"Precocious" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... hair: a cross between a goddess and a Madonna—that was Colin's Ideal—Good Heavens! What did he now behold? A very little woman. One of the snippets he despised. Not an ounce of the traditional dignity about her. Lady Bridget gave the impression of an old-fashioned, precocious child, dressed up in a picture frock of soft shining white stuff, hanging on a straight slender form and gathered into a girdle at the waist, with a wisp of old lace flung carelessly over the slight ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... the poet made some progress in acquiring the art of painting; and the bequest suggests the possibility that the precocious child had already given some indications of artistic taste. Affectionate eyes were certainly on the watch for any symptoms of developing talent. Pope was born on May 21st, 1688—the annus mirabilis which introduced a new political era in England, and was fatal to the hopes of ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... empty pork-barrel in front of McMullin's shebang. A small and vagrant infant, whose associations with empty barrels were doubtless hitherto connected solely with dreams of saccharine dissipation, approached the bunghole with precocious caution, and retired with celerity and a certain acquisition of experience. An unattached goat, a martyr to the radical theory of personal investigation, followed in the footsteps of infantile humanity, retired with even greater promptitude, and ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 1 • Various
... scientist to inject a milligram of the lymph into the femoral artery of Miss Susan's cat. Within an hour the precocious beast surreptitiously entered my library for the first time in her life, and ate the covers of my pet edition of Rabelais. This demonstrated to Dr. O'Rell's satisfaction the efficacy of his diagnostic, and it proved to Judge Methuen's ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field
... so general a remark, but it is easier to point out men who have been successful both at school and in life, than to find sufficient evidence that school and college prizes prevent further triumphs. Macaulay, who is noted by Stevenson as an exception, was precocious enough to arouse the fears rather than the hopes of his friends. When he was four years old, he hurt his finger, and a lady inquiring politely as to whether the injured member was better, the infant replied gravely, "Thank you, ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of Day, and The Fairchild Family. I wonder if any one ever reads this book now. If they haven't, they should. Mr. and Mrs. Fairchild were, I regret to say it, self-righteous prigs of the deepest dye, whilst Lucy, Emily, and Henry, their children, were all little prodigies of precocious piety. It was a curious menage; Mr. Fairchild having no apparent means of livelihood, and no recreations beyond perpetually reading the Bible under a tree in the garden. Mrs. Fairchild had the peculiar gift of being able to recite a different prayer off by heart applicable to every conceivable ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... nuisance. Husbands may escape from her when their business compels them to be away from home all day; but young children may be, and quite often are, killed by her cuddling and coddling and doctoring and preaching: above all, by her continuous attempts to excite precocious sentimentality, a practice as objectionable, and possibly as mischievous, as the worst ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw
... so grave and great and unemotional—had been since he had entered the convent in his precocious boyhood the central figure, fascinating the interest of his community by the marvel of his progress, so that those who had been his teachers stood reverently aside, before he had attained to manhood, recognizing gifts beyond their leading ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... achievements. Almost any other youth who had as much of the sense of language as was there exhibited, would have been led astray by the standards of the hour, would have mounted the spread-eagle and flapped its wings in rhetorical clamor. But Lincoln was not precocious. In art, as in everything else, he progressed slowly; the literary part of him worked its way into the matter-of-fact part of him with the gradualness of the daylight through a shadowy wood. It was not ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... me was that, staggered at the amount of "book-learning" implied by my conversation (for the journalistic instinct, I am inclined to think, was early displayed in me), they would listen open-mouthed to all my information, regarding me as a precocious oracle. Sometimes they would obtain permission to take me home with them to tea, generously eager that their friends should also profit by me. Then, encouraged by admiring, grinning faces, I would "hold forth," keenly enjoying the sound of ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... of the child in earlier years is chronicled in our ancient parchment with as much care as in the vellum-bound volume of our church scriptures. At the age of twelve, the last glimpse we have of Jesus in the New Testament, is as a precocious boy, seated in the Temple, expounding the Scriptures to the learned members of the Sanhedrin. After that, we have no further sight of him, until sixteen years later, he re-appears at the marriage in Cana, a grown and serious man, already with well-formulated ...
— Violets and Other Tales • Alice Ruth Moore
... opposed to the Christian, and at the same time that a reconciliation had to be effected. Each had been worked out separately; but both were needed for the modern synthesis. All that aesthetic handling, in this region more precocious and more immediately fruitful than pure thought, could do towards mingling them, was done by the impartiality of the fine arts. Painting, in the work of Raphael, accomplished a more vital harmony ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... recipe for keeping young, a well-known physician refused to reply. In view of the increasing number of precocious authors, the question again arises, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, October 13, 1920 • Various
... nature, as one of Cowley's critics professes to do, is unpardonably partial; to grumble with another at not finding them is futile; even with a third to see in the piece 'a boy's conception of Sicilian life' is, to say the least, unnecessary. Cowley had, indeed, a great deal too much of 'the precocious humour of the world-wise boy' to put forward his play as anything of the kind; he was perfectly aware that it was an absolutely unreal fantasy, based entirely on convention and imitation, the sole merit of which was the more or less clever manner in which borrowing, ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... luck still. In March an unusually early spring set in, and things began to grow. From the big mountains to the ditches by the roadside, everything became green and young; the high-road was peopled by precocious chickens, ducks, and traveling journeymen, and birds of every size flitted through the ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... money-getter; and in getting his money he is a very serious obstruction to less capable neighbours who are on the same quest. I think that that is the trouble. In estimating worldly values the Jew is not shallow, but deep. With precocious wisdom he found out in the morning of time that some men worship rank, some worship heroes, some worship power, some worship God, and that over these ideals they dispute and cannot unite—but that they all worship money; so he made it the end and aim of his life ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... beyond expression," wrote this precocious youth to Washington on the 10th of November, "to inform your Excellency that, on my arrival here, I find everything has been neglected and deranged by General Putnam.... Not the least attention has been paid to my order, in your name, for a detachment of one thousand men from the troops ...
— "Old Put" The Patriot • Frederick A. Ober
... you want? Oh—goroo, goroo!"—until the helpless little fellow was obliged to close with an offer of a few pence instead of half a crown for his waistcoat, is the portrait of some actual Jew dealer whom, in one of the back streets of Chatham, the keen eyes of the precocious child, seeming to look at nothing, had curiously watched hovering like a hideous spider on the pounce behind ...
— Dickens-Land • J. A. Nicklin
... mother had been broken. The three were alone in the world; they lived one life, a life of close sympathy. If Mme. Willemsens was silent in the morning, Louis and Marie would not speak, respecting everything in her, even those thoughts which they did not share. But the older boy, with a precocious power of thought, would not rest satisfied with his mother's assertion that she was perfectly well. He scanned her face with uneasy forebodings; the exact danger he did not know, but dimly he felt it threatening in those purple rings ...
— La Grenadiere • Honore de Balzac
... of philosophers, such as could nowhere have existed except in India, and even there in early times alone. It is with the Hindu mind as if a seed were placed in a hothouse. It will grow rapidly, its colours will be gorgeous, its perfume rich, its fruits precocious and abundant. But never will it be like the oak growing in wind and weather, and striking its roots into real earth, and stretching its branches into real air beneath the stars and the sun of heaven. Both are experiments, the hothouse flower and the Hindu mind; and as experiments, whether physiological ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... intellect singularly precocious, William Riddell, so early as the age of seven, composed in correct and interesting prose, and produced in his eighth year some vigorous poetry. With a highly retentive memory he retained the results of an extended ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume VI - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... were the thoughts that floated through the mind of this child of twelve years old. And from these precocious yearnings after the infinite, Olive's fancy turned to earthly, childish things. She pictured with curious minuteness how she would feel when she awoke next morning, and found that Elspie was dead;—how there would be a funeral; how strange the house would seem afterward; even what would be ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... the 'Apologia,' a picture of his precocious and dreamy boyhood, when he lived in a world of his own, peopled by angels and spirits, a world in which the supernatural was the only nature. He was lonely and reserved, then as always. It is not for nothing ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... previous role of fiancee, and only Octavia Dean and one or two older girls appreciated its mysterious fascination; while the beautiful Rupert, secure in his avowed predilection for the middle-aged wife of the proprietor of the Indian Spring hotel, looked upon her as a precocious chit with more than the usual propensity to objectionable "breathing." Nevertheless the master was irritatingly conscious of her presence—a presence which now had all the absurdity of her ridiculous love-experiences superadded to it. He tried to reason with himself that it was ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... spirit and powerful intellect he detested still more. The first place at the board of Treasury was repeatedly offered to Pitt; but the offer, though tempting, was steadfastly declined. The young man, whose judgment was as precocious as his eloquence, saw that his time was coming, but was not come, and was deaf to royal importunities and reproaches. His Majesty, bitterly complaining of Pitt's faintheartedness, tried to break the coalition. Every art of seduction was practised on ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 3. (of 4) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... "He's very precocious and very sensitive, and his mother thinks she can't begin to guard him too early." Miss Ambient's head drooped a little to one side and her eyes fixed themselves on futurity. Then of a sudden came a strange alteration; her face lighted ...
— The Author of Beltraffio • Henry James
... D. came shortly after Christmas. The spireas were in bloom, and the monthly roses; you could always find a sweet violet or two somewhere in the yard; here and there splotches of deep pink against gray cabin walls proved that precocious peach-trees were in bloom. It never rained. At night it was cold enough for fires. In the middle of the day it was hot. The wind never blew, and every morning we had a four for tennis and every afternoon we rode in the woods. And every night we sat in front of the fire (that didn't smoke because ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis
... he practise on the soft sands, laughing as he falls, and rising to try again. And thus, does he quickly, wonderfully develop, unfolding in the little circle of his caressers—in his mother's lap, in Shakib's arms, on Khalid's back, on Mrs. Gotfry's knee—the irresistible charm of his precocious spirit. ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... seven years—directed their steps towards the wild moors above their home rather than into the village. Over a century has passed, and practically no change has come to the moorland side of the house, so that we can imagine the precocious toddling children going hand-in-hand over the grass-lands towards the moors beyond, as though we had travelled ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... he was apprenticed to a cobbler. There, bending over his work on the pavement outside the shop-door, his blue eyes and curly fair hair, his rosy cheeks, his winning smile, his precocious retorts, attracted the most favourable comment from the passers-by and secured him an unfailing supply of chocolates and cigarettes. People liked him so much that he quickly learned not only how to mend shoes but a good many other things ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... distinguished, almost from his earliest infancy, by those precocious accomplishments, which, because they consist in an imitation of the vices and follies of maturity, render a boy the favorite plaything of men. He seemed to have received from nature the convivial talents, which, whether natural or acquired, are a most ...
— Fanshawe • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... wisdom,—for they all quote him. So, many a tongue the evening hour prolongs With spangled speeches,—let alone the songs; Statesmen grow merry, lean attorneys laugh, And weak teetotals warm to half and half, And beardless Tullys, new to festive scenes, Cut their first crop of youth's precocious greens, And wits stand ready for impromptu claps, With loaded barrels and percussion caps, And Pathos, cantering through the minor keys, Waves all her onions to the trembling breeze; While the great Feasted views with silent glee His scattered ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... born December 9, 1594. He was the son of King Charles IX. of Sweden, and the grandson of the renowned Gustavus Vasa. He was a precocious child, and it is told (though it appears rather incredible) that at the age of twelve he spoke Latin, French, German, Dutch, and Italian with great fluency, besides having a superficial acquaintance with Polish and Russian. There can be no doubt, however, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various
... method, but his custom of making his pupil stand upright, with his head and back against the wall while playing, no doubt gave to him that repose and grace of bearing which was so noticeable in later years. Lundholm was, however, quite unable to control his precocious pupil and a coolness soon sprung up between them, which appears to have culminated in ...
— Famous Violinists of To-day and Yesterday • Henry C. Lahee
... Anthophora (A. pilipes). The males of the Osmia make their appearance even before those of the Anthophora and at so early a season that the young Sitaris-larvae are perhaps not yet aroused by the instinctive impulse which urges them to activity. It is no doubt to their precocious awakening that the males of the Osmia owe their ability to traverse with impunity the corridors in which the young Sitaris-grubs are heaped together, without having the latter fasten to their fleece; at least, I cannot ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... "She was a precocious huntress: early in youth she passed through the accumulator stage, leaving it to the crude or village belle to rejoice in numbers and the excitement of teasing cubs in the bear-pit. It is the nature of this imagined Carmen to play fiercely with one imitation of love after another: ...
— The Flirt • Booth Tarkington
... charming as Rebecca, and who is so nimble in skipping about the stage when avoiding the melodramatic Sir Brian de Bois-Guilbert-sans-Sullivan, and so generally active and artful as to be quite a Becky Sharp,—nor, I say, did Miss MACINTYRE seem to treat her precocious parent (Isaac must have married very young, seeing that Becky is full twenty-one, and Isaac apparently very little more than twenty-eight, or, say, thirty) with any great tenderness and affection; but these feelings no doubt will be intensified, as she becomes more and more accustomed ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100. February 14, 1891. • Various
... little fellow was coming to think for himself and had an active and earnest mind. In fact, he was so precocious and said such droll things as greatly to amuse the king and those around him. Here is one of his sayings, spoken in a spell of cold weather when the butter could not be spread on the bread. The prince bent a piece of ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 9 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. Scandinavian. • Charles Morris
... the Byronic flush it looks as if in- fluenced by the historical descriptions in 'Childe Harold', and might provide a quotation for a tourist's guide to Spain. The history seems competent, and the artistic knowledge precocious. ...
— Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins - Now First Published • Gerard Manley Hopkins
... The precocious little savage was known to every rider on the trail from St. Joe to Sacramento. Of course the Indians were always on the alert to steal the horses that belonged to the stations, but where Little Cayuse was living they never made a success of it, owing to his vigilance. Often ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... City from the clutches of the Saracens, and set a second Godfrey upon the vacant throne of Palestine. To this important end the experiences of his infancy and his training by the Jesuits had undoubtedly tended to urge the precocious young poet. The servants of his father's house at Sorrento must many a time have regaled his eager boyish mind with harrowing tales of the infidel pirates who scoured the Tyrrhene Sea within sight ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... "The cunning of a precocious boy," prompted Eustace Eubanks, who was one of us. "He is well aware that we would not dare ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... in those strange colleges, for the most part precocious urchins, fall into classes, which, however, are not sharply divided off from one another. Day and night they sit bent over the huge folios of the Rabbis, occupied constantly with the study of the Law. Their meals are furnished ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz
... boy, who was precocious for his age, heard what his mother had said, and seeing that he had not been scolded for his ill behaviour, began to scream and struggle more than ever, and his little sister imitated him, in a dutiful, feminine way. I then lost my patience, seized the little boy, dragged ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... Diaz saw waiting at his table when he dined.* (* Bernal Diaz Hist. Verd. de la Nueva Espana 1630.) The custom of marrying very young, according to the testimony of the monks, is no way detrimental to population. This precocious nubility depends on the race, and not on the influence of a climate excessively warm. It is found on the north-west coast of America, among the Esquimaux, and in Asia, among the Kamtschatdales, and the Koriaks, where girls of ten years old are often mothers. It may appear astonishing, that the time ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... with such volubility that nobody could keep pace with me. First I scolded the nurse, then abused the fairies, and finally took my parents to task roundly for attempting to stop me. The courtiers tried to persuade them that this was only an omen of my precocious genius, and that, beyond all doubt, I should one day become the wisest, most eloquent princess in the world. But they remembered the threat of the malicious old fairy, and became exceeding sorrowful. As I grew up my volubility increased; I talked ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various
... the boy who shrank from the very sight of a sword seemed helpless. But if the young king had little physical courage, morally he proved fearless enough. He drew confidence in himself from a sense of his intellectual superiority to the men about him. From his earliest years indeed James showed a precocious cleverness; and as a child he startled grave councillors by his "discourse, walking up and down in the Lady Mar's hand, of knowledge and ignorance." It was his amazing self-reliance which enabled him to bear the strange loneliness of his life. He had nothing in common ...
— History of the English People, Volume V (of 8) - Puritan England, 1603-1660 • John Richard Green
... rose no rose. Leaf after leaf fell under Mr. Stackpole's touch, as if it had been a black frost. The American government was a rickety experiment; go to pieces presently,—American institutions an alternative between fallacy and absurdity, the fruit of raw minds and precocious theories;—American liberty a contradiction;— American character a compound of quackery and pretension;—American society (except at Mrs. Evelyn's) an anomaly;—American destiny the same with that ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... said M. Ricot, holding up his hands in amazement. The boy referred to was a little fellow seven or eight years of age, by name Louis Joseph de Saint Veran. M. Ricot was his tutor, and was led to express himself after this fashion in consequence of some precocious criticisms of his pupil on the tactics employed by Caius Julius Caesar at a battle fought in Transalpine Gaul fifty odd years before the advent of the Christian era. It was evident to the critic's youthful ...
— Canadian Notabilities, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... Baker Glover Patterson Eddy (1821-1910) was born at Bow, New Hampshire. After a precocious and neurotic childhood, she united with the Congregational Church when seventeen years of age. At the age of twenty-two she married George Washington Glover, probably the best of her husbands. His death, six months later, was followed by the birth of her only child and ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... can discover, on the anthers opening in the bud; no evidence being adduced that the stigma is at this period mature, or that it is not subsequently acted on by pollen brought from other flowers. In the case of Cephalanthera grandiflora I have shown that precocious and partial self-fertilisation, with subsequent full fertilisation, is the regular course of events. (3/4. 'Fertilisation of Orchids' page 108; 2nd edition 1877 page 84.) The belief that the flowers of many plants are fertilised in the bud, that is, are perpetually self-fertilised, is a most ...
— The Different Forms of Flowers on Plants of the Same Species • Charles Darwin
... It is a premature, an unconscious effort made by a limited class to achieve per saltum what was slowly and laboriously wrought out by whole nations in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Too precocious, too complete within too narrow limits, it was doomed to sterility. Not the least singular fact about it is that though the Carmina Vagorum continued to be appreciated, they were neither imitated nor developed to any definite extent after the period which I have indicated. They ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various
... in the tale the young Prince's sister (Margaret) is described as residing at the castle. Now Margaret married Charles of Alencon at Blois, in October 1509, and forthwith removed to Alencon. Possibly Francis, who was very precocious, especially in matters of gallantry, engaged in the love affair narrated by his sister at a yet earlier age than she asserts, in which case the town she refers to would undoubtedly ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. IV. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... capacities the elder Coleridge was a sincere man, gentle and kindly, whose memory was "like a religion" to his sons and daughters. In that same year was born Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the youngest of thirteen children. He was an extraordinarily precocious child, who could read at three years of age, and who, before he was five, had read the Bible and the Arabian Nights, and could remember an astonishing amount from both books. From three to six he attended a "dame" school; and from six till nine (when his father died and left ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... idealism. The naive realism of Filippino Lippi's chubby baby, placidly sucking his thumb as he looks out of the picture, is matched in the frolicsome boys of Andrea del Sarto's many paintings, smiling mischievously from the Madonna's arms. At the other extreme is the strangely precocious looking child of Botticelli, raising his eyes heavenward, with a mystic ...
— Child-life in Art • Estelle M. Hurll
... describe my son. Like all children, he was imitative, so had commenced very early to make a collection of insects, and this was sufficient to give him a precocious taste for natural history; but in his character he was earnest and reflective, and very eager for knowledge. Sumichrast took pleasure in the boy's intelligence, and often amused himself by arguing with him. From the flashes of childish humor which he would display on such occasions, my friend ...
— Adventures of a Young Naturalist • Lucien Biart
... occasion he entered into the matter with the zeal of a true friend, and a young man who never expected to have another occasion to sing a public "In Memoriam." It made my hair stand on end,—metaphorically, of course. From my childhood I had been extremely precocious. There were anecdotes of preternatural brightness, picked up, Heaven knows where, of my eagerness to learn, of my adventurous, chivalrous young soul, and of my arduous struggles with chill penury, which was not able (as it appeared) to repress my rage, until I entered this institution, ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... of trees, I saw that the buildings cleverly contrived to look old and grey and picturesque, like ours. The elms in a big green square past the top of the hill had a venerable air, too, so they must have been precocious about growing, for it doesn't stand to reason that West Point can be as ancient as Oxford or Eton. But anyway, the elms were there, making an effect that England couldn't improve on, and there were some grey stone ...
— Lady Betty Across the Water • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... the situation before his young Patroclus, that precocious warrior at once justified the confidence reposed ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... Pitt was a most precocious child, and was fond of reading stiff books of history and poetry at an age when other children barely knew their letters. Even whilst in the nursery he would declare that 'when he was a man he would speak in ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... mechanical toys. When the working of these brought a deeper tint into his cheeks, and a brighter light into his eyes, Madam Liberality was quite happy; and when he broke them one after another, his infatuated aunt believed this to be a precocious development of manly energies. ...
— A Great Emergency and Other Tales - A Great Emergency; A Very Ill-Tempered Family; Our Field; Madam Liberality • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
... was lively, and rather bold, not at all in the coarse sense, but she struck me as having formed a system of ethics and views of life, both good-humoured and sarcastic, and had carried into her rustic sequestration the melancholy and precocious lore of her ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... it is a bad sign, as well from an intellectual as from a moral point of view, if he is precocious in understanding the ways of the world, and in adapting himself to its pursuits; if he at once knows how to deal with men, and enters upon life, as it were, fully prepared. It argues a vulgar nature. On the other hand, to be surprised ...
— Counsels and Maxims - From The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... most precocious nature, who was termed 'tua tara,' from a horrid sort of lizard that ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... was not related to him. Thence at the age of seventeen he had been sent to a German University, and at the age of twenty-one had appeared in London, in a stockbroker's office, where he was soon known as an accomplished linguist, and as a very clever fellow,—precocious, not given to many pleasures, apt for work, but hardly trustworthy by employers, not as being dishonest, but as having a taste for being a master rather than a servant. Indeed his period of servitude was very short. It was not in his nature ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... precocious the life which I bore, Which I drew sweetly in with each breath! The fulness of life did no more Than ripen a fruitage for death, Within me, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... detached from the opposition, and that Godolphin had been removed from the head of the hoard of Treasury. The party which Sunderland had done so much to serve now held a new pledge for his fidelity. His only son, Charles Lord Spencer, was just entering on public life. The precocious maturity of the young man's intellectual and moral character had excited hopes which were not destined to be realized. His knowledge of ancient literature, and his skill in imitating the styles of the masters of Roman eloquence, were applauded by veteran scholars. The sedateness ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... posterity; but our own times have seen a bolder war, a broader peace, and a richer development of science, invention, and eloquence. For fifty years, England was pronounced to have worn herself out by the prolific brilliancy of the half century before; like a precocious infant, to have anticipated her powers, and ensured their premature decay; like the Boeotians, to have had her Pindaric period, and thenceforward to have paid for its raptures and renown by perpetual darkness; or like the Israelites in Egypt, to be condemned to drudgery for ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... Pittsburgh, for he came thither in November, 1753, and established the location of the now imperial city by choosing it as the best place for a fort. Washington was then twenty-one years old. He had by that time written his precocious one hundred and ten maxims of civility and good behavior; had declined to be a midshipman in the British navy; had made his only sea-voyage to Barbados; had surveyed the estates of Lord Fairfax, going for months into the forest without fear of savage Indians ...
— A Short History of Pittsburgh • Samuel Harden Church
... and mothers, they have none of the habits or character necessary to govern their household and to train their children properly. Hence arise that growing neglect or laxity of family discipline; that insubordination, that lawlessness, and precocious depravity of Young America; that almost total lack of filial reverence and obedience with the children of this generation. Exceptions there happily are; but the number of children that grow up without any proper training or discipline at ...
— Public School Education • Michael Mueller
... remember how bitterly I wept, and how deeply humiliated I felt. But the little incident, so mortifying to me, did not spoil my first appearance altogether. The Times of May 1, 1856, was kind enough to call me "vivacious and precocious," and "a worthy relative of my sister Kate," and my parents were pleased (although they would not show it too much), and Mrs. Kean gave me a pat on the back. Father and Kate were both in the cast, too, I ought to have said, and the Queen, Prince ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... of Shortshanks may be taken as a fair, and even a favorable example of the tone of these Norse tales. Shortshanks and King Sturdy are twin brothers, who set out to seek their fortunes within a few minutes of their birth, driven thereto by a precocious perception of the res angustae domi. They part at two roads almost immediately, and the story follows the fortunes of Shortshanks, the younger; for in these miniature romances the elder is, as usual, continually ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... tendencies transmitted by heredity and developed by the precocious rudeness and constant brutalities of the colleges had made the youth of the day strangely crude and as strangely positive and cold, it had none the less preserved, in the back of their heads, an old blue flower, an old ideal ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... nature-mystic's view of the situation which, when really attained, is seen to be of no less importance, though it is too often left in comparative obscurity. It is easily approached from the purely aesthetic side. The city may develop a quick and precocious intelligence, but it is at the cost of eliminating a rich range of experiences which should be the heritage of all normal human beings. In the city, the mind tends to be immersed in a restricted and specialised round of duties and pleasures, ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... wiles and insinuating ways known to the professional student of human nature. So that, when Fouchette reached the Prefecture, she had not only imparted valuable information, she had astounded her official auditor. Not altogether by what she had revealed, but quite as much by her precocious cleverness ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... Moravian school at Niesky, and then to Barby. He was to escape the contamination of the universities, and the woes through which his father had passed. Even there the spirit of the age pursued him. The precocious lad, in his loneliness, raised every question which the race was wrestling with. He long concealed these facts, dreading to wound the man he so revered. Then in a burst of filial candour, he threw himself ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... nullities we see gradually rising a young monster—with face handsome and tranquil—Saint-Just! A sort of precocious Sulla, who at five-and-twenty suddenly springs from the ranks, and by force of atrocity wins his place! Six years before, he began life by an act of domestic robbery: while on a visit at his mother's, he ran away in the night ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... insensibly the displeasure will efface itself to make way for quite another feeling. The hill has at last become a mountain, so high a mountain that it is quite impossible for our eyes to take it in at one look. There is an object more precocious than all this smiling plain which surrounds it, and the impression that it makes on us is of such a nature that we should regret to exchange it for any other impression, however beautiful it might be. Now, suppose this mountain to be leaning, and of such an inclination ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... Instinct in Boys.—Sooner or later in different individuals, the boy pays attention to his erections, which are at first produced in a reflex and involuntary manner. Mental development and reflection, so precocious in man, are causes which draw attention to the differences of the sexes before the sexual appetite is developed. It is, however, the first signs of this appetite which concentrate the attention on these ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... has compelled me for several months to catch an early train at Broad Street three times a week. I call it an "early" train, but, of course, these matters are merely relative; 7:45 are the figures illuminated over the gateway—not so very precocious, perhaps; but quite rathe enough for one of Haroun-al-Raschid temper, who seldom seeks the "oblivion of repose" (Boswell's phrase) ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... right in his early notion of himself as a slow moving mind? Would it be true to say that, compared with Pitt, for instance, he ripened slowly? Or can we accurately describe him as having in any department of life, thought, knowledge, feeling, been precocious? Perhaps not. To speak of slowness in a man of such magical rapidity of intellectual apprehension would be indeed a paradox, but we have seen already how when he is walking in the middle path of his years, there is a sense in which he was slow in character and motion. ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... corrosive criticism irritated his sensitiveness, and it was not until he recalled his last meeting with her and her innocent escort that he was himself again. Fortunately, he did not relate it to the critic, who would in all probability have added a precocious motherhood to the young ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... their foe. Charles XII was a mere boy, but precocious, gloomy, and sensitive, and endowed with all the martial determination and heroism of his ancestors. He desired nothing better than to fight against overwhelming odds, and the fury of the youthful commander soon earned him the sobriquet of the "madman of the North." ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... the floor was no careful pose: it was due to the brimming overplus of his happiness. Happiness is surely the best teacher of good manners: only the unhappy are churlish in deportment. He was young, remember; and this was his first job. His precocious experience as a paterfamilias had added to his mien just that suggestion of unconscious gravity which is so appealing to ladies. He looked (they thought) as though he had been touched—but Oh so lightly!—by poetic sorrow or strange experience: to ask him the way to the notion ...
— Where the Blue Begins • Christopher Morley
... eyes chanced to turn toward the main entrance door of the East Room. I saw, pushing through, a certain page, a young boy of good family, who was employed by Mr. Calhoun as messenger. He knew me perfectly well, as he did almost every one else in Washington, and with precocious intelligence his gaze picked me out ...
— 54-40 or Fight • Emerson Hough
... sentence:—"What can be said of those beardless poets who dare to sing at that age, when, if they were true poets, they would not have too much in their whole being with which to feel, and to inhale silently, those perfumes which later only they may know how to diffuse in their verse? There are precocious mathematicians; ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... had a son, as we said; Prince of the Tyrol and appendages, titular Margraf of Mahren and much else, by nature: but alas, he died about ten; a precocious boy,—fancy the wild weeping of a maternal She-bear! And the Father had already died; [In 1361, died Kurfurst Ludwig; 1363, the Boy; 1366, Maultasche herself.] a malicious world whispering that perhaps she poisoned them BOTH. ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol, II. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Of Brandenburg And The Hohenzollerns—928-1417 • Thomas Carlyle
... heir of my invention' implies that the poem was written, or at least designed, before Shakespeare's dramatic work. It is affluent in beautiful imagery and metrical sweetness, but imbued with a tone of license which may be held either to justify the theory that it was a precocious product of the author's youth, or to show that Shakespeare was not unready in mature years to write with a view to gratifying a patron's somewhat lascivious tastes. The title-page bears a beautiful Latin motto from ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... consisted of young prodigies of nine and ten, who were going up the school at the rate of a form a half-year, all boys' hands and wits being against them in their progress. It would have been one man's work to see that the precocious youngsters had fair play; and as the master had a good deal besides to do, they hadn't, and were for ever being shoved down three or four places, their verses stolen, their books inked, their jackets whitened, and their lives otherwise made a burden ...
— Tom Brown's Schooldays • Thomas Hughes
... group, these two women of different races, exhibiting, as they did, the characteristic beauty of each: Tahoser elegant, graceful, and slender, like a child that has grown too fast; Ra'hel dazzling, blooming, and superb in her precocious maturity. ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... life, as a contemporary chronicler mentions, had distinguished himself by an accomplishment extremely rare among the young country gentlemen of his own day—indeed, we may add of our own—that is to day, a precocious ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... preposterous (rear end foremost) and cart before the horse; between salary (salt-money, an allowance for soldiers) and pin-money; between pedigree (crane's foot, from the appearance of genealogical diagrams) and crowsfeet (about the eyes); between either precocious (early cooked), apricot (early cooked), crude (raw), or recrudescence (raw again) and half-baked. To ponder is literally to weigh; to apprehend an idea is to take hold of it; to deviate is to go out of one's way; to congregate is to flock together; ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... is the more interesting, in the present connection, since it contrasts strongly with the unqualified commendation Dr. Clarke accords the other sisters. From the same authority we learn that as a child Miss Mehetabel was so precocious that at the age of eight she could read the Greek Testament in the original; that she was from her earliest youth emotional and sentimental; that despite her intellectual tastes and attainments she gave her hand to an illiterate journeyman plumber and ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce
... of bodily discomforts, each a dagger to repose, and mental disquietudes, of which any one was enough to wither all the poppies of Somnus, I rose about four o' my watch, and commenced chewing the narcotic weed of Virginia. For you must know that in childhood almost, through a precocious mannishness and a desire of experimental knowledge, I commenced the habit of tobacco-chewing, and the vice born of a freak, has 'grown with my growth,' till now it holds me as in a 'vice' screwed up ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various
... corruptions, a hinge got twisted, and after a time it acquired the habit of suddenly, and with an unpleasant oscillatory laughing noise, opening of its own accord and proclaiming its horrid secret to Euphemia's best visitors. An air of wickedness, at once precocious and senile, came upon it; it gaped and leered at Euphemia as the partner of her secret with such a familiar air of "I and you" that she could stand it no longer, and this depraved piece of furniture was banished at last from her presence, and relegated to its proper sphere of sham gentility ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... this dark, cavern-like den—in this mysterious caldron of precocious depravity, rioting unheeded in the very centre of a great city, whose boasted wealth and civilization it might put to shame, if indeed it were capable of shame, I first met the child of beauty, Anna Bonard. Yes!—the Anna Bonard you now see at the house of Madame Flamingo. ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... to be overcome. A companionable and sensible father aids him judiciously, and leaves success to be worked out on natural lines. All the stage effects of the cheaper kinds of boys' books are blissfully absent; there are no villains plotting against the upright, no nations saved by the precocious intelligence of youth, and no impossible adventure or accomplishment—just the problems before average boys, and that can be solved as these boys solve them if "Mr. Responsibility" is recognized as a partner in all undertakings, and one learns to see and grasp his opportunities. A book that ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Foresters • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... Rolls, naturally gifted with extreme sensibility, on which a careful education had imposed due restraint, had barely completed her twelfth year when she was married to Martin Guerre, a boy of about the same age, such precocious unions being then not uncommon, especially in the Southern provinces. They were generally settled by considerations of family interest, assisted by the extremely early development habitual to the climate. The young couple lived for a long time as brother and sister, and Bertrande, thus early ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - MARTIN GUERRE • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... and book lore and the command of the English tongue were William Wetherell's only legacies to his daughter, and many an evening that spring she had read him to sleep from classic volumes of prose and poetry I hesitate to name, for fear you will think her precocious. They went across the green to Cousin Ephraim Prescott's harness shop, where Jethro had tied his horse, and it was settled that Cynthia ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... with a blue leather belt about his waist. He had fine lace ruffles at his wrists, a fine line of white at his throat, and in his ears (if you could have seen them) gold rings. Just the pampered young minion of any Tuscan court, a precocious wrappage of wit, good manners, and sensibility, he looked what he spoke, the exquisite Florentine, to these broad-vowelled Venetian lasses; did not smile, but seemed never out of temper; and was certainly not timid. Self-possessed, reticent ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... little girls to little boys is to go into quite another, an inferior, coarser world. No doubt there are wonderful little boys, but as a rule their wonderfulness consists in a precocious intellect: this kind doesn't appeal to me, so that if I were to say anything on the matter, it would be a prejudiced judgment. Even the ordinary civilised little boy, the nice little gentleman who is as much at home in the drawing-room ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson
... with the quickness of a mind precocious on some points though childish on others. "Then if I had been brave and told the truth, he might ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of this commemorative history was remarkable for a precocious development of intelligence. An old nurse who saw him at the very earliest period of his existence is said to have spoken of him as one of the most promising infants she had seen in her long experience. At school he was equally remarkable, and at a tender ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... overheard by Annie, who, we may here seize the opportunity of saying, was, in addition to being a sensitive creature, one of those precocious little philosophers thinly spread in the female world, and made what they are often by delicate health, which reduces them to a habit of thinking much before their time. Not that she wanted the vivacity of her age, but that it was tempered by periods of serious ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Vol. XXIII. • Various
... companionship of his relations; now he had it in perfection. For every word that he said appreciative laughter was ready—it really sparkled round him. When he disagreed with prevailing tastes, prejudices, and morals, they disagreed too. When his precocious intelligence burst upon them, they were always ready to applaud. They even met him half-way—they could foresee the direction of his thoughts. As he was young in years and disposition, and at the same time knew more than most young people, he suited ...
— Absalom's Hair • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... A child was sitting at the foot of the stairs, her face and arms begrimed—her black hair hanging to her back foul with disease and dirt. She was about nine years old; but evil knowledge, cunning duplicity, and the rest, were glaring in her precocious face. She clasped her knees with her extended hands, and swinging backwards and forwards, sang, in a loud and impudent voice, the burden of an obscene song. I asked this creature if a man named Warton dwelt there. She ceased her song, and commenced whistling—then ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... to,' rejoined Master Bardell, 'I'm a-goin' to have some, I am.' Cheered by this prospect, the precocious boy applied himself to his infantile treadmill, ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... one too many for him. What, in any case, was the good of trying to follow? She preferred Palgrave. She had no use, at that moment, for home. She was bored at the mere idea of talking things over. She was not serious. She refused to be faced up with seriousness. She was like a precocious child who snapped her fingers at authority and pursued the policy of the eel at the approach of discipline. What had she cried out that night in the dark with her chin tilted up and her arms thrown out? "I shall go joy-riding in that huge round-about. If I can get anybody to pay my ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... the subject of so much amusement and as to where her governess had really been. She didn't feel at all as if she had been seriously told, and no such feeling was supplied by anything that occurred later. Her embarrassment, of a precocious instinctive order, attached itself to the idea that this was another of the matters it was not for her, as her mother used to say, to go into. Therefore, under her father's roof during the time that followed, she made no attempt to clear up her ambiguity by an ingratiating way with housemaids; and ...
— What Maisie Knew • Henry James
... From the age of ten I specialized in that subject, never for a moment regretting the choice. When I was still a child of twenty-four I took part in the Ninth Jupiter Expedition and after that there were many more. I had a precocious marriage at thirty and my boys, Robert and Neil, were born within a few years after Marla and I wed. It was fortunate that I fought for government permission that early; after the accident, despite my high rating, I would have been denied the rare ...
— Man Made • Albert R. Teichner
... several young men who had pliable backs and flashing breastpins and whom she inarticulately introduced to them, which gave her still more to do, as after this serious step she had to stay and watch all parties. It was strange to Raymond to see her transformed by her mother into a precocious duenna. Him she introduced to no young girl, and he knew not whether to regard this as cold neglect or as high consideration. If he had liked he might have taken it as a sweet intimation that she knew he couldn't care for any girl ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James |
