"Puerile" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... marriage, the allies, that is to say, all the King's enemies, had an outburst of satisfaction, and gave themselves up to puerile jubilations. The King of Great Britain stood definitely on their side; he made common cause with them, and soon there appeared in the political world an audacious document signed by this prince, in which, from the retreat of his island, the empire of fogs, ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... have made ten miles a-day, but preferred doing five. Argument was useless, and I was reluctant to apply the stick, as the Arabs would have done when they saw their porters trifling with their pockets. Determining, however, not to be frustrated in this puerile manner, I ordered the bugler to sound the march, and started with the mules and coast-men, trusting to Sheikh and Baraka to bring on the Wanyamuezi as soon as they could move them. The same day we crossed the Mgazi where we found several Wakhutu spearing fish in the muddy hovers ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke
... errors. But in 1824 Napoleon was dead, a Bourbon reigned in France, and Freycinet was the servant of the monarchy to which he owed the command of the expedition of 1817. The suppression of Napoleon's name and the record of his actions from Peron's text, was a puerile piece of servility. ...
— Terre Napoleon - A history of French explorations and projects in Australia • Ernest Scott
... been so long in the closeness of his carriage. He hesitated as to what he should do, unwilling to return to Unorna and acknowledge himself vanquished, yet finding it hard to resist his desire to try every means, no matter how little reasonable, how evidently useless, how puerile and revolting to his sounder sense. The street behind him led directly towards Unorna's house. Had he found himself in a more remote quarter, he might have come to another and a wiser conclusion. Being so near to ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... gentleman of leisure from the common crowd are, in some measure, marks of an arrested spiritual development. They mark an immature phase, as compared with the stage of development attained by the average of the adults in the modern industrial community. And it will appear presently that the puerile spiritual make-up of these representatives of the upper and the lowest social strata shows itself also in the presence of other archaic traits than this proclivity to ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... slide of the lantern is to represent a quite peculiar and abnormal case. It introduces a strangely fragile, unsubstantial, and puerile figure, wherein, however, resided one of the most potent and original spirits that ever frequented a tenement of clay. He shall be called, on account of associations that may or may not be found out, Thomas Papaverius. But how to make ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... went back to my long-delayed affairs with a heavy heart. The more I thought, the more criminally foolish Nick's journey seemed to me. However puerile the undertaking, De Lemos at Natchez and Carondelet at New Orleans had not the reputation of sleeping at their posts, and their hatred for Americans was well known. I sought General Clark, but he had gone to Knob Licks, and in my anxiety I lay awake at ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... decidedly eccentric. Gray Kidds is one of those individuals whose peculiarity it is never to have been a boy. Kidds at fifteen had whiskers as voluminous as he now has at six-and-twenty, and as he gambolled heavily amongst his more puerile schoolfellows, visitors to the playground used to ask the assistant masters who that man was playing with the boys. They evidently had an uneasy notion that a private lunatic asylum formed a branch of the educational establishment, ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... the wood-nymphs decided not to go into the water home; instead, they implored the water-nymphs to come forth from their liquid residence. But the water-nymphs refused. The dryads tried to lure them with gestures and dances. It was all dreadfully puerile, and yet somehow ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... over him, and for two or three days at a time he would avoid her, as though she were some dissolving agency which would destroy all his power of will should he approach too closely. However, these paroxysms of puerile fear, these wild surgings of his rebellious brain, always ended in thrills of the gentlest tenderness, with yearnings to love and be loved, which he concealed with a ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... pantomime character, who has inadvertently stepped into a melodrama, but the caricature is amusing by its very crudity. She writes in red ink to express "the blushes of her cheek," when she sends a message of encouragement to the Conde d'Ossori. This and other puerile jests are more tolerable than Lewis's attempts to depict passion or describe character. Bold, flaunting splashes of colour, strongly marked, passionate faces, exaggerated gestures start from every page, and his style is as extravagant as his imagery. Sometimes he uses a short, staccato sentence ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... of May, with the little group of black nuns, with discreet babble, with puerile and lifeless laughter, Gracieuse, at all hours, went to church. Hastening their steps under the frequent showers, they went together through the graveyard, full of roses; together, always together, the little ...
— Ramuntcho • Pierre Loti
... our shoulders at sight of the puerile contrivance, the only thing here that recalls to us the gigantic war raging somewhere under the sky. We begin to laugh bitterly, offended and even wounded to the quick in our new impressions. Tirette collects himself, and some ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... and can put it in better language than any man. I hear that he does not like to be told that he may get better; nor is it to be wondered at, considering his firm persuasion that he shall not survive. He can only regard it as a puerile thing, and an insinuation that he shall die. But if his persuasion should happen to be no longer so strong, or if he can now put up with attempts to console him, of what I have said a thousand times, and what I still (upon my honour) think always, that I have seen too many instances ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... strike had come. Shu Kofa made some effort to oppose the Manchu armies, and even assumed the command in person, although he was only a civilian, but his troops had no heart to oppose the Manchus, and the devices to which he resorted to make his military power appear more formidable were both puerile and ineffective. Yet one passage may be quoted to his credit if it gave his opponent an advantage. It is affirmed on good authority that he could have obtained a material advantage if he would only have flooded the country, but he "refused to do so, on the ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... Nettie Wincher as living in privileged intimacy. The Duchess was, indeed, more amiable and accessible than Undine's conception of a Duchess, and displayed a curiosity as great as her daughter's, and much more puerile, concerning her new friend's history and habits. But through her mild prattle, and in spite of her limited perceptions. Undine felt in her the same clear impenetrable barrier that she ran against occasionally in the Princess; ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... flood of vitality, so prodigally lavished upon our world in the beginning, has been ebbing lower and lower; and the theory of organic nature steadily advancing from the lower to the higher is manifestly just as puerile as the old hope of creating energy by a perpetual-motion machine,—and a mistake of precisely the same nature. Both are contradicted by the magnificent law of the Conservation of Energy, which, as we have said, is only the scientific expression of the Scriptural statement ...
— Q. E. D., or New Light on the Doctrine of Creation • George McCready Price
... the tales which offended it, but has not succeeded in discarding them all."(1) Just as the poets of the Rig-Veda prefer to avoid the more offensive traditions about Indra and Tvashtri, so Homer succeeds in avoiding the more grotesque and puerile tales about his own gods.(2) The period of actual apology comes later. Pindar declines, as we have seen, to accuse a god of cannibalism. The Satapatha Brahmana invents a new story about the slaying of Visvarupa. Not Indra, but Trita, ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... wonders differ from Normal Science in this—they are alike objectless, purposeless, puerile, frivolous. They lead on to no grand results; and therefore the world does not heed, and true sages have not cultivated them. But sure I am, that of all I saw or heard, a man, human as myself, was the remote originator; and I believe unconsciously to himself as to the exact effects produced, ...
— The Best Ghost Stories • Various
... the tirade faltered, Victor seemed to forget his anger or else to remind himself it was puerile in contrast with the mortal ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... larvae, 69. Swammerdam, 70. Queen departs when successors are provided for. Queens, artificial rearing, 71. Interesting experiment, 72. Objections against the Bible illustrated, 73. Huish against Huber, 74. His objections puerile. Objections to ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth
... 'presence of mind.' It is a good phrase, that, because an intellectual person, when he is attacked with sudden violence, hasn't for the time being any mind at all. He is just a heap of nerves, a compound of puerile passion and ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... movement, while in another it was an insult to the human understanding. It attempted a purer morality, but abnegated obvious and pressing duties. It was always a contradiction,—lofty while degraded, seeking to comprehend the profoundest mysteries, yet debased by puerile superstitions. ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume V • John Lord
... incursion of those lovers of classified collections, "each with its Latin label on," who believe that in gaining stuffed specimens they may best arrive at the charm and the mystery of that exquisite phenomenon which we call bird-life. Mr. Torrey has no puerile ambitions for birds in the hand, and a bird in the bush makes to his perception holy ground, where he takes the shoes from off his feet and watches and waits, feeling a delightful surprise in each ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, August, 1885 • Various
... in the manufacture of cut-and-dried constitutions is, in consequence, a puerile task, the useless labour of an ignorant rhetorician. Necessity and time undertake the charge of elaborating constitutions when we are wise enough to allow these two factors to act. This is the plan the Anglo-Saxons have adopted, as their great ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... young debutants, he was not intoxicated or dazzled for a moment by his triumph, but accepted it without pride or false modesty, evincing none of the puerile enjoyment of gratified vanity exhibited by the PARVENUS of success. His countrymen who were then in Paris gave him a most affectionate reception. He was intimate in the house of Prince Czartoryski, of the Countess Plater, ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... that, when I opened my heart to you, you pierced it with a mocking glance, and that, when I closed it, it seemed to me I felt within it a treasure that none but you could dispense? Shall I speak of all the frailty and all the mysteries which seem puerile to those who do not respect them? Shall I tell you that when you left me in anger I shut myself up to read your first letters; that there is a favorite waltz that I never played in vain when I felt too keenly the suffering caused by your presence? Ah! wretch that I am! How dearly ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... Histoire de Pascal Paoli, i. 231, 'En traversant la Mediterranee sur de freles navires pour venir s'asseoir au foyer de la nationalite Corse, des hommes graves tels que Boswel et Volney obeissaient sans doute a un sentiment bien plus eleve qu'au besoin vulgaire d'une puerile curiosite' ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... purposed to wreck upon Alkmaar. Already he gloated in anticipation over the havoc which would soon be let loose within those walls. Such ravings, if invented by the pen of fiction, would seem a puerile caricature; proceeding, authentically, from his own, they still appear almost too exaggerated for belief. 'If I take Alkmaar,' he wrote to Philip, 'I am resolved not to leave a single creature alive; the knife shall be put to every throat. Since the example of Harlem has proved of no ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... blind forgetfulness of the evidence of history. The Islam of the earlier centuries evolved and progressed with the nations, and the stimulus it gave to men in the reign of the ancient caliphs is beyond all question. To impute to it the present decadence of the Moslem world is altogether too puerile. The truth is that nations have their day; and to a period of glorious splendour succeeds a time of lassitude and slumber. It is a law of nature. And then one day some danger threatens them, stirs them from ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... consisting in a strain of liberal, enlightened sentiment, an ingenious and original cast of thought, and a painstaking lucidity of style which leaves the writer's meaning even prosaically plain. There is a good deal of absurd and even puerile exegesis in its pages, which makes you wonder how so much sentimentality can co-exist with so much ability; but the book is vitiated for all purposes beyond mere literary entertainment by one grand defect, which is the guarded ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... which you have reference is celebrated, both for its antiquity, and the pleasing harmonies that must ever commend it to the taste of the true lover of music; although I allow that to a disciple of the modern and more flimsy school of this glorious art, it may seem puerile and ridiculous," he remarked, in grandiose patronage. Then, again to Mabel, "There were four of us—as I said—all students. What ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... for ever in the hearts and minds of her readers. In the present redundant age of novel writers and novel-readers, and when one would suppose the supply must far exceed the demand from the amount of puerile and often at the same time prurient literature in the department of fiction that daily flows from the press, it is refreshing to turn to the vigorous and, above all, healthy moral tone of this lady's works. To the present generation they are as if they had never been, and to the ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... the British fleet followed, staggering under their pyramids of sails, with wet decks and the wild north-west gale on their quarter. Hawke's best sailers gained steadily on the laggards of Conflans' fleet. Had Hawke obeyed the puerile tactics of his day he would have dressed his line and refused to attack at all unless he could bring his entire fleet into action. But, as Hawke himself said afterwards, he "had determined to attack them in the old way and make ...
— Deeds that Won the Empire - Historic Battle Scenes • W. H. Fitchett
... already possess? Others have sought the answer in the idea that THE ALL "wished something to love" and others that it created for pleasure, or amusement; or because it "was lonely" or to manifest its power;—all puerile explanations and ideas, belonging to ...
— The Kybalion - A Study of The Hermetic Philosophy of Ancient Egypt and Greece • Three Initiates
... been mentioned, that Sallust was read in the school at Paderborn. It is supposed that Tacitus was known to Wittikind or Dittmar: both relate visions, and several puerile circumstances; but they write with precision, and shew, on many occasions, great ...
— The Life of Hugo Grotius • Charles Butler
... loyalty to justice does not smother the accents of human sympathy; and before proceeding any further, I hope your Honor will appoint some counsel to confer with and advise the prisoner. Her isolation appeals to every noble instinct of manhood, and it were indeed puerile tribute to our lamented General Darrington, to bring his granddaughter before this tribunal, without the aid and defence of legal advisers. Justice itself would not be welcome to me, if unjustly won. My friend, Mr. Hazelton, who ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... frequently knew beforehand what her mistress's plans would be, and was as inconvenient in her kitchen as a calculating prodigy in a counting-house. Things went perfectly right, but the manner was vexatious and irregular; so her mistress sent her away. This anecdote would appear less puerile to you, if I might venture to name the lady who told it to me, and who believed it. But, as I said before, I do not build, in this branch of the question, upon any special evidence that I have to adduce. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... somewhat in the heartiness of my thirst for the amusements incident to my station. I do not care to keep a stud—I was once tempted: nor hounds. And I can remember the day when I determined to have the best kennels and the best breed of horses in the kingdom. Puerile! What is distinction of that sort, or of any acquisition and accomplishment? We ask! one's self is not the greater. To seek it, owns to our smallness, in real fact; and when it is attained, what then? ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the Apologia. There are few speeches of antiquity that give such a vivid impression of the character of the author and of the life of the society in which he moved. The style, it is true, is often bombastic and affected, many of the arguments are almost more puerile and absurd than the accusations, while the intense conceit and complacency of the author often make him ridiculous. A man of wide and varied knowledge, he has no depth of intellect. He is always ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... respectability. Some are assassins. There are pale stenches and gaunt superstitions and mere shadows and lively malices: whims and amiabilities. The naive and the pedantic and the bizarre and the grotesque and the sincere and the insincere, the profound and the puerile. ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... instruction in the doctrines and duties of Christianity, throw much light on the religious spirit, tendencies, and heretical sects of the times to which they belong. Others of these writings are unutterably absurd and puerile, worthy of notice only as showing the type of the puerilities current in the age of ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... he continued, to the grave march of criticism to follow this fantastical Peri of whom they had just heard, through all her flights and adventures between earth and heaven, but he could not help adverting to the puerile conceitedness of the Three Gifts which she is supposed to carry to the skies,—a drop of blood, forsooth, a sigh, and a tear! How the first of these articles was delivered into the Angel's "radiant ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... prevented. It was denounced as childish. After a moment, everybody but Fields had seated himself in his accustomed place, overcome with agitation. Those who could see devoured the teller with their eyes. Two others wept with puerile fear and anger. They began to realize the plight they were in. It began to dawn upon them that an immense disaster was hanging over their heads. How were they to escape from it? Which way were they to turn to find relief? It was no time for brawling ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 1 • Various
... life," he said. "And if I find that I must simply go—to British Columbia, I think—those mining missions would give a man his chance against himself. There is splendid work to be done there, of a rough-and-ready kind that would make it puerile to ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... canvas and see whether YOU can do it? There are brushes, palettes, and gallipots full of paint and varnish. Have you tried, my dear sir—you who set up to be a connoisseur? Have you tried? I have—and many a day. And the end of the day's labor? O dismal conclusion! Is this puerile niggling, this feeble scrawl, this impotent rubbish, all you can produce—you, who but now found Rubens commonplace and vulgar, and were pointing out the tricks of his mystery? Pardon, O great chief, magnificent ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... encourage extravagance in expenditure and to lead Japan to suppose that whenever she wanted money for any purpose she had only to come to Europe and ask for it. The financial experts who so argue, if such puerile assertions can be dignified by the name of argument, talk as if Japan were like a child with a new toy. The Japanese statesmen—in which term I of course include the Mikado, one of the world's greatest statesmen—are ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... commended of science. We have quite enough of these zoological brutalities: man, the son of the Ape; duty, a foolish prejudice; conscience, a lure for the simple; genius, neurosis; patriotism, jingo heroics; the soul, a product of protoplasmic energies; God, a puerile myth. Let us raise the war-whoop and go out for scalps; we are here only to devour one another; the summum bonum is the Chicago packer's dollar-chest! Enough, quite enough of that, without having transformism next to break down the sacred law of work. I will not hold it responsible ...
— The Mason-bees • J. Henri Fabre
... entirely destitute as a taste for Homer.... I remembered how we had been disgusted; how often we had sought the simplicity and majesty of Homer in his English representative, and had found instead of them puerile conceits, extravagant metaphors, and the tinsel of modern ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos
... comprehension of a noble action."—I., 179: On Augustus's clemency and his saying, "Let us be friends, Cinna," the following is his interpretation of it: "I understand this action simply as the feint of a tyrant, and approve as calculation what I find puerile as sentiment."—"Notes par le Comte Chaptal": "He believed neither in virtue nor in probity, often calling these two words nothing but abstractions; this is what rendered him so distrustful and so immoral.... He never experienced a generous sentiment; this is why ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... genius tells us, shows us, teaches us; seldom is it, indeed, that the scholar critic comprehends fully the lessons taught; but to pretend to go before the masters, and to set up a post with his Number 20 marked upon it, and to bid his master reach it if he can, is the puerile play of an infantine intellect, or very conceited mind! And so we give M. De Piles, and all his followers, a slap in the face, and bid them go packing with Number 20. We will not condescend to pull to pieces this fantastic ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... Presumption, puerile vanity, insubordination, feather-headedness, inability to grasp many different ideas at a glance, want of scientific sense, simple and stupid ignorance, here is the summary of our history for a year!... The Opposition, which pretended to have revolutionary remedies for all ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... mental imbecility produced by excessive old age, is also a disqualification for admission. Distinguished as it is by puerile desires and pursuits, by a failure of the memory, a deficiency of the judgment, and a general obliteration of the mental powers, its external signs are easily appreciated, and furnish at once abundant reason why, like idiots and madmen, the superannuated dotard is unfit ...
— The Principles of Masonic Law - A Treatise on the Constitutional Laws, Usages And Landmarks of - Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... cattle.'' In his book on imitation, Tarde says, "In crowds, the calmest people do the silliest things,'' and in 1892, at the congress for criminal anthropology, "The crowd is never frontal and rarely occipital; it is mainly spinal. It always contains something childish, puerile, quite feminine.'' He, Garnier, and Dekterew, showed at the same congress how frequently the mob is excited to all possible excesses by lunatics and drunkards. Lombroso, Laschi, etc., tell of many cruelties which rebelling crowds committed without rhyme or reason.[1] The "soul of the crowd,'' ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... English criminal code with death in every line—why is it not reformed, I say? 'Twould be well if our legislators, instead of their puerile and frothy declamations against revolutionary principles and the ambition of Napoleon, would occupy themselves seriously with this subject. But then the lawyers would all oppose the simplification of our Code. They ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... resources, they were the friends of her lonely life, and awoke many a keen feeling of interest, many an aspiration of admiring adoration that carried her through her dreary hours. And though Miss Fennimore thought her science puerile, her credulity extensive, and her observations inaccurate, yet she deemed even this ladylike dabbling worthy of respect as an element of rational pleasure and self-training, and tried to make Bertha ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Pilate for special service. But they were Roman soldiers, as appears from the danger which the rulers provided against, that of their alleged crime against military discipline, in sleeping at their post, coming to his ears. The trumped-up story is too puerile to have taken in any one who did not wish to believe it. How could they tell what happened when they were asleep? How could such an operation as forcing back a heavy stone, and exhuming a corpse, have been carried on without waking ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... so largely into the fabric and conduct of the political institutions of the people, their mythology, that is, the traditionary legends by which they affected to unfold the mysteries of the universe, was exceedingly mean and puerile. Scarce one of their traditions—except the beautiful one respecting the founders of their royal dynasty—is worthy of note, or throws much light on their own antiquities, or the primitive history of man. Among the traditions ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... admitted on all hands. There is an appetite of the eye, of the ear, and of every sense, for which God has provided the material. Gaiety of every degree, this side of puerile levity, is wholesome to the body, to the mind, and to the morals. Nature is a vast repository of manly enjoyments. The magnitude of God's works is not less admirable than its exhilarating beauty. The rudest forms have something of beauty; the ruggedest strength is graced with some charm; the ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... your accomplished philological readers will doubtless consider the information of this Note trivial and puerile; but they will, I hope, bear with a tyro in the science, in recording an original remark of his own, borne out by an authority ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 185, May 14, 1853 • Various
... think to disarm me by such puerile tricks?" he thought, turning a look of angry warning on the old madame; and in the steady gaze which she fixed on him he ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... aged six, and leaving the passage aged sixteen, a cruel young monster filled with rebellion and immorality, not educated at all, but full of the sense of vague failures, having in common with those of my years, all the levels of puerile understanding, stung with patronage and competitive strife, designed to smother that which was ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... may be asked, why I have censured the Earl of CARLISLE, my guardian and relative, to whom I dedicated a volume of puerile poems a few years ago?—The guardianship was nominal, at least as far as I have been able to discover; the relationship I cannot help, and am very sorry for it; but as his Lordship seemed to forget it on a very ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... some people who are miserable if they cannot classify. It certainly deals with pirates, and pieces of eight, and adventures by land and sea; but the manner of dealing—the style and narrative and the delineation of the chief character, the engaging villain John Silver—is about as little puerile as anything that can be imagined. From that time Stevenson's reputation was assured. Ill health, a somewhat restless disposition, and an early death prevented him from accomplishing any great bulk of work: and the merit ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... "Enterprise" and the "Tripoli" alone saved the first year of the war from being entirely puerile. Certain it is that the distinguished naval officers who accompanied the fleet to the Mediterranean were so hedged about with political red tape, that they were powerless to take a step in defence of the honor of their country. While they were empowered ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 1 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... those great men whose intellect and character were strong enough to overcome the natural conservatism of their times. The mind of the early white men of the North never soared higher than a valhalla peopled with puerile deities and blood-stained warriors whereas the swarthy thinkers of the South discovered the unseen God, invented art and philosophy and developed law and government. And though the Church proclaims the highest of all ...
— The Black Man's Place in South Africa • Peter Nielsen
... fact that the subject matter is so incongruous to English thought, the first object of the translator from the Old Irish must continue to be, for some time to come, rather exactness in rendering than elegance, even at the risk of the translation appearing laboured and puerile. This should not, however, be carried to the extent of distorting his own idiom in order to imitate the idiomatic turns and expressions of the original. In this translation, I have endeavoured to keep as close to the sense and the literary form of the original as possible, but ...
— The Ancient Irish Epic Tale Tain Bo Cualnge • Unknown
... pretext that exposed itself: the Greek Fleet consisted of only five battleships dating from 1891-2, except one whose date was 1908; two cruisers, dating from 1911 and 1914; and a microscopic light flotilla. "To see there a serious danger, it would be puerile," says Admiral Dartige himself; and far from feeling elated at the success of the operation, he tells us that he "suffered at being constrained by events to use force against a neutral and weak nation." But he had to do it: though not a matter to be proud of, it was a precaution ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott
... evidence that the menace was thoroughly understood, for the whole day shift was toiling at the ice, chopping it, thawing it, shoveling it away, although its tremendous thickness made their efforts seem puerile. Everywhere there was manifested a frantic haste, a grim, strained eagerness that was full ...
— The Iron Trail • Rex Beach
... wish you could wrap in that rug and throw overboard. He certainly meant well. That formula of card and messenger is so convenient and so cheap. Withal, is he not too busy, think you, to come up to the dock for the puerile, prosaic purpose of shaking hands and saying ta-ta? If you can not consider the matter in this light, try to forget it. One must not be too visceral at the hour of departure. Behold, your skyscrapers and your Statue of Liberty are now receding from view; and your landlord ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... one who bears false witness against his neighbor? I do not believe that any man in the United States (or, at least, I have never heard of any) teaches that, if a person only is baptized and receives the Lord's Supper, [he] is safe exclusive of repentance. What a puerile conduct some men manifest in trying to prove that the doctrine with which Mr. Shober has charged me is erroneous, when no man nor class of men contend for it! They are all the while fighting their own shadows. ...
— American Lutheranism - Volume 1: Early History of American Lutheranism and The Tennessee Synod • Friedrich Bente
... as though time had left him behind. The younger Holland shook its head over the old gentleman of the past century, with his antagonism for the poetry of the day and his rage against Shakespeare and the latter's "puerile" 'King Lear.' For to Bilderdijk even more than to Voltaire, Shakespeare was an abomination. Then in 1830 he received the severest blow of his life: Katherina Wilhelmina died. This happened in Haarlem, whither he had gone in 1827. With this ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... gazed downward at a tiny white ash on the glowing coals; a little film that might have been—paper? "In a matter so important we may consider a little longer, lest," still regarding the hearth, "there may be after-regrets." His words even to himself sounded puerile; but what they led to had more poignancy; he lifted now his keen glowing eyes. "In one little regard I did your lordship ...
— Half A Chance • Frederic S. Isham
... earlier plays, are neither few nor small. Among these are to be reckoned, of course, his frequent quibbles and plays upon words, his verbal conceits and affectations, his equivoques and clinches. Many of these are palpable sins against manliness; not a few of them are decidedly puerile; the results of an epidemic of trifling and of fanciful prettiness. Some critics, it is true, have strained a point, if not several points, in defence of them; but it seems to me that a fair-minded criticism has no way but to ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... unrest which will be satisfied only when the sources of it are probed to the core. The Church authorities repeat a series of phrases which they are pleased to call answers to objections; they treat the most serious grounds of perplexity as if they were puerile and trifling; while it is notorious that for a century past extremely able men have either not known what to say about them, or have not said what they thought. On the Continent the peculiar English view has scarcely a single educated defender. Even in England the ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... of Essex; and from this time they went on in a regular series of consultations with and enquiries from these miraculous visitors, a great part of which will appear to the uninitiated extremely puerile and ludicrous, but which were committed to writing with the most scrupulous exactness by Dee, the first part still existing in manuscript, but the greater portion from 28 May 1583 to 1608, with some interruptions, ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... confirming and perpetuating such religious observances as were at that time observed, and in introducing others. Every public act which he performed was always accompanied and sanctioned by religious solemnities. The rites and ceremonies which he instituted seem puerile to us, but they were full of meaning and of efficacy in the view of those who performed them. There was, for example, a class of religious functionaries called augurs, whose office it was to interpret the divine will by means ...
— Romulus, Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... inhabitants of little towns prying and censorious. Idleness, rather than ill-nature, gives birth to scandal, and to the observation of little incidents which narrows the mind. It is frequently only the fear of being talked of which produces that puerile scrupulosity about trifles incompatible with an enlarged plan of usefulness, and with the basis of all moral principles—respect for the virtues which are not merely the virtues ...
— Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark • Mary Wollstonecraft
... it was reviled as subversive of morality and religion, good arrows in those days. It was called puerile, half-educated stuff—I half-educated! More, an utterly false charge of plagiarism was cooked up against me and so well and venomously run that vast numbers of people concluded that I was a thief of the lowest order. Lastly, my father, ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... brilliant but giddy young nobles. The Bastille was captured by the Parlement, and the university promised its support and a subsidy. Thus arose the civil war of the Fronde, one of the most extraordinary contests in history, whose name is derived from the puerile street fights with slings, of the printers' devils and schoolboys of Paris. The incidents of the war read like scenes in a comic opera. A hundred thousand armed citizens were besieged by eight thousand soldiers. The evolution ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... decay of the King; the utter failure of all male heir in the House of Cerdic, save only the boy Edgar; whose character (which throughout life remained puerile and frivolous) made the minority which excluded him from the throne seem cause rather for rejoicing than grief: and whose rights, even by birth, were not acknowledged by the general tenor of the Saxon laws, which ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... see either Jesus or his disciples offer any sacrifice in the Temple, excepting the Paschal lamb; but Joseph and Anna used frequently during their lifetime to offer sacrifice for the Child Jesus. However, even this accusation was puerile, for the Essenians never offered sacrifice, and no one thought the less well of them for not doing so. The enemies of Jesus still continued to accuse him of being a sorcerer, and Caiphas affirmed several times that the confusion in the statements of the ...
— The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ • Anna Catherine Emmerich
... quantity that we were able to take, non-intoxicant. We also took tea, sugar, milk, and a kettle, Thus furnished, we struck for the country, merry as a group of schoolboys, making the quiet air ring again with song, shout, and laughter—all of which may seem puerile and trivial in the extreme; but having seen liberty men ashore in nearly every big port in the world, watched the helpless, dazed look with which they wander about, swinging hands, bent shoulders, and purposeless rolling ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... her personality was overpowering his in the first clash. With a last effort he forced his eyes to steadiness and succeeded in sneering at her, though he felt that somehow the sneer was ineffectual, puerile. And then she smiled at him, deliberately, with a disdain that maddened him and brought a dark flush to his face that reached to his temples. And ...
— The Boss of the Lazy Y • Charles Alden Seltzer
... generally to superintend the morals, happiness, and personal comfort of some fifty assorted scientific enthusiasts. The secretary who diverges from these his proper and elevated functions into trivial and puerile disquisitions upon the antiquity of man (when he ought rather to be admiring the juvenility of woman), or the precise date of the Anglo-Saxon conquest (when he should by rights be concentrating the whole force of his massive intellect upon ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... geography are equally puerile. They imagine that the world is an extended plain, the termination of which no eye has discovered; it being, they say, overhung with clouds and darkness. They describe the sea as a large river of salt water, on the farther shore ...
— Life and Travels of Mungo Park in Central Africa • Mungo Park
... their inward significancy. In speaking of the Turks, we may for a moment yield to the romance which attends on their name and their actions, as we may admire the beauty of some beast of prey; but, as it would be idle and puerile to praise its shape or skin, and form no further judgment upon it, so in like manner it is unreal and unphilosophical to interest ourselves in the mere adventures and successes of the Turks, without ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... of the city's roofs, hearing the rumble of the city as it came faintly up to him, watching the people hurrying to and fro, there was something puerile in the argument that men any longer needed war to fill their lives, must have the war fear to keep them from softness and degeneration. Thinking of the problems of that very city, it seemed men need not worry greatly about having nothing to fight ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell
... true-bred English man or woman. The French of all ranks teach their children, from their earliest years, politeness by rule, as they do grammar or geography, or any other branch of a sound education. From La Civilite Puerile et Honnete, up to works which treat of the etiquettes of polite society, there are books published for persons of every class in life; and although of late years one sees the same sort of writings advertised in England, they have certainly ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 462 - Volume 18, New Series, November 6, 1852 • Various
... excite Ali's ambition by their suggestions. Some of these men frequently saluted him as King, a title which he affected to reject with indignation; and he disdained to imitate other states by raising a private standard of his own, preferring not to compromise his real power by puerile displays of dignity; and he lamented the foolish ambition of his children, who would ruin him, he said, by aiming, each, at becoming a vizier. Therefore he did not place his hope or confidence in them, but in the adventurers of every sort and kind, pirates, coiners, renegades, assassins, ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - ALI PACHA • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... themselves to entreaty; Flamininus in reality desisted on the intercession of the Achaeans and Athenians, exacting but a very moderate fine from those who were guilty; and although the Macedonian party remained continuously at the helm in the petty province, the Romans met their puerile opposition simply with the forbearance of superior power. In the rest of Greece Flamininus contented himself with exerting his influence, so far as he could do so without violence, over the internal affairs especially of the newly-freed communities; with placing the council ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... to some occult force or to a master. They will explain the Crusades by the cunning organization of the Papacy; the French Revolution by the cunning organization of the Masonic lodges; the Napoleonic episode by the individual cunning and plan of Bonaparte. Such explanations are puerile. ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... other passage which one would have thought must have gone home to every heart—that which describes the communing of the wanderer with nature [Footnote: Excursion, book i.]—is singled out for ridicule; while the whole poem is judged to display "a puerile ambition of singularity, grafted on an unlucky predilection for truisms". [Footnote: Edinburgh Review, xxiv. I, &c. It is but just to add that in the remainder of the essay the Reviewer takes back—so far as such things can ever be taken back—a ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... civilised warfare; (3) was mutilated and fired by our unscrupulous and barbaric opponents themselves; (4) was deliberately pushed into our line of fire on the night of the 19th September; (5) never existed at all, being indeed an elaborate but puerile fiction basely invented by a baffled enemy with the object of discrediting our enlightened army in the eyes of neutral Powers. Any of these was good enough, but what now appears is better. Exact measurements ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, October 21, 1914 • Various
... separated from science; but in times past many physicists dissociated themselves from studies which they looked upon as unreal word-squabbles, and sometimes not unreasonably abstained from joining in discussions which seemed to them idle and of rather puerile subtlety. They had seen the ruin of most of the systems built up a priori by daring philosophers, and deemed it more prudent to listen to the advice given by Kirchhoff and "to substitute the description of facts for ...
— The New Physics and Its Evolution • Lucien Poincare
... almost imperceptible shrug of the shoulders, as if she were astonished to have to answer such puerile objections. "Have you already forgotten the disparaging remarks made by our ...
— Baron Trigault's Vengeance - Volume 2 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... remained forever. Logically stated, this means that man's goal is the world; this world meaning earth carried to a state higher and with elimination of its evils is the state they call heaven. This theory, on the face of it, is absurd and puerile because it cannot be. There cannot be good without evil, or evil without good. To live in a world where there is all good and no evil, is what Sanskrit logicians call a ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... author is deficient in every mental preparation to accomplish the aim of his novel. He not only has not the slightest understanding of the new positive philosophy, but even of the old ideal systems his knowledge is merely superficial and puerile. You could laugh at the heroes of the novel alone as you read their silly and 'hashy' discussions on the young generation had not the novel as a whole been founded on ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... suffered, but now out of the dregs of their suffering the glad years would come bearing their precious burden of love and service. How puerile did the sacrifices of the past seem now— how terribly out of proportion to the great task that lay before them, with the sublime result already in sight! Surely there was only one quality in humankind that really mattered, softening suffering and despair and turning away wrath, and as Donna knelt ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... bound to answer whether the process is eternal, or how it began to be. Either it had a beginning or it had not; if it had, creation out of nothing is conceded, and there is nothing left to dispute. It is puerile to except to the frequency of creative acts on the ordinary hypothesis of specific origin, because it is freely open to science to reduce the several 'kinds' to the lowest minimum it can experimentally establish. Moreover—besides the utter inconsequence ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... to himself not altogether puerile; they are parcel of the complex explanation of his existent self. He starts, I suppose, as something, a very malleable something, ready to be hammered into the shape that the socket requires. The two greatest forces at work on the yielding substance are parents and position, with ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... utter exclusion of the higher and more intellectual doctrine of gnan (Knowledge of the Supreme Soul)." The conception of the all-comprehending impersonal Brahma has, indeed, lost vitality; for the educated also the externals of the popular religion have lost their significance and become puerile. But for them also, the objects of popular bhakti, Ram and Krishna, are as much epical as religious heroes. Hinduism needs an object of bhakti for her educated people. The fact explains several of the novel religious features ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison
... could be more quibbling than were the comments and expositions of the Jewish doctors at that time; nothing so puerile as their distinctions. Their evasion of the fifth commandment, their exposition of the law of oaths, are specimens of the bad taste in morals which then prevailed. Whereas, in a numerous collection of our Saviour's ...
— Evidences of Christianity • William Paley
... Miss Effingham, like any other problem. In ordinary times, extraordinary men seldom become prominent, power passing into the hands of clever managers. Now, the very vanity, and the petty desires, that betray themselves in glittering uniforms, puerile affectations, and feeble imitations of other systems, probably induce more than half of those who fill the foreign missions to apply for them, and it is no more than we ought to expect that the real disposition should ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... unquestionably a very fine writer. His Muse was as well qualified as the Graces themselves to dress out a Venus; and he could even adorn the brows of a conqueror with fragrant and beautiful wreaths. But he had some puerile and low thoughts, which unaccountably mixed with the elegant and the noble, like schoolboys or a mob admitted into a palace. There was also an intemperance and a luxuriancy in his wit which he did not enough restrain. He wrote little to the understanding, and less to the heart; but ...
— Dialogues of the Dead • Lord Lyttelton
... with sufficient hardihood. It is not often we meet with the principle of intervention between state and state, asserted in these days with so much boldness as in the following passage:—"Men have stigmatized the war in Spain, calling the principle of intervention an oppressive principle. Puerile accusation! All people are brothers, and all revolutions cosmopolite. When a government believes that it represents a just cause, let it make it triumph wherever a triumph is possible. This is its right; it is more—it is its ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... he was at last induced to leave the picture, and have tea. While Delilah poured, Porter watched the two, interested and diverted by enthusiasms which seemed to him somewhat puerile for a man who could do real things in the ...
— Contrary Mary • Temple Bailey
... much narrower than the other, and instead of being straight, made a sort of elbow or angle. At the point of that angle a short arm joined it to a hexagonal islet with a soil of gravel and its shores faced with dressed stone, a perfection of puerile neatness. A couple of tall poplars and a few other trees stood grouped on the clean, dark gravel, and under them a few garden benches and a bronze effigy of Jean Jacques Rousseau ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... tricks which he imputed to Spiritual agency, but which were almost puerile in the simplicity of their legerdemain, and which have been repeated with perfect success by one of our number; such as tossing a slate pencil on and sometimes over the table from a slate held apparently under the table, or the playing of an accordion ...
— Preliminary Report of the Commission Appointed by the University • The Seybert Commission
... constituted, than the twofold feeling that was destined to dispute and contest every act—the monarchical and republican feeling—commenced upon a frivolous pretext, a struggle, puerile in appearance, serious in reality, and in which each party in the course of two days was alternately the conqueror and the conquered. The deputation that had waited on the king to announce to him the constitution of the Assembly, reported the result of ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... Cyrano de Bergerac was a brilliant madman, sometimes sparkling with wit and imagination, but often dirty and ridiculous. Saint-Amant possessed plenty of imagination and capacity for exquisite poetical feeling, but he lacked taste and too often was puerile. Wiser than they, yet themselves verbose, long-winded, slow, and spun out, Desportes translated into French verse Italian poetry of the sixteenth century, often with very happy turns of expression, and Bertaut, melancholy and graceful, ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... question for evolutionists. Any scientific theory must be ready to give an account of all phenomena. A hypothesis to explain the origin of man must explain all the facts. How did man become a hairless animal? Darwin's explanation is too puerile for any one professing to be a learned scientist to give. He says that the females preferred males with the least hair (?) until the hairy men gradually became extinct, because, naturally, under such a regime, the hairy men would die off, and, finally only hairless men to beget progeny would survive. ...
— The Evolution Of Man Scientifically Disproved • William A. Williams
... more in a similar style, for his lordship loved composing florid despatches. But this one had a bad reception when it was sent home to England. "At this puerile piece of business," says the plain spoken Stocqueler, "the commonsense of the British community at large revolted. The ministers of religion protested against it as a most unpardonable homage to an idolatrous temple. Ridiculed by the Press of India and England, and laughed at by the members ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... that this new world, so different from the old sweet, green one, was a world of enemies, every soul against him, and he was ready to fight them all to the death. He neither pawed the sand nor bellowed, for these are puerile betrayals of temper to which the noblest bulls do not descend. Like a tornado he swept across the ring, killed a horse with a single thrust, sent the picador crashing against the barrera; and quick as a wild cat, ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... Sire, to-night will be dead or in prison," said Mrs. Carey, with increased firmness, reading the puerile nature and seeing ...
— The King's Men - A Tale of To-morrow • Robert Grant, John Boyle O'Reilly, J. S. Dale, and John T.
... the "Leopard's" action. His further plea, that it must therefore be taken into the account in determining the reparation due, was pettifogging, reducing a question of insult and amends to one of debit and credit bookkeeping; but the American claim that the step was necessary to internal quiet was puerile, and its precipitancy carried the ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... picture and poem, and of all that the glorious impulse to create in beauty achieves, been fickle as the wind; based on discordant fancies and distorted tradition. Symbolism in art, at present means only an arbitrary and puerile substitution of one object or caprice for another. The most successful poetic simile is often as thoroughly conventional, and consequently as perishable, as possible. In short, we are not in an age when there is one poetry ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... hundreds of millions in gold, other hundreds of millions in platinum and noble metal, and some five kilograms of the bromide of radium—all of which I shall take from the planets of this Solar System before I leave it. I shall take them in spite of the puerile efforts of the fleets ...
— Triplanetary • Edward Elmer Smith
... rules and the humanizing usages of civilized warfare? [Cheers.] We think we cannot. [Cheers.] The enemy, borrowing what I may, perhaps, for this purpose call a neutral flag from the vocabulary of diplomacy, describe these newly adopted measures by a grotesque and puerile perversion of language as a "blockade." [Laughter.] What is a blockade? A blockade consists in sealing up the war ports of a belligerent against sea-borne traffic by encircling their coasts with an impenetrable ring of ships ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... fault for a mother to kiss her children on the Lord's day—and inflicting actual punishment on the captain of a ship for having embraced his wife on 5 Sunday, when, after a long separation, she hurried to meet him, as he landed from the vessel! To such puerile littlenesses will even great ...
— The Pilgrims of New England - A Tale Of The Early American Settlers • Mrs. J. B. Webb
... reputations won by toil, by services rendered, by talent, are privileges granted at the expense of the masses. Agrarian law will spread to the field of glory. Never, in any age, have men demanded the affixing of their names on the nation's posters for reasons more puerile. Distinction is sought at any price, by ridicule, by an affectation of interest in the cause of Poland, in penitentiaries, in the future of liberated galley-slaves, in all the little scoundrels above and ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... land, heavy-laden with the puerile details of daily living, fling off your shrouding cares, and lift your worn faces that you may see with a broad outlook how full-fruited is the vineyard in which you are toiling; the thorns are irritating; the glebe is rough; your spirit faints ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... by half, and gave a new civilization room and triumph. He was of his age, and his morality was not unimpeachable; but in him were still great moralities and humanities. He had mountain-tops in his spirits, and on these peaks he stood. What puerile work it is to attempt robbing Columbus of his discoverer's glory by attempting to show how vikings discovered this continent! Such historians might fight a less bloody battle still by showing that the aborigines ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... hither then with my precious old friend. It seems incredible now that we did it in two days, but such is my recollection. I no longer mention that we walked back in a single day, it makes me so furious to see doubt in the face of the hearer. Men were men in those old times. Think of one of the puerile organisms in this effeminate age attempting ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... of General Loftus, and the previous one of General Fawcet, circumstantially illustrate the puerile imbecility with which the royal cause was then conducted. Both movements foundered in an hour, through surprises, against which each had been amply forewarned. Fortunately for the government, the affairs of the rebels were managed even worse. Two sole enterprises were undertaken by them after ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... we have done with such puerile declamations? We contemn, we revile interest, that is to say, the good and the useful, (for if all men are interested in an object, how can this object be other than good in itself?) as though this interest were ...
— Sophisms of the Protectionists • Frederic Bastiat
... strange man," said the other, "and much too hot-headed to listen to reason. Surely we ought to love truth above our puerile prejudices. We do not make nature, but she is already such as she is, spread out before us, for us to watch her ways and learn from ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... intelligible word on the second sheet; it was simply a succession of scrawls and puerile outline pictures, such as ...
— The False Gods • George Horace Lorimer |
