"Puerility" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... token of relenting clemency, the more usual signal, made by virgins and matrons, demanding the continuance of the combat unto death. Do we not call Titus the delight of the human race? Do we not praise his commonplace puerility, perdidi diem, the exclamation of conceit, rather than of manliness? And yet it was this philanthropist, this favourite of humanity, who caused the vast amphitheatre to be erected, as it were a monument to all ages of the barbarous civilization of the ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... breast; penetrating straight to that organ as yet undefined, the seat of our sensibility, the region whither, since sentiment has had any existence, the sons of men carry their hands in any excess of joy or anguish. Do not accuse this chronicle of puerility. The rich, to be sure, never having experienced sufferings of this kind, may think them incredibly petty and small; but the agonies of less fortunate mortals are as well worth our attention as crises and vicissitudes ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... so utterly surprised and terrified in the outer world that this infantile parody was curiously welcome, since nothing keeps the mind in balance on the tight-rope of sanity like the counterweight that comedy furnishes to tragedy, farce to frenzy, and puerility to solemnity. ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... invidious subject fell to my lot. What I said was merely a summary of the foregoing pages. But one point in my lecture aroused the ire of some of Gen. Hooker's partisans, and was made the subject of attacks so bitter that virulence degenerated into puerility. The occasion of this rodomontade was a meeting of Third-Corps veterans, and its outcome was a series of resolutions aimed at the person who had dared to reflect on Gen. Hooker's capacity, and to refer to the question of Gen. Hooker's habitual use of stimulants. The public mention of ...
— The Campaign of Chancellorsville • Theodore A. Dodge
... and pernicious. He lacked the touchstone of mature philosophy, whereby to separate the pinchbeck from the gold of social usage; and in his intense enthusiasm he lost his hold on common sense, which might have saved him from the puerility of arrogant iconoclasm. The positive side of his creed remains precious, not because it was logical, or scientific, or coherent, but because it was an ideal, fervently felt, and penetrated with the whole life-force of an ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... class of evidence relied upon by Christians, wherewith they seek to build up an impassable barrier between their sacred books and the dangerous uncanonical Scriptures, namely, the intrinsic difference between them, the dignity of the one, and the puerility of the other. Of the uncanonical Gospels Dr. Ellicott writes: "Their real demerits, their mendacities, their absurdities, their coarseness, the barbarities of their style, and the inconsequence of their narratives, have never been excused or condoned" ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... Segantini, then to J.W. Morrice, and then to Bonnard, demanding the maitre's views. In a few moments they were really discussing pictures. And it was years since Priam had listened to the voice of informed common sense on the subject of painting. It was years since he had heard anything but exceeding puerility concerning pictures. He had, in fact, accustomed himself not to listen; he had excavated a passage direct from one ear to the other for such remarks. And now he drank up the conversation of Mr. Oxford, and perceived that ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... the puerility of such reproaches. It was certainly of the forty volumes of this fastidious publication that Mr. William James was thinking when he wrote that all these dissertations simply represented "a string of facts clumsily ...
— The Psychology of Revolution • Gustave le Bon
... observance of costume on the European stage; what with this view has been accomplished has always appeared excellent to the multitude, and yet, to judge from the engravings which sometimes accompany the printed plays, and from every other evidence, it is plain that it was always characterized by puerility and mannerism, and that in none the endeavours to assume a foreign or antique appearance, could shake themselves free of the fashions of the time. A sort of hoop was long considered as an indispensable appendage ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... last, with the decision of conscious superiority, and the judicial air afforded by the precision of utterance belonging to her class—a precision so strangely conjoined with the lack of truth and logic both—she said, in a tone that gave to the merest puerility the consequence of a judgment between ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... his breast; and when I called his attention to those drops of water which were actually falling upon the roof, he denied having heard them. He was even vexed at what I translated by the term, imitative harmony. He protested with all his might, and he was right, against the puerility of these imitations for the ear. His genius was full ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... suppose, these brutalities only served to inflame the ardor of the apostles. They came forth from the Sanhedrim, where they had just undergone flagellation, rejoicing that they were counted worthy to suffer shame for Him whom they loved. Eternal puerility of penal repressions applied to things of the soul! They were regarded, no doubt, as men of order, as models of prudence and wisdom; these blunderers, who seriously believed in the year 36 to gain the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... sight and natural docility, may be easily supposed to be led into such a situation; the mind adopts the credibility, and enjoys the whimsical and mischievous consequence, while it condemns the folly and puerility of the Blood who occasioned it. It is this peculiar faculty of choice of subjects, situation, and assemblage, which constitutes the excellence of a humorist, which Stevens possessed in a most eminent degree; ...
— A Lecture On Heads • Geo. Alex. Stevens
... sitting bolt upright, awake, listening, intent. Then her rush to the lamp. Her guilty feelings. The unconscious stealth of her tiptoeing to the landing outside. Her horror at the discovery that her obstruction to the staircase had been removed, and the chairs, as though to mock the puerility of her scheming, set in orderly fashion, side by side against the wall to make way for the midnight intruder. The closed door of the sick-room, which yielded to her touch and revealed the apparition of her father bending over her lover, and, with no uncertainty of movement, ...
— The Night Riders - A Romance of Early Montana • Ridgwell Cullum
... twice as numerous, in Naples, in the nineteenth as in the eighteenth century. Why an image of the Mother of God should be decked with this worldly symbol, as a reward for services rendered, will be obscure only to those who fail to appreciate the earthly-tangible complexion of southern religion. Puerility is its key-note. The Italian is either puerile or adult; the Englishman remains everlastingly ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... third, "Of Ornament." After some remarks on the origin of the art and its earliest professors, and an account of the various kinds of poems known to the ancients,—in which there is an absence of pedantry, of quaintness, and of every species of puerility, very rare among the didactic writers of the age,—the critic proceeds to an enumeration of our principal vernacular poets, or "vulgar makers," as he is pleased to anglicize the words. Beginning with a just tribute to Chaucer, as the father of genuine English ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... aesthetic heaven! And why can they not manage to forget a few of them, more particularly when they are of that unaesthetic, earthly, and ephemeral order to which the scholarly thoughts of Gervinus belong, and when they so obviously bear the stamp of puerility? But it almost seems as though the modest greatness of a Strauss and the vain insignificance of a Gervinus were only too well able to harmonise: then long live all those Blessed Ones! may we, the rejected, ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... the stimulus of remote chances of danger either from beasts or men. Our sympathies are drawn out towards our humble hardy companions by a community of interests, and, it may be, of perils, which make us all friends. Nothing but the most pitiable puerility would lead any manly heart to make their inferiority a theme for self-exaltation; however, that is often done, as if with the vague idea that we can, by magnifying their deficiencies, demonstrate our ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume I (of 2), 1866-1868 • David Livingstone
... informed that these lines have been cited as a specimen of despicable puerility. So much the worse for the citer; not willingly in his presence would I behold the sun setting behind our mountains.... But let the dead bury their dead! The poet sang for the living.... I was always pleased ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... every generation have felt at least the aesthetic charm of the rites of the Catholic Church. For Pascal, on the other hand, a certain weariness, a certain puerility, a certain unprofitableness in them is but an extra trial of faith. He seems to have little sense of the beauty of holiness. And for his sombre, trenchant, precipitous philosophy there could be no middle ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... well as the highest boon which mortals seek,—then prayer itself, recognized even by Mohammedans as the loftiest aspiration and expression of a dependent soul, and regarded by prophets and apostles and martyrs as their noblest privilege, becomes a superstition, a puerility, a ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume V • John Lord |
