"Naivete" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... affairs was that he need not trouble about the police, but could calmly consider the question of going elsewhere, as he found no inducement to take part in an insurrection conducted in such a slovenly fashion. While he walked about, smoking his cigar, and making fun of the naivete of the Dresden revolution, I watched the Communal Guards assembling under arms in front of the Town Hall at the summons of their commandant. From the ranks of its most popular corps, the Schutzen-Compagnie, I was ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... that we are able to follow the young enthusiast, not only in all the actions of his life, but also in all the thoughts of his mind and all the hesitations of his conscience. In it we find his whole self, simple to naivete, enthusiastic to madness, gentle even to weakness towards others, severe even to asceticism towards himself. One of his great griefs was the expense that his education occasioned to his parents, and every useless and ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - KARL-LUDWIG SAND—1819 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... been much praised; on the other hand, at least one good judge has remarked to me that it is not a good style. It is, above all things, direct and clear; and it is characteristic of himself in its simplicity, bordering on naivete, and in its absence of pretence. He had the strongest disbelief in the common idea that a classical scholar must write good English; indeed, he thought that the contrary was the case. In writing, he sometimes showed the same tendency to strong expressions as he did in ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... brother-in-law was permitted, if not expected, to "raise up seed" to his dead brother, as among the Hebrews.(4) As to literature, the very structure of the hymns proves that it was elaborate and consciously artistic. M. Barth writes: "It would be a great mistake to speak of the primitive naivete of the Vedic poetry and religion".(5) Both the poetry and the religion, on the other hand, display in the highest degree the mark of the sacerdotal spirit. The myths, though originally derived from nature-worship, in an infinite majority of cases only reflect ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... best of any one, always prepared to do a friend a service, devoted to his wife and her relations, and anxious to deal justly and honourably with all men. We have called him vain, and vain he undoubtedly was to an extraordinary degree. But Pliny's vanity is never offensive. The very naivete with which he acknowledges his failing disarms all criticism and merely renders it amusing. Indeed, it is doubtful whether he would have admitted that it was a failing at all, inasmuch as it was his love of praise which spurred him on to literary endeavour. The Romans, in their grand ...
— The Letters of the Younger Pliny - Title: The Letters of Pliny the Younger - - Series 1, Volume 1 • Pliny the Younger
... their admiration of the wax-work exhibition of 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 IV., "looking the very picture of good-nature"—the Duke ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... impression he quickly corrected at the sound of her voice, her frank ingenuousness, and her unmistakable youth. In the habit of being crushed by Miss Avondale's unrelenting superiority, he found himself apparently growing up beside this tall English girl, who had the naivete of a child. After a few commonplaces she suddenly turned her gray eyes ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... 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 of pure ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... unintelligible, or even thought they were being unintelligible. They were only thinking too concisely or too rapidly for the reader. But don't you try to produce that sort of illusion. Try to say things like Newman or Ruskin—big, beautiful, profound, delicate things, with an almost childlike naivete. That is the most exquisite kind of charm, when you find that half-a-dozen of the simplest words in the language have expressed a thought which holds you spell-bound with its truth and loveliness. That is what lasts. People want to be fed, not to be ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... islands in this neighbourhood were written. Though the papers were transposed and turned upside down, George could read them with equal facility. The list of rivers would be read for the islands, and the islands for the rivers, quite indifferently, and with entertaining naivete. But he treasured the papers, and continued to delude his fellows with the display of what they considered to be ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... gather into his arms and devour with kisses this sweet specimen of womanly tenderness, frank inconsistency, naivete, and archness. ...
— A Perilous Secret • Charles Reade
... hardly finished the publication of the Brazilian Fishes, when I began to study the works of the older naturalists. Professor Dollinger had presented me with a copy of Rondelet, which was my delight for a long time. I was especially struck by the naivete of his narrative and the minuteness of his descriptions as well as by the fidelity of his woodcuts, some of which are to this day the best figures we have of the species they represent. His learning overwhelmed me; I would gladly have read, ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... unheard-of work. He is a fanatic, and fanaticism draws him on, even to the point of becoming an accomplished Jesuit. At moments he becomes simply stupid. Most of his lies are sewn with white thread.... In spite of this relative naivete, he is very dangerous, because he daily commits acts, abuses of confidence, and treachery, against which it is all the more difficult to safeguard oneself because one hardly suspects the possibility. With all that, Nechayeff is a force, because he is an immense energy. It is with ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... The Merchant of Venice, "Soga um Kaupmannen i Venetia"[32] which appeared in the same year, nothing need be said. It is a simple, unpretentious summary of the story with a certain charm which simplicity and naivete always give. No name appears on the title-page, but we are probably safe in attributing it to Madhus, for in the note to Kaupmannen i Venetia we read: "I Soga um Kaupmannen i Venetia hev ein sjolve forteljingi som stykkji er ...
— An Essay Toward a History of Shakespeare in Norway • Martin Brown Ruud
... and wonder whether the words of the intellect have anything to do with the facts of life? What insight into reality can a man possess who is capable of discussing politics and ignoring politicians? What kind of naivete was it that led this educator into asking ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... petty trade, no better, no worse than, say, the trade in groceries. Do you understand, gentlemen, that all the horror is in just this, that there is no horror! Bourgeois work days—and that is all. And also an after taste of an exclusive educational institution, with its NAIVETE, ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... to judge where the naivete of the British Secretary of State ends and cynicism begins, for Sazonof could not have told to him more plainly than in these lines that all Russia's ostensible readiness for peace served no other purpose than to win time to complete the strategical ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War from the Beginning to March 1915, Vol 1, No. 2 - Who Began the War, and Why? • Various
... disdaining that servile conformity to prevailing fashion which makes many old people at once ugly and contemptible: speaking English with a slight, old- fashioned, refined Scotch accent, which gives naivete to everything she says, up to the latest novelty in theology and politics: devoted to her children and grandchildren, the life of the family, and though upwards of seventy, the first to rise, and the last to retire in the house. She was away when I came, but ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... whose gratitude to Agias had known no bounds, took the little thing into her heart, and determined to devote herself to instructing an innocence that must not continue too long, despite its charming naivete. ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... assistance of the Rajah of Oadpur, General Watson hastened thither. He had letters of introduction from sundry persons who wished to get rid of him to sundry others who had no desire to assist in any way. But the old man's naivete and characteristically simple interest in details soon made their way, while Bertha's wise little smile carried all before it. It somehow conveyed the impression that she knew a thing or two of which we were ignorant, and like one man we fell to desiring knowledge of ...
— Tomaso's Fortune and Other Stories • Henry Seton Merriman
... it generally refreshing. His family accepts the situation with perfect naivete. I am welcomed as Doro's chum with all ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... them to eliminate all good qualities from the god of their superiors; they make revenge on their masters by making a devil of the latter's god.—The good god, and the devil like him—both are abortions of decadence.—How can we be so tolerant of the naivete of Christian theologians as to join in their doctrine that the evolution of the concept of god from "the god of Israel," the god of a people, to the Christian god, the essence of all goodness, is to be described ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... in self-defense industries began to coalesce in enormous "trusts" and "combines" and monopolies. Capitalization of millions now ran into billions, finance became international in its scope and gargantuan in its proportions and ominousness, advertising grew from its original simplicity and naivete into a vast industry based on all that the most ingenious professors could tell of applied psychology, subsidizing artists, poets, men of letters, employing armies of men along a hundred different lines, expending millions annually in its operations, making the ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... dressmaking shop. Those formal phrases, the 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' ...
— My Antonia • Willa Cather
... by anyone else; indeed, I am not aware that it was ever published. But had it been we should rarely hear it. Like Locke's music to "Macbeth" it bears an unpleasant reputation; to include it in any concert programme would be to court disaster. An idle superstition, perhaps, but there is much naivete in the ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... you are mistaken," said Jane, with perfect naivete. "I was at two or three small parties, you know, in New York, while I was staying with Mrs. Stanley, this spring; well, I missed more than half the quadrilles, while those fat Miss Grants, and the Howard girls, were dancing all the evening. Adeline says it is all because I was ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... charms me at fifteen," and his eye glanced at Helen, then was retracted, then returning to his point of view, "at eighteen perhaps may do," and his eyes again turned to Helen, "at eighteen—it captivates me quite," and his eye dwelt. "But naivete at past fifty, verging to sixty, is quite another thing, really rather too much for me. I like all things in season, and above all, simplicity will not bear long keeping. I have the greatest respect possible for our learned and excellent friend, but I wish this could be any way suggested to him, ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... 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 ...
— The Amazing Interlude • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... hazy morning, and such a little pigeon—the rest of the picture being cheap sky, and still cheaper sea; nothing, I have often heard him say, was more popular than this with his clients. He held it to be his masterpiece, but would add with some naivete that he considered himself a public benefactor for carrying it out in such perishable fashion. "At any rate," he would say, "no one can bequeath one of my ...
— Erewhon Revisited • Samuel Butler
... without any strokes and flourishes, it is as if she was exhausted of her hate and rage and just put out an utterly tired hand and set this here like a sigh. That's pathetic, the mere look of it and that thought of it. And then what she says. The dreadfully simple naivete of the beginning of it. Staring at a fallen horse in the street. It's just where they would be, both of them. They'd stand there for hours and just stare and stare. And then she steps back on his foot and there's 'his dear face' smiling at her; ah, it's pathetic, ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson
... 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 man elsewhere acquaints us with a certain stratagem of his own invention, consisting of his ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... polite little note. It was very short, and I tried not to make it too nice, and I said nothing at all about writing, only just remarked that it would be interesting to receive letters from India," said Bridgie, with a naivete which made Mademoiselle throw up her hands in delight. "He has written to me four times since then, and,"—her eyes began to dance, and a dimple danced mischievously in her cheek—"I enjoy writing to ...
— Pixie O'Shaughnessy • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... the value of their eyes depends on the amount of individual character they took with them, and of the previous culture that had sharpened and tutored the faculty of observation. In our conscious age the frankness and naivete of the elder voyagers is impossible, and we are weary of those humorous confidences on the subject of fleas with which we are favored by some modern travellers, whose motto should be (slightly altered) ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various
... in 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 that might ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... gone, I pondered several minutes on the novelty and boyish naivete of the whole proceeding, and found myself a good deal refreshed by the sincerity of the two young fellows and their fine confidence in the perfectibility of the future. It seemed to me, the more I thought of it, that I could hold on to this scheme ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... buffoon. We can hear its 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 ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... cried, in her simple girlish naivete, "Mr. Le Neve's been so kind to me! I don't know how I should ever have got through the night without him. It was so good of him to come. He's been SUCH a help ...
— Michael's Crag • Grant Allen
... or inability 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, ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... betokened energy of character and great strength of purpose. The girl was at most only eighteen or nineteen years old, but oddly enough, she possessed none of that indescribable attractiveness which seems the natural accompaniment of girlhood, nothing of the hilarity and naivete of youth. The great blue eyes gazed at you earnestly but coldly, and you felt instinctively that the soul which looked out through them never lost itself in girlish dreams of brave heroes and suppliant lovers. The bearing and ...
— The Northern Light • E. Werner
... by spiritual encouragement, were done with a beautiful naivete. Such a life was all the more meritorious because the abbe was possessed of an erudition that was vast and varied, and of great and precious faculties. Delicacy and grace, the inseparable accompaniments of simplicity, lent ...
— Ursula • Honore de Balzac
... book had been "edited" by Franklin's loyalist grandson, and had been cut and tortured into the pompous, stilted periods that were supposed to befit the dignity of so important a personage. When John Bigelow published the original with all its naivete and homely turns of phrases and suppressed passages, he shed a flood ...
— Washington's Birthday • Various
... Church or the reputation of a saint—in general, by its relationship to matters of faith. Thus it happens that the chronicles of the monks and the lives of the saints, charming and interesting as they are in their naivete, their simplicity, their trustful credulity, and their pictures of a life and an attitude of mind so remote from ours, are filled with incidents given as facts that test the greatest faith, strain the most vivid imagination, ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... my bride, 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 ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... 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 ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... abandoned 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 ...
— Fantazius Mallare - A Mysterious Oath • Ben Hecht
... only remembered because they were reprinted in the collections of Hakluyt and Purchas, this book of Raleigh's takes easily the foremost position. In comparison with the bluff and dull narratives of the other discoverers, whose chief charm is their naivete, the Discovery of Guiana has all the grace and fullness of deliberate composition, of fine literary art, and as it was the first excellent piece of sustained travellers' prose, so it remained long without a second in our literature. ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... is the French word naif. Littre says that naif comes from natif, as vulgar comes from vulgus, as though native traits must be simple, and commonness must be vulgar. Both these derivative meanings were strange to the eleventh century. Naivete was simply natural and vulgarity was merely coarse. Norman naivete was not different in kind from the naivete of Burgundy or Gascony or Lombardy, but it was slightly different in expression, as you will see when you travel south. Here at ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... humor shone in the Northman's face. He spoke to his companion, who made answer; then he replied with the naivete ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... either," returned the iron-founder, with grave naivete. "And, yes, I guess she meant it. But that reminds me. She knew I was looking for you and she gave me a note—let me see, I've got it here somewhere; oh, yes, here ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... with woman's warm and delicate sympathy and with the clear vision of childhood. "Selma Lagerloef," declared the Swedish critic, Oscar Levertin, "has the eyes of a child and the heart of a child." This naivete is responsible for the simplicity of her character types. Deep and sure they may be, but never too complex for the reader to comprehend. The more varied characters—as the critic Johan Mortensen has pointed out—like Hellgum, the mystic in "Jerusalem," are merely indicated and shadowy. How unlike ...
— Jerusalem • Selma Lagerlof
... been 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 Clavering ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... She could not wait, it seemed, for the orderly procedure of the ordeal—she wanted to know at once, and when I caught her trying to slip a knife into my side and questioned her she explained the whole thing with the utmost naivete. The warriors already had commenced drinking—it would have been futile to make any sort of appeal either to their intellects or their superstitions. There was but one alternative to death and that was flight. I told the woman that I was very much outraged and ...
— Tarzan the Terrible • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... 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 was ...
— Gold • Stewart White
... most engaging sentiment, and the most refin'd simplicity of manners; but he wants that rustic wildness and naivete in delineation characteristic of the Sicilian, and of the composition ...
— The Farmer's Boy - A Rural Poem • Robert Bloomfield
... Adrian raised his eyebrows, well-marked crescents of reddish-brown above his ruddy face, and assumed thereby a physiognomy of almost childlike naivete. "Ah, well, on Friday, then;—though Friday is unlucky, and one rarely shines on a day of abstinence, anyhow. It's all a fallacy about fish being food for the brain. Meat, red meat, is what the brain requires." He slapped his forehead. "But Friday, since ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... look for him there, and find him too, and save him," exclaimed Paganel. "Ah, precious document," he added, with perfect NAIVETE, "you must own you have fallen into the ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... that same speech upon a bare platform; but I am not entirely sure that it has grown wiser. We theatre-goers have come to manhood and have put away childish things; but there was a sweetness about the naivete of childhood that we can never quite regain. No longer do we dream ourselves in a garden of springtide blossoms; we can only look upon canvas trees and paper flowers. No longer are we charmed away to that imagined spot where journeys end in lovers' meeting; we can only look upon love in a ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... numbers to animate the front steps of the Main Building with constantly gathering and dissolving little groups. These called out greetings to each other, and exchanged dolorous mutual condolences on their hard fate; all showing, with a helpless masculine naivete, their consciousness of the lovely, observant figure in the carriage below them. Of a different sort were the professors' wives, who occasionally drifted past on the path. Aunt Victoria might have been a blue-uniformed messenger-boy for all that was betrayed by their skilfully casual glance ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... For Betty's innocence was deeply laid, and had survived the shock of all the waves that had beaten against it since her coming to Paris. It was more than innocence, it was a very honest, straightforward childish naivete. ...
— The Incomplete Amorist • E. Nesbit
... pen. "Mon maitre, lui dit-il, vient de faire un heritage et va donner force festins aux parents et aux amis; je ne saurais manquer d'engraisser pendant cette periode, et vous aurez alors plus de plaisir a me manger." Le loup eut la naivete de croire ce maitre hableur et le laissa partir. Quand il revint le chercher au jour convenu, il ne le trouva pas seul. Le ruse compere avait fait signe aux camarades des alentours: une meute entiere tomba sur la bete fauve et la ...
— French Conversation and Composition • Harry Vincent Wann
... firmly. Let us take it for granted that the most extravagant hopes of our most reckless dreamers are fulfilled, that England is crowded out of Egypt, Mesopotamia, Persia, and is involved in a long-lasting war with the native Indians. An impossibly large dose of political naivete is needed in order to make us believe that England would take this ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... her soon and find out what was the matter. There was undoubtedly something the matter. His eyes stared at her furtively as she returned to her work. "There's something the matter," his thought cautioned him. Rachel resumed her talking. A naivete and freshness were in her voice. She was letting her tongue speak for her and laughing at the sound of ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... liked moving 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 despair, ...
— Trapped in 'Black Russia' - Letters June-November 1915 • Ruth Pierce
... girl pleads with her father to make peace, with humorous naivete argues with the counsellors of state, tries to bribe the seers, and finally resorts to magic. When nothing avails, she secures Carme's aid. The lock is cut, the city falls, the girl is captured by Minos—in true Alexandrian technique the catastrophe comes with terrible ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... really did go to America, in all seriousness, and with empty hands ... Why, think, man, what it means to acquire land and foundation for a model state with empty hands. That was almost cr ... At all events it was unique in its naivete. ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume I • Gerhart Hauptmann
... but 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 life. It isn't ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... 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 and felt sick at heart. Desirable she ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... with the greatest naivete, so that her absolute faith in herself, her genius, and her mission, did not astonish him. The words seemed to ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... being long jolted upon an uneasy pavement, makes the whole 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 forehead, embossed with protuberant organs of the intellectual faculties, ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... out on purpose that you might be prepared," Pyotr Stepanovitch said hurriedly, with surprising naivete, running up to the table, and instantly staring at the corner of the letter, which peeped out from ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... and her naivete brought the ready tears to his eyes. They made a rendezvous for the next morning on the Promenade Platz. The only thing he did not like was the scowling face of the dancer when he said good night to the others under the electric ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... Demidoff collection into an exquisite delicacy and airiness of line which is the language of etching in its most modern expression. A Demidoff Rembrandt, a Lucrezia, reproduced by the needle of M. Koepping, is an example of the naivete of an art which gave itself no thought for archaeology. Lucrezia is a simple Dutch maiden in the full-sleeved, straight-bodied Flemish costume. Her innocent, childish face tells of real grief, but not of a tragic history. It is interesting to compare ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... people are so cruel as to blame 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 is thus ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... popular he was with everyone in the regiment, and how satisfied his father was with him. Berg evidently enjoyed narrating all this, and did not seem to suspect that others, too, might have their own interests. But all he said was so prettily sedate, and the naivete of his youthful egotism was so obvious, ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... in the first stage of the emotion's 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 ...
— A Preliminary Study of the Emotion of Love between the Sexes • Sanford Bell
... social relations had become firmly established, into a triangular conversation. They 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, ...
— A Christmas Accident and Other Stories • Annie Eliot Trumbull
... happened 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
... within the limits of the art; thus the painter may produce the utmost relief he can by means of light and shade, but is peremptorily forbidden to use actual solidities on a plane surface. He must represent gold by colour, not by sticking gold on his fIgures. [This was done with naivete by the early painters, and is really very effective in the pictures of Gentile da Fabriano—that Paul Veronese of the fifteenth century—as the reader will confess if he has seen the "Adoration of the Magi," in the Florence Academy; ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... old church; not because one shares its beliefs—creeds are increasingly unimportant—but because the church is an instrument of social welfare, and a man can do more good in combination with his fellows than when he stands alone. There is much truth in this doctrine, though it has a certain naivete, when looked at from the standpoint of the private soul and its ...
— Four Americans - Roosevelt, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman • Henry A. Beers
... deadly instrument we discovered it to be loaded to the very muzzle, a mixture of pebbles, slugs, and bits of iron being crammed into the barrel over a charge of a couple of ounces of powder. On our inquiring why it was so heavily charged, the man told us with much naivete, that it was to kill nine men, illustrating the method by which this wholesale destruction was to be accomplished, by planting the butt on his hip and whirling the muzzle from right to left in a horizontal direction across us ...
— A Peep into Toorkisthhan • Rollo Burslem
... the other seemed fearful and diffident even to a degree of bashfulness, through which, however, I could discern a delicate sensibility and uncommon understanding. There was in his person, which was very agreeable, as well as in his behaviour, a certain naivete that was very pleasing; and, at this first interview, we relished each other's company so well, that a sort of intimacy immediately commenced, and was carried on in a succession of parties of pleasure, in the course of which I found him fraught ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... the lowest ebb, to go wandering about the world like Teufelsdroeckh, looking for a rest for the sole of his foot. And yet all the time, with incomparable naivete, he ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... [112] having nothing in common with other mythical literature. For example, we have, in the story of Izanagi, the world-maker, visiting the shades to recall his dead spouse, a myth that seems to be purely Japanese. The archaic naivete of the recital must impress anybody who studies the literal translation. I shall present only the substance of the legend, which has been recorded in a number of ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... conditions to help him with money. Although, as we see, the messengers had been stopped on the way, the Turkish envoy had all the same found a means of getting his despatch sent to the pope: we give it here in all its naivete. ...
— The Borgias - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... discarding medieval naivete and superstition, in assuming a freer attitude towards theological authority, and in developing a new conception of the value of individual personality, men looked to the guidance of Greek and Roman thinkers, and called up the spirit of ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... resist this invincible naivete. Courtland bit his lip as the vision arose before him of this still more naif English admirer bringing hither, at Miss Sally's bidding, the tribute which she wished to place on the grave of an old lover to please a THIRD man. Meantime, she had put her two little hands behind ...
— Sally Dows and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... 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 fellow with his combination of appealing ignorance ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... further point may be noted. Aeschylus always has a taste for the unseen and the supernatural; and one effective incident here is the raising of Darius's ghost, and his prophecy of the disastrous battle of Plataea. But in the ghost's revelations there is a mixture of audacity and naivete, characteristic at once of the poet and the early youth of the drama. The dead Darius prophesies Plataea, but has not heard of Salamis; he gives a brief (and inaccurate) list of the Persian kings, which the queen and chorus, whom he addresses, presumably know; and his only practical ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... 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 ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... 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 ...
— Sex and Society • William I. Thomas
... reader. Suffice it to say, that the incident proved my friend. The ice of indifference was broken; and I was rewarded for my sleight-of-hand prowess by something more than smiles—by words of praise that rang melodiously in my ear— words of gratitude spoken with the free innocent naivete of childhood— revealing, on the part of her who gave utterance to them, a ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... For once the extreme 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 that hitherto guarded the council at Brissago ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... Fontaine 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., the delicate carving and sculpture, so original in ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... will be 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
... simplicity of the language as if they had been written by Burns or by a Greek lyrist. I do not think that it would be possible to find anywhere in the English language more pure and fresh delight in the sights and sounds of rural nature expressed with such apparent naivete. And all the time the mind's eye is kept so closely, so distinctly, on the object that the result is often the sublimity of art as defined by Longinus, the selection and combination of exactly those features which are the most essential ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... her companion closely,—evidently Mlle. Fouchette was in earnest. Such naivete in a ragpicker ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... and good-breeding which the exquisite polish of his compositions would lead us to expect. He was always cheerful and animated, often, indeed, boisterous in his mirth; entered with spirit into convivial society; contributed largely to its enjoyments by solidity of information, and the naivete and originality of his character; talked often without premeditation, and laughed ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... and the comic papers; if they were left with no other assistance than this, absolutely free to please themselves, and could be persuaded not to try and please any one else, I believe that in fifty years we should have all that was ever done repeated with fresh naivete, and as much more delightfully than even by the best old masters, as these are more delightful than anything we know of in classic painting. The young plants keep growing up abundantly every day—look at Bastianini, dead not ten years since—but they are browsed down by the ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... he 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, playing ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... 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, whom she ...
— Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 • S.M. Fuller
... This naivete confused Mrs. Armine. For a moment it seemed to be pushing away her anger, to be drawing the sting from her curiosity. But then the childishness of this strange rival stirred up in her a more acrid bitterness than she had known till now. And the wondering touch became intolerable ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... every noble spark within the human breast into speedier and more brilliant flame. In this sense the Roman aristocracy had been at all times hereditary; in fact, it had displayed its hereditary character with great naivete in the old custom of the senator taking his sons with him to the senate, and of the public magistrate decorating his sons, as it were by anticipation, with the insignia of the highest official honour—the ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... ubiquity. His principal and most favourite post was of course by the side of the ladies, who, sensible of his extreme attention to their safety, began to converse with him in almost the tone of familiar friendship, and appeared to take great pleasure in the naivete, yet shrewdness, of his conversation. Yet Quentin did not suffer the fascination of this intercourse to interfere with the vigilant discharge of ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... 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, "most ...
— In a Hollow of the Hills • Bret Harte
... that existed in the girl's soul. Mother and daughter had never been parted; thus Cecile had, what is more rare in young girls than is generally supposed, a purity of thought, a freshness of heart, and a naivete of nature, real, complete, ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac
... that you told him that," Morton replied primly, albeit he was hard put to it to prevent himself from chuckling aloud over the naivete of this indiscreet ...
— Making People Happy • Thompson Buchanan
... lake. His hair, sparse and unkempt of growth, was as indeterminate and colorless as his complexion. It would seem that all the color of his frame had gone into his eyes, for they were startlingly blue. Also, they were laughing and merry eyes, within them much of the naivete and wonder of the child; and yet, in an unassertive way, they contained much of calm self-reliance and strength of purpose founded upon self-experience and ...
— Moon-Face and Other Stories • Jack London
... one man, who was noted in the place for his outspokenness, which would have been brutal had it not been for his naivete—"I heard she wasn't going to ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman |
