
— Sesame and Lilies • John Ruskin
... publishing the secret of his amour elicited from Kamehameha only the sarcastic remark, "Couldn't he eat his food and keep his mouth shut?" The lady herself took the same view of his action. There was no evasion in her reply; her only reproach was for his childishness ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... possessed. . . . He embarked for America, and nearly twenty years passed by before he came back again; . . . but oh, how altered!—he was in every sense of the word an old man, his body and mind were enfeebled, and second childishness had come upon him. How often have I bent over him, vainly endeavoring to recall to his memory the scenes we had shared together: and how frequently, with an aching heart, have I gazed on his vacant and lustreless eye, while he has amused himself in clapping his hands and singing ...
— George Cruikshank • William Makepeace Thackeray
... have children of your own, 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 ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... 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 of worsted, ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... the Englishman, unless he wants to be emphatic, says, "[)a] man."[T] Neither is right, neither wrong; it is purely a matter of habit; and to consider either habit ridiculous is merely to exhibit that childishness or provincialism of mind which is moved to laughter by whatever is unfamiliar. Again, when I first read the works of the sagacious Mr. Dooley, I thought it a curiously far-fetched idea on the part of that philosopher to talk of Admiral ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... 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 ...
— Love, The Fiddler • Lloyd Osbourne
... of recent comings and goings, was standing at the door of the shop, and missed no item of this dumb show. He raised both hands in silent condemnation of Elkin's childishness, whereupon the horse-dealer jerked a thumb toward Grant's retreating figure, and went through a rapid pantomime of the hanging process. His crony disapproved again, and went in. Now, both those men were on the jury panel, so, to all appearance, Grant would be judged by at least one deadly enemy, ...
— The Postmaster's Daughter • Louis Tracy
... nineteen years of age, took no part in the struggle: neither did he show any desire to live in Ireland, but courted English aristocratic society, and served English party interests. During three years before his death, the brain gradually softened, and he sunk into childishness. None of his children survived him. His widow, a charming person, retained a pension of L100 a-year, conferred ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... scientific or other, of myself and of the world about me, that not a day goes by but I fall a-marvelling before the mystery of the universe. To trumpet the triumphs of human knowledge seems to me worse than childishness; now, as of old, we know but one thing—that we know nothing. What! Can I pluck the flower by the wayside, and, as I gaze at it, feel that, if I knew all the teachings of histology, morphology, and so on, with regard to it, I should have exhausted its ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... means of announcing his presence, he saw a handle at the end of a rod of iron, and pulled, but heard nothing: the sound of the bell was smothered in a wilderness of stone walls. By and by, however, appeared an old servant, bowed and slow, with plentiful hair white as wool, and a mingled look of childishness and ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... primeval times we used fists and clubs. Now we hit with brains and words or hard cash. That is all the difference. The strong man is still the one who takes what he wants, and keeps it. And I want you, Hal. It is mere feebleness - childishness - to be thwarted by convention and circumstance. Hoodwink convention, and stamp on circumstance. Go through stone walls with a battering-ram. As long as the world doesn't know - who cares? Those are my sentiments. They have ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... there was dead silence between these two, the strings of whose lives Fate was inextricably mixing in her fingers, palsied by age, and fretted by the constant tugging and straining of those other threads which, in moments of senile anger or childishness, she gets into such ...
— Desert Love • Joan Conquest
... very persons who seem to dread it the most. But we should clearly understand, that this excess of intellectual exertion at an early age, is by no means the same thing with hastening the change from childishness to manliness. We are all enough aware, in common life, that a very clever and forward boy may be, in his conduct, exceeding childish; that those whose talents and book-knowledge are by no means remarkable, may be, ...
— The Christian Life - Its Course, Its Hindrances, And Its Helps • Thomas Arnold
... 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 all he said ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... they say, can it do to ourselves, and then to our neighbour can it do none at all. And therefore they condemn it for superstitious folly. Now, heaviness of heart and weeping for our sins, this they reckon shame almost, and womanish childishness—howbeit, God be thanked, their women wax there now so mannish that they are not so childish, nor so poor of spirit, but what they can sin on as men do and be neither afraid nor ashamed nor weep for their ...
— Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation - With Modifications To Obsolete Language By Monica Stevens • Thomas More
... other hand, has laughed at M. Leroux and his ideas on property, charging him with TAUTOLOGY and CHILDISHNESS. "Le National" does not wish to understand. Is it necessary to remind this journal that it has no right to deride a dogmatic philosopher, because it is without a doctrine itself? From its foundation, "Le National" has been a nursery of intriguers and renegades. From time to time ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... 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, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... with a careless, good-natured smile, which seemed to be saying: "Foolish creature! You can't defend yourself, and these airs are amusing. But I am benevolent." And she was ashamed of her shame, and furious against the childishness that made her frown, and lower her eyes, and escape out of the room ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... 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 that, here and there, cases occur in which the animal ...
— The Mason-bees • J. Henri Fabre
... Edward, with benign loftiness, observing that his guests grew pale, and himself, though often weak to childishness, and morally wavering and irresolute,—still so far king and gentleman, that he knew no craven fear of the body. "Fear not for me, my fathers; humble as I am, I am strong in the faith of heaven ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of interwoven feelings. And you know, I was also acutely sorry for him—almost as sorry as I was for my aunt Susan. Even then I had quite found him out. I knew him to be weaker than myself; his incurable, irresponsible childishness was as clear to me then as it was on his deathbed, his redeeming and excusing imaginative silliness. Through some odd mental twist perhaps I was disposed to exonerate him even at the cost of blaming my poor old mother who had left things in his ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... 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 ...
— Cruel Barbara Allen - From Coals Of Fire And Other Stories, Volume II. (of III.) • David Christie Murray
... 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 it varies in ...
— Petty Troubles of Married Life, Second Part • Honore de Balzac
... of the grave brought back his thoughts from the dreaming channel into which they had flowed. Fanny, whose very childishness had once so soothed him, now disturbed; he felt the want of that complete solitude which makes the atmosphere of growing passion: he muttered some scarcely audible excuse, and quitted the house. Fanny saw him no more that evening. He did not return till midnight. But ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... 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 ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... 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 more than any other influence of the century; a mind ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... similar to the one Polly had on, and tried to appear as like her as possible, so that no unfair advantage should arise from appearances. Barbara smiled scornfully at what she considered "childishness" in Eleanor. "Why should she want to have Polly look as well as she could? And why bother, anyway, to dress up for a nobody like Kenneth Evans? Of course, it would be all right for Jim Latimer—if he were at home—but not in the wilderness. Chances were that the ...
— Polly and Eleanor • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... 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 so ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... was all he said, and I never mentioned it to him again, any of it. Of course, a sensible fellow like him would feel too ridiculous; knowing he had that silly idea in his head, yet not being able to get over it without such childishness—I felt sorry ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... rector Dr. Linde), a lady with whom Frederick often played duets. What strikes one at once in both of them is the almost total absence of awkwardness and the presence of a rarely-disturbed ease. They have a natural air which is alike free from affected profundity and insipid childishness. And the hand that wrote them betrays so little inexperience in the treatment of the instrument that they can hold their ground without difficulty and honourably among the better class of light drawing-room pieces. Of course, there are weak points: the introduction ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... 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
... a poor impresario to do? He longed to grasp her by the shoulders and shake the voice out of her; his hands fairly itched to get hold of the obstinate little piece of humanity, who, in her childishness, her helplessness, her blindness, thus defied him, and set all ...
— Melody - The Story of a Child • Laura E. Richards
... moulded, the lips thin and compressed. The nose was unusual when seen in profile. There was no sign of a bony bridge, but it was markedly curved and jutted out at a curious angle from the line of the face. The nostrils were wide and open. None of these features produced any effect of childishness; but this effect was partly achieved by the contours of the cheeks, and by the fact that there was no indication of any lines on ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford
... Culch. That's childishness, my dear fellow; you ought to talk about it—it will do you good. And really, I'm not at all sure, after all, that we have not both of us had a fortunate escape. One is very apt to—er—overrate the fascinations of persons one ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 102, Feb. 20, 1892 • Various
... Alternations of overvaluation and undervaluation of ourselves At sixty we come "within range of the rifle-pits Blessed are those who have said our good things for us Cavil on the ninth part of a hair Cerebral strabismus Childishness to expect men to believe as their fathers did Consciousness is covered by layers of habitual thoughts Content to remain more or less ignorant of many things Controversialists Cracked Teacup Cultivated symptoms as other people cultivate ...
— Widger's Quotations from the Works of Oliver W. Holmes, Sr. • David Widger
... 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
... 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 her love ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... aimed at is not Wagner's work, but the way in which his work was represented. The splendours of the setting do not hide the childishness of the ideas behind them: the dragon Fafna, Fricka's rams, the bear, the serpent, and all the Valhalla menagerie have always been ridiculous. I will only add that the dragon's failure to be terrifying was not Wagner's fault, for he never attempted to ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... our naturalistic standards to bankruptcy. You are strong only by being weak, it shows. You cannot live on pride or self-sufficingness. There is a light in which all the naturally founded and currently accepted distinctions, excellences, and safeguards of our characters appear as utter childishness. Sincerely to give up one's conceit or hope of being good in one's own right is the only door to the ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... of it, it's the height of childishness in you—I mean me—" said Mr. Jarndyce, "to regard him for a moment as a man. You can't make HIM responsible. The idea of Harold Skimpole with designs or plans, or knowledge of consequences! ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... not help smiling, there was so much coaxing childishness and grace in this little whispered sentence. I do not know why I turned toward the cousin who had remained a little apart, smoking in silence. He seemed to me rather pale; he took three or four sudden puffs, rose suddenly under ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... fixation or mother fixation. We all know from experience persons who cannot grow up from their childhood dependency, and they make very trying husbands or wives. They are easily spotted if one is only keen in noticing what takes place, because they are constantly showing their childishness, and we can be sure that they will continue both to reveal and to nurse their weakness throughout life in such a way as to be discouraging and irritating in marriage and ...
— The Good Housekeeping Marriage Book • Various
... reasonable persons like thee commit themselves to acts contaminating alike body, speech, and heart, and destructive of virtue? Thou knowest not what virtue is, neither hast thou taken council of the wise. And therefore it is that from ignorance, and childishness thou destroyest the lower animals. Say, who art thou, and what for hast thou come to the forest devoid of humanity and human beings? And, O foremost of men, tell thou also, whither thou wilt go to-day. ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... Howard?" She blushed at the childishness of her eager question. But she demanded the expected answer with the insistence of unsatisfied love. And when he failed to reply at the moment, surprised by her mood, she knelt by his ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick |
