"Unsophisticated" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... he was as simple, as direct, and as unsophisticated as the old priest himself, and now took his leave without attempting to disguise the fact that he had ...
— In Kedar's Tents • Henry Seton Merriman
... morning, while the camels were being loaded, I strolled to a small pool in the sand, tempted by a couple of wild geese; these were sufficiently unsophisticated as to allow me to approach within shot, and I bagged them both, and secured our breakfast; they were the common Egyptian geese, which are not very delicate eating. The donkeys being saddled, we at once started with our attendant, Hadji ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker
... reciprocity between man and man, and the wise, whose minds have looked far into the relations and tendencies of things, none can be found to lift their voices against a system so utterly repugnant to the feelings of unsophisticated humanity—a system which permits all the atrocities of the domestic slave trade—which permits the father to sell his children as he would his cattle—a system which consigns one half of the community to hopeless and utter degradation, and which threatens ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... man through the blue eyes and sumptuous linens of some Belinda Portman or Lord Mortimer. None of your good-hearted, sorely-tempted villains then! It made your hair stand on end only to read of them,—going about perpetually seeking innocent maidens and unsophisticated old men to devour. That was the time for holding up virtue and vice; no trouble then in seeing which were sheep and which were goats! A person could write a story with a moral to it, then, I should hope! People that were born ...
— Margret Howth, A Story of To-day • Rebecca Harding Davis
... to what sort of person he might be, and now fearing perhaps to wound him if he should turn out to be a very unsophisticated one, Sylvia obediently set her teeth to the lustrous, dark bark and tore off a bit, which gave out in her mouth a mild, pleasant aromatic tang, woodsy and penetrating, unlike any other taste she knew. "Good, isn't it?" said her ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... liked Stephen Marshall. There was good stuff in him; all the fellows recognized that. Only he was woefully unsophisticated, abnormally innocent, frankly religious, and a little too openly white in his life. It seemed a rebuke to the other fellows, unconscious though it might be. He felt with the rest that the fellow needed a lesson. Especially since the bald way in which he ...
— The Witness • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... a fix, as the men would not enter the place till we hunted up that long-suffering individual the interpreter. Then we found the placard to be only a ruse on the part of the unsophisticated peasantry to avoid having ...
— From the St. Lawrence to the Yser with the 1st Canadian brigade • Frederic C. Curry
... first class butter on its merits, and out of the sixth class butter, which he put in the first class casks and sold on the testimony of the brand on the wood. This became in time notorious to most people except the more unsophisticated of his clients, and when he embarked on bricks and mortar his house ...
— The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent • S.M. Hussey
... literis instruendam curavit, et omni musices genere doctam reddidit." Here is another insight into the considerations which brought about the marriage. When he set out in search of a wife, he wished to capture a simple, unsophisticated, untaught country girl, whose ignorance of the world should incline her to rely on his superior knowledge, and the deficiencies of whose intellectual training should leave him an ample field for educational experiments. Seeking this he ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... composition. This Psalm has been well termed a "prelude to the Song of Songs," for in a real sense Canticles is anticipated and even necessitated by it. In Ruth we have a romance of the golden corn-field, and the author chooses the unsophisticated days of the Judges as the setting of his tale. In Canticles we have a contrasted picture between the simplicity of shepherd-life and the urban voluptuousness which was soon to attain its climax in the court of the Ptolemies. So the poet chose the luxurious reign of Solomon as the background ...
— The Book of Delight and Other Papers • Israel Abrahams
... and pulled out a shilling. "Is that what you're after? Well, I'm glad you had the delicacy to let the ladies pass out first. They think us an unsophisticated folk." ...
— The Mayor of Troy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... it was a good thing, and well built, and finished like two dollars' worth of cutlery. The selling price, retail, was one dollar, and it looked to an unsophisticated young graduate of an agricultural college to be a better opening toward independence and the foundation of a farm than a job in the hay fields. A man must make his start somewhere, and the farther away from competition ...
— The Duke Of Chimney Butte • G. W. Ogden
... with, for they were sure to like this perfume, which his experience of the country taught him was seldom procurable in such out-of-the-way places, and to a dead certainty always procured him favour in the eyes of the unsophisticated fair, whom he taught how to ...
— Recollections of Manilla and the Philippines - During 1848, 1849 and 1850 • Robert Mac Micking
... to manage the deceitful brook, was now finished, and I waited for the results. During much of the summer there was not a drop of water in the wide canal, save where a living spring trickled into it. The ordinary fall rains could scarcely more than cover the broad, pebbly bottom, and the unsophisticated laughed and said that I reminded them of a general who trained a forty-pound gun on a belligerent mouse. I remembered what I had ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe
... in her ear, he had refrained, with the results as aforesaid. For the first time in her life she had looked him in the eye and acknowledged, frankly, that she liked him. But she had not kissed him—she drew the line there—and once more in his shrewd unsophisticated way he judged it was never done, in ...
— Rimrock Jones • Dane Coolidge
... a startling question for the unsophisticated London youth. He had never heard such an expression in his life; and although he might have puzzled his agricultural interrogator by a good many questions in return, yet that possibility was no answer ...
— The Humourous Story of Farmer Bumpkin's Lawsuit • Richard Harris
... which they ministered, and corrupt to the core with putrefying odds and ends of obscenity. At every turn, she had to submit to the dastardly jests, the cruel mystifications, the malicious tricks of these scoundrels, who were only too happy to make a little martyr of the poor unsophisticated child, ignorant of everything, with the crushed and sickly air, timid and sullen, thin and pale, and pitiably clad in her wretched, countrified gowns. Bewildered, overwhelmed, so to speak, by this hourly torture, she became their drudge. They made sport of her ignorance, ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... also because they were not sufficiently refined, and because their occupations were of an inferior kind, such as mechanical trades, small shop keeping, &c. Said he, "You would not wish to ask your tailor, or your shoemaker, to dine with you?" However, we were too unsophisticated to coincide in his Excellency's notions ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... herself just as she had been smiling at Jack Barrow while they sat on the log and fed the swans. And she made an amiable grin at the reflection in the glass. But even though Miss Weir was twenty-two and far from unsophisticated, it did not strike her that the transition of herself from a demure, business-like office person in sober black and white to a radiant creature with the potent influences of love and spring brightening her eyes and lending a veiled caress to her every supple movement, satisfactorily ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... man recovers his self-command," thought Andre, "he will never forgive me for having been the involuntary listener to this terrible tale." But in this Andre was mistaken, for unsophisticated nature requires sympathy, and Nichols Gandelu would have said the ...
— Caught In The Net • Emile Gaboriau
... experimentally verified, substantiated, proven (demonstrated) 478. rigorously true, unquestionably true. true by definition. genuine, authentic, legitimate; orthodox &c. 983a; official, ex officio. pure, natural, sound, sterling; unsophisticated, unadulterated, unvarnished, unalloyed, uncolored; in its true colors; pukka[obs3]. well-grounded, well founded; solid, substantial, tangible, valid; undistorted, undisguised; unaffected, unexaggerated, unromantic, unflattering. Adv. truly ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... unfit for the position into which fortune had thrust him. Nathan sat back in his chair, in the House, with few books and papers on the desk before him, and these unopened, his manner, like his wrinkled boots, indicative of the farm, his whole attitude that of the unsophisticated. He listened to the speeches made around him, but had no ideas to express. He was a pathetic figure. Only the accidents of Grasshopper Year, when legislative timber was scarce, could have placed him in such a ...
— The Wind Before the Dawn • Dell H. Munger
... inmates of the hotels which now alternate attractively by the water-side with villas old and new were I to read the appearances more cynically. But if it is lost to florid fiction it still presents its blue bosom to most other refined uses, and the unsophisticated tourist, the American at least, may do any amount of private romancing there. The pretty hotel at Cadenabbia offers him, for instance, in the most elegant and assured form, the so often precarious adventure of what he calls at home summer board. It is all so unreal, ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... which we constantly deal. Youth is buoyant, hopeful, exuberant; and yet, with this material constantly surrounding us, we frequently find the task wearisome and apparently hopeless. The reason is not far to seek. Youth is not only buoyant, it is unsophisticated, it is inexperienced, in many important particulars it is crude. Some of its tastes must necessarily, in our judgment, hark back to the primitive, to the barbaric. Ours is continually the task to civilize, to sophisticate, to refine this raw material. ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... the room when Walter awoke from his long and refreshing sleep, to gaze in astonishment at the rich and beautiful furniture that adorned the apartment. Silk curtains, mirrors that reached to the ceiling, beautiful carpets, attractive pictures in gilt frames—all was new and dazzling to the unsophisticated mountain youth. He was still gazing in wonder at all these glories, when Mr. Seymour, who had slept in the next room, ...
— Harper's Young People, December 23, 1879 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... found her first expression in a volume of 'Fugitive Verses,' published in 1790. The book caused so little comment that the words of but one friendly hand are preserved: that the poems were "truly unsophisticated representations of nature." ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... from Normandy, the injured always called for justice. This was for many centuries believed in Normandy, but in fact the word Haro is only the same as our own "hurrah," the beginning of a shout. There is no doubt, however, that the keen, unsophisticated vigor of Rollo, directed by his new religion, did great good in Normandy, and that his justice was sharp, his discipline impartial, so that of him is told the famous old story bestowed upon other just princes, that a gold bracelet was left for three ...
— Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... campaigns of more modern times; they illustrate the warlike spirit, as well as the domestic relations of the Kozaks, and their skill in narrative, as well as their power of expressing in lyric strains the unsophisticated emotions of ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... I had said to you, timidly: "Lady Aline, I love you: I am a simple, unsophisticated person; will you marry me?" You would have answered, "Yes, Harrison, ...
— Five Little Plays • Alfred Sutro
... tendency of human nature to give credence to widely advertised and high-sounding descriptions and specious promises of vast profits, these men find little difficulty in conjuring money out of the pockets of the unsophisticated and gullible, who rush to become stockholders in concerns that have "airy nothings" for a foundation, and that collapse quickly when the bubble ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... The unsophisticated reader is informed that the word "bait," in New England phraseology, is applied to taking lunch ...
— Paul Prescott's Charge • Horatio Alger
... she said, "I thought you were white slavers. But I've got it now. The other game is different. Oh, I may come from a small town, but I'm not unsophisticated. You people didn't send my father those black hand letters he's ...
— More Tish • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... sought and found tranquillity and courage in my former consolatory faith. My reliance is that these principles will obtain no general currency; for, if they should, it requires no gloomy imagination to sadden the perspective of the future. My reliance is upon the unsophisticated good sense and noble spirit of the American people. I have what I may be allowed to call a proud and patriotic trust, that they will give countenance to no principles which, if followed out to their obvious ...
— American Eloquence, Volume II. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various
... not say that your letter was a complete surprise to me. It is seldom a woman is so unsophisticated in the ways of men that she is not aware when friendship passes the borderline and trespasses on ...
— A Woman of the World - Her Counsel to Other People's Sons and Daughters • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... honest, open, truthful, artless, impartial, simple, unbiased, fair, ingenuous, sincere, unprejudiced, frank, innocent, straightforward, unreserved, guileless, naive, transparent, unsophisticated. ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... being pinched and prodded and trotted up and down the room like a horse to show how she moved, that "bidders might satisfy themselves," as the auctioneer said, of the soundness of the article to be sold. John Johnston and John Hanks and Abraham Lincoln saw these sights with the unsophisticated eyes of honest country lads from a free State. In their home circle it seems that slavery was always spoken of with horror. One of them had a tenacious memory and a tenacious will. "Lincoln saw it," ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... the soldier's death, if other eyes had not been bent reproachfully upon him and warned him that something was amiss. It was this reproach in other men's eyes that made him look aside. He was a wild-beast, as I began with saying,—an unsophisticated wild-beast,—while the rest of us are partially tamed, though still the scent of blood excites some of the savage instincts of our nature. What this wretch needed, in order to make him capable of the degree of mercy and benevolence that exists ...
— Sketches and Studies • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... self-possessed and coherent.) Inez states she is 17 and has just come from a town in Tennessee where she has been living for a couple of years with some people by the name of B. who adopted her. At first they were very good to her and she loved them dearly. She was quite unsophisticated when she went to them and did not realize then that they were not good people. She met them at an employment agency in St. Louis where she had gone after leaving the Smiths, the people who had brought her up. At that time ...
— Pathology of Lying, Etc. • William and Mary Healy
... with horror for the most part, but some of the children and young people were interested and drew nearer. "There ain't a bob on the beach," said Grubb in an undertone, and the Desert Dervishes plied their bicycles with comic "business," that got a laugh from one very unsophisticated little boy. Then they took a deep breath and struck into the cheerful strain of "What Price Hair-pins Now?" Grubb sang the song, Bert did his best to make the chorus a rousing one, and it the end of each verse they danced certain steps, skirts in hand, that they ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... reason a very wise and exemplary individual, a sort of martyr for principle; "you fellows have no idea of the happiness of a plain country gentleman, living without care or ceremony—having none of the restraints of society, none of your artificial wants—everything simple and unsophisticated. Why, if you knew what it was, you'd give up all thoughts of town, and be living in the country before ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... discovered neighbor with immense good-will. Finding no discouragement in the mild gaze that answered his, he presently raised himself on his flippers, and with laborious, ungainly effort flopped himself over to make acquaintance. Both youngsters were too unsophisticated for ceremony, too trusting for shyness, so in a very few minutes they were sprawling over ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... boiled beef, and of cookery generally, and therefore the destroyer of the original simplicity of living which characterized primitive man, when milk and fruits cooked by the sun, and acorns, were the standing repasts of unsophisticated humanity. Per contra, Horace makes man, in his ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... children, and dogs, and more than thirty riders, with their feet tucked up round their horses' necks, all escorting a "pale face," was grotesque and enchanting, and I revelled in this lapse into savagery, and enjoyed heartily the kindliness and goodwill of this unsophisticated people. ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... in his chair. The unsophisticated innocence of this boy from the country would be amusing if ...
— Peter - A Novel of Which He is Not the Hero • F. Hopkinson Smith
... they food to strangers give? Where kindly, liberally relieve? Where unsophisticated live? ...
— The Poetry of Wales • John Jenkins
... Little Arcady considered her furniture to be unfortunate. She knew that they scorned it for its unstylishness; that some of them sympathized in the humiliation that such impossible stuff must be to her; while others believed that she was too unsophisticated to have any proper shame in the matter. These latter strove by every device to have her note the right thing in furniture and thus be moved to contrast it instructively with her own: as when Mrs. Judge Robinson borrowed for an afternoon Aunt Delia McCormick's ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... little scheme, and the manner in which she had laid it bare to the person most concerned was delightfully unsophisticated. He laughed at her tenderly, stroking her soft, pretty hair with his big man's hand, the while he explained that he was a business man pure and simple, and had made no excursions whatever into literature; that the "writing" ...
— Big Game - A Story for Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... he would have done in any case, probably, but which he continued to do in a quiet, earnest, regular way that won him a friendly feeling from most men, and more than his share of sympathy and attention from the good women who had not self-love enough to be wounded by his indifference. Unsophisticated little maidens, just budding into womanhood, would peep after him shyly from the old-fashioned houses sometimes, and would feel in their tender little hearts a gentle pity for one who was so handsome and so unfortunate. Like the true hero of romance, he was believed by them to be supremely ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... security and rest. My brother had left me to purchase the tickets, thinking that I might have better success than he would. When the stewardess came to me, I paid what she asked, and she gave me three tickets with clipped corners. In the most unsophisticated manner I said, "You have made a mistake; I asked you for cabin tickets. I cannot possibly consent to sleep on deck with my little daughter." She assured me there was no mistake. She said on some of the routes colored people were allowed to sleep in ...
— Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl - Written by Herself • Harriet Jacobs (AKA Linda Brent)
... Unsophisticated judgment of this sort, when met with unsought, seems to be of real value in a question depending for its decision so much upon the faithful ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 196, July 30, 1853 • Various
... Prohibition (there were cocktails in this play) strange things must have happened in "God's own country" under the banner of the Bird of Freedom. But never so strange as the effects you get on the stage when very English people play at being Americans. You have to be rather young and unsophisticated if such phrases as "He's putting it over on us," or "I'm not going to stand for that," generously peppered about the dialogue and recited in the purest of English accents, can persuade you to believe that you are getting the real local stuff. At the same time you accept cheerfully the most ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, November 24, 1920 • Various
... the bud all the same," he remarked. Cornelia, for some reason, felt a little provoked and a little frightened. He wasn't entirely unsophisticated after all; and she felt quite uncertain where the ignorance ended and the knowledge began. She put the bud in her hair, and they walked on, Bressant being now at her side, instead of behind. The path ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... last. I had done several little things, when an elderly man who is tremendously rich, whose name you would recognize if I mentioned it, gave me an order. For weeks, nearly every day, he came to my studio for tea, to talk over the plans. I was really unsophisticated then—but I can see now—well, that the garden was a secondary consideration . . . . And the fact that I did it for him gave me a standing I should not otherwise have had . . . . Oh, it is sickening to look back upon, to think what an idiot I was ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... nation will dare disregard it by attempting any such covenants of selfishness and compromise as were entered into at the Congress of Vienna. The thought of the plain people here and everywhere throughout the world, the people who enjoy no privilege and have very simple and unsophisticated standards of right and wrong, is the air all governments must henceforth breathe if they ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... within the confines of the castle demesne as these two girls were, our appearance upon the scene had assumed almost the importance of an event in their lives, and had wrought so interesting a change in the somewhat monotonous daily routine of their existence that the unsophisticated creatures had each inwardly resolved to make the most of the novelty whilst the opportunity to do so remained. And in that case our work was likely to suffer both in quality and quantity. This, I felt, ought not to be allowed. At the same time the pleasure to be derived from ...
— The Rover's Secret - A Tale of the Pirate Cays and Lagoons of Cuba • Harry Collingwood
... barefooted boy. In early ages men met face to face with Nature, and spent their strength directly in questioning her. Now the work of God is overlaid. Every blunder is a rock in our field, and at last the field is a stone-heap of blunders, and our giants have work enough to reach any ground in the unsophisticated facts of life. We set no limit to the revolutionary power of truth; in happy hour it may sweep away doctrine and usage, supplant systems by songs, and governments by Love. Yet the first men were able to cleave the world to its centre, and predict the last results. We only enlarge ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... wishes,—some younger brothers,—he had seen them pushed from the drawing-room the day of the matinee,—a sister near her age, not yet out. Caroline had apologized for her sister's crying while listening to his music. "She was unsophisticated still, and had not forgotten her boarding-school nonsense." Then, if Caroline did not enjoy city-life, there was a house in the country to which she might have gone early in the spring. She had, too, her friend Marie. She imparted to him some of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... not be necessary to enter into that," she replied. "Let me go on. But then it became apparent, little by little, that we had misjudged you. We liked you, as I have said, because you were unsophisticated and delightfully fresh and natural. Somehow we took it for granted you would stay so. Rut that is just what you didn't do—just what you hadn't the sense to try to do. Instead, we found you inflating yourself with all sorts of egotisms and vanities. We found you presuming upon the friendships which ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... obtained an interview also with Elector August, who referred him to his theologians. On August 18, 1569, Andreae held a conference with the Wittenbergers. They insisted that the basis of the contemplated agreement must be the Corpus Misnicum (Philippicum). When Andreae, unsophisticated as he still was with respect to the real character of Philippism, publicly declared that the Wittenbergers were orthodox teachers, and that the Corpus Misnicum contained no false doctrine he was supplied with a testimonial in which the Wittenbergers refer to their Corpus, but not to ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... suspect that we have traveled if you are so unsophisticated in your feelings and expressions," continued Ellen; but observing that her reproof received no attention, she and Mary went into the house, leaving the sweet child with the pure breath of nature all around her, and her own heart as fresh and ...
— The Elm Tree Tales • F. Irene Burge Smith
... was still—as she will ever be—"The City of the Lily"; but the blue and silver emblematic giglio—the modestly unfolding fragrant iris of the unsophisticated countryside, drooped before the flaming, passionate tiger-lily of the formal garden of debauchery, with its pungent odour and its secretive, incurled scarlet petals—splashed with the blacks and ...
— The Tragedies of the Medici • Edgcumbe Staley
... of petals turning as frankly toward the observer as the sunflower turns toward her god, and little bells hanging as regularly as a chime. These are their characteristics, easily recognisable and expressing the unsophisticated charm of the creations of honest childish hands. Irrelevancy is theirs, too. They spring from stones or pavement as well as from turf or garden, and thus express the more ardently their love for man and for close association with ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... a Wessex woman born, and thoroughly understood the pure and unsophisticated nature ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 102, May 7, 1892 • Various
... strength, the absence of trivial submissive tendernesses, for which she makes amends by such large humane and generous compassion. "In Emily's nature," says her sister, "the extremes of vigour and simplicity seemed to meet. Under an unsophisticated culture, inartificial taste and an unpretending outside, lay a power and fire that might have informed the brain and kindled the veins of a hero; but she had no worldly wisdom—her powers were ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... the vices of polished society, without its knowledge or its comforts; and the evils of barbarism without its simplicity. No age, no sex, no rank, no condition, was exempt from the fatal influence of this wide-wasting calamity. Thus it attained to the fullest measure of pure, unmixed, unsophisticated wickedness; and, scorning all competition and comparison, it stood without a rival in the secure, undisputed, possession of its ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the - Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament (1839) • Thomas Clarkson
... it is different. It is a commonplace on its subject (but like many other commonplaces a thing ill to forget or ignore) that natural and unsophisticated children always do, and that almost anybody who has a certain power of turning blind eyes when and where he chooses can, read it simply as a story of adventure and enjoy it hugely. It would be a most preternatural child or a most ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... there, with no further purpose than to see you. On the journey perhaps I indulged in foolish fancies. How would you receive me? Would you be pleased; annoyed? So I tempted my fancy with air-castles like the most unsophisticated lover. But you had no word of welcome; scarcely listened to me, and hurried away! I could not win you as I desired; the next best ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... to the meanest capacity that Sydney was making an absurd mistake as to the identity of the violinist. The most unsophisticated novel-reader in the world would cast contempt and ridicule on the present writers if they, in their joint capacity, introduced the young lady in white as actually Lady Pynsent's governess. To avoid misunderstanding on the point, therefore, it may as ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... trapper may at least content himself with the idea that the particular fox he is after is an old fellow and is "not to be caught with chaff" or any thing else,—for if these devices will not secure him nothing will. If he is a young and comparatively unsophisticated specimen, he will fall an easy victim to any of the ...
— Camp Life in the Woods and the Tricks of Trapping and Trap Making • William Hamilton Gibson
... in which Mr. Hill had got himself up. He saw quickly the difference between the real and the flash fashionable. But he did not betray this by word or sign, and continued to maintain the character he had assumed of an unsophisticated, verdant ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... almonds, spices, and a little flour. Eier-brod is a saffron-coloured sweet bread, made with eggs; and kuechli is a kind of pastry, crisp and flimsy, fashioned into various devices of cross, star, and scroll. Grampampuli is simply brandy burnt with sugar, the most unsophisticated punch I ever drank from tumblers. The frugal people of Davos, who live on bread and cheese and dried meat all the year, indulge themselves but once with these ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... somewhat peculiar character, who, coming unannounced to Oakdale, had at first been greatly misunderstood by the boys there, not a few of whom had fancied him an impostor and a fake Texan, mainly because of his quiet manners and conventional appearance; for these unsophisticated New England lads had been led, through the reading of a certain brand of Western literature, to believe that all Texans, and especially those who dwelt upon ranches, must be of the "wild and woolly" variety. Perceiving this at last, Rod had proceeded ...
— Rival Pitchers of Oakdale • Morgan Scott
... not right in saying that a great change had come over Pauline? She, who only a few weeks ago, was the simplest and most unsophisticated of girls, now knew the meaning of that dreadful word—affectation. She not only knew what it was, but she knew that it must be avoided, and she took ...
— The Bastonnais - Tale of the American Invasion of Canada in 1775-76 • John Lesperance
... the unsophisticated eye of the blushing Mr. Pucker, presented a very fine specimen of the Examining Tutor; and this impression on Mr. Pucker's mind was heightened by Mr. Fosbrooke, after a few minutes' private conversation with the other two gentlemen, ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... the explanation, it is known from the folk-lore of even the most unsophisticated peoples that the heart was originally regarded as the seat of life, feeling, volition, and knowledge, and that the blood was the life-stream. The Aurignacian pictures in the caves of Western Europe suggest that these beliefs were ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... boy, with the end of his nose shot off: "Have you any painkiller? give it me quick, so that I can get back to fight." On either side, there was the same delight in sound and smoke and schoolboy cheering, the same unsophisticated ardour of battle; and the misdirected skirmish proceeded with a din, and was illustrated with traits of bravery that would have fitted a ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Fielding had known Mr. Wilson! Partridge, a mere unsophisticated booby, thought simplicity the characteristic of Nature, and therefore out of place in Art. Mr. Wilson, a transcendental Partridge, thinks simplicity the characteristic of Art, and therefore out of place in Nature. He is more than ordinarily severe on Mr. Prescott for not having detected ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... to mind what a slip of decorum he had been guilty of, immediately rose, and resuming his usual unsophisticated politeness, as he walked up to my sister, took her hand, and said, "Excuse me, my dear Miss Ellen; I must apologize for my rudeness; but my delight was so great, and my gratitude to your brother so intense, that I am afraid that in my warmth I allowed the expression ...
— Peter Simple and The Three Cutters, Vol. 1-2 • Frederick Marryat
... his untutored genius, the most single-minded of verbal impressionists, using his great gifts of straight feeling and right expression with a fine sincerity and a strong if, perhaps, not fully conscious conviction. His art did not obtain, I fear, all the credit its unsophisticated inspiration deserved. I am alluding to the late Stephen Crane, the author of "The Red Badge of Courage," a work of imagination which found its short moment of celebrity in the last decade of the departed ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... the two chieftains, Captain Bonneville and White Plume, in soldier-like communion, the captain delighted with the opportunity of meeting on social terms with one of the red warriors of the wilderness, the unsophisticated children of nature. The latter was squatted on his buffalo robe, his strong features and red skin glaring in the broad light of a blazing fire, while he recounted astounding tales of the bloody exploits of his tribe and himself in their ...
— The Adventures of Captain Bonneville - Digested From His Journal • Washington Irving
... at Hastings, at Dover, at semi-Dutch Harwich, and then no more until it put into Scarcliffe Bay. Here Bessie's sea-adventures ended. She went ashore and walked with her uncle on the bridge, gazing about with frank, unsophisticated eyes. The scenery and the weather were beautiful. Mr. Frederick Fairfax had many friends now at Scarcliffe, the favorite sea-resort of the county people. Greetings met him on every hand, and Bessie was ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... Mulgrave's clever novel is sufficiently explained by the hero, Lord Castleton, a man of high refinement, marrying an unsophisticated, uneducated peasant girl. The scenes and incidents of her introduction into the fashionable world are replete with humour, yet true to the life. Thus, how naturally are ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 546, May 12, 1832 • Various
... for the remainder of my life. I was passionately attached to Naka-poop, for such was the name of my young wife, and notwithstanding my French education, could not but acknowledge that her natural and unsophisticated manners were more graceful and more fascinating, than is all the studied address of my own country-women. She was of high rank in her own country, being nearly allied to the king; and for two years my life slipped away, in uninterrupted happiness and ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Captain Frederick Marryat
... laughing matter, and yet, despite the gravity of the situation, I keenly appreciated the humor and irony that it involved. Arsene Lupin seized and bound like a novice! robbed as if I were an unsophisticated rustic—for, you must understand, the scoundrel had deprived me of my purse and wallet! Arsene Lupin, a victim, ...
— The Extraordinary Adventures of Arsene Lupin, Gentleman-Burglar • Maurice Leblanc
... "unsophisticated" are frequently confused. The former suggests a type of behavior which is artless, spontaneous, and free from the restraints of custom. The latter implies fully as great lack of knowledge of social usage, and, in addition, ...
— Stanford Achievement Test, Ed. 1922 - Advanced Examination, Form A, for Grades 4-8 • Truman L. Kelley
... Saratoga under the colonnades fronting two sides of the great space before the hotel, and she formed a critical and exacting taste in music from a constant attendance at the afternoon concerts; it is true that during the winter in New York she had cast forever behind her the unsophisticated ideals of Tuskingum in the art, so that from the first she was able to hold the famous orchestra that played in the Kurhaus concert-room up to the highest standard. She had no use for anybody who had any use for rag-time, and she was terribly severe with a young American, primarily of ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... take it blindly. Her mother thought it her duty to lay before her all the objections to a union where there existed such a disparity of age. No undue influence was exerted, therefore, in favor of the marriage. Nor was Mademoiselle Bernard as unsophisticated as French girls usually are at that age. Her childhood had not been passed in seclusion. Since she was ten years old she had been constantly in the society of men of letters and men of the world. Under such influences ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... Doctor continued, picking up an elementary treatise on evolution; "I am particularly anxious to see what effect it will have on a fresh, unsophisticated mind. Make notes as you read, and we will discuss it when ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice
... compositions they enter into, to whose excellence they contribute nothing else. For instance, consuming two partridges to make sauce for one: half a pint of game gravy (No. 329,) will be infinitely more acceptable to the unsophisticated appetite of Englishmen, for whose proper and rational recreation we sat down to compose these receipts; whose approbation we have done our utmost to deserve, by devoting much time to the business of the kitchen; and by repeating the various ...
— The Cook's Oracle; and Housekeeper's Manual • William Kitchiner
... so full of artificialities that men are deceived as to whom they are marrying, and no one but the Lord knows. After the dressmaker, and the milliner, and the jeweler, and the hair-adjuster, and the dancing-master, and the cosmetic art have completed their work, how is an unsophisticated man to decipher the physiological hieroglyphics, and make accurate judgment of who it is to whom he offers hand and heart? This is what makes so many recreant husbands. They make an honorable marriage contract, but the goods ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... I was probably the only real countryman in the car and he picked me out at once, some quality of rural things hovered about us both and drew us together. I felt that he had paid me an involuntary compliment. How unsophisticated and communicative he was! So much so that I took it upon myself to caution him against the men he was liable to fall in with in New York. I should like to know if he reached the fatherland safely and returned to ...
— My Boyhood • John Burroughs
... itself, an insufficient safeguard to Kate, had not her knowledge of men reassured her. She believed that her daughter was not the type to arouse more than a passing interest in such a man as Channing. Her beauty, her flattered response to his attentions, her fresh, unsophisticated charm of gaiety, might well appeal to him for a time, adding the fillip of the unaccustomed to a jaded palate. But it was an appeal that must be constantly renewed, that would not outlast any continued absence. She believed that Channing, while he would accept with ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... treatment, a Chinese witness is by no means doggedly stubborn or doltishly stupid; he may be either or both if he has previously been tampered with by native officials, but even then it is not absolutely impossible to defeat his dishonesty. Occasionally a question will be put by a foreigner to an unsophisticated boor, never dreamt of in the philosophy of the latter, and such as would never have fallen from the lips of one of his own officials; the answers given under such circumstances are usually unique of their kind. We know of an instance where a boatman was asked, in reference to a collision case, ...
— Chinese Sketches • Herbert A. Giles
... forward, and gave me a stage embrace. This performance, including the pantomime, must have been of a very moving character, for when we had finished, I actually saw tears in the eyes of several of our audience. This evidence of the gentle and unsophisticated character of these simple people, affected me almost as much as our music had moved them, and I could not help thinking to how much better account such amiable impressibility was ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... daughter, tyrannical and Lear-like impotentia of the King himself, etc.—may be exaggerated, but cannot be denied. In the greatest of all by general acknowledgment, the far-famed Roland, the economy of pure story interest is pushed to a point which in a less unsophisticated age—say the twentieth instead of the twelfth or eleventh century—might be put down to deliberate theory or crotchet. The very incidents, stirring as they are, are put as it were in skeleton argument or summary rather than amplified into full story-flesh ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... bold, jagged handwriting with a Gothic turn to the letters,—something between a highly sophisticated hand and a very unsophisticated one,—not in the least ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... has original and sometimes wonderful ideas; but it is those ideas that are so dangerous. They make men extremely rich or extremely poor. They make or break men. I always feel people are happier who live a simple unsophisticated life. I believe I am happy because I am not ambitious. Somehow I feel that Lupin, since he has been with Mr. Perkupp, has become content to settle down and follow the footsteps of his father. This ...
— The Diary of a Nobody • George Grossmith and Weedon Grossmith
... himself that very night when he got home. I was by his side till the very last moment. Those Jesuit confessionals are really my most delightful diversion at melancholy moments. Here's another incident that happened only the other day. A little blonde Norman girl of twenty—a buxom, unsophisticated beauty that would make your mouth water—comes to an old priest. She bends down and whispers her sin into the grating. 'Why, my daughter, have you fallen again already?' cries the priest. 'O Sancta Maria, what do I hear! Not the same man this time, how long is this going ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... strides. The semi-theatrical air of the artist made a deep impression on the trapper. Had Gibault known what a theatrical air was, he might have been immensely tickled; but, being what he was—an unsophisticated son of the wilderness—he knew nothing about such airs, and therefore regarded his companion in the light of a superior order of being, or a madman; he ...
— The Wild Man of the West - A Tale of the Rocky Mountains • R.M. Ballantyne
... everything that Elizabeth did was nowhere more conspicuous than in this question of clothes. To keep in the rear of opportunity in matters of indulgence is as valuable a habit as to keep abreast of opportunity in matters of enterprise. This unsophisticated girl did it by an innate perceptiveness that was almost genius. Thus she refrained from bursting out like a water-flower that spring, and clothing herself in puffings and knick-knacks, as most of the Casterbridge girls ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... a cry of indignation against Robin, and dragged him from the tent, the elders rebuking him, and the multitude threatening to resort to stronger measures; and, though he told them a plain and unsophisticated tale of the black corbies, he was only derided. The great preacher appeared once more, and went through his two discourses with increased energy and approbation. All who heard him were amazed, and many of them went ...
— The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner • James Hogg
... after Mr. Cameron? The forks, and saltcellars, and spoons, and castor were cheerfully promised, while Morris consented to go for the guest; and then Katy came to the rest of her errand, the part distasteful to her, inasmuch as it might look like throwing disrespect upon Uncle Ephraim—honest, unsophisticated Uncle Ephraim—who would come to the table in his shirt sleeves. This was the burden of her grief—the one thing she dreaded most, inasmuch as she knew by experience how such an act was looked upon by Mr. Cameron, who, never having lived in the country ...
— Family Pride - Or, Purified by Suffering • Mary J. Holmes
... hen-roost and ranger of the orchard, with greater power than I had possessed before my disgrace. Had my mistress looked half as much in my face as she did into my hatful of eggs, she would have read my guilt; for at that unsophisticated age I could blush, a habit long since discarded in the course of my ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat
... women. A brisk little trade sprang up for yams, bananas, m'wembe meal, eggs, and milk. No shrewder bargainer exists than your African safari man, and these soon discovered that beads and wire possessed great purchasing power in this unsophisticated country. The bartering had to be done in sign language, as Swahili seemed to be unknown; and no man in the safari understood this unknown tongue. Kingozi sat in state before his tent, smoking his pipe—which he still enjoyed ...
— The Leopard Woman • Stewart Edward White et al
... blossom of Christianity among the Teutonic races. The love expressed in the Slavic songs is the natural, heartfelt, overpowering sensation of the human breast, in all its different shades of tender affection and glowing sensuality; never elevating but always natural, always unsophisticated, and much deeper, much purer in the female heart, than in that of man. In their heroic songs, also, the reader must not expect to meet with the chivalry of the more western nations. Weak vestiges of this kind of exaltation, with a few exceptions, are to be found among those Slavic ...
— Historical View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic - Nations • Therese Albertine Louise von Jacob Robinson
... simple means, and by thus imposing myself upon the hospitality of these unsophisticated people, that I worked my way, by slow degrees, chiefly on foot, into the part of the country I desired to visit; and I trust that I in a measure repaid them for it by the stores of information which I imparted to them, and of which they stood much in need, and by little sketches of their ...
— Stories By English Authors: Italy • Various
... delicate cleavage, yet unerringly she attained to its utmost point of discrimination. Perhaps it was the strength of her love for Mortimer that enabled her to view so calmly this passionate declaration. A year before, unsophisticated as she had been, it would have thrown her into an agitated confusion, but she was developing rapidly; responsibility had tempered fine the great will power which was hers in ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser
... permitting the unsophisticated guest to blow out the gas in his bedroom at the city hotel without inconvenience to himself or anybody else has been devised. The gas burner is made of a metal having great expansive and contractive properties. The gas is turned on in the regular way and a small ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1082, September 26, 1896 • Various
... more favourable situations. While these are to be pitied, what shall be said of those whose fortunes place them above this painful necessity. Let them at at least rear their children on wholesome food, and with unsophisticated habits, as the most unequivocal testimony of parental affection performing its duty towards its offspring. It is proper also to observe, that children ought not to be hurried in their eating, as it ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... artificial-flower repositories, and the head-dress depots. They are in strange hands at this time of year—hands of unaccustomed persons, who are imperfectly acquainted with the prices of the goods, and contemplate them with unsophisticated delight and wonder. The children of these virtuous people exchange familiarities in the Arcade, and temper the asperity of the two tall beadles. Their youthful prattle blends in an unwonted manner with the ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... property,—which recognizes no social obligations, no natural relations,—which tears without scruple the infant from the mother, the wife from the husband, the parent from the child. In the strong but just language of another: "It is the full measure of pure, unmixed, unsophisticated wickedness; and scorning all competition or comparison, it stands without a rival in the secure, undisputed possession ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... have always found Marjorie such a nice girl," urged Miss Duckworth. "From my personal experience of her I could not have believed her capable of unladylike conduct. She has always seemed to me very unsophisticated and childish—certainly not 'fast'. Can there possibly be any explanation of ...
— A Patriotic Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... the most conscientious persons go about with an habitually apologetic manner. They are rapidly acquiring the evasive air of the conscious criminal. It is only a very hardened philanthropist, or an unsophisticated beginner in good works, who can look a sociologist in the eye. Most persons, when they do one thing, begin to apologize for not doing something else. They are like a one-track railroad that has been congested with traffic. They are not sure which ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... ancients, partly by observation, really almost a new faculty, were enough; that conscious paganism which later, but for the great disaster, might have emancipated the world, had not yet discovered itself; in Cosimo's day art was still an expression of joy, impetuous, unsophisticated, simple. In this world of brief sunshine Cosimo appears to us very delightfully as the protector of the arts, the sincere lover of learning, the companion of scholars. To him in some sort the world owes the revival of the Platonic Philosophy, ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... general, the male flirt is a much less worthy character than the young lady who makes a pastime of flirtation. He is something more than a flirt. In nine cases out of ten, he is a rake as well. His object in flirting is to gratify a mean propensity at the expense of those who are pure and unsophisticated. He is skilled in the arts of fascination and intrigue. Slowly he winds his coils about his victim, and before she is aware of his real character, ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... gave at the theater to amuse the summer visitors was a farce called "To Parents and Guardians." I played the fat, naughty boy Waddilove, a part which had been associated with the comedian Robson in London, and I remember that I made the unsophisticated audience shout with laughter by entering with my hands covered with jam! Father was capital as the French usher Tourbillon; and the whole thing went splendidly. Looking back, it seems rather audacious for such a child to have attempted a grown-up comedian's part, ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... that the Allies had achieved their aim they were to refuse to perform their part of the compact in the name, too, of a moral principle from the operation of which three great Powers were dispensed. That was the light in which the matter appeared to the unsophisticated mind of the average Italian, and not to him alone. Others accustomed to abstract reasoning asked whether the best preparation for the future regime of right and justice, and all that these imply, is to transgress existing rights and violate ordinary justice, ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... trussed, in order that we may be filled, like stuffed birds in a museum, with chaff and rags, and paltry, blurred shreds of paper about the rights of man. We preserve the whole of our feelings still native and entire, unsophisticated by pedantry and infidelity. We have real hearts of flesh and blood beating in our bosoms. We fear God; we look up with awe to kings, with affection to Parliaments, with duty to magistrates, with reverence to priests, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... North, and when the schooner finally reached her anchorage he was on the lookout for her, and at once came aboard with much blustering, to demand her immediate delivery. He believed he had some unsophisticated livyeres to deal with, whom he could easily browbeat out of their rights. What was his surprise, then, when Douglas stepped ...
— Ungava Bob - A Winter's Tale • Dillon Wallace
... handled with the nicest care if sentimentality is to be avoided. Let me put it that Miss TURNBULL has not always been entirely successful in this respect. Thus, despite some agreeable scenes, the book remains one for the unsophisticated, or for those whose appetite for fictional glucose is robust. There is not very much that can be called plot; what there is concerns itself with the fortunes of Miss Jessie's tenants, the chief objects of her ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 21, 1919. • Various
... a quietness and a charm about this connexion that made him never forbode danger in it. He loved to be treated as a child by Elise, and he gave, therefore, free play to his naturally unsophisticated feelings. Her gentle reproofs were a sort of luxury to him; he had a delight in sinning, in order to deserve them; and then, whilst listening to them, how gladly would he have pressed her dress, or her white and beautiful hand ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... salutation in English, he was thinking in French: "Without doubt, this rather oversized, bareheaded, interrupted-looking convalescent who stands before me, wondering how I should know in what language to address him, is Joseph Frowenfeld, of whom Doctor Keene has had so much to say to me. A good face—unsophisticated, but intelligent, mettlesome and honest. He will make his mark; it will probably be a white one; I will subscribe to ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable
... harmless departures from the code. To be dressed "odd," to behave "oddly," to eat in a different manner or of different food, to commit, indeed, any breach of the established convention is to give offence and to incur hostility among unsophisticated men. But the disposition of the more original and enterprising minds at all times has been ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... description. Dutch uncle though he was to me, I must give him thanks for the careful business training he bestowed on me. I say with pride that I proved to be his most apt and willing pupil. He taught me how the natives, by nature simple-minded and unsophisticated, had lost all confidence in their fellow-men in general and merchants in particular through the, to say the least, very dubious and suspicious dealings of the tribes of Israel. My uncle said he was an old timer in New Mexico, but the Jew was there already ...
— Tales of Aztlan • George Hartmann
... Among unsophisticated German peasants there is a belief in magical powers possessed by bread baked at Christmas, particularly when moistened by Christmas dew. (This dew is held to be peculiarly sacred, perhaps on account of the words "Rorate, coeli, ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles |
