"Immaturity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... opening night in Gounod's "Romo et Juliette." In many ways she was fortunate in her introduction to the operatic stage of her people—her people, though she was born in China. She was only twenty-four years old, and there was much to laud in her art, and nothing to condone except its immaturity. Her endowments of voice and person were opulent. She appeared in the opera in which she had effected her entrance on the stage at the Grand Opra in Paris less than three years before, and for which her gifts and graces admirably fitted her. She appeared, ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... shine in every possible department; a restless vanity permitted him not to be satisfied with the pursuit of perfection in any single walk of literature; and from the variety of subjects on which his mind was employed, it was impossible for him to avoid shallowness and immaturity of ideas. To form a correct idea of his relation to his two predecessors in the tragic art, we must institute a comparison between the characteristic features of the preceding classical age and of that in which he gave the tone. In the time of Louis the ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... the youngest offspring is able successfully to carry on his own struggle with environment there is no longer need for the parent, and the parent enters therefore the stage of disintegration. The average length of life in any species is the sum of the years of immaturity, plus the years of female fertility, plus the adolescent years ...
— The Origin and Nature of Emotions • George W. Crile
... the duty of the artist to open his flowers without dread of frost, and perhaps God will allow my efforts to fulfil themselves in the future. My very various attempts at work all have an indescribable immaturity about them still, a halting execution, which consorts badly with the real loftiness of the intention. It seems to me that my art will not quite expand until my life is further advanced. Let us pray that God will allow me ...
— Letters of a Soldier - 1914-1915 • Anonymous
... successor; of whom we are so much inclined to hope great things, that most of us begin already to believe them. The young man is hitherto blameless; but it would be unreasonable to expect much from the immaturity of juvenile years, and the ignorance of princely education. He has been long in the hands of the Scots, and has already favoured them more than the English will contentedly endure. But, perhaps, he scarcely knows whom he has distinguished, or ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... her unimpeachable in such details, had devoted herself with artistic zeal to her niece's training for the world; the pupil's natural aptitude ensured perfection in the result. Cecily's manner accorded with her utterance; it had every charm derivable from youth, yet nothing of immaturity. She was as completely at her ease as Mrs. Lessingham, and as much more graceful in her self-control as the advantages ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... letter is explained by the following extract from Mr. Fiske's work: "I have endeavoured to show that the transition from animality (or bestiality, stripping the word of its bad connotations) to humanity must have been mainly determined by the prolongation of infancy or immaturity which is consequent upon a high development of intelligence, and which must have necessitated the gradual grouping together of pithecoid men into more or less definite families." (See "Descent," I., page 13, on the prolonged infancy of the ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... wrote a tractate entitled, Was ist Aufklaerung? He said: 'Aufklaerung is the advance of man beyond the stage of voluntary immaturity. By immaturity is meant a man's inability to use his understanding except under the guidance of another. The immaturity is voluntary when the cause is not want of intelligence but of resolution. Sapere aude! "Dare to use thine own understanding," ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... as the slighter and feebler one? Is it strange that this mysterious influence or effluence should belong especially or exclusively to the period of complete womanhood in distinction from that of immaturity or decadence? On the contrary, it seems to be in accordance with all the analogies of nature,—analogies too often cruel in the sentence they pass upon the ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... growing up rapidly, as Chicago was growing up. Chicago was facing greater problems as its population increased; and as Douglas rose into higher power, thicker complications entangled him. He dragged after him the imperfect education of his youth, the opinions of his immaturity. He was now enmeshed in the problems of the new territories, and always, slavery. Prepared or not, he would fight for his principles. If defeated he would rise ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... post, he scarcely needed to take his feet from the ground, while for the rest of us a good hop was necessary fairly to clear the top. That is my earliest memory of Phillips Brooks. Big as he was, he was a year, perhaps two years, younger than most of us, and had the boyishness proper to his immaturity. He had come from his long training in the Boston Latin School, was reputed, like the rest of his class, to be able to repeat the Latin and Greek grammars from beginning to end, exceptions, examples, and all, and to have at his tongue's end other acquirements equally ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... present occasion, was apparently a mere youth. He had probably seen twenty summers—scarcely more. Yet his person was tall and well developed; symmetrical and manly; rather slight, perhaps, as was proper to his immaturity; but not wanting in what the backwoodsmen call heft. He was evidently no milksop, though slight; carried himself with ease and grace; and was certainly not only well endowed with bone and muscle, but bore the appearance, somehow, of a person ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... relates an unconventional career without conventional reproaches and also without conventional heroics. Felix Fay dreams and blunders and suffers but he goes on growing like a tree, pushing his head up through one level of development after another until he stands above the minor annoyances of his immaturity and looks out over a broader world. He has a soul which is naturally socialist and yet he never loses himself in proclamations or statistics. He can be fresh and hopeful and yet learn from the remarkable old men he ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... Miss Lady, round of throat and arm, already stately, quite past the days of flat immaturity. A veritable young goddess one might have called her, with her high, short mouth and upright head, and her shoulders carried back with a certain haughtiness. Yet only a gracious, pensive goddess might have had this wistfulness ...
— The Law of the Land • Emerson Hough
... implies indifference, and intolerance is inseparable from sincerity. Thus intolerance, in itself a defect, becomes in this case a merit. Again, although the political conditions of intolerance belong to the youth and immaturity of nations, the motives of intolerance may at any time be just and the principle high. For the theory of religious unity is founded on the most elevated and truest view of the character and function of the State, on the perception that its ultimate purpose is not distinct from that ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... entreaties, that the dictator would, for their sakes, remit the punishment of the master of the horse. The tribunes likewise, following the example set them of employing entreaties, earnestly beseech the dictator to pardon human error, to consider the immaturity of the offender's age; that he had suffered sufficiently; and now the youth himself, now his father, Marcus Fabius, disclaiming further contest, fell at the dictator's knees and deprecated his wrath. ...
— The History of Rome, Books 01 to 08 • Titus Livius
... to introduce self-governing experiments into elementary schools and, whilst they have often been defeated by reason of the immaturity of the children, yet some of them have met with great success. The election of monitors on the lines of a general election is an instance of success in this direction. The ideas which have arisen from the advocacy of the Montessori system have induced methods of greater freedom in connection ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... this philosophy appeal to the child? Is it not adult wisdom foreign to his immaturity?" The old folk-tales are the products of adult minds; but the adults were grown-ups that looked upon the world with the eyes of children, and their philosophy often was the philosophy of childhood. For childhood has its philosophy; but because it meets with repression ...
— A Study of Fairy Tales • Laura F. Kready
... the little drawing-room by an extremely immature young footman who—doubtless as a consequence of his immaturity—appeared upon the scene too suddenly. The War left one only servants who were idiots or barely out of Board Schools, Feather said. And in fact it was something suggesting "a scene" upon which Coombe was announced. The athletic and personable young ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... and to awake to the knowledge of an unbeautiful reality, bereft of all fictitious adornment. When, however, the naked truth can be discovered—and that is seldom the case—it must be faced; if the national or individual mind cannot receive it, the fault lies with the immaturity or morbid condition of the former, not with ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... composed it at an earlier period; perhaps, also, he did not include theatrical labours, as they then possessed but little literary dignity. The earlier Shakespeare began to compose for the theatre, the less are we enabled to consider the immaturity and imperfection of a work as a proof of its spuriousness in opposition to historical evidence, if we only find in it prominent features of his mind. Several of the works rejected as spurious may still have been produced ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... that Sadness had sarcastically invited Joe, and Joe felt honoured. He found that all of his former feelings had been silly and quite out of place; that all he had learned in his earlier years was false. It was very plain to him now that to want a good reputation was the sign of unpardonable immaturity, and that dishonour was the only real thing worth while. It made him ...
— The Sport of the Gods • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... beginning to complain: "Where is that which we expected of you—that in hope of which we admired the soft green of the shoot? Are we to put up with immaturity for ever? It is high time for us to know what we shall gain from you. We want an estimate of the proportion of oil which the blindfold, mill-turning, unbiased critic can squeeze out ...
— Glimpses of Bengal • Sir Rabindranath Tagore
... Sordello, and, on a more contracted scale, Pauline—each a study in "the development of a soul," gain and lose through the immaturity of the writer. He had, as yet, brought only certain of his faculties into play, or, at least, he had not as yet connected with his art certain faculties which become essential characteristics of his later work. There is no humour in these early poems, or (since Naddo and the critic tribe ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... differences in their immaturity. She was forming under the guidance of a mother who blended firmness and judgment equally with love. Gentle blood was in her veins, and she had inherited many of her mother's traits with her beauty. Her parents, however, believed that, even as the garden of Eden ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... reflected in this group was a sign both of the health and of the immaturity of the field, and more time would have to pass before we convince ...
— LOC WORKSHOP ON ELECTRONIC TEXTS • James Daly
... we may say that the belief that virtue is not the right road to happiness betrays inexperience and immaturity of judgment. A moderate degree of morality saves man from many pitfalls into which his unrestrained impulses would lead him. The highest levels of morality bring a degree of happiness unknown to the "natural man." Who are the happiest people ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... failing ability. Gradually he improved. His colours were clearer and ground more smoothly; his gold showed a more glassy surface. The book ended as it had begun, a virile work of art; but in the course of its making, one man had grown old, lost his skill, and died, and another had started in his immaturity, gained his education, and devoted his best years ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... the responsibilities of the married state be undertaken? In the best years of life if possible. Not in the physical and mental immaturity of early youth. How can the child-wife of seventeen fulfil all the duties of her position, and endow her child with the needful strength for the journey of life? How can the boy of twenty be expected to work for three without ...
— The Etiquette of Engagement and Marriage • G. R. M. Devereux
... freshness of the rest; but in the foreground was part of the gnarled trunk and of the spreading boughs of a large forest-tree, whose foliage was of a brilliant golden green—not golden from autumnal mellowness, but from the sunshine and the very immaturity of the scarce expanded leaves. Upon this bough, that stood out in bold relief against the sombre firs, were seated an amorous pair of turtle doves, whose soft sad-coloured plumage afforded a contrast of another ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... the well-known lines 'I stood tiptoe upon a little hill'. With much that is of the highest poetic value, many memorable lines and touches of his unique insight into nature, the volume yet showed considerable immaturity. It contained indeed, if we except one perfect sonnet, rather a series of experiments than any complete and finished work. There were abundant faults for those who liked to look for them, though there were abundant beauties too; and the critics and the public chose rather ...
— Keats: Poems Published in 1820 • John Keats
... cottage into the world. I had acquired, even in my transient sojourn among the busy haunts of men, more knowledge than the lucubrations and employments of all my previous years had conferred. Hence I might infer the childlike immaturity of my understanding, and the rapid progress I was still capable of making. Was this an age to form an irrevocable contract; to choose the companion of my future life, the associate of my schemes of ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... stolid German—Hildebrandt, was his name?" cried the Duchessa. "Not she! Long ago, I'm glad to say, she learned to laugh at that, as a mere caprice of her immaturity. However, this is a digression. I want to return to our 'Man of Words.' Tell me—what is the quality you especially like ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... Penseroso, and yet he fancies himself still unripe for poetry and is only forced by the "bitter constraint" of the death of his friend to pluck the berries of his laurel which seem to him still "harsh and crude"; for of course these allusions refer to his own immaturity and not, as Todd thought, to that of his dead friend. And the presence of the same over-mastering emotion which compelled him to begin is felt throughout. There is no poem of his in which he appears to make so complete a surrender to the changing moods of passion. The ...
— Milton • John Bailey
... eighteen. Her long, slim figure, in its clinging riding habit, betrayed, despite roundness and supple grace, a certain immaturity. Her hands and feet were long and slender. Her sun-tanned cheek and neck were soft and rounded. Her mouth was delicately chiseled and the lips were pink as the heart of a Bridesmaid rose, but, being firmly closed, told no tale of the teeth within, without a peep at which ...
— An Apache Princess - A Tale of the Indian Frontier • Charles King
... to go there next summer. Ferrieres is the name of the place where our vineyards are, the dearest village!" She was a beautiful little girl of a dainty porcelain type, her colouring low in tone. She wore no jewels, but her little, undeveloped neck and shoulders, of an exquisite immaturity, rose from the tulle bodice of ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... darkness still hung over the stage, for the intellect of a democracy, which first seeks an outlet in statesmanship, secondly in commerce, and lastly in art and literature, had hardly begun to express itself, with the immaturity of youth, in several of these latter fields. It was Oliver's distinction as well as his misfortune that he lived before his country was ready for him. Coming a quarter of a century later, he might have made ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... of perennial youth, and to toy with the flattering fictions which every ancient personage accepts as true so far as he himself is concerned, and laughs at as foolish talk when he hears them applied to others. When, in my exulting immaturity, I wrote the lines not unknown to the reading public under the name of "The Last Leaf", I spoke of the possibility that I myself might linger on the old bough until the buds and blossoms of a new spring were opening and spreading all around me. ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... improbable, though it is not certain, that he had already turned his attention to prose fiction of a kind. For, though the Miscellanies which followed Joseph Andrews were three years later than Pamela in appearance, the Journey from this World to the Next which they contain has the immaturity of earliness; and we can hardly conceive it as written after the adventures and character of Mr. Abraham Adams. It is unequal, rather tedious in parts, and in conception merely a pastiche of Lucian and Fontenelle: but it contains some remarkable things in the way of shrewd satirical observation ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... represents an affectionate remembrance of the dead which is full of pathos, and has a refinement in its simplicity which commands our sympathy far above the semi-barbarous engravings of heads and skulls which we have previously pictured. The immaturity of provincial art in Ireland is at least redeemed by an absence of such monstrous figures and designs as we at the present day usually associate with the carvings of savages ...
— In Search Of Gravestones Old And Curious • W.T. (William Thomas) Vincent
... power supremely in every way. Nobody could have guessed that. And yet this was one of the immediate causes of the Monterist Revolution. This will appear less incredible by the reflection that the fundamental causes were the same as ever, rooted in the political immaturity of the people, in the indolence of the upper classes and the mental ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... for mispronunciation or incorrect speech, this stutter being anatomical (due to malformation of one or more organs of articulation) or developmental (due to incorrect functioning of the organs of articulation resulting in certain cases of immaturity, such as lisping). Stammering, in this sense, is of no psychological interest. The reviewer is in favor of employing the terms "stammering" and "stuttering" synonymously, as is the practice in England and America. The writer (Fletcher) finds that he cannot accept the Freudian interpretation ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... human nature the vicious tendencies which are due either to immaturity or to the numberless influences that come under the general head of environment, we shall find that a very small percentage remain to be accounted for. We need not have recourse to the doctrine of original sin in order to account for these. So far I have said nothing ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... very rare gift, and in public affairs it is often as much a hindrance as a help. Forms of government and other great religious or political institutions, like the products of nature, have their times of immaturity, of growth, of ripeness and of decay, and it by no means follows because they at last become indefensible, that they have not during many generations discharged useful functions and that those who first assailed and ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... husband from such a motive, though it will not be deemed improbable by those whose experience of the world convinces them that even persons like her, of good understanding, beauty, and piety, are sometimes guilty of similar improprieties. Riches are, on many accounts, attractive to those whose immaturity of judgment is dazzled by the glare of life, and who are consequently too apt to associate in their conceptions things which, in reality, have no connection—splendour and happiness. The mind is naturally gratified by a sense of elevation above the usual level of mankind, ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... from Cruikshank, had adorned the hand of Jonathan Wild, pl. 1. "This is mastering me," as Whitman cries, upon some lesser provocation. What am I? what are life, art, letters, the world, but what my Skelt has made them? He stamped himself upon my immaturity. The world was plain before I knew him, a poor penny world; but soon it was all coloured with romance. If I go to the theatre to see a good old melodrama, 'tis but Skelt a little faded. If I visit a bold scene ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the productive capacity of laborers, to three thousand eight hundred and five and one-half full hands. The cotton-crop produced will not exceed sixty-five thousand pounds of ginned cotton. Work enough was done to have produced five hundred thousand pounds in ordinary times; but the immaturity of the pod, resulting from the lateness of the planting, exposed it to the ravages of the frost and the worm. Troops being ordered North, after the disasters of the Peninsular campaign, Edisto was evacuated in the middle of July, and thus one thousand acres ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... accidental and avoidable. I cannot forbear to flatter myself that prudence and benevolence will make marriage happy. The general folly of mankind is the cause of general complaint. What can be expected but disappointment and repentance from a choice made in the immaturity of youth, in the ardour of desire, without judgment, without foresight, without inquiry after conformity of opinions, similarity of manners, rectitude of ...
— Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia • Samuel Johnson
... flowers should be so entirely suppressed, in the Richmond bouquet, by the half-opened buds. These latter, doubtless, gave a charming promise of bloom and fragrance when they came to their full; but too early they left an effect of immaturity and crudity upon the sense of the unaccustomed. Yet Richmond had written over the portals of its society: Who enters here no spouse must leave behind! and the law was of the Medan. A stranger within their gates had no right to cavil at a time-honored custom; but not one could spend a ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... De Forrest "very nice." She liked him better than any one else she had met and flirted with since her school-days, during which period of sincerity and immaturity she had had several acute attacks of what she imagined to be the "grand passion." But as the objects were as absurd as her emotions, and the malady soon ran, its course, she began to regard the whole subject as a jest, and think, with her fashionable ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... nothing else to do with Arnold, they all did go to the "show," Arnold engineering the expedition with a trained expertness in the matter of ticket-sellers, cabs, and ushers which was in odd contrast to his gawky physical immaturity. At all the stages of the process where it was possible, he smoked cigarettes, producing them in rapid succession out of a case studded with little pearls. His stepmother looked on at this, her beautiful manner of wise tolerance tightening up a little, and after dinner, as they ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... immaturity and bad taste the poem compels admiration by its elevation of thought and sustained brilliance of execution; it contains passages of lofty thought and real beauty, such as the dream of Pompeius, or the character which Cato gives of Pompeius, and is full of quotations which ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce
... the period when childhood passes from immaturity of the sexual functions to maturity. Woman attains this state a year or two sooner than man. In the hotter climates the period of puberty is from twelve to fifteen years of age, while in cold climates, such as Russia, the United States, ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols |
