"Naive" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in the face of her naive expression of self-sacrificing love, and after a moment she added, hesitatingly: "I wish I could meet your father. Perhaps he'd come up here if you asked him ...
— The Forester's Daughter - A Romance of the Bear-Tooth Range • Hamlin Garland
... among them, the negros themselves were permitted to be judge and jury. Their administration of justice was often characteristically naive. Mr. Brewster gives an amusing sketch of one of their sessions. King Nero is on the bench, and one Cato—we are nothing if not classical—is the prosecuting attorney. The name of the prisoner and the nature of his offense are not disclosed ...
— An Old Town By The Sea • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... 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 ...
— The Art of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... word.... It seems such a short time ago that he was taking his first stumbling steps along the dim hallways of language. I have been turning back to the journal I began shortly after his birth and kept up for so long, the naive journal of a young mother registering her wonder at the unfolding mysteries of life. It became less minute and less meticulous, I notice, as the years slipped past, and after the advent of Poppsy and Pee-Wee the entries seem a bit hurried and often incoherent. ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... 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 ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... no reason to doubt the truth of these records, naive as are some of the descriptions. Unquestionably the Wokou were a terrible scourge to the ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... 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
... the anachronisms in local color were not so extraordinary as we have often been told." The author a little further on calls attention to the fact that the mise en scene of the old mystery plays had combined splendor with naive poverty. But he is careful to note that the latter condition accompanied the representations given by strolling troupes in small villages or towns, while the former state was found where well paid and highly trained actors gave performances in rich municipalities. In ...
— Some Forerunners of Italian Opera • William James Henderson
... social origin, noticed in the social world are the direct or indirect result of imitation in all its forms,—custom, fashion, sympathy, obedience, instruction, education, naive or deliberate imitation. Hence the excellence of that modern method which explains doctrines or institutions by their history. This tendency can only be generalized. Great inventors and great geniuses do sometimes ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... His countenance presented a sort of comical assurance and conceit mingled with good nature, which gave it originality and saved it from too close a resemblance to the insipid face of a Parisian bourgeois. Without this air of naive self-admiration and faith in his own person, he would have won too much respect; he drew nearer to his fellows by thus contributing his quota of absurdity. When speaking, he habitually crossed his hands behind his back. When he thought ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... look of half-smiling, half-tender reproach at him. "You know who I mean, Bob. And I'm not going to have him put in danger on our account," she added with naive dogmatism. ...
— Gunsight Pass - How Oil Came to the Cattle Country and Brought a New West • William MacLeod Raine
... "Passion Play" of Oberammergau had been transformed into almost illusive groups in painted terra-cotta. The scenes of the Last Supper, of the Martyrdom of the Innocents, of the Raising of Jairus' daughter, for instance, are certainly touching in the naive piety of their life-sized realism. But Gaudenzio Ferrari had many [94] helpmates at the Sacro Monte; and his lovelier work is in the Franciscan Church at the foot of the hill, and in those two, truly Italian, far-off towns of the ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... "'Tis a posy, and fairly enough writ." He read the lines, blushing like a girl. They were very naive, ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... not only the claim of the specialist that I would repudiate. People are too apt to suppose that in order to discuss morals a man must have exceptional moral gifts. I would dispute that naive supposition. I am an ingenuous enquirer with, I think, some capacity for religious feeling, but neither a prophet nor a saint. On the whole I should be inclined to classify myself as a bad man rather than a ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... naive and awkward as is always the singing of English hymns in English churches by English citizens. The chapel, which had seemed before to be rising to some strange atmosphere of expectation, slipped back now to its native ugliness ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... and caught sight of his father's apprentice on his way back to the workshop. The lad stood there on the pavement talking with naive effrontery to a little book-stitcher of his acquaintance. He was kissing the girl, without a thought of the passers-by, and whistling a tune between his teeth. The pretty, sickly-looking slattern carried ...
— The Aspirations of Jean Servien • Anatole France
... with a naive remembrance only of the chivalry of this idyllic indiscretion, "when I look at you I can understand how a knight could ...
— The Flaw in the Sapphire • Charles M. Snyder
... the stiff attitudes of some of the Primitives are scarcely alive to the source of their inspiration. They believe in their own sincerity, whereas, if an eminent master had not revived this form of art, people would have continued blind to all but its naive and inferior sides. Those artists who, after the manner of another illustrious master, inundate their canvasses with violet shades do not see in nature more violet than was detected there fifty years ago; but they are influenced, "suggestioned," by the personal and ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... a fool? Withdraw? These cormorants! these suckers of blood! these harpies and vultures! I laughed as I imagined sneaking Hector, malicious Luke, or brutal John responding to this naive appeal, and then found myself wondering why no echo of my mirth came from the men themselves. They must have seen much more plainly than I did the ludicrousness of their weak old kinsman's demand; yet Luke was still, ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... 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 schoolboy smacking his lips over ...
— One Basket • Edna Ferber
... It was probably naive to assume that an increase of black cadets from four to nine would stir much interest when other statistics suggested that black officers had a limited future in the service. As Secretary Royall pointed out, even if the total number of black officers could not be quickly increased, ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... off with a reservation like that, Miss Copley. You made a naive, but very wise, remark this afternoon when you said you might just as well tell me something, especially as I was bound to find it out anyway. Stick to that maxim. It will save me time ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... he would not give me time to see one-tenth of the beauties and interesting objects of Rome. He wanted to get me home, he said, to have me all to himself, and to see me safely installed as the mistress of Grassdale Manor, just as single-minded, as naive, and piquante as I was; and as if I had been some frail butterfly, he expressed himself fearful of rubbing the silver off my wings by bringing me into contact with society, especially that of Paris and Rome; and, more-over, he ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... It is all delightfully naive and fanciful, this elfin-world, where the impossible does not strike one as incongruous, and the England of 1648 seems never very ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... own relations so rich, and Phil never knew where the money was coming from for to-morrow's tobacco. Why couldn't they do something for him? But they were so selfish. Why couldn't they build country-houses? She had all that naive dogmatism which is so pathetic, and sometimes achieves such great results. Bosinney, to whom she turned in her discomfiture, was talking to Irene, and a chill fell on June's spirit. Her eyes grew steady with anger, like old Jolyon's when ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... naive way to account for a chastisement which had now strung out for ninety-six years. But nobody found fault with it. There was nobody there who would not punish a sinner ninety-six years if he could, nor anybody there who would ever dream of such a thing as the Lord's ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc Volume 2 • Mark Twain
... perfect silence and suspense. The audience was open-mouthed and dumb; the choir stood like Lot's wife; and Harry, with his music-sheet, stood there uplifted, looking down with a dumb sort of indifference on Mrs. Nixon, his face naive and faintly mocking. Mrs. Nixon sat defiant in ...
— England, My England • D.H. Lawrence
... everyday gesture, which the poetry of the Divine Comedy involves, and before the fifteenth century Dante could hardly have found an illustrator. Botticelli's illustrations are crowded with incident, blending, with a naive carelessness of pictorial propriety, three phases of the same scene into one plate. The grotesques, so often a stumbling-block to painters who forget that the words of a poet, which only feebly present an image to the mind, ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... Hastings met Aggie in the most casual way. He was captivated by her freshness and beauty, her demureness, her ignorance of all things vicious. Straightway, he set his snares, being himself already limed. He showered every gallant attention on the naive bread-and-butter miss, and succeeded gratifyingly soon in winning her heart—to all appearance. But he gained nothing more, for the coy creature abruptly developed most effective powers of resistance to every blandishment that went beyond strictest propriety. His ardor cooled suddenly when Harris ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana
... the Conference opened about noon, when there was a long discussion of the points at issue. Workman after workman came to the platform and gave his view. Some of the speeches were a little naive, as when one soldier said that Comrades Lenin and Trotsky had often before pointed out difficult roads, and that whenever they had been followed they had shown the way to victory, and that therefore, though there was much in the Central Committee's theses that was hard to digest, he was for giving ...
— The Crisis in Russia - 1920 • Arthur Ransome
... great type I know of nothing more delightful than his figures of young musicians going to the marriage feast of Mary, nothing more graceful than the genius ivy-crowned and seated at the foot of the cross.[389] The sentiment for naive and artless grace, so fully possessed by Luini, gave freshness to his treatment of conventional religious themes. Under his touch they appeal immediately to the most untutored taste, without the aid of realistic or ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... between knowledge and religion. The theology of the Middle Ages has not yet disappeared, although fortunately there are some signs of a great reconstruction going on in our midst. Fortunately, this naive view of the universe is a theology and not a religion; but doubtless even the religion of the soul suffers when its knowing aspect is perpetually contradicted by scientific knowledge. There is such a close connection between "head" and "heart"—even closer than between body and ...
— An Interpretation of Rudolf Eucken's Philosophy • W. Tudor Jones
... found something to interest you at last!" said Miss Melhuish, in naive triumph. "Yes—burglars! But don't speak so loud. It's supposed to be kept a great secret. I really oughtn't to tell you ...
— The Amateur Cracksman • E. W. Hornung
... importance must be imported into the significance of that word—the sick-room became a shrine, served by two ageing priestesses and a naive acolyte. Everything was done to make Henry an invalid in the grand manner. His bed of agony became the pivot on which the household life flutteringly and soothingly revolved. No detail of delicate attention ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett
... agreeable intelligence quite meekly; simply wondering, in his own heart, how many of these doomed men had wives and children, and whether they would feel as he did about leaving them. It is to be confessed, too, that the naive, off-hand information that he was to be thrown into jail by no means produced an agreeable impression on a poor fellow who had always prided himself on a strictly honest and upright course of life. Yes, Tom, we must confess it, was rather proud of his honesty, poor ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... example. If you wish to guide a young man on the path of true culture, beware of interrupting his naive, confident, and, as it were, immediate and personal relationship with nature. The woods, the rocks, the winds, the vulture, the flowers, the butterfly, the meads, the mountain slopes, must all speak to him in their own language; in them he must, ...
— On the Future of our Educational Institutions • Friedrich Nietzsche
... of St. Gudule, the tower and tapestry and frescos and facade of the magnificent Hotel-de-Ville, the stately halls and the gilded dome of the immense new Courts of Justice, and the consummate beauty of the Bourse, had diligently sought out the naive boy-fountain, and had made the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... Bangana," the king responded in a small, thin tone, as though the virile resonance of his voice had passed away with all his naive and grandiose hopes. "All those tales! To whom shall I listen now at night? Besides, it has been good to see you here every day; for you alone in these forests have really understood my heart—and have stabbed it ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... could look that nice," she said with a candor at once pathetic and naive. "I've been wishing he wouldn't come, but now I kinda hope ...
— Betty Gordon in Washington • Alice B. Emerson
... How naive, how touchingly ingenuous, the girl was in spite of her experience of life and of the uglier side of politicians. No girl in Corinna's circle would ever have appeared so confiding, so innocent, so completely beneath the spell of a sentimental illusion. The girls that Corinna knew ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... forth under the shadow of prominent brows; his amiable mouth surrounded by a copious silver-white beard. The cordial, prepossessing expression of the whole face, the gentle, mild voice, the slow, deliberate utterance, the natural and naive train of ideas which marked his conversation, captivated my whole heart in the first hour of our meeting, just as his great work had formerly, on my first reading it, taken my whole understanding by storm, I fancied a lofty world-sage out of ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany
... outdone by that most intolerable of romancers, Happel. This school was remarkable for the most extravagant license and bombastical nonsense, a sad proof of the moral perversion of the age. The German character, nevertheless, betrayed itself by a sort of naive pedantry, a proof, were any wanting, that the ostentatious absurdities of the poets of Germany were but bad and paltry imitations. The French Alexandrine was also brought into vogue by this school, whose immorality was carried to the highest pitch by Guenther, ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... had caught a Tartar! Outside at the end of the corridor, in full view, but out of earshot, of Narayan Singh, Yussuf Dakmar made a proposal to Jeremy that was almost perfect in its naive obliquity. There was nothing original or even unusual about it, except the circumstances, time and place. Green-goods men and blue-sky stock salesmen, race-course touts and sure-thing politicians get away with the same proposition ...
— Affair in Araby • Talbot Mundy
... reflected itself on the faces of all who heard this naive, but indefinite acceptance of Mrs. Van Clupp's invitation, while Mrs. Van Clupp herself was somewhat mortified, and knew not what to answer. This Norwegian girl was evidently quite ignorant of the usages of polite society, or she would at once have recognized the fact that an "at ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... It is a naive confession, poor Human Nature has made to itself, in choosing, as it has, this story of Cinderella for its leading moral:—Be good, little girl. Be meek under your many trials. Be gentle and kind, in spite of your hard lot, and one day—you shall marry a prince and ...
— The Second Thoughts of An Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... naive ignorance of a convent pensionnaire, she adds an innocence of mind, a purity of conduct, and a credulity which render her an easy prey to the adroit, who play upon her sympathies. She is dangerous only as a source ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
... ancient reputation. Of course, we went to see the houses where these old worthies lived, and the works of art they have left behind them,—things seen and described by everybody. The stone carving about the church portals and on side buttresses is inexpressibly quaint and naive. The subjects are sacred; and with the sacred is mingled the comic, here as at Augsburg, where over one portal of the cathedral, with saints and angels, monkeys climb and gibber. A favorite subject is that of our Lord praying in the Garden, while the apostles, ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... that I have been here all night," said Gluck, with naive astonishment. "But I assure you, Marianne, that I fully intended to go to bed at the end of two hours. Is it my fault if the night has seemed so short? Twelve hours since we parted? ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... 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 the manager of his troupe as a great-hearted ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... propound. "Ponteach" is our first American problem play. Parkman claims that at least part of it was written by Rogers, thus throwing doubt on his entire claim to authorship. There is not only a dignity displayed in the drawing of the main character of the Indian, but there is a very naive attempt at subtle humour in the characters of the Englishmen. There is no distinct excellence in depicting Indian character as such, after the romantic manner of Cooper, although Rogers, with his English ...
— Ponteach - The Savages of America • Robert Rogers
... life-process for its own most adequate fulfilment. What was said about disregard of the child's present experience because of its remoteness from mature experience; and of the sentimental idealization of the child's naive caprices and performances, may be repeated here with slightly altered phrase. There are those who see no alternative between forcing the child from without, or leaving him entirely alone. Seeing no alternative, some choose one mode, some another. Both fall into the ...
— The Child and the Curriculum • John Dewey
... us another glimpse of that awful winter. His naive words are, "Chie-ke-nayelle, a Slavi from Fort Norman, was a winning fellow, handsome, gracious, the possessor of a happy countenance. On his features played always a smile of contentment and innocence. In ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... the first in Judah in the time of Elijah, the second in Israel in the time of Amos. J gives us the immortal stories of Paradise and the Fall, Cain and Abel, Noah and the Flood; E, Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac; and the documents conjointly furnish the more naive and picturesque parts of the grand accounts of the Patriarchs generally—the first great narrative stage of the Pentateuch. God here gives us some of His most exquisite self-revelations through the Israelitish peasant-soul. And Isaiah of Jerusalem, successful statesman as well ...
— Progress and History • Various
... marched along eight abreast. In the van were a number of big, square-headed fellows, who seemed to possess the herculean strength and naive confidence of giants. They would doubtless prove blind, intrepid defenders of the Republic. On their shoulders they carried large axes, whose edges, freshly sharpened, ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... long and heartily, for this new point of view in regard to our doings amused him immensely. Of all the local motives attributed to our garden vacation, none had been quite so naive and ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright
... years since Taine wrote his somber previsions the French have had to pay the same penalty as other ill managed Democracies; Bankruptcies direct or indirect with galloping inflation and enormous devaluations with as a consequence impoverishment of naive depositors and credulous pension fund participants, wars for which France was badly prepared with millions of dead and prisoners and with occupation of France as a result. The culprits, the elected politicians, have either ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... prudent man these questions. Could I, under these circumstances, trust any uncorroborated statement emanating from headquarters, or made by the General's order? Had I any reason to doubt the truth of Mr. Hodges's naive confession of the corrupting influence of Mr. Booth's system? And did it not behove me to pick my way carefully through the mass of statements before me, many of them due to people whose moral sense ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... concept is the word a name for? Is it these forecasts and guesses, and the exact mode of realizing the Socialist ideal which Marx laid down, or is it the great principle of social evolution determined by economic development? Is it his naive and simple description of the process of capitalist concentration, in which no hint appears of the circuitous windings that carried the actual process into unforeseen channels, or the broad fact that the concentration has ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... posting placards and bringing out the crowds; and when the show was on he attended to the fireworks and the beer. Thus in the course of the campaign he handled many hundreds of dollars of the Hebrew brewer's money, administering it with naive and touching fidelity. Toward the end, however, he learned that he was regarded with hatred by the rest of the "boys," because he compelled them either to make a poorer showing than he or to do without their share of the pie. After that Jurgis did his best to please ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... the rats swarmed softly out from a hundred holes, and pattered about, and made themselves at home everywhere; and one of them sat up like a squirrel on the king's head and held a bit of cheese in its hands and nibbled it, and dribbled the crumbs in the king's face with naive and impudent irreverence. It was a tranquil scene, and restful to the weary ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... a spontaneity, a youthful vivacity, in her manner, which saved it from the charge of conceit; she spoke with a naive earnestness pleasantly relieved by the smile in her grey eyes and by something in the pose of her head which ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... betrayed Kerr. But she had no sooner murmured his name to Mrs. Herrick, no sooner had that lady's gray eyes lighted upon him, than they altered their clear confidence. The situation as reflected in Flora looked naive enough, but there was nothing naive about Kerr. The very perfection of his coolness, there in the face of her burning agitation, was appalling. Oh, why couldn't he see, Flora thought wildly, how it was damning him—how it was showing him so practised, so marvelously equal ...
— The Coast of Chance • Esther Chamberlain
... formed a pleasant acquaintance, and whose chatty ways rapidly revived my knowledge of the German, in which language only she could express herself. I shall not soon forget her, for she told me that she married to please the "Eltern"—that she "had never loved," and was so naive in her mode of reasoning as to prove a source of infinite surprise. She had no conception of any destiny for a girl but that of marriage, and never tired of asking about "American girls," whom I described as ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... "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 man very coarsely painted by comparison ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... sentiments, and in which we are almost as happy by ourselves, was not likely to last long with Sarrasine. However, events surprised him when he was still under the spell of that springtime hallucination, as naive as it was voluptuous. In a week he lived a whole lifetime, occupied through the day in molding the clay with which he succeeded in copying La Zambinella, notwithstanding the veils, the skirts, the waists, ...
— Sarrasine • Honore de Balzac
... come upon, bending over beneath her tallow candle, writing to the dear one at the front. To this task as to all the others she concentrates her every effort and attention, anxious that no news be forgotten,—news which is as fresh and naive as the events and the nature that inspires it. "The sow has had twelve little pigs, the donkey has a nail in its hoof, little Michel has a cold, and butter now sells ...
— With Those Who Wait • Frances Wilson Huard
... one of those delightfully lifelike, naive and interesting characters which no one so well as Pansy can portray, and in the study of which every reader will find delight and profit. ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Vol. II, No. 6, March, 1885 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... new books, and new people are always a joy to me," she said, in a glow of naive enthusiasm. And then she blushed slightly lest he should discover a personal application in the last-named, or even in the ...
— Pearl of Pearl Island • John Oxenham
... not see them. Presently—and it was just on the stroke of seven—he saw her coming, hesitantly, and with an air of complete and proper primness. She had on a plain little shabby suit and hat, but round her throat was a string of beads of a blue to match her eyes, an enticing, naive harmony. ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... further analysis. It is the obvious reality of his own delight in 'Petrarchising.' He is perpetually in love with making; he disports himself with a childlike enthusiasm in his art. There are moments when he seems hardly to have passed beyond the stage of naive wonder that words exist and ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry
... 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, ...
— Mary Anderson • J. M. Farrar
... "You are deliciously naive, I must say that for you!" Mrs. Westgate exclaimed. "It must be a great advantage to you here in London. I suppose that if I myself had a little more naivete, I should enjoy it more. I should be content to sit on a chair in the ...
— An International Episode • Henry James
... his description has been already taken in the first book of this work, represents him as beardless, and, as far as one can judge, somewhere above thirty—old enough, to be sure, to have a beard; and seven years afterwards he wore a long one, which greatly displeased his naive biographer, who seems to consider it a sort of crime. The head is very remarkable for its stern beauty, and little, if at all, inferior to that of Napoleon; to which, as I before remarked, it has some resemblance in expression, if not in feature.) young and brilliant, ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... either. I knew Clarissa Putnam; I also knew Susannah Wormwood and her sister Elizabeth, and all that pretty company; and many another pretty minx and laughing, light-minded lass in county Tryon. And a few in Cambridge, too. So I was no niais, no naive country fool, unless to remain aloof were folly. And I often wondered to myself how this might really be, when Boyd rallied ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... its contemporary advocates appear to maintain; and free verse goes back far in our English speech and song. But the new generation believes that it has made a discovery in reverting to sensations rather than thought, to the naive reproduction of retinal and muscular impressions, as if this were the ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... "Ah, que c'est beau!" and "Ah, qu'elle est gentille!" like some Hector who had strayed into the gynaeceum of Priam's palace. He felt a little foolish, perhaps, but very happy, happy in his wife's naive happiness and affection, which did not require any mental effort to understand, nor that panting pursuit on which he had embarked more than once in order to keep up with the witty flirtatiousness of some of the beauties ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... 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
... hand for the letter. It was dated from on board the ship "Cyclops," off Havana, ten years ago, and, by the unsteady character of the handwriting, which rendered some words almost illegible, had evidently been written in a high sea. Mr Armstrong could scarcely help smiling at the banker's naive suggestion as to the use of the document as ...
— Roger Ingleton, Minor • Talbot Baines Reed
... Roger, as Mrs. Mifflin made no comment. "Don't you think it will be rather interesting to get a naive young girl's reactions toward the problems ...
— The Haunted Bookshop • Christopher Morley
... Above the whole rose, in beautiful symmetrical lines, a wooden belfry, tapering from a square tower into a delicately modelled spire. To complete and accentuate the note of the picturesque, the superstructure was held in its place by rude modern beams, propping the tower with a naive disregard of decorative embellishment. We knew it at once as the quaint and famous Belfry ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... to 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
... probably return this very day to the mill, having told her that it was his purpose to do so soon. When he expressed a hope that Sam held no consort with those bad men who had murdered and robbed Mr. Trumbull, she answered him with such naive assurance that any such consorting was out of the question, that he became at once convinced that the murderers were far away, and that she knew that such was the case. As far as he could learn from her, Sam had really been over to Pycroft ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope
... was this, astute as Morano, and simple as his naive mind. The clothing for which Rodriguez searched the plain vainly was ready to hand. No disguise was effective against la Garda, they had too many suspicions, their skill was to discover disguises. But in the moment ...
— Don Rodriguez - Chronicles of Shadow Valley • Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Baron, Dunsany
... peddle necklaces made of shells and oranges, in the streets of Acapulco, on steamer days. They are quite naive about it. Handing you a necklace they will say, "Me give you pres-ENT, Senor," and then retire with a low curtsey. Returning, however, in a few moments, they say quite sweetly, "You give me pres-ENT, Senor, of quarter ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 4 • Charles Farrar Browne
... January, 1708, and as on the one hand I showed a desire to learn the thing from himself, and on the other it was a kind of honorable distinction to have had by daylight an apparition of one of his comrades, he related it before dinner without requiring to be pressed, and in a very naive manner. ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... of the will to live, the human organism, with the cunning and complex working of its machinery, must fall to dust and yield up itself and all its strivings to extinction—this is the naive way in which Nature, who is always so true and sincere in what she says, proclaims the whole struggle of this will as in its very essence barren and unprofitable. Were it of any value in itself, anything ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Studies in Pessimism • Arthur Schopenhauer
... so clear as to be almost naive, that if one does not wish bonds broken, he should make them elastic and ...
— Battle Studies • Colonel Charles-Jean-Jacques-Joseph Ardant du Picq
... work very conscientiously. I once observed, in a hut, a small fragment of the skin of a newly killed kid; the wolf had devoured the beast, and the shepherd was keeping this corpus delicti to prove to his superior, the agent, that he was innocent of the murder. There was something naive in his honesty—as if a shepherd could not eat a kid as well as any wolf, and keep a portion of its skin! The agent, no doubt, would hand it on to his lord, by way of confirmation and verification. Another time I saw the debris of a goat hanging from a tree; it was ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... for gods, you mean!" cried Eustace, on whose common sense the naive absurdity of the last speech struck keenly; and then, as if to escape the scolding which he ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... slain-god religion to develop, and then only from the field-fertility magic of primitive agriculturists. Well, you saw these people's fields from the air. Some of the members of that old platoon were men who knew the latest methods of scientific farming; they didn't need naive fairy tales about the planting and germination ...
— The Return • H. Beam Piper and John J. McGuire
... full advantage of the offer. He "lifted up his eyes, and beheld all the plain of Jordan, that it was well watered everywhere, even as the garden of the Lord." So they parted, and Lot "pitched his tent towards Sodom," whose inhabitants, says our naive story, "were wicked and sinners before the Lord exceedingly." Commentators explain that Lot's approach to such a detestable sink of iniquity indicated the native corruption of his heart, or at least a sad lack of horror at the sins which made the place stink ...
— Bible Romances - First Series • George W. Foote
... moment arrived the poet would rise, exhaling sweetness from every pore of his bulky entity, to interpret what he called a "Thought." Sometimes it was a demonstration of the priceless value of "nothings"; sometimes it was a naive suggestion that no house could afford to be without an "Art"-rocker with Arr Noovo insertions. Such indispensable luxuries were on sale up-stairs. Again, he performed a "necklace of precious sounds"—in other words, some verses upon various topics, nature, ...
— Iole • Robert W. Chambers
... and bloodthirsty "doctrinaire," Henry VIII., be the means of a brilliant and lasting success to St. Saens, who richly deserves it; but in the matter of serious opera the public has reached that blase point which is explained in the words of Ronge, a naive German reformer:— ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 2: "From Rome to the End" • Franz Liszt; letters collected by La Mara and translated
... maid dressed him after the bath she broke out in admiration of his physical presence. "The handsome fellow! No wonder her ladyship was seized by the love wind." In the evening's entertainment he had proved himself no fool in interesting anecdote of the town, and a quaint and naive description of the view the lowly take of those who call themselves the great. Under the skilful questioning of one or other this simple fellow—of keen wit and observation—had shown a phase of life unknown to them, beyond the careless ...
— Bakemono Yashiki (The Haunted House) - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 2 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... were making upon the reader was not always an affectation. There is a real solicitude in the confidences concerning William Ravenshoe upon his sudden promotion from the stable to the drawing-room of Ravenshoe Manor. 'I hope you like this fellow, William,' he says in one place, and then there is a naive enumeration of some of the ex-groom's social deficiencies. This, at best, is a useless interruption of the story, but it helps, with other signs, to show Kingsley's constant ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... of cold, hard fact, it is your modern who is ancient; the ancients were younger. Consider the Greeks and their naive joy in creation! The twentieth-century man brings forth his works of art in sorrow. His music shows it. It is sad, complicated, hysterical and morbid. I shan't allude to Chopin, who was neurotic—another empty medical phrase!—or to Schumann, ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... Hall and its other merits Kampen is the Dutch Gotham. Any foolishly naive speech or action is attributed to Kampen's wise men. In one story the fathers of the town place the municipal sundial under cover to protect it from the rays of the sun. In another they meet together to deliberate on the failure ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... at him with naive incredulity and surprise. It would have been a challenge to be kissed from any other woman, but Leam, with her fire and passion and personal reticence all in one, had no thought of offering such a challenge, still less of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various
... J. Schaack's "Anarchy and Anarchists" (F. J. Schulte & Co., Chicago, 1899); and Pinkerton's "The Molly Maguires and Detectives" (G. W. Dillingham Co., New York, 1898) are the naive stories of those who have performed notable roles in labor troubles. They read like "wild-west" stories written by overgrown boys, and the manner in which these great detectives frankly confess that they or their agents were at the bottom ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... hand in the dark clasping his groping fingers, a breath, human, warm, fragrant, familiar, like a soft, sweet caress on his shrunken cheeks. Alone there in the dim half-light of the decaying Mission, with its crumbling plaster, its naive crudity of ornament and picture, he wrestled fiercely with his desires—words, fragments of sentences, inarticulate, incoherent, wrenched from his ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... descent from Abraham, the son of Terakh, but the children of Israel claimed the privilege of being the only legitimate issue of his marriage with Sarah, giving naive or derogatory accounts of the relations which connected the others with their common ancestor; Ammon and Moab were, for instance, the issue of the incestuous union of Lot and his daughters. Midian and his sons were descended from Keturah, who was merely ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 4 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... darker contrast is very handsome. It is to be regretted that the lunettes over the other doors are again that watery blue from heaven. Though brilliant in themselves and clear in coloring, none of the three decorations in this court are sufficiently naive in design for the space - much too smart and knowing, they might be easel picture motifs used for the occasion. The American public is so quick and clever that it is difficult to find in the painters the simplicity of mind necessary for such work. Again we find good composition ...
— The Sculpture and Mural Decorations of the Exposition • Stella G. S. Perry
... motives are many—the result joy. Yes, joy, even in the providential escapes and the "bad five minutes," beloved by our naive scribes of the ice-axe, in the perils and death which they court for the sake of adventure and exploration. Sir Martin Conway speaks of the systematic climber as the man for whom climbing takes the place of fishing and shooting. How depressingly banal! Yet Sir ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... Testament about it both in its blind faith and in its insistence on a few simple essentials. It embodies everything essential to an understanding of the old mentality of China which has not yet been completely destroyed. From a literary standpoint it has also much that is valuable because it is so naive; and although it is concerned with such a distant region of the world as China its treatment of modern political ideas is so bizarre and yet so acute that it will ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... did leave Augsburg about 1514; or, at any rate, Hans did, since there is a naive little Virgin and Child in the Basel Museum, dated 1514, which must have been painted in the neighbourhood of Constance in this year,—probably for the village church where it was discovered. As everything points to the conclusion that Holbein ...
— Holbein • Beatrice Fortescue
... made Aaron naive and communicative, unlike himself. And he knew he was being unlike himself, he knew that he was not in proper control of himself, so ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... discriminations unfamiliar to the manner and mode of thought of the ancient balladist. The latter, it may be said, does not stop to think or to analyse or moralise; he feels, and is content to tell us in the most direct and naive language, all that he has felt. He has not learned the new trick of introspection; he is guided by intuition and the primaeval instincts. He carries from his own lips to ours a draught of pure, strong, human passion, ...
— The Balladists - Famous Scots Series • John Geddie
... MILDRED—How naive age makes one! But I said he did, Aunt. I even said he had given me a letter to them—which I had lost. And they were afraid to take the chance that I might be lying. [Excitedly.] So it's ho! for the stokehole. The second engineer is to escort me. [Looking at her ...
— The Hairy Ape • Eugene O'Neill
... the origin and growth of human speech." Dr. Muir[2] 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 literature, and many of the hymns ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... is, moreover, thanks to it that we know where and what we are. Without it we should live as the blind, in eternal ignorance of the very conditions of our terrestrial existence. Without it we should still be penetrated with the naive error that reduced the entire Universe to our minute globule, making our Humanity the goal of the Creation, and should have no exact notion of the ...
— Astronomy for Amateurs • Camille Flammarion
... I'm a failure," was a phrase that Mr. Stokes repeated with a mild, gentle humour, and without any trace of bitterness. He spoke of himself with the naive candour of a docile school-boy, who has taken up several subjects for examination and been ploughed in them all. For Mr. Stokes had been to Oxford, and left it without taking a degree. Then he had gone into the army, and had ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... one finds in the words of the naive Ingersoll the squeaking timber of the soapbox, yet even a soapbox does lift a man a few inches above the level of ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... Aristotle and Horace and Virgil; a body of critical doctrine, to teach them how to express the France and England or Italy of their day, and thus give permanence to their fleeting vision of the world. Naive as may have been the Renaissance expression of this need of formal training, blind as it frequently was to the beauty which we recognize in the undisciplined vernacular literatures of mediaeval Europe, those groping scholars were essentially right. No one can paint or compose by nature. ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... has endured much ridicule, not the least being for a certain naive vanity perceptible directly he passed from the south to the north of France; but he had some knowledge; he was acquainted with Hebrew, then a sufficiently rare accomplishment, and he was an assiduous student of classic literature. His tragedy, ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... are in a class by themselves in the same sense that the works from the Third Symphony on, up to, and including the Eighth, are in a class apart from the others. His compositions prior to the Third Symphony are in the style of Mozart and Haydn. They are the naive utterances of the young musician who does not yet realize that he has a mission to perform; whose ambition was to be ranked with his great predecessors. Of the works of the second period, it can be said that their most prominent characteristic is gayety ...
— Beethoven • George Alexander Fischer
... fabled Fountain of Youth, sought by Ponce de Leon. In their way, these are the loveliest fountains on the Exposition grounds, though they differ so from all the rest that comparison is not easy. The naive conception of the Fountain of Youth and the realistic strength of that of El Dorado lead visitors back to them again and again. They are hidden fountains, as their prototypes were hidden. Each terminates one of the two open colonnades with a central niche composition ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... whenever the critical standard of the day is applied. Yet one may actually know that in the Kantian sense the limits of possible knowledge are here exceeded: one may know in what way Herbart (who never arrived at an "arrangement of ideas") would discover his "naive realism." One may even know the degree to which the modern pragmatism of James and Schiller and others would find the bounds of "true presentments" transgressed—those presentments which we are able to make our own, to vindicate, ...
— An Outline of Occult Science • Rudolf Steiner
... through the indiscriminate volubility of his host who, when his feelings had been injured, was amusingly naive ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... been so very sick, Lone would have laughed at her naive method of identifying the spot. But he was too sorry for her to be amused at the vagaries of her sick brain. He did not believe anything she had said, except that she had been coming to the ranch and had left her bag under a bush beside the road. It should not ...
— Sawtooth Ranch • B. M. Bower
... limitations and in other areas will have far greater chance for success if both sides enter them motivated by mutual self-interest rather than naive sentimentality. ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Richard Nixon • Richard Nixon |
