"Naivete" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... who call themselves friends. These at first approved of her, always misunderstood her, and at length despised her. They misunderstood her, because a person truly inarticulate was incomprehensible to them. Her naivete they mistook for insolence, her dreaminess for disrespect. They confused her memory with her understanding. They gave her books to read, brought her to lectures, sat her at the theatre, took her to hear sermons, prayed with her and drank with her the holy wine. And some would ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... to me? The woman on whose bosom my child rested is the most abandoned of creatures. I loved her just as if she belonged to another world—a world of innocence. And now I am satisfied that she was the go-between, and that her naivete was a mere mask concealing an unparalleled hypocrite. I imagined that truth and purity still dwelt in the simple rustic world—but everything is perverted and corrupt. The world of simplicity is base; aye, far worse ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... Response to impressions, correlation of those impressions into a connected body of phenomena, and final interpretation of them as a whole are, have been, and always will be the marks of the enduring in all literature, whether poetry or prose." [Footnote: Lewis Worthington Smith, "The New Naivete," Atlantic, April, 1916.] To quote another critic: "A rock, a star, a lyre, a cataract, do not, except incidentally and indirectly, owe their command of our sympathies to the bare power of evoking reactions in a series of ocular ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... of Chinese scholars know next to nothing about matters directly in the line of their studies, and in regard to which we should consider ignorance positively disgraceful. A venerable teacher remarked to the writer with a charming naivete that he had never understood the allusions in the Trimetrical Classic (which stands at the very threshold of Chinese study) until at the age of sixty he had an opportunity to read a Universal History prepared by a missionary, in which for the first time Chinese ...
— Sex and Society • William I. Thomas
... "Hilda" was chiefly responsible for this; her frankness was of the breath-taking kind. Far from attempting to hide or ignore the struggle by which she and her husband had attained their present position, she referred with the utmost naivete to incidents in her career, while the whole table ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... assure you, Mr. Homos, you were never more mistaken in your life. I perfectly delight in your naivete. I know that the Altrurians don't think as we do about some things, and I don't expect it. What is it ...
— Through the Eye of the Needle - A Romance • W. D. Howells
... Madame Tussaud; though the Khan, who was not sufficiently acquainted with the features of our public characters to judge of the likenesses, expresses his commendation only in general terms. But the Parsees, with the naivete of children, break out into absolute raptures at recognising the features of Lord Melbourne, "a good-humoured looking, kind English gentleman, with a countenance, perhaps, representing frankness and candour more than dignity"—William ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... reader reflect on the astounding ignorance of the world, and especially of the world of industry, which is betrayed with so much naivete by this socialist of the Christian pulpit. He knows so little of the commonest facts of history that he looks upon steel as a ready-made product of nature, and all the mills of the steel trust as merely ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock
... to talking of many things, as they rode toward Poetical, but inevitably they spoke chiefly of the great State of Missouri. On the subject of Missouri the boy talked, as old Bernique had talked, with expansive naivete. In his roamings he had ridden the State up and down, and had found much to love in it. "You'll like her, too, all righty," he told Bruce confidently, "whend you git broke to her." On one of youth's candid impulses to speak up for the life on the inside, the cherished desire, the gallant ideal, ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... the sunny side of it; it matters not one straw whether it is with man or Heaven they are bargaining. In this respect we are the same now, at bottom, as we were four hundred years ago: only in those days we did it a grain or two more naively, and that naivete shone out more palpably, because, in that rude age, body prevailing over mind, all sentiments took material forms. Man repented with scourges, prayed by bead, bribed the saints with wax tapers, put fish into the ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... curious "compositions" in the little book, and we must make room for one. It is full of naivete, brutal truth, and unembarrassed directness, and is the funniest (genuine) boy's composition I think I ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... wall. In the reception room of this building are seven delightful small panels by Charles J. Taylor, showing the early life of Pennsylvania villages. They are painted in the quaint style of old colonial decorations and have charm, humor, naivete and beauty ...
— The Sculpture and Mural Decorations of the Exposition • Stella G. S. Perry
... it made you think of me, whom you never saw, to see another woman's profile," she retorted, with the faintest touch of asperity in her childlike voice. "But," she added, more gently and with a relapse into her adorable naivete, ...
— In a Hollow of the Hills • Bret Harte
... lowest form of organism, and not a wonderfully complex being like man who is the product of an incalculable evolution. But the Archbishop did not perhaps intend this; it may be that in his haste to silence the "infidel" he stumbled over his own meaning. Lastly, there is a remarkable naivete in the aside of the final question—"for they are minds." He should have added "you know," and then the episode would have been delightfully complete. The assumption of the whole point at issue in an innocent parenthesis is perhaps to be expected from a pulpiteer, but it ...
— Arrows of Freethought • George W. Foote
... to see her mother in robes of sin irritated Kirkwood. For Phil to call her an amusing person was sheer childish naivete. Phil was the victim of an infatuation which he could understand now that his wife began to live again in his imagination. He had read in books that the maternal instinct will assert itself after long separations, where mother and child are without other clue than that of the ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... a more sophisticated class, Jean had at first taken her naivete for the height of subtlety. He was always expecting her to betray herself. But after that evening with her he changed. Just such simplicity had been his wife's. Sometimes Sara Lee reminded him of her—the upraising of her eyes or an ...
— The Amazing Interlude • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... a sort of innocence that renewed itself, as by a miracle, every evening. His youth remained virgin because of its incorruptible hope. He almost disarmed criticism by the gaiety, the naivete of the pursuit. She was always in front of him, that young Joy; but if he did not overtake her by midnight, he was all the more sure that he would find her in the morning, with the dew on her feet and the dawn on her forehead. He was convinced that it was ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... you told him that," Morton replied primly, albeit he was hard put to it to prevent himself from chuckling aloud over the naivete of ...
— Making People Happy • Thompson Buchanan
... said Rigou, without replying to this naivete, "go over to Gaubertin's to-morrow morning. Tell him that my fellow-mayor and I" (striking Soudry on the thigh) "will break bread with him at breakfast somewhere about midday. Tell him everything, so that we ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... transformation scene—the red robbers becoming white ones—to all of which he was witness. After that the card-playing by the camp fire, during which the chief came to his tent, and did what he could to draw him. In this part of his narration, the mulatto with modest naivete, hints of his own adroitness; how he threw his inquisitor off the scent, and became at length disembarrassed of him. He is even more reticent about an incident, soon after succeeding, but referred to it at an early part of ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... individual and the youth of a State, we must also remember that America was in many respects born full-grown, like Athena from the brain of Zeus, and cooerdinates in the most extraordinary way the shrewdness of the sage with the naivete of the child. Those who criticise the United States because, with the experience of all the ages behind her, she is in some points vastly defective as compared with the nations of Europe are as much ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... they are, and to the capacity of infants. They are in too many cases made vulgar, puerile, barbarous. They are neither fish nor flesh, and with all the point that's left out and all the naivete that's put in, they cease to place before us any coherent appeal or any ...
— Picture and Text - 1893 • Henry James
... sire, and indeed Esther was a lovely girl, who had but one fault—she did not love me. She had the naivete to tell me so, and indeed to confess that she ardently loved another, a poor clerk of her father's, who, when their love was discovered, a short time before, had been turned out of the house. They loved each other none the less glowingly for ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... well-nigh distracted. Nor was Ralph any less disturbed. In his undemonstrative way he watched Nick, and suffered the acutest pangs of jealousy at what he believed was Aim-sa's marked preference. But the woman continued to stir the fire she had kindled with a childlike naivete which was less of the wild than ...
— In the Brooding Wild • Ridgwell Cullum
... impossibility," responded the man, earnestly, though he was unable to keep from slightly smiling at the unconscious naivete of the question. "I would she could see it in a more befitting frame, to set it off. If thou 't but let me, I'd put it in the other setting. Then 't would ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... beautiful ode in his nineteenth idyl; but is very inferior, I think, to his original, in delicacy of point and naivete of expression. Spenser, in one of his smaller compositions, has sported more diffusely on the same subject. The poem to ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... to gather into his arms and devour with kisses this sweet specimen of womanly tenderness, frank inconsistency, naivete, and archness. ...
— A Perilous Secret • Charles Reade
... Christina with any lie he pleases, if she asks questions. In short, he regards the General of the Jesuits as a person ready to tell any convenient falsehood, and lets this opinion appear with perfect naivete! He will ask the Pope to hurry de la Cloche into priest's orders, or, if that is not easy, he will have the thing done in Paris, by means of Louis XIV., or his own sister, Henrietta (Madame). Or the Queen and Queen Mother can have it done in London, as they 'have ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang
... ten or twelve, told them. The father had told them to the son as he had gathered them up, intending to put them into verse after the manner of La Fontaine. The lad loved the stories and re-wrote them from memory for his father with such charming naivete that the father chose the son's version in preference to his own, and published it. But the tales of Perrault, nevertheless, show the embellishment of the mature master-Academician's touch in subduing the too marvelous ...
— A Study of Fairy Tales • Laura F. Kready
... token, did not escape the attention of the interviewer. Her appealing charm of face and figure was accentuated by her daintiness and a fleeting suggestion of naivete in poise and expression when she was amused. His first glance revealed to Haines that her eyes were gray, the gray that people say indicates the possessor to have those priceless qualities—the qualities that make the sweetest women true, ...
— A Gentleman from Mississippi • Thomas A. Wise
... of a woman is intriguing in its very naivete, and now as she stood before me, slim and graceful in her well-cut walking costume, a quick flicker of red flaming in her cheeks and her eyes alight with that sweet tantalizing look in which expectation and a hot pride were mingled, I wondered ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... which had bound it so long. So, too, it seems to us, despite all the rhythmical innovations of our time. The personality that could beat out exuberantly music as rhythmically various and terse and free must indeed have possessed a primitive naivete and vitality and spontaneity of impulse. What manifestation of unbridled will in that freedom of expression! Berlioz must have been blood-brother to the savage, the elemental creature who out of the dark and hidden needs of life itself invents on his rude musical instrument ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... you are robbers, who live by disturbing and pillaging all the countries around your own." They replied, "that they had no other means to live." The Pasha answered, "cultivate your land, and live honestly." They replied with great naivete, "we have been bred up to live and prosper by what you call robbery; we will not work, and cannot change our manner of living," The Pasha replied, "I will make you ...
— A Narrative of the Expedition to Dongola and Sennaar • George Bethune English
... illustration of the blissful ignorance and charming naivete which marked their study and discussion at this time, that nerves were for centuries regarded as hollow tubes, carrying a supply of "animal spirits" from the central reservoir of the brain to the different limbs. So seriously was this believed, that, in ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... Friday," he wrote to Mrs. Locke (May 6), "than ever I have been in my life. . . ." He had rejoiced in his task of peace-making, in which the Privy Council had practically failed, and had shown great naivete in trusting Bothwell. The best he could say to Mrs. Locke was that he felt no certainty about the fact that Bothwell had tempted ...
— John Knox and the Reformation • Andrew Lang
... his interest, which he always saw in the garb of virtue, told him that now especially it would be essential not to break off his relations with England, and that this gave him a splendid chance of strengthening them. Afterwards he explained this with a naivete which often causes his writings, especially where he tries to suppress or cloak ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... day be ascertained without discovering his engine-turned repeater, and hearing its fascinating music: then the fanciful chain, the precious stones in golden robes, and last of all, the family pride described in true heraldic taste and naivete. Of Peter Pindar's ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... a precious detail, full of naivete, which will be of value in the eyes of an archaeologist. The tower in which the spiral staircase goes up is placed at the corner of a great gable wall in which there is no window. The staircase comes down to a little arched door, ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... and composer of four books about it, was a true poet. His incessant wandering, for he was always moving from place to place, was due in part to love of Nature and of novelty, but still more to a desire to spread his own fame. He lacked the naivete and openness to impressions of the true child of Nature; his songs in praise of spring, etc., scatter a colourless general praise, which is evidently the result of arduous thought rather than of direct impressions from without; and his many references to ancient deities shew that he borrowed ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... be noticed, that the circumstances of the time at which Giotto appeared were peculiarly favourable to the development of genius; owing partly to the simplicity of the methods of practice, and partly to the naivete with which art was commonly regarded. Giotto, like all the great painters of the period, was merely a travelling decorator of walls, at so much a day; having at Florence a bottega, or workshop, for the production and sale of small tempera pictures. ...
— Giotto and his works in Padua • John Ruskin
... intermediate class have neither the simplicity of the peasantry, nor the grandeur of the boyars; and no public opinion yet exists to keep in check this third class, whose existence is so recent, and which has lost the naivete of popular faith without having acquired the point of honor. A display of jealous feeling was also remarked between the military commanders. It is in the very nature of a despotic government to create, ...
— Ten Years' Exile • Anne Louise Germaine Necker, Baronne (Baroness) de Stael-Holstein
... turning explanatorily to Boompointer, "married my adopted mother in California—at Robles, a dear old place where I spent my earliest years. So, you see, we are sort of relations by marriage," she added, with delightful naivete. ...
— Clarence • Bret Harte
... 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 park, and see the people pass, and be told that this is the Duchess of Suffolk, and that is the Lord Chamberlain, and that I must be thankful ...
— An International Episode • Henry James
... pictures before. Here they are presented differently than in America. Some of the plays I've seen have the naivete and simplicity of a confession. Others interpret abnormal, psychopathic characters whose feelings and thoughts are expressed by the actors with a fine and vivid realism. There is the exultation of life, and the ...
— Trapped in 'Black Russia' - Letters June-November 1915 • Ruth Pierce
... which is genuinely characteristic of some section of the folk anywhere is to do what may be important and is sure to be interesting. But Mr. Tarkington no more displays the naivete of a true folk-novelist than he displays the serene vision that can lift a novelist above the accidents of his particular time and place. This Indianian constantly appears, by his allusions, to be a citizen of the world. He knows Europe; he knows New York. Again ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... very flower of small-town proprieties, and the flat commonplaces, nearly all hypocritical in their origin, became very funny, very engaging, when they were uttered in Lena's soft voice, with her caressing intonation and arch naivete. Nothing could be more diverting than to hear Lena, who was almost as candid as Nature, call a leg a "limb" or ...
— My Antonia • Willa Sibert Cather
... her naivete, and Wolsey's lips wore a smile, as he plucked the king by the sleeve and took him over to the window, out of ...
— When Knighthood Was in Flower • Charles Major
... cozened Vachel by begging him to recite his poems at the beginning of each course, in the meantime getting on with their eating; but despite the naivete of his eagerness to sing, there is a plain and manly simplicity about Vachel that delights us all. We like to know that here is a poet who has wrestled with poverty, who never wrote a Class Day poem at Harvard, who has worn frayed collars or none at all, and who lets ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... the youngest member of the group about Uhland, lived in the utmost serenity amid the troubles of revolutionary agitation, devoted to his art, turning the common experiences of every day into forms of beauty, or reviving with charming naivete the romantic figures ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... Montaigne, with honest naivete, compares his writings to a thread that binds the flowers of others; and that, by incessantly pouring the waters of a few good old authors into his sieve, some drops fall upon his paper. The good old ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... Sweet naivete of feature, Simple, wild, enchanting elf, Not to thee, but thanks to nature, Thou art acting ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... it comes out with delicious naivete in the working classes. Now, educated people like to read of scenes that are familiar to them, though I grant you that the picture must be idealised if you're to appeal to more than one in a thousand. The working classes detest anything that tries to represent their daily ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... years ago, wasn't it?—a long time, as political incidents or accidents go. But Washington hasn't forgotten. When I was down there last winter the five-o'clock-tea people were still recalling Mrs. Blount's gowns and the wild-Western naivete of 'The Honorable ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... greeted her with cordiality, responded to her advances, talked to her with the tolerant and humorous shrewdness that lurked in their dim eyes, but it was always one at a time. If, with disarming naivete, she appealed to Stephen, Reuben turned into a graven image; and if she chaffed with Reuben, Stephen became as one who having eyes seeth not, and having ears heareth not. But she persisted with a zeal which, if not according to ...
— A Christmas Accident and Other Stories • Annie Eliot Trumbull
... companion closely,—evidently Mlle. Fouchette was in earnest. Such naivete in a ragpicker ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... the girl he loved would find herself in for. She could see this now—she could see it from his present bewilderment and mystification, and she liked him and pitied him, with the kindest smile, for the original naivete as well as for the actual meekness. No wonder he hadn't known what she was in for, since he now didn't even know what he was in for himself. Were there not moments when he thought his companions almost ...
— The Chaperon • Henry James
... frame alive with a luxurious languid sense of all its inmost fibres. Our cheerfulness ran over, and the mild, pensive clerk was so magnetized by it that he came and sat down with us. He presently confided to me, with infinite naivete and ingenuousness, that, judging from my personal appearance, he should not have thought me the writer that he in his generosity reckoned me to be. His conception, so far as I could reach it, involved a huge, uplifted ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... prepared for a powerful and sympathetic personality, that curious mixture of naivete and hard sophistication, and she had ascribed her interest in him to curiosity in exploring what to her was a completely foreign type. In her own naivete it had never occurred to her that men outside her class were gentlemen as she understood the term, and she still supposed ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... development are generally spontaneous, profuse, and unrestrained. There is an absence of shyness, of any sense of shame, of the feeling of self-consciousness. The children have as yet no notion of the meaning of sex. Their naivete in this regard has not been destroyed by the social suggestion that such actions are wrong and vulgar. They are natively happy and free in their ignorance. The individual differences among children are as great in their experiencing and ...
— A Preliminary Study of the Emotion of Love between the Sexes • Sanford Bell
... one of great interest, firstly to all those who visit the theatre, secondly to readers of Shakspeare, and thirdly to all who relish originality and naivete of character, such as Mr. Hackett displays abundantly, from the rising of the curtain even to the going down of the same, in his book. There are no men who live so much within their profession as actors, or are so earnest in their faith in it; and this devotion is reflected ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... question whose naivete reminds me of the little Louise Schwerin of earlier days. Well, let us speak on that subject which interests most deeply all who know you; let us speak of your happiness. You sigh. Have you already paid your tribute? Do you realize the ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... we heard much of naivete—it was the fashion among the schools and the lesser individuals to use this term in describing the work of anyone who sought to distinguish himself by eccentricity of means. It was often the term ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... from a letter to the London and China Express, of 5th July 1875, part of which we have ventured to reproduce in italics, surpasses, both in fiction and naivete, anything it has ever been our lot to read on either side of this much-vexed question:—"The fact is, that this tremendous evil is utterly beyond the control of politicians, or even philanthropists. Nothing but the divine power of Christian life can cope ...
— Chinese Sketches • Herbert A. Giles
... but as he glanced in seeming naivete at his companion, something he saw in the latter's eye warned him, and suddenly Fred thought it would be ...
— Ramsey Milholland • Booth Tarkington
... refreshing. His family accepts the situation with perfect naivete. I am welcomed as Doro's chum with all the good-will in ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... another said it turned her lips quite black, and upset her so that she was afraid that she would never get over it.... One girl vomited for two hours and thought she was dying. All these observations are recorded with an innocent naivete as though the idea that anyone could possibly take exception to them were far from the writers' minds. But whatever credit may be given to Drs. Ringer and Murrill for scientific enthusiasm, it is impossible to acquit them of grave ...
— An Ethical Problem - Or, Sidelights upon Scientific Experimentation on Man and Animals • Albert Leffingwell
... the grace of one born to the instrument. As she took the sticks in her hands and struck a chord upon the outstretched strings, her face assumed a new expression; so far, we must confess, there had been much "naivete" in it, now she felt at home; this was ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... cared just then to ask what I thought, or what anybody thought; but he DID care, and he was too natural to conceal, too impulsive to repress his wish. Well! if I blamed his over-eagerness, I liked his naivete. I would have praised him; I had plenty of praise in my heart; but alas I no words on my lips. Who HAS words at the right moment? I stammered some lame expressions; but was truly glad when other people, coming up with profuse ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... details thrown against it. Scenes are divided by slender Gothic columns, and other architectural features are tessellated floors and a sketchy sort of brick-work that appears wherever a limit-line is needed. It is the charming naivete of its drawing that delights. Border there is none, but its lack is never felt, for the pictures are of such interest that the eye needs no barrier to keep it from wandering. Whatever border is found is a varying structure of architecture and of lettering and of the happy ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... friend, delighted to see him come out of his queer scrape so triumphantly. The Colonel bowed and smiled with very pleasant good-nature at our plaudits. It was like Dr. Primrose preaching his sermon in the prison. There was something touching in the naivete and kindness of the placid ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... their minds, and neither felt it easy to speak upon any other. The youth and apparent frankness of Waverley stood in strong contrast to the shades of suspicion which darkened around him, and he had a sort of NAIVETE and openness of demeanour, that seemed to belong to one unhackneyed in the ways of intrigue, and which ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... they were admitted to the Quartier at all they were sent on the ordinary group excursions like the home correspondents themselves. Indeed, the wonder was—in view of the comparative ease with which neutral correspondents drifted about Europe: the naivete, to put it mildly, with which the wildest romances had been printed in American newspapers, that we were permitted to see as much ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... within the church, and represents in its two divisions the burial of the Saint by Pope Urban, and her appearance in St. Peter's Church to the sleeping Paschal, whose figure is rendered with amusing naivete and literalness. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... religion. A new verb, "sternbaldisieren," was coined to parody a new movement in German art toward the medieval, religious spirit. It is this book which Heine had in mind when he ridiculed Tieck's "silly plunge into medieval naivete." Overbeck and Cornelius in Rome, with their pre-Raphaelite, old-German and catholicizing tendencies, became the leaders of a productive school. Goethe scourged it for its "mystic-religious" aspirations, and demanded a more vigorous, cheerful and progressive ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... gentleness of heart with the unreal "gush" of the Brothers Cheeryble, or the fatuous benevolence of Mr. Pickwick. We do not believe in the former, and we cannot but despise the latter. But Captain Shandy is reality itself, within and without; and though we smile at his naivete, and may even laugh outright at his boyish enthusiasm for his military hobby, we never cease to respect him for a moment. There is no shirking or softening of the comic aspects of his character; there ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... evenings were much lightened by the gay chat of one of the party, who, with the excellent practical sense of mature experience, and the kindest heart, united a naivete and innocence such as I never saw in any other who had walked so long life's tangled path. Like a child, she was everywhere at home, and like a child, received and bestowed entertainment from all places, all persons. I thanked her for making me laugh, as did the sick and poor, ...
— Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 • S.M. Fuller
... talking when we were all gathered together. Yank and I did the listening and Talbot the interpellating. Johnny swarmed all over himself like a pickpocket, and showed us everything he had in the way of history, manners, training, family, pride, naivete, expectations and hopes. He prided himself on being a calm, phlegmatic individual, unemotional and not easily excited, and he constantly took this attitude. It ...
— Gold • Stewart White
... naivete of Leblanc seems to have been mitigated by duplicity. He went on with the general pacification of the world as if the Balkan submission was made in absolute good faith, and he announced the disbandment of the force of aeroplanes ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... vast and unruly body. Since the opening of this session, all that he has said and done has proved his utter unfitness for the place he occupies. First, his imprudent answers to O'Connell, and the turn he gave to that affair. Then, in bringing forward his financial statement, the naivete with which he admitted that he had submitted to the clamour against the House Tax, and withdrawn it contrary to his own judgment; then the facility with which he gave in to O'Connell's motion about the Irish ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... at them, never had the idea of looking at them, unless occasionally at the 'Signal' for an account of a wedding or a bazaar. In which case she would glance at the world for an instant with mild naivete, shocked by the horrible things that were apparently going on there, and in five minutes would forget all about it again. Here the whole of England, Ireland, and Scotland was at its front doors that night waiting for newsboys, ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... had been translation rather than imitation and he would have abhorred the feeble new product, but this did not concern his successors— they were interested only in his technical principles. Moreover, in their naivete, they imagined they were improving on Jackson because their prints were counterfeit paintings ...
— John Baptist Jackson - 18th-Century Master of the Color Woodcut • Jacob Kainen
... naivete in the way she uttered the last three words which made me suspect the actress. Indeed I was quite conscious as I met her thrilling and expressive glance, that I should never feel again the same confidence in her sincerity. My judgment ...
— The Millionaire Baby • Anna Katharine Green
... study Roman Law under Niebuhr and Schlegel at Bonn. 'Our dear child,' writes Mrs. Austin to Mrs. Grote, 'is a great joy to us. She grows wonderfully, and is the happiest thing in the world. Her German is very pretty; she interprets for her father with great joy and naivete. God forbid that I should bring up a daughter here! But at her present age I am most glad to have her here, and to send her to a school where she learns—well, writing, arithmetic, geography, and, as a matter of course, German.' Lucie returned to England transformed into a ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... was in Philadelphia that he told me the beginnings of the love affair which eventually ended in his marrying and settling down into the homiest of home men I have ever seen and which for sheer naivete and charm is one of the best love stories I know anything about. It appears that he was walking in some out-of-the-way factory realm of North Philadelphia one Saturday afternoon about the first or second year of his stay there, when, ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... problem. I am loyal, as I have said; but I am a daughter and sister first, patriot later. In a fit of meaningless bravado, tempered perhaps by some compulsion from over the border, my old father and brothers had joined a rebel commando. You, with a naivete which I had hardly expected in you, and for which I liked you, told me the objective of your column—information which meant everything to me, and perhaps to you, for you looked as if you would have liked to have bitten your tongue out after you had parted with it. I, with the honest intention ...
— On the Heels of De Wet • The Intelligence Officer
... Thurston Gore, with all her astuteness and real estate, was of a naivete in regard to spiritual matters that Hodder had grown to recognize as impermeable. In an evening gown, with a string of large pearls testing on her firm and glowing neck, she appeared a concrete refutation of the notion of rebirth, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... of silence in which Darrell studied the face before him; the same, yet not the same, as on that summer night. The childlike naivete, the charming piquancy, had given place to a sweet seriousness, but it was more tender, more womanly, ...
— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour
... remarkable than its precision in the use of language, the work, for the most part, not only reading like the production of a native, but of one familiar with the most intimate resources of idiomatic English. A very few exceptions to this remark in some portions of the dialogue, whose naivete atones for their inaccuracy, only present the general purity of the composition in a more striking light. We sincerely trust that the writer, who has been so happily distinguished in the field of literary research, will be induced, by the success of this volume, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... "first time" had been but a week before. Preciosa McNulty had communicated her novel impressions to his daughters, who, in turn, had commented on Preciosa's naivete in their father's hearing; then Roscoe Orlando, who had never hurt himself by overwork and who was developing a growing willingness to leave his maps and his plats and his subdivisions a little earlier ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... paper to the uses of typography. In the fifteenth century, that naive and vigorous age, names were given to the various formats as well as to the different sizes of type, names that bear the impress of the naivete of the times; and the various sheets came to be known by the different watermarks on their centres; the grapes, the figure of our Saviour, the crown, the shield, or the flower-pot, just as at a later day, the eagle of ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... humour of civilization. It is significant that Mme. Blanc, a polished and refined intelligence, found the nil admirari attitude of "Mark Twain" no more enlightening nor suggestive than the stoicism of the North American Indian. This mirthful and mock-innocent naivete, so alien to the delicate and subtle spirit of the French, found instant response in the heart of the Anglo-Saxon and Germanic peoples. The English and the Germans, no less than the Americans, rejoiced in this gay ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... 1829 enabled him to publish by subscription his first book, 'A Journey on Foot from Holm Canal to the East Point of Amager' a fantastic arabesque, partly plagiarized and partly parodied from the German romanticists, but with a naivete ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... all by the delicate naivete and sparkling espieglerie, interchanged with true love pathos, of her duet with Belletti, from Rossini's I Turchi in Italia, the music being in the same voice with that of his 'Barber of Seville.' The distinct rapidity, without hurry, of many passages, was remarkable in both performers. ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton
... make Alphonse jealous," she interjoined, with excessive naivete. That made them all laugh. The right hand jealous of the left! The heart jealous of the soul! But for that matter, the Creole husband is never jealous; with him the gangrene passion is one which has become ...
— The Awakening and Selected Short Stories • Kate Chopin
... him, he avoided a greater tragedy. In a manner it was not Mallare who became insane. It was his point of view that went mad. Although there are passages in the Journal that escape coherence, the greater part of the entries are simple almost to naivete. They reveal an intellect able to adjust itself without complex uprootings to the phenomena engaging its energies. The first concrete evidence of the loathing for life that was to result in its own annihilation appears in a passage ...
— Fantazius Mallare - A Mysterious Oath • Ben Hecht
... necessity of a confidante or a rival—both equally revealing to her thoughtless enjoyment. They took their rides together openly and without concealment, relating their adventures afterwards to Aunt Viney with a naivete and frankness that dreamed of no suppression. The city-bred Cecily, accustomed to horse exercise solely as an ornamental and artificial recreation, felt for the first time the fearful joy of a dash across a league-long plain, with no onlookers but the scattered wild horses she might ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... ballad of "Bess, the Gawkie,"—a production which has been pronounced by Allan Cunningham "a song of original merit, lively without extravagance, and gay without grossness,—the simplicity elegant, and the naivete scarcely rivalled."[61] ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... naivete that would be unusual in an unpaid attache of Legation, this sudden leap from his own to his opponent's ground, after two years and a half of dogged resistance, might have roused Palmerston to inhuman scorn, but instead of derision, ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... composers up till then, if they ventured to use bits of popular melody at all, gave them the scholastic turn, either because they liked it, or because the habit was strong. The fact that Haydn gave it in its naive form, invented themes which in their deliberate naivete suggest folk-song and dance, hints at what his later music proves conclusively, that he found his inspiration as well as his ...
— Haydn • John F. Runciman
... spite of his cross mamma, and learned to tipple wine like papa, to swear like Mr. Hattersley, and to have his own way like a man, and sent mamma to the devil when she tried to prevent him. To see such things done with the roguish naivete of that pretty little child, and hear such things spoken by that small infantile voice, was as peculiarly piquant and irresistibly droll to them as it was inexpressibly distressing and painful to me; and when ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... told Peabody that the signatures had been written by herself. That the sheet had been written in the officer's presence she declared to be a pure invention on his part to secure her conviction. She told her extremely illogical story with a certain winsome naivete which carried an air of semi-probability with it. From her deportment on the stand one would have taken her for a boarding school miss who in some inconsequent fashion had got mixed up in a frolic for which no really logical explanation ...
— True Stories of Crime From the District Attorney's Office • Arthur Train
... from this language, so strange from the pen of M. Garofalo, it is impossible not to perceive the strange contrast between his critical talent and the numerous statements in this book which are, to say the least, characterized by a naivete one would never ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... echoes in the invectives of the reformer,—"I doubt," said a good fifteenth-century bishop to the ladies of England in their horned caps,—"I doubt the Devil sit not between those horns." We find it illustrated with admirable naivete in the tapestries which hang in the entrance corridor of the ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... name nor where he lived; he was I should suppose an absolutely abominable plunderer and pirate and ruffian. He would appear suddenly in my room, stand by the door and talk—but talk with the ignorance, naivete, brutal simplicity of an utterly abandoned baby. Nothing mystical or beautiful about the Rat. He did not disguise from me in the least that there was no crime that he had not committed—murder, rape, arson, immorality of the most hideous, sacrilege, the basest betrayal of his best friends—he ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... evening, when the reverend gentleman occupied a seat near mine, I asked, with as much naivete as I could command, if he had "worked" the plumbers, the architects, the masons, the carpenters, and the bell-founders? To each of these questions ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 19, June, 1891 • Various
... her expressed contempt, one by one fell away. Vivian and the Baroness were left alone, and conversed much together. The lady displayed, on every subject, engaging ignorance, and requested information on obvious topics with artless naivete Vivian was convinced that her ignorance was not affected, and equally sure that it could not arise from imbecility of intellect; for while she surprised him by her crude questions, and her want of acquaintance with all those topics ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... cannot be summarized so briefly; its scattered chronicle must be sought in the minutes of trustees' meetings, where it modestly evades the public eye, in the academic formalities of presidents' reports and the journalistic naivete of college periodicals; in the diaries of early graduates; in newspaper clippings and magazine "write-ups"; in historical sketches to commemorate the decennial or the quarter-century; and from the lips of the ...
— The Story of Wellesley • Florence Converse
... it, though all discuss it. And it is here that the harshness of American and English society toward the erring woman (harshness which is not injustice, but half- justice only) contrasts visibly to our advantage over the bad naivete and lenity of the Italians. The carefully secluded Italian girl is accustomed to hear of things and speak of things which, with us, parents strive in every way to keep from their daughters' knowledge; and while her sense of delicacy ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... first of many outbursts of confidence. Afterward she related to Clelie, with the greatest naivete, the whole ...
— Esmeralda • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... papa sent him away. Then there was Dick, the groom; but he laughed at me, and I suffered misery!" and she struck a tragic French attitude. "There is to be company here to-morrow," she added, rattling on with childish naivete, "and papa's sweetheart— Blanche Marabout—is to be here. You know they say she ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... because of this very limitation, it is much more alert to the variety and life of the human substance with which it deals. It does not take the whole of life for granted and it often reveals the fresh naivete of childhood in its discovery of life. When its sophistication is complete, it is the sophistication of English rather than of American literature, and is derivative rather than original, for the most part, in its criticism ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... went out of her studies, why, she did not know. But the whole thing seemed sham, spurious; spurious Gothic arches, spurious peace, spurious Latinity, spurious dignity of France, spurious naivete of Chaucer. It was a second-hand dealer's shop, and one bought an equipment for an examination. This was only a little side-show to the factories of the town. Gradually the perception stole into her. This was no religious retreat, no perception ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... general rule, I should warn the young artist against the imitation of "naivete" and so-called "quaintness;" especially in our designs for Church embroidery as it is hardly a noble quality in art, though we look on it with a tender pity, half-way between admiration and contempt, when we find it inevitably in mediaeval work; struggling to overcome the expression ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... Western veneer was the fascinating naivete of the Eastern woman, and Miska had all the suave grace, too, which belongs to the women of the Orient, so that many admiring glances followed her charming figure as she crossed the room ...
— The Golden Scorpion • Sax Rohmer
... twenty! Meistersingers, philistines, that's what they are, whether they are starving or basking in the public favor. Fellows that go to the cookbook rather than to nature to satisfy their hunger. They think, indeed, they've learned her secret—naivete! Ha—ha!—Tastes like plated brass!—They make art their starting-point rather than life! Write music for musicians rather than for yearning mankind! Blind, benighted ephemerons! Senile youths whom the sun of Wagner has dried and shriveled up! (Seizing GERARDO'S arm violently.) ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... preferred the chateau of Francois I. to that of Louis XII., perhaps the naivete of that of the good king will give true artists more pleasure, while at the same time they admire the magnificent structure of the knightly king. The elegance of the two staircases which are placed at each end of the chateau of Louis XII., ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... glanced at me eagerly. His naivete was not of ignorance of men and their motives. He had confessed royalty, cannibals, pirates, and nuns. The souls of men were naked under his scrutiny. But his faith burned like a lambent flame, and to win to the standard of the Maid of Orleans one who would listen was a duty ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... lashes scarce, trunk elongated and cylindrical. Limbs thick and plump, tapering from the root to the extremities. Good fat layers over the entire body. Reproductive organs those of a little boy. Infantile mental state: light-heartedness, naivete, timidity, easily evoked tears and laughter, promptly aroused but fugitive wrath: ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... over-anxiety for proof, he complains, is breaking down, by vain scruples, the knowledge which seemed to have been attained; witness the present state of chemistry. The demand of proof for what has been accepted by Humanity, is itself a mark of "distrust, if not hostility, to the sacerdotal order" (the naivete of this would be charming, if it were not deplorable), and is a revolt against the traditions of the human race. So early had the new High Priest adopted the feelings and taken up the inheritance of the old. One of his favourite aphorisms is the strange one, that the living are more and more ...
— Auguste Comte and Positivism • John-Stuart Mill
... you may try to plumb the depths of the Della Robbia soul,—through its purity and limpid candour, through its shining, sweetly wholesome homeliness, down to the crystal sincerity burning recessed in the shrine. It is the fashion to say of Angelico da Fiesole that his was a naivete which amounted to genius: a thin phrase, which may nevertheless pass to qualify the inspired miniaturist. The religiosity of the Della Robbia, while no less naive, is really far other. It is not ...
— Earthwork Out Of Tuscany • Maurice Hewlett
... open, monstrous, undisguised humbug? I said, before, that you should have a history of these people by Dickens or Theodore Hook, but there is little need of professed wags;—do not the men write their own tale with an admirable Sancho-like gravity and naivete, which one could not desire improved? How good is that touch of sly indignation about the LITTLE CATAFALQUES! how rich the contrast presented by the economy of the Catholics to the splendid disregard of expense exhibited ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... heartily as she pleased. She had heard men say before, but always with more or less of a languishing air, inevitably ridiculous in a man, that they thought it about time they were getting married; but she could not remember anything to compare with Sam Turner's naivete ...
— The Early Bird - A Business Man's Love Story • George Randolph Chester
... only by these primitive races. In Japan, to the present day, men and women bathe in the same room, separated merely by a partition, two or three feet high.[8] Zoeller relates of the Cholos of Ecuador (P. and A., 364) that "men and women bathe together in the rivers with a naivete surpassing that of the South Sea Islanders." A writer in the Ausland (1870, p. 294) reports that in Paraguay he saw the women washing their only dress, and while they waited for the sun to dry it, they stood by ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... in what seemed their sympathetic presence. They were charmed to have invited his guileless confidence, to have evoked possibly all the simple poetry of his soul; it was what might have happened in Italy, only there so much naivete would have meant money; they looked at each other with rapture. and Basil answered warmly while the waiter flushed as at a personal compliment: "Yes, it 's a nice hotel; one of the best I ever saw, East or ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... to her face, which had an expression of naive sophistication, or of sophisticated naivete, not at all likely to mislead the mature; nor to her carriage, which, though slightly self-conscious, was modest enough, and not a bit too demure. It was due to her dress, which, after all, was not quite so simple, either in intention or in execution, as it seemed. It was black, ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller
... I have difficulty in framing my impressions of the famous Texan editor. I think the principal thing that struck me was his lack of pose and affection. All through his talk, and he was in high spirits and talked a great deal, there were sparks of delightful naivete. ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... attached to me, and would reveal her sentiments to me, either in prose or verse. I therefore began my declaration with delight, and in a little while executed it in a flowing measure, between doggerel and madrigal, with the greatest possible /naivete/, and in such a way that the sceptic was overcome with admiration, and my friend with delight. The request of the former to possess the poem I could the less refuse, as it was written in his almanac; and I liked to see the ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... the four windows with their leaded panes, the brown and mossy walls, the door in common pine slit like a bundle of matches, far from being attracted by the adorable naivete of these details, the grace of the vegetations which draped the roof and the dilapidated wooden frames of the windows, the wealth of the clambering plants escaping from every cranny, and the clasping tendrils of the grape-vine which looked into every window ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac |
