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More "Childlike" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... rudeness, and approaching Natasha he held out his arm to grasp her waist before he had completed his invitation. He asked her to waltz. That tremulous expression on Natasha's face, prepared either for despair or rapture, suddenly brightened into a happy, grateful, childlike smile. ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... topics solely, in social intercourse So far from this, he continually startled one by his swift transitions from solemn discourse to humorous descriptions of persons, places, experiences. And as the Misses Cabot and my mother alike regarded healthful laughter, cheery sallies, and childlike gayety as a wise relief for overwrought brains or high-strung sensibilities, our fireside sparkled with brilliant repartees and scintillating mirth. It is [137] pleasantly remembered that, in such by-play, Dr. ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... a hatred of monarchy Mr Carnegie combines a childlike faith in the political power of money. Though his faith by this should be rudely shaken, he clings to it as best he may. Time was when he wished to buy the Philippines, and present them, a free gift, to somebody or other. Now he thinks that he may purchase the peace of the world for a round ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... She would have liked to say to him: "You lost belief in me and dropped me. I have begun to make a life for myself. Let me alone. Do not upset me—do not force me to see what I must not see if I am to be happy. Go away, and give me a chance." But we do not say these frank, childlike things except in moments of closest intimacy—and certainly there was no suggestion of intimacy, no invitation to it, but the reverse, in the man facing her at the front ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... could be burdened: and I suspected him of an inimical attitude toward the older families of the city. Certain men possessed his confidence; and he had built, as it were, a stockade about them, sternly keeping the rest of the world outside. In Theodore Watling he had a childlike faith. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... face on the picture. It was that of a woman, not exactly pretty, but very gentle and childlike, with a strange pathetic look in the large eyes ...
— The Old Man in the Corner • Baroness Orczy
... supremely grotesque, in fact, was the essential opposition of theories—as if a galantuomo, as HE at least constitutionally conceived galantuomini, could do anything BUT blush to "go about" at such a rate with such a person as Mrs. Verver in a state of childlike innocence, the state of our primitive parents before the Fall. The grotesque theory, as he would have called it, was perhaps an odd one to resent with violence, and he did it—also as a man of the world—all merciful ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... compassion an old gentleman in the cabin making a hearty meal of sardines and fruit-pie, and I asked him if he had ever been at sea. No, he said. I could have wept over that innocent old gentleman's childlike confidence of appetite, and guileless trust of ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... weakened, reduced, compounded with inferior elements, to be of service. So with Truth. People are always begging for Truth, seeking the ultimate Truth, as if that would bring the perfect state of happiness. This is childlike ignorance. Truth in its pure, perfect condition would simply kill them—like unadulterated drugs. They could not stand its blinding light. They could not stand the shock. Like the rest—to change the metaphor—it has to be made up so ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... looked at her in childlike wonder, and then her face lit up with a heavy smile. "Oh, my! there's no fear ...
— Treasure Valley • Marian Keith
... lamps tended by saint and sage. O framed for calmer times and nobler hearts! O studious Poet, eloquent for truth! Philosopher! contemning wealth and death, Yet docile, childlike, full of Life ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... cried his Excellency. "That's simply rich!" Here was a thing to relish! The Frontier comes to town "heeled for a big time," finds that presents are all the rage, and must immediately give somebody something. Oh, childlike, miscellaneous Frontier! So thought the good-hearted Governor; and it seems a venial misconception. "My dear fellow," he added, meaning as well as possible, "I don't want you to spend your money ...
— Lin McLean • Owen Wister
... his voice a sound of warm yet almost childlike enthusiasm, with which she was becoming ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... or, if that were impossible, to end its sufferings, and was then left to rest, while the doctor returned to the morning-room, to face the sisters with what courage he might. Bridgie lay back in a deep, old-fashioned chair, a slight, almost childlike figure, her hands clasped in her lap, her shoulders bowed as by too heavy a burden—the burden of all those five motherless,—it might soon be fatherless?—children. Esmeralda, straight and defiant by the fireplace, her stormy ...
— Pixie O'Shaughnessy • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... all things, and with the moral basis of its action largely undermined, Acton gave the spectacle of a career which was as moving as it was rare. He stood for a spirit of unwavering and even childlike faith united to a passion for scientific inquiry, and a scorn of consequences, which at times made him almost an iconoclast. His whole life was dedicated to one high end, the aim of preaching the need of principles based on the widest induction and the most ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... character, got her name and general character from real life. Miss Cooper writes that when their "family was living on the cliffs of Sorrento a young peasant girl became one of the household,—half nurse, half playfellow to the children. She bore the sweet name of Gelsomina. Simple, innocent, and childlike, yet faithful to duty, Gelsomina was soon in high favor with great and small, and, in charge of the young flock, made one of every family party about the bay." At such times "she was always in gay ...
— James Fenimore Cooper • Mary E. Phillips
... hot. He thrust his plate away from him and pushed back his chair. But Nan's calmness defeated his almost childlike subterfuge. ...
— The Forfeit • Ridgwell Cullum
... when it seems childlike. As a master of verse he has no English rival since Spenser. The trochaic meter in which "Hiawatha" is written would seem to have been his own invention; [Footnote: At least I can remember no other long poem composed in it.] and ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... whole movement both in subject and treatment. Think of the gulf between the Cimabue Madonna and the Giotto Madonna, side by side, which we saw in the Accademia, and this. With so many vivid sympathies Giotto must have wanted with all his soul to make the mother motherly and the child childlike; but the time was not yet; his hand was neither free nor fit. Between Giotto and Raphael had to come many things before such treatment as this was possible; most of all, I think, Luca della Robbia had to come between, for he was the most valuable reconciler of God and man of them ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... speak truly, I saw not one elephant, but half a dozen. I had a feast of roaring and a flow of circus. In fact I indulged in the wildest dissipation. I visited Barnum's circus and sucked peppermint candy in a way most childlike and bland. The reason seems obscure, but circuses and peppermint candy are as inseparable as peanuts and the Bowery. Appreciating this solemn fact, Barnum provides bigger sticks adorned with bigger red stripes than ever Romans ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume II. (of X.) • Various
... by her turning to him in her loneliness. That Sydney's withdrawal from him lay at Hilda's charge he could not fail to see, and he blamed himself for the occasional repulsion against his sister-in-law with which the situation filled him. She was so sweet, so childlike, so full of trust in him, so regretful for her mistakes of the past, so reticent as to Maximilian's ill-behavior. Her whole conduct won his respect and confidence, even while he felt himself subtly encompassed by the seine of her entire reliance upon the keeping of his oath. That she expected ...
— A Tar-Heel Baron • Mabell Shippie Clarke Pelton
... Femmes, and Mlle. de Brabender explained Agnes to me. The dear, good lady did not see much in it, for the whole story appeared to her of childlike simplicity, and when I said the lines, "He has taken from me, he has taken from me the ribbon you gave me," she smiled in all confidence when Meydieu and my godfather ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... was afterward. The party started off from Hampton in high fettle and with a childlike trust in the honesty of ...
— Ruth Fielding Down East - Or, The Hermit of Beach Plum Point • Alice B. Emerson
... Ah, well we knew The manly soul, so brave, so true, The cheerful heart that conquered age, The childlike silver-bearded sage. ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... even to assume an air of unconcern while among his associates; but, the moment he was alone with Dr. Johnson, in whose rough but magnanimous nature he reposed unlimited confidence, he threw off all restraint and gave way to an almost childlike burst of grief. Johnson, who had shown no want of sympathy at the proper time, saw nothing in the partial disappointment of overrated expectations to warrant such ungoverned emotions, and rebuked him sternly for what he termed a silly affectation, saying that "No man should be ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... although he was for ever mentioning the names of persons and places unknown to me; and he constantly spoke about some exploring party. He never asked me questions, nor did he get into serious trouble with the natives, being privileged. He never developed any dangerous vices, but was simply childlike and imbecile. ...
— The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont
... Friday over with a scarcely veiled contempt. "You have a beautiful, childlike faith in every man's dishonesty, Wally. Did it ever occur to you that some people are straight—that they ...
— The Yukon Trail - A Tale of the North • William MacLeod Raine
... I had not once raised my voice in protest, and had frankly connived with the others,—I confess that I felt shame for us and pity for the friendless man we were sending out into the world. Something childlike in his acceptance of the proposal, a few phrases of naive enthusiasm for his new prospects, repeated to me by Solon, touched me strangely. It was, therefore, with real embarrassment that I read ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... conditions under which the spirit of American romance has been preserved and heightened from time to time, one becomes aware that although ours is rather a romance of wonder than of beauty, the spirit of beauty is also to be found. The first fervors of the romance of discovery were childlike in their eagerness. Hakluyt's Voyages, John Smith's True Relation of Virginia, Thomas Morton's New England's Canaan, all appeal to ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... town, for instance, as Zagazig, last seen by a very small boy who was lifted out of a railway-carriage and set down beneath a whitewashed wall under naked stars in an illimitable emptiness because, they told him, the train was on fire. Childlike, this did not worry him. What stuck in his sleepy mind was the absurd name of the place and his father's prophecy that when he grew up he would 'come that way ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... mustn't be ashamed of that!" the invisible entity told him. "That's the beginning of real wisdom—becoming childlike again. One of your religious teachers said something like that, long ago, and a long time before that, there was a Chinaman whom people called Venerable Child, because his wisdom had turned back again ...
— Dearest • Henry Beam Piper
... carry the Gospel to their inhabitants, and formed settlements in the Northern districts, in days when the lives of settlers were in constant peril from the Maoris. But nothing could daunt his courage; and whenever they came into personal contact with him, these childlike savages felt his power and responded to his influence, and he was able to lay a good foundation. In 1841 the English Church sent out George Augustus Selwyn as first Missionary Bishop of New Zealand, giving him a ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... that she is my child Nor fearing me as if I were her father; And, may I say to thee, this pride of hers, Upon advice, hath drawn my love from her; And, where I thought the remnant of mine age Should have been cherish'd by her childlike duty, I now am full resolv'd to take a wife And turn her out to who will take her in. Then let her beauty be her wedding-dower; For me and my possessions ...
— The Two Gentlemen of Verona • William Shakespeare [Craig, Oxford edition]
... would be necessary before long; she grew into the custom of speaking of the room which she had occupied on her first visit to the ranch as 'my room.' She was very happy and forgot that her father was a troublesome childlike parent who fancied that he knew how to discover gold mines. What did mere gold ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory
... was saved, and it was Obed's sister who brought her back from the clutches of fever and the jaws of death. She had as tender a heart as her brother, and had come to love as a sister or a daughter this poor, friendless, childlike girl, who had been thrown upon their hands in so extraordinary a manner. Brought up in that puritanical school which is perpetually on the look-out for "special providences," she regarded Zillah's arrival among them as the most marked special providence which she had ever ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... gathered unknowingly a sheaf of landscapes, images, keys of dreamed horizons, that opened a world to her at any chance breath altering shape or hue: a different world from the one of her old ambition. Her fall had brought her renovatingly to earth, and the saving naturalness of the woman recreated her childlike, with shrouded recollections of her strange taste of life behind her; with a tempered fresh blood to enjoy aimlessly, and what would erewhile have been a barrenness to ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... His climaxes are never strained; nothing is ever idealized, sentimentalized, etherealized; no part of the truth is left out, no part is exaggerated. There is no cleverness, no startling feat of virtuosity. All appears simple, candid, almost childlike. I could imagine the editor of a popular magazine returning a story of Tchehkoff's with the friendly criticism that it showed promise, and that when he had acquired more skill in hitting the reader exactly between the eyes a deal might be possible. Tchehkoff never hits you between ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... it jarred me when I heard you pulling that stuff,' continued White. 'I haven't what you might call a childlike faith in my fellow-man as a rule, but it had never occurred to me for a moment that you could be playing that game. It only shows,' he added philosophically, 'that you've got to suspect everybody when it comes to a gilt-edged ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... to remember that those who say they understand, show, simply by so saying, that they understand nothing at all; that those who say they see, are sure to be blind; while those who confess that they are blind, are sure some day to see. All we can do is, to keep up the childlike heart, humble and teachable, though we grew as wise as Newton or as Humboldt; and to follow, as good Socrates bids us, Reason whithersoever it leads us, sure that it will never lead us wrong, unless we have darkened it by hasty and conceited fancies ...
— Madam How and Lady Why - or, First Lessons in Earth Lore for Children • Charles Kingsley
... Convention, which his friends and emissaries from this city went out to prepare, but which perhaps neither he nor they in the beginning ventured to hope for, seemed to promise him at last the crown and consummation of a life's longings, and he received it with almost childlike joy. The election was, therefore, a crushing blow. It was not, perhaps, the failure to get the presidency that was hardest to bear—for this might have been accompanied by such a declaration of his fitness for the presidency ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin
... and Ki Sing lay down at nine o'clock and sought refreshment in sleep. Both were fatigued, but it was the Chinaman who first lost consciousness. Dewey scanned with curiosity the bland face of his guest, looking childlike and peaceful, as he lay by ...
— The Young Explorer • Horatio Alger
... in a chair, with a childlike wail. "Why did he do it? Oh! why did he do it? Oh, Jimmy! you'll never look at me now! If only ...
— Out of the Primitive • Robert Ames Bennet
... Chesterton would restore the primitive joys of wonder and childlike delight in simple things. His ideal is the real, not the merely impossible. Unlike most would-be saviours of the race, he seeks not to merge a new humanity into a brand new glittering civilization. He would have us awaken once more to the ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... of the war had he languished a captive, Suffering much in an old French fort as the friend of the English. Now, though warier grown, without all guile or suspicion, Ripe in wisdom was he, but patient, and simple, and childlike. He was beloved by all, and most of all by the children; For he told them tales of the Loup-garou in the forest, And of the goblin that came in the night to water the horses, And of the white Letiche, the ghost of a child who unchristened Died, and was doomed to haunt unseen the chambers ...
— The Children's Own Longfellow • Henry W. Longfellow
... over a nail keg and loosed the shot and screws into it, smiling with childlike simplicity as he listened to the tintinnabulation of the metal shower among the nails. "It does drop when you let go ...
— Bar-20 Days • Clarence E. Mulford
... it is very old-fashioned and queer," said Geraldine, pulling the wrap over the grass stains and looking up into his eyes with a childlike appeal that made him set his teeth. "It was my mother's and you said 'white.' ...
— In Apple-Blossom Time - A Fairy-Tale to Date • Clara Louise Burnham
... the steps with Sidney, his honest heart, in his eyes. She could not bring herself at first to tell him about the hospital. She put it off from day to day. Anna, no longer sulky, accepted wit the childlike faith Sidney's statement that "they'd get along; she had a splendid scheme," and took to helping Harriet in her preparations for leaving. Tillie, afraid of her rebellious spirit, went to prayer meeting. ...
— K • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... their thoughts and energies. For a century the people lived self-concentrated, introspective, their minds filled only with thoughts of themselves. If foreign affairs were discussed at all it was in curiously childlike and impracticable terms. The nation grew up a nation of provincials (there is no other word for it), with a provincialism which was somewhat modified, but still provincial, in the cities of the Atlantic coast, and ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... my entry Father Pichon was surprised at the workings of grace in my soul; he thought my piety childlike and my path an easy one. My conversation with this good Father would have brought me great comfort, had it not been for the extreme difficulty I found in opening my heart. Nevertheless I made a general confession, ...
— The Story of a Soul (L'Histoire d'une Ame): The Autobiography of St. Therese of Lisieux • Therese Martin (of Lisieux)
... very vague and a very childlike plan, but too much could not be expected from one who had been conceived, born and bred on ...
— The Hawk of Egypt • Joan Conquest
... beautiful and bright he stood, As born to rule the storm— A creature of heroic blood, A proud though childlike form." ...
— Fifty Famous Stories Retold • James Baldwin
... Miss Anderson was able to obtain all the outward and visible signs of a dramatic triumph in a role which intrinsically had little to commend it.... Usually it is the rude manliness, the uncouth virtues, the awkward and childlike submissiveness of that tamed Bull of Bashan [Ingomar] that absorbs the attention of a theatrical audience. On Saturday evening the center of interest was, of course, transferred to Parthenia. To the ...
— Mary Anderson • J. M. Farrar
... answered Bertrand, "of likening one to the other, save inasmuch as both have been maidens, born in lowly surroundings, yet chosen for purity of heart and life, and for childlike faith and obedience, for the honour of receiving a divine commission. There the parallel stops; for there can be no comparison regarding the work appointed to each. Yet even as this Maid shall fulfil her appointed task in obedience to ...
— A Heroine of France • Evelyn Everett-Green
... October, 1852, she made her first appearance in Boston, where her playing and her style called forth eulogies from the critics of those days. John S. Dwight wrote to the effect that it was one of the most touching experiences of his life to see and hear the charming little maiden, so natural and childlike, so full of sentiment and thought, so self-possessed and graceful. Her tone was pure, and her intonation faultless, and she played with a "fine and caressing delicacy," and gave out strong passages in chords ...
— Famous Violinists of To-day and Yesterday • Henry C. Lahee
... grew up among the folk of long ago in the forms of rhyme, myth, fairy tale, fable, legend, and romantic hero story; and, second, the kind that has been produced in modern times by individual authors. The first, the traditional kind, was produced by early civilization and by the childlike peasantry of long ago. The best of the stories produced by the childhood of the race have been bequeathed to the children of today, and to deprive children of the pleasure they would get from this inheritance of folklore seems ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... of the late Henry Man was published in 1802, among the subscribers being three of the officials named in this essay—John Evans, R. Plumer, and Mr. Tipp, and also Thomas Maynard, who, though assigned to the Stock Exchange, is probably the "childlike, pastoral M——" of a later paragraph. Small politics are for the most part kept out of Man's volumes, which are high-spirited rather than witty, but this punning epigram (of which Lamb was an admirer) on Lord Spencer and ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... stars represent the War. I take a childlike pleasure in dismissing Armageddon in this brusque fashion. If you have had anything at all to do with ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 14, 1919 • Various
... on a card what father had, stuck ag'in' the wall." She began to recite, her eyes fixed upon him with childlike gravity. "'He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: He leadeth me beside the still waters.... Yea, though I walk through the valley of shadows, thou art with me, thy rod and thy ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt
... her new role of acquiescence, shone silently on this interchange of ideas; Amherst even detected in her a vague admiration for his power of conversing on subjects which she regarded as abstruse; and this childlike approval, combined with her submission to his will, deluded him with a sense of recovered power over her. He could not but note that the new phase in their relations had coincided with his first assertion of mastery; and he rashly concluded that, with ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... barbarous maltreatment and inhuman oppression! After all these years of unremitting toil, the negro was pushed out into the world without one morsel of food, one cent of money, one foot of land. Naked and unarmed he was pushed forward into a dark cavern and told to beard the lion in his den. In childlike simplicity he undertook the task. Soon the air was filled with his agonizing cries; for the claws and teeth of the lion were ripping open every vein and crushing every bone. In this hour of dire distress the negro lifted up his voice in loud, long ...
— Imperium in Imperio: A Study Of The Negro Race Problem - A Novel • Sutton E. Griggs
... Her voice was shrill and strange, calling from the distance. He watched her as she paddled away. There was something childlike about her, trustful and deferential, like a child. He watched her all the while, as she rowed. And to Gudrun it was a real delight, in make-belief, to be the childlike, clinging woman to the man who stood there on ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... of money was given into the hands of Rothschild, no one has ever denied. But as to how he secreted it from the French has been explained by the very childlike tale that he buried it in the garden back of his house. In the first place, there were no gardens in the Ghetto, and in the second place, money buried in a garden yields no return, and can not to ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... that looked from her face, and he felt suddenly that until this instant he had never loved her. Now she was really his because now she needed him; but for him she would stand alone, deserted and afraid, in that future to which she had turned with such pitiable and childlike ignorance. She and the fight were both in his hands, and he was bracing himself to resist until ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... and magnanimous heart," exclaimed Napoleon, and his large blue eyes assumed a mild and tender expression. "She is a woman just as I like women—so gentle and good, so childlike and playful, so tender and affectionate, so passionate and odd! And at the same time so dignified and refined in her manners. Ah, you ought to have seen her at Milan receiving the princes and noblesse in her drawing-room. I assure you, my friend, the wife of little General Bonaparte looked and ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach
... her innocence, the beautiful, direct gaze, the childlike fulness of mouth and contour of cheek and throat, left him spellbound. The very air around them seemed suffused with the vital glow of her youth and beauty; each breath they drew increased their wonder, till the whole rosy universe seemed thrilling and singing ...
— Iole • Robert W. Chambers
... pleading with our Father God in behalf of the sorrowing ones, or for the Church of God, so dear to his heart, or committing his loved ones into his gracious care; while, with lowly meekness, he confessed and bewailed his sins, and plead for pardon with a childlike love and trust in our blessed Saviour. But oh! delightful thought, his prayers are now turned ...
— A Biographical Sketch of the Life and Character of Joseph Charless - In a Series of Letters to his Grandchildren • Charlotte Taylor Blow Charless
... belonged to that peculiar race immortalized by Bret Harte. He was a heathen Chinee! His face was smooth and bland, and wore an expression of childlike innocence which was well calculated to deceive. Ah Sin possessed the usual craft of his countrymen, and understood very well how to advance his worldly fortunes. He belonged to the advance guard of immigrants ...
— The Young Miner - or Tom Nelson in California • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... already told on these infants. They consider their mother in all things, going without butter when they think the stock is low, bringing in wood and water too heavy for them to carry, anxiously speculating on the winter prospect and the crops, yet withal the most childlike and innocent ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... position of defending the verbal inspiration of the New Testament. This singularly illogical position, however, is always met with in a transition period, when a larger and more purposeful life is struggling with time-hallowed traditions and the memories and teachings made almost sacred by the childlike acceptation, of loved parents, and teachers who have vanished down ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various
... no great anxiety. She knew that she was innocent, and had a childlike, childish confidence that innocence must come out clear of stain, and then ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould
... nevertheless, a sort of youthful buoyancy. Many men of thirty were less fresh in mind and body than he. He was one of those beings who die, as they have lived, children: even the privations of the hardest kind of an existence can not take away from them that purity and childlike trust which seem to be an integral part of themselves, and which, although they may be betrayed, deceived and treated harshly by life, they never wholly lose; very manly and heroic in time of need and danger, they are by nature peculiarly exposed to treasons and deceptions which ...
— Prince Zilah, Complete • Jules Claretie
... himself. The cathedral spire, where it rose beyond the fields in the ruddy evening skies or in the dim, gray, misty mornings, said other things to him than this. But these he told only to Patrasche, whispering, childlike, his fancies in the dog's ear when they went together at their work through the fogs of the daybreak, or lay together at their rest among the rustling rushes by the ...
— A Dog of Flanders • Louisa de la Rame)
... my heart failed me, and I was in two minds whether to slink off ere it was too late, and return to my former solitary way of travel. But the Colonel stood in the path. I had not seen much of him; but already I judged him a man of a childlike nature—with that sort of innocence and courtesy that, I think, is only to be found in old soldiers or old priests— and broken with years and sorrow. I could not turn my back on his distress; could not leave him alone with the selfish trooper who snored ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... books. And nothing could be more charming than just those incidental and unstudied utterances of Behmen about himself. Into the very depths of a passage of the profoundest speculation Behmen will all of a sudden throw a few verses of the most childlike and heart-winning confidences about his own mental history and his own spiritual experience. And thus it is that, without at all intending it, Behmen has left behind him a complete history of his great mind and ...
— Jacob Behmen - an appreciation • Alexander Whyte
... drawn her chair a little back and with her head leaning on the back of Mr. Linden's chair, listened—in a spirit not very different from Johnny's own. She looked up then when it was done, with almost as childlike a brow. It had quieted him, as with a charm, and the little smile he gave Faith was almost wondering why ...
— Say and Seal, Volume II • Susan Warner
... this. To us, love is the coldest, cleanest, as it is perhaps the most loyal of the three. L'amour sounds to us seductive, enticing, often indeed little more than lust embroidered to make a cloak for ennui. Liebe is to us friendly, soft, childlike. ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... good men a guileless and holy second childhood, in which the soul becomes childlike, not childish, and the faculties in full fruit and ripeness are mellow without sign of decay. This is that songful land of Beulah, where they who have travelled manfully the Christian way abide awhile to show the world a perfected manhood. Life, with its battles and its sorrows, lies far behind ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... wrought, by the spell which he had intrusted to his treacherous mistress. The friendly arts of Merlin are succeeded by the machinations of the malicious fairy Morgana, and the watchful care of the the Lady of the Lake. To excite the childlike wonder of his readers, the romancer turns knights to stone, or makes them invisible; he introduces enchanted castles, vessels that steer themselves, and the miraculous properties of the Saint Greal, Arthur and Tristram fight with dragons and giants. ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... struggle was Henri Rousseau, the real and only naif of this time, and certainly among the truest of all times. As much as a man can remain child, Rousseau remained the child, and as much as a man could be naive and childlike, certainly it was this simple ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... occasion, and a crimson ribbon like a flame gleamed in her hair. She was pale-faced, thin, and frail, with soft, delicate features sunburnt from working in the open air; a shy, mournful smile always hovered about her face, and there was a childlike look in her eyes, trustful ...
— The Witch and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... dazed look at the tall clock, and was beginning to put on her cloak when the door opened and Patty entered the kitchen by way of the shed; the usual Patty, rosy, buoyant, alert, with a kind of childlike innocence that could hardly be associated with the possession ...
— The Story Of Waitstill Baxter • By Kate Douglas Wiggin
... looked at her with wistful entreaty; and Madame, in spite of all her pre-arrangements of conduct, was unable at that hour not to answer the appeal for affection she saw in them. She stooped and kissed the childlike little woman, and Archie watched this token of reconciliation and promise with eyes wet ...
— A Knight of the Nets • Amelia E. Barr
... Mammy and Jenny? These humble devoted souls whose lives and thoughts had no concern but to make Mrs. Clayton and Dorothy happy, and who had taken me into the circle of their interest! What were the colored people but the shadows of the white people, following them and imitating them in a childlike, humorous, innocent way? How difficult for selfishness, seeking its own happiness, to understand Mammy and Jenny, whose whole happiness and undivided heart were in giving happiness to Mrs. ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... and concentrated genius, intensely absorbed in some special subject. Such men are often among the most unobservant of the social sides of life, and very bad judges of character, though there will frequently be found among them an almost childlike unworldliness and simplicity of nature, and an essential moderation of temperament which, combined with their superiority of intellect, gives them a charm peculiarly their own. Tact, however, has a natural affinity to a calm, equable, and good-natured ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... and yet her best beloved son. I never have visited the Abbey since, without halting for a few moments beside the chapel in which the Dean and his beloved wife are slumbering. Greater than all his books or literary achievements was Arthur Penryn Stanley, the modest, true-hearted, unselfish, childlike, Christian man. ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... soul that she had never cared for him really, but only for what he might give; and because he had disappointed her, giving little, she hated and would perhaps leave him, to better herself. Now the touch of her shoulder against his breast, and the tired, childlike tucking of her head into his neck, warmed his blood that had run sluggishly and cold as the blood of a prisoner in a cell. New courage flowed back to his heart. Vague thoughts of suicide flapped away like night-birds with the coming of ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... almost childlike spirit of the Milanese painters felt the antique: how differently from their Roman brethren! It was thus that they interpreted the lines of ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... but demands still specific mildness from the land-owner, or loaner of capital, his former master. It is inevitable that there should be complaints on both sides.(439) But in the higher stages of economic culture, the relation of paternal protection and childlike obedience between the different classes of the people, which, even in medieval times, never obtained in all its purity, is certainly unrecallable. Hence it is, that all hope of a better condition of things is based only on this, that the lower classes may as ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... jewellery were all passed in review, and we were asked the price of each article, and whether we had brought them out from England. Our table knives seemed to cause them the greatest astonishment, and as the Sheffield steel glanced in the sun, they were quite childlike in their delight; certainly our English cutlery was a great contrast to the jagged iron knives which served them at table. In our turn, we admired their quaint old silver ornaments, but when we testified a desire to purchase, we failed to ...
— A Girl's Ride in Iceland • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... herself, with justice, to be loved, nay, worshiped by him whom she too loved and worshiped, she danced and laughed, and gave way to other manifestations of joy that had in them, after all, something childlike ...
— Pepita Ximenez • Juan Valera
... noble exceptions to this state of things. Many men whose pre-eminence in scientific knowledge and research is admitted by all, have yet clung in childlike trust to the Bible. They have recognized its authority, they have been satisfied that God's Word could not be in opposition to His Work, and they have been content to wait in unquestioning faith for the day when all that now seems dark and perplexing shall be made clear. ...
— The Story of Creation as told by Theology and by Science • T. S. Ackland
... water to his fevered lips. He bade them give it to a soldier who was stretched on the ground beside him. "Thy necessity," he said, "is greater than mine." The whole of Sidney's nature, his chivalry and his learning, his thirst for adventures, his freshness of tone, his tenderness and childlike simplicity of heart, his affectation and false sentiment, his keen sense of pleasure and delight, pours itself out in the pastoral medley, forced, tedious, and yet strangely beautiful, of his "Arcadia." In his ...
— History of the English People, Volume V (of 8) - Puritan England, 1603-1660 • John Richard Green
... child's face was rather pale than very fair, of a beautiful transparent paleness, with the least tinge of colour in the cheeks; her great violet eyes gazed wonderingly into the study, and her lips parted in childlike uncertainty, while her little gloved hand rested on the door-post as though to get a sense of security from ...
— A Tale of a Lonely Parish • F. Marion Crawford
... able-bodied men were on their feet and half way to the door before we realized the cowardliness of it. We forced ourselves back inside the store very slowly, all of us rather ashamed of our ridiculous and childlike fear. ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various
... of England, and like all hopeful and childlike minds, he imagined the excellent to be far off, and the splendid at a distance: Great Britain was to ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... a child of fourteen, was quiet and thoughtful; her great deep blue eyes had a musing look, but the childlike smile still played around her lips: I was not able to blow it away, nor did ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... an imaginative fascination of the grandly, superhumanly wicked such a necessity to magnify a villain into a demon with archangelic splendour of power of evil, can exist only in minds pure and strong, braced up to virtue, virgin of evil, with a certain childlike power of wonder; minds to whom it appears that to be wicked requires a powerful rebellion; minds accustomed to nature and nature's plainness, to whom the unnatural can be no subject of sophistication and cynicism, but only of wonder. ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... than this. Beards were to the wearers' fancy, and things as strange as the Kaiserliche boar-tusk moustache were commonplace. "Side-burns" found nourishment upon childlike profiles; great Dundreary whiskers blew like tippets over young shoulders; moustaches were trained as lambrequins over forgotten mouths; and it was possible for a Senator of the United States to wear a mist of white whisker upon his throat only, not a newspaper in the ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... body showing through, the hair, platted for the night, in two pig-tails that hung forward, one over each small breast, the tired face between the parted hair made Alice look childlike ...
— The Three Sisters • May Sinclair
... continue to turn the prickly-pears into ogres and hags," said his wife, with her childlike smile. "When you get up again, he will have a whole army of ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... Longfellow's most {485} aboriginal and "American" book. The tripping trochaic measure he borrowed from the Finnish epic Kalevala. The vague, childlike mythology of the Indian tribes, with its anthropomorphic sense of the brotherhood between men, animals, and the forms of inanimate nature, he took from Schoolcraft's Algic Researches, 1839. He fixed forever, in a skillfully chosen poetic form, the more inward ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... the greater occasions which occur but rarely. Moreover, fidelity in trifles, and an earnest seeking to please God in little matters, is a test of real devotion and love. Let your aim be to please our dear Lord perfectly in little things, and to attain a spirit of childlike simplicity and dependence. In proportion as self-love and self-confidence are weakened, and our will bowed to that of God, so will hindrances disappear, the internal troubles and contests which harassed the soul vanish, and it will be filled with ...
— Daily Strength for Daily Needs • Mary W. Tileston
... heaven, but by men with hide-bound souls, who, in order to get them into their own intellectual pockets, melted down the ingots of the kingdom, and re-cast them in moulds of wretched legalism, borrowed of the Romans who crucified their master. Grand, childlike, heavenly things they must explain, forsooth, after vulgar worldly notions of law and right! But they meant well, seeking to justify the ways of God to men, therefore the curse of the apostle does not fall, I think, upon them. They sought a way out of ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... not for his own, and especially for those of his own house (or kindred), he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel." 1 Tim. v. 8. It is, however, concerning this verse, only needful, in childlike simplicity to read the connexion from verse 3 to 5, and it will be obvious that the meaning is this, that whilst the poor widows of the church are to be cared for by the church, yet if any such needy believing widow had children ...
— A Narrative of some of the Lord's Dealings with George Mueller - Written by Himself, Third Part • George Mueller
... gramophone, with illustrated Scripture lessons and pictures from the Life of Christ, and by calling on her "band" for "music" with a big drum, castanets, cymbals, and various other instruments of Indian manipulation. Salvation Army methods have great influence over a childlike people, and Mrs. Baker would make, in case of necessity, a first-class Salvation Army lassie. In fact, no act of missionary humility has struck our eyes as more pathetic and true, than that of Mrs. Baker, beating a big drum to the time of native music, in order to hold an audience ...
— A Tour of the Missions - Observations and Conclusions • Augustus Hopkins Strong
... after he has done with learning wish to stand by a childlike state; and after having done with the childlike state and learning (he is) a Muni' (Bri. Up. III, 5). A doubt arises whether this text enjoins Muni-hood in the same way as it enjoins learning and the childlike state, or merely refers to it as something already ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... over her. The girl had brushed her long fair curls back from her face, and they fell over the cushions in rich luxuriance, a feverish color was on her cheeks, lighting up her loveliness, and her whole appearance was so pretty, so singularly childlike, as she lay there, that it seemed impossible, even then, that she could have anything in common with the trouble that ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... subtly into the sentiment of a human tenderness: "I love its fields clothed with tender trefoil" goes on the song; "I love the marches of Merioneth where my head was pillowed on a snow-white arm." In the Celtic love of woman there is little of the Teutonic depth and earnestness, but in its stead a childlike spirit of delicate enjoyment, a faint distant flush of passion like the rose-light of dawn on a snowy mountain peak, a playful delight in beauty. "White is my love as the apple-blossom, as the ocean's spray; her face shines like the pearly dew on Eryri; the glow of her cheeks is ...
— History of the English People, Volume II (of 8) - The Charter, 1216-1307; The Parliament, 1307-1400 • John Richard Green
... wondering what they meant. The more dull she proved, the more earnestly she was plied. She was sent to school to try the spur of emulation; and brought home again for the advantage of more exclusive attention. And, as still the progress lagged, all feminine employ and childlike recreations were prohibited, to gain more time for study. It cannot be said that Fannny's health was injured by the over action of her mind; for, having none, it could not be easily acted upon; but, by perpetual dronish application, ...
— The Ladies' Vase - Polite Manual for Young Ladies • An American Lady
... this reversion to primitive theology had been merely an automatic reaction of certain nerve cells, she saw and condemned the childlike superstition. No, she was not punished so quickly; but she had been a fool, and she was paying the price of her incredible folly. How little, how pitifully little she knew of the world, after all! A year ago, on that horrible night, she had thought that her lesson was finished, but ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... adhere to religion are undeniably dying out, it is asserted, or suggested, that religion itself is dying. Religion is identified with mythology. But mythology is merely the primaeval matrix of religion. Mythology is the embodiment of man's childlike notions as to the universe in which he finds himself, and the powers which for good or evil influence his lot; and, when analysed, it is found beneath all its national variations to be merely based upon a worship of the sun, the moon, and the forces ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... existence.... The Japanese woman can be known only in her own country,—the Japanese woman as prepared and perfected by the old-time education for that strange society in which the charm of her moral being,—her delicacy, her supreme unselfishness, her childlike piety and trust, her exquisite tactful perception of all ways and means to make happiness about her,—can be comprehended and valued.... Even if she cannot be called handsome according to western standards, the Japanese woman must be confessed pretty,—pretty like a comely ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... joy in nature and in the innocent, childlike pleasures of everyday things, and at the same time possessed a ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... even for a few hours, there is much in the sound of "land ahead" to raise one's spirits, perhaps more especially when crossing the Channel. There is no one who does not hail with delight the first sight of the shore. It gladdens the hearts of the sickly ones, and soon their childlike helplessness disappears; hope and life return, sending the warm blood once more to the pallid cheek, and lighting the languid eye with fresh joy and anticipation. It is pleasant to see how quickly the sufferers shake off the evil spirit of the sea—the terrible mal de mer, ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... he answered, "Yes—Yes—" She had passed her hands through his hair, and she repeated in a childlike voice, despite the big tears which were falling, "Rodolphe! Rodolphe! ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... monastic seclusion to which he has been lately subjected—are extremely pleasing, and even handsome, set-off as they are by the clean collar which he has put on in anticipation of his approaching doom. Before sinking into childlike slumber, he listened with evident pleasure to a banjo which was being played outside a public-house in the vicinity of the gaol. The banjoist is now being interviewed, and believes that the air he must have been performing ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., November 29, 1890 • Various
... in right assertion; it is the assumption of legitimate responsibility and command. To be lowly of heart does not mean to be inefficient; to be humble does not necessarily mean to be obscure. Luther and Lincoln were both of a childlike humility ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... of her writings is the frankness with which she takes the reader into her personal confidence. She is never formal, never a martyr to artificial restraint, never wrapped in a mantle of reserve; but, with an almost childlike simplicity, presents a transparent revelation of her inmost thoughts and feelings, with perfect ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn
... metaphysical speculations—mysticisms: the arcana coelestia of Swedenborg was Holy Writ to him. He believed in three heavens, and their opposites. Jane's endeavors were directed to make him believe in a fourth heaven. Childlike and immature in appearance, she was in character exceedingly precocious. Her intelligence was keen and practical. In very early years it had been instilled into her that her future welfare would depend upon her own exertions, ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn
... A minute after Mrs. Leyburn called her, and she went to sit on a stool at her mother's feet, her hands resting on the elder woman's lap, the whole attitude of the tall active figure one of beautiful and childlike abandonment. Mrs. Leyburn wanted to confide in her about a new cap, and Catherine took up the subject with a zest which kept her mother ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... loveliness such as is rarely seen even in a beauty-abounding land. A form of medium height which would, in later years, develop much of stately grace; a complexion of lily-like fairness; and eyes as deep and brown, as tender and childlike, as if their owner were gazing, ever and always, as infants gaze who see only great, grand wonders, and never a ...
— Madeline Payne, the Detective's Daughter • Lawrence L. Lynch
... reminds us of the childlike and bland Sir Henry Drummond Wolff, when he opposed Mr. Brad-laugh's entry to the House of Commons. That honorable champion of Almighty God objected to Mr. Bradlaugh on the ground that he acknowledged ...
— Bible Romances - First Series • George W. Foote
... studying it. Many of these things were not strange to Tony, because, born among plants, he had grown up with them as if they were brothers and sisters, and the sturdy, brown-faced boy had learned many lessons which no poet or philosopher could have taught him, unless he had become as childlike as himself, and studied ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various
... interpretation. This air of remoteness, baffling the impertinent crowd not less effectually than the dust which has gathered for centuries about the heads of Sphinxes, is due partly to the deeply sunken eyes beneath the wrinkled, overarching forehead; partly it arises from that childlike simplicity and sweetness which lurk in gentle undulations of the features,—undulations as of happy wavelets set in motion ages since, and that cannot cease forever; but chiefly it is born of a dream-like, brooding eternity of speculation, which we can trace neither to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... and found Bertie's Nellie behind the black boys' humpy shyly peeping round a corner. With childlike impetuosity she had scampered along the four miles from the Warlochs, only to be ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... Belasco. He has been privileged to hear expressed, by this Edison of our stage, diverse opinions about plays and players of the past, and about insurgent experiments of the immediate hour. He has always found a man quickly responsive to the best memories of the past, an artist naively childlike in his love of the theatre, shaped by old conventions and modified by new inventions. Belasco is the one individual manager to-day who has a workshop of his own; he is pre-eminently a creator, whereas his contemporaries, like Charles Frohman, ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm • David Belasco
... was reciting, it was easy for Brown, sitting next, to open his book, and calculating narrowly the parallax, to hold it concealed below the rail, while he diligently conned the page following. In his turn he rose well-primed, and spouted glibly, and so on down the class. Rumour went that our childlike professor declared he had never known anything like it. Nearly every man got the perfect mark. This was a fiction. The professor's idea was that we were old enough to know what was good for us, and ought to be above childish negligence ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... Before whose inexperienced sight Life lies extended, vast and bright, To peer into the future tries. Old age through spectacles too peers, Although the destined coffin nears, Having lost all in life we prize. It matters not. Hope e'en to these With childlike ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... soundly on his hard bed. For hours he had fought off this terrible languor with a desperation born of terror for those he had left behind him, who looked to him as their only hope. Now he resigned their fate to the big man whose eyes had looked so kindly into his, with a childlike feeling of rest and content. He lay thus until the sun rose high in the heavens the next morning, when he was awakened by the insistent neighing of his horse which had risen almost to a cry ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... the many subdivisions of this class are much less childlike and more dignified than those we have been describing, and it is from these sections that the entities who have sometimes been reverenced under the name of wood-gods, or local village-gods, have been drawn. Such entities ...
— The Astral Plane - Its Scenery, Inhabitants and Phenomena • C. W. Leadbeater
... Madonna and the Giotto Madonna, side by side, which we saw in the Accademia, and this. With so many vivid sympathies Giotto must have wanted with all his soul to make the mother motherly and the child childlike; but the time was not yet; his hand was neither free nor fit. Between Giotto and Raphael had to come many things before such treatment as this was possible; most of all, I think, Luca della Robbia had to come between, for he was the most ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... "That is childlike. Your finger-prints prove it is false. Perhaps you will tell us what underlies this note that you sent to Lady Eileen Meredith the day you ...
— The Grell Mystery • Frank Froest
... face and brown, extraordinary eyes revealing a strong soul. They were capable both of melting and of flashing, but especially of flashing; the soul was imperious. As for the rest of her, the dear straight little nose was non-committal, the mouth fresh and childlike, with a slight, appealing droop in the corners. In short, Nature the great experimentalist had in this case endowed a most sweet and kissable little body with ...
— The Deaves Affair • Hulbert Footner
... thoughts and energies. For a century the people lived self-concentrated, introspective, their minds filled only with thoughts of themselves. If foreign affairs were discussed at all it was in curiously childlike and impracticable terms. The nation grew up a nation of provincials (there is no other word for it), with a provincialism which was somewhat modified, but still provincial, in the cities of the Atlantic coast, and which, after all, had a dignity of its own from the mere fact ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... following that when she had summoned Eddo to speak with her, Nya sat at the mouth of the cave. It was late afternoon, and already the shadows gathered so quickly that save for her white hair, her little childlike shape, withered now almost to a skeleton, was scarcely visible against the black rock. Walking to and fro in her aimless fashion, as she would do for hours at a time, Rachel accompanied by Noie passed and repassed her, till at length the old woman lifted ...
— The Ghost Kings • H. Rider Haggard
... characteristic, slouching, gait—but it seemed that was all too slow, that he must throw discretion to the winds and run the distance. His blood was tingling; there was elation upon him, coupled with an almost childlike dread that she might ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... professor had found his way into the hearts of the Judge and his wife. He had a charm about him. Most people immediately liked him, and his childlike qualities brought out a protective feeling in others. And everybody from Tang and his boys to the Judge were eagerly watching a chance to do him ...
— The Merriweather Girls in Quest of Treasure • Lizette M. Edholm
... want to come, Abner. She don't like me and I thought she did," said Perez, turning his eyes from the girl to Abner, with an expression of despairing, appealing helplessness, almost childlike. ...
— The Duke of Stockbridge • Edward Bellamy
... limited. So much time was spent at Severndale with Peggy, and it was during one of these visits that Mrs. Harold figured in one of the domestic episodes of Severndale. They were not new to Peggy for she was Southern-born and used to the vagaries and childlike outbreaks of the colored people. But even though Mrs. Harold had lived among them a great deal, and thought she understood them pretty thoroughly, she had yet to learn some of ...
— Peggy Stewart: Navy Girl at Home • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... to all such forms of impiety, believe me, is not controversy of any sort; but the childlike study of the Bible, each one for himself,—not without prayer.—Humble must we be, as well as assiduous; for the powers of the mind as well as the affections of the heart should be prostrated before the Bible, or a man will ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... was among these fortunate ones. The household of these two women was a curious one. Both were childlike, placing side by side in a common domain, inexperience and ambition, the tranquility of an accomplished destiny and the fever of a life plunged in struggle, all the different qualities manifest even in the serene style of dress affected by this blonde who seemed all white like a faded rose, with ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... example of Jesus offer a simpler and more natural ideal? The moral experience of the Son of Man was not a revolution but an evolution. His own religion was not that of the twice-born, and all that He asked of His disciples was the childlike mind.[15] Paul, the man of cities, feels a kindred turbulence within himself. Jesus, the interpreter of nature, feels the steady persuasiveness of the sunshine of God, and grows from childhood in stature, wisdom, and favour with God and man. It is contended by some that the whole Pauline conception ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... exaggerated ceremony, but with a sort of innocent and childlike gravity, while the satin of her gown spread itself like a great blossom over the floor. Her head was bowed until the dark lashes swept her crimson cheeks; then she rose again from the heart of the shimmering lily, with the one splendid rose glowing ...
— Penelope's Progress - Being Such Extracts from the Commonplace Book of Penelope Hamilton As Relate to Her Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... distant as though he were in another country. She became in this way, as time went on, more silent, graver, and more what her cousins called "old-fashioned"; and though at heart she was far more childlike than they, she went about her work with serious application like one of twice her years. Mrs Greenways did not disapprove of this, and though she lost no occasion of impressing upon Lilac her smallness and uselessness, ...
— White Lilac; or the Queen of the May • Amy Walton
... to the Stockbridge Indians by the most ponderous of the metaphysical preachers of New England, Samuel Hopkins, is beautifully simple and childlike. It is given in full in Park's "Life of ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... an alert, eager mind, childlike with its curiosity, yet strangely matured. And her manner was naively earnest. Yet this was no clinging vine, this Anita Prince. There was a firmness, a hint of masculine strength in her chin and in ...
— Brigands of the Moon • Ray Cummings
... childlike attitude, delighting in details, and proud of the clever brush which could carry imitation to the point of deception. Rubens was the first to treat landscape in a bold subjective way. He opened ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... Her childlike nature shed happiness upon me, her gentle innocence stilled me. It is quite true that I felt her influence upon my senses like ...
— Three Comedies • Bjornstjerne M. Bjornson
... countries, he has never yet been sinful. He wishes me, eight or nine weeks hence, to accompany him on foot to Quebec, and then to Niagara and New York. I should like it well, if my circumstances and other considerations would permit. What pleases much in Mons. S—— is the simple and childlike enjoyment he finds in trifles, and the joy with which he speaks of going back to his own country, away from the dull Yankees, who here misunderstand and despise him. Yet I have never heard him speak harshly of them. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... an air of complete candor and purity, and Alice Singleton stood before the company as the incarnation of sincerity and truth. Her face was of the rounded, full-lipped, wistful type; the sensuous, selfish face moulded into the likeness of childlike guilelessness which of all the multitudinous varieties of the "ever womanly" is the one ...
— The Puritans • Arlo Bates
... took a cordial affection and enthusiasm for the widely-celebrated Poet, and on closer acquaintance with Schiller, also affected his Mother,—who, as Widow, for her three Sons' sake, lived frequently at Stuttgart,—with a deep and zealous sympathy in Schiller's fate. Schiller had, with a truly childlike trust, confided himself to this excellent Lady, and after his Arrest,—a bitter consequence of his secret visit to Mannheim,—had confessed to her his purpose to run away. Frau von Wolzogen, who feared no sacrifice when the ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... slabe white or black?" asked Mrs Lilly, with childlike simplicity, and more for the purpose of gaining time to think ...
— The Middy and the Moors - An Algerine Story • R.M. Ballantyne
... upon old Tom the eye of the Big City, which is an eye expressive of cold and justifiable suspicion, of judgment suspended as high as Haman was hung, of self-preservation, of challenge, curiosity, defiance, cynicism, and, strange as you may think it, of a childlike yearning for friendliness and fellowship that must be hidden when one walks among the "stranger bands." For in New Bagdad one, in order to survive, must suspect whosoever sits, dwells, drinks, rides, walks or ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... charming, even when it seems childlike. As a master of verse he has no English rival since Spenser. The trochaic meter in which "Hiawatha" is written would seem to have been his own invention; [Footnote: At least I can remember no other long poem composed in it.] and is a very agreeable change from the perpetual ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... there are others who, ripening from natural, that is divine causes and influences, are the daintiest little men and women, gentle in the utmost peevishness of their lassitude, generous to share the gifts they most prize, and divinely childlike in their repentances. Their falling from the stalk is but the passing from the arms of their mothers into those of—God knows whom—which is ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... knew by experience that his old miser of an aunt would send him to bed supperless, but, with childlike faith and certain of having been, all the year, as good and industrious as possible, he hoped that the Christ-Child would not forget him, and so he, too, planned to place his wooden shoes in ...
— The Children's Book of Christmas Stories • Various
... Estelle, with her quiet yet childlike resolution, 'they are not going to kill any of us yet. They said so. You are so tired, poor Victorine! Now all the hubbub is over, suppose you lie still and sleep. My uncle,' as he roamed round her, mourning for his rosary, 'I am afraid your beads are lost; ...
— A Modern Telemachus • Charlotte M. Yonge
... family, the nations of Christendom, for which our Lord Jesus Christ was contented to be betrayed into the hands of wicked men, and suffer death upon the cross. Let us ask this, even though we do not fully understand what Christ's death on the cross did for mankind. That was the humble, childlike, really believing spirit of the early Christians. God grant us the same spirit; we need it much ...
— Discipline and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... sacerdotalism, its subtle reverie, its sensuous colour and perfume, its marmoreal austerity, its honeyed music, its frequent preoccupation with the haunted recesses of thought, there go an endearing homeliness and simplicity, a deep human tenderness, a gentle friendliness, a something childlike. He has written of her, "the presence that rose thus so strangely beside the waters," to whom all experience had been "but as the sound of lyres and flutes," and he has written of "The Child in the House." Among all "the strange dyes, strange colours, and curious ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... away from the box and neatly executed a somersault on the floor of the cage, as much as to say, "I am disgusted with the whole situation." Again, later on the same day, after falling from the top of the larger box, which tilted over very easily, he rolled himself into a ball, and childlike, played with his feet. An additional evidence of his changed affective attitude toward his task, especially in connection with definite failures, appeared in his rough handling and biting of the boxes. When most impatient, ...
— The Mental Life of Monkeys and Apes - A Study of Ideational Behavior • Robert M. Yerkes
... an American journalist, must have been sorely tempted to produce. Indeed he has little to offer us that has not been common property of the Correspondents for long enough, and several of his descriptions (his picture of a glacier, for one), given with a rather irritatingly childlike air of new discovery, cannot escape the charge of commonplace. But his reflections, for once in a way the better half of experience, more than make good this defect. His essay on Paris, for instance—"the city of unshed tears"—is something ...
— Punch, Volume 153, July 11, 1917 - Or the London Charivari. • Various
... Belknap's perfidy was not removed by the attitude of the President, nor by the vote of the Senate on the article of impeachment—37 guilty, 25 not guilty-for the evidence was too convincing. The public knew by this time Grant's childlike failing in sticking to his friends; and 93 of the 25 Senators who voted not guilty had publicly declared they did so, not because they believed him innocent, but because they believed they had no jurisdiction over an ...
— The Boss and the Machine • Samuel P. Orth
... bosoms, as thus, day after day, while, like the d&y, our hearts were in their first youth, we resorted to the ever-fresh mansions of the sovereign Nature. This habit produces purity of feeling, and continues the habit in its earliest simplicity. The childlike laws which it encourages and strengthens are those which virtue most loves, and which strained forms of society are the first to overthrow. The pure tastes of youth are those which are always most dear to humanity; and love is easy of access, and peace not often a stranger ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... formed settlements in the Northern districts, in days when the lives of settlers were in constant peril from the Maoris. But nothing could daunt his courage; and whenever they came into personal contact with him, these childlike savages felt his power and responded to his influence, and he was able to lay a good foundation. In 1841 the English Church sent out George Augustus Selwyn as first Missionary Bishop of New Zealand, giving him a wide province and no less wide ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... of his mouth as he spoke, which might have been thought characteristic of him. He was an odd-looking boy, not ill-made, though very thin and not tall. His pallor was clear and even, as though constitutional; the features were delicate, almost childlike, but they were very slightly distorted, through nervous habit, to an expression at once wistful and humorous; one eyebrow was a shade higher than the other, one side of the mouth slightly drawn down; the eyelids twitched a little, habitually; ...
— The Conquest of Canaan • Booth Tarkington
... ardent, enthusiastic, young in heart and mind, a thoroughly open nature. Her husband, on the other hand, was of a morose, sombre, melancholy, reserved nature. In spite of her superior intelligence Hortense had a sort of childlike air; but Louis, though young in years, had the character and appearance of an old man. As much as Hortense loved liberty, her suspicious husband wished to hold firmly the reins of conjugal authority. He was prematurely afflicted with various infirmities, almost always morbidly ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... something better:' and off came the dainty embroidered cambric sleeves, up went the coloured ones, a white apron came out of a pocket, and the pretty hands were busy among the flour; the children assisting, learning, laughing a childlike laugh. ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... supernatural world. The gods to them were the guardians of the State, whose will in all things they were bound to seek and to obey. The forms in which they endeavored to learn what that will might be were childish or childlike. They looked to signs in the sky, to thunder-storms and comets and shooting stars. Birds, winged messengers, as they thought them, between earth and heaven, were celestial indicators of the gods' commands. But omens and auguries were but the outward symbols, ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude
... by, slowly at first, then quicker, for the young native woman whom he had married a year before had aroused in him a sort of unspoken affection for her artless and childlike innocence, and this deepened when her first child was born; and sometimes, as he worked at his old trade of boat-building—learned before he joined the King's ...
— Rodman The Boatsteerer And Other Stories - 1898 • Louis Becke
... dread of wrath and condemnation, and, because of such doubt, would flee from God, not daring to call upon him. But where there is faith in Christ, there the Holy Spirit brings the comfort spoken of, and a childlike trust which does not doubt that God is gracious and will answer prayer, because he has promised all these—grace and help, comfort, and answer to prayer—not for the sake of our worthiness, but for the sake of the name and merit of ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. III - Trinity Sunday to Advent • Martin Luther
... shoulders, but said no more; I suppose because he did not know what to say, to such a simple, childlike question. ...
— Stories and Legends of Travel and History, for Children • Grace Greenwood
... Mataafa's camp, called in broad day at the German quarter of the town for guides, and proceeded to the reef. Here, diving with a rope, they got the gun aboard; and the night being then come, returned by the same route in the shallow water along shore, singing a boat-song. It will be seen with what childlike reliance they had accepted the neutrality of Apia bay; they came for the gun without concealment, laboriously dived for it in broad day under the eyes of the town and shipping, and returned with it, singing ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... woods, and you may not see them again that day. However, they may come back to you after a while, as if they relished your company. The goldfinches are also long-distance flyers, not flitters. Usually they give some signal of their presence, either by their vivacious "pe-chick-o-pe" or their childlike and semi-musical calls; but there are times when a good-sized flock of them will suddenly appear in the tree-tops above you, and you cannot tell when they arrived, for you did not see them there at all a few ...
— Our Bird Comrades • Leander S. (Leander Sylvester) Keyser
... degradation instead of beauty, dignity, and civilising power. At first there was a halt in this man's life. He cursed the North and he cursed the Negro. Then there was despair, almost utter hopelessness, over his weak and childlike condition. The temptation was to forget all in drink, and to this temptation there was a gradual yielding. With the loss of physical vigour came the loss of mental grasp and pride in surroundings. There was the falling off of a piece of plaster from the walls of the house which was not ...
— The Future of the American Negro • Booker T. Washington
... we have the true Sajouins; and of these the Saimiri or Titi is the most distinguished species. This pretty little creature is about equal in size to a squirrel, and possesses all the playful disposition of the latter. Its childlike innocence of countenance, as well as its pleasing and graceful manners, render it a favourite pet wherever it can be obtained. Its rich robe of yellowish-grey, mixed with green, adds to the attraction of its presence. There are several species of Sajouins, known as the Widow monkey, ...
— Quadrupeds, What They Are and Where Found - A Book of Zoology for Boys • Mayne Reid
... characteristics. He left me nothing but his example and the memory of his many virtues, for all that he ever earned was given to the poor. He was {17} too good for this world; but the remembrance of his high principles, his cheerfulness, his childlike simplicity and truly Christian character, is never absent from my mind.' It was John Howe's practice for years 'to take his Bible under his arm every Sunday afternoon, and, assembling around him in the large room all the prisoners in the Bridewell, to read and explain to them the ...
— The Tribune of Nova Scotia - A Chronicle of Joseph Howe • W. L. (William Lawson) Grant
... use of metaphor and chary of definition. The teaching of the Buddha on the other hand is essentially intellectual. The nature and tastes of his audience were a sufficient justification for his style, but it indicates a temper far removed from the unquestioning and childlike faith of Christ. We can hardly conceive him using such a phrase as Our Father, but we may be sure that if he had done so he would have explained why and how and to what extent such words can be ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... and that feeling of his submission and her own power filled her with happiness. Her recollections revived in one moment. He was for her again that splendid Vinicius, beautiful as a pagan god; he, who in the house of Aulus had spoken to her of love, and roused as if from sleep her heart half childlike at that time; he from whose embraces Ursus had wrested her on the Palatine, as he might have wrested her from flames. But at present, with ecstasy, and at the same time with pain in his eagle face, with pale forehead and imploring eyes,—wounded, ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... vent aloud, and would not be comforted. The doctor, whom the old housekeeper had called in, pronounced Antonia's case a somewhat serious but by no means dangerous attack; and she did indeed recover more quickly than her father had dared to hope. She now clung to him with the most confiding childlike affection; she entered into his favorite hobbies—into his mad schemes and whims. She helped him take old violins to pieces and glue new ones together. "I won't sing again any more, but live for you," she often said, sweetly smiling upon him, after she had been asked to ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: German • Various
... meal at Strides Cottage—then continued:—"That brings to mind to ask you, whether little Davy is in the right of it when he writes your name 'Picture'?... Is he not, mayhap, calling you out of your name, childlike?" ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... the reality of which the wandering fancies of every human child bear ample witness; not to speak of the dreams of those childlike tribes of the race, who in our progressive insolence we are pleased to name "uncivilized." The deeper we dig into the tissue of convoluted impressions that make up our universe the more vividly do we become aware that our only redemption from sheer insanity lies in "knowing ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... lesser light to rule the night,' is touching to the verge of pathos; and the additional remark which he throws in, as it were casually,—'He made the stars also,' cannot but move us to admiration. How childlike the simplicity of the soul which could so venture to deal with the inexplicable and tremendous problem of the Universe! How self-centred and sure the faith which could so arrange the work of Infinite and Eternal forces ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... Childlike, she did not pause to think of the wrong of so doing, for she ought to have known that her parents never would have consented ...
— Through Forest and Fire - Wild-Woods Series No. 1 • Edward Ellis
... shown pouring the rain out of a water-jar (just as the deities of Babylonia and India are often represented), and putting his foot upon the head of a serpent, who is preventing the rain from reaching the earth. Here we find depicted with childlike simplicity and directness the Vedic conception of Indra overcoming the demon Vritra. Stempell describes this scene as "the elephant-headed god B standing upon the head of a serpent";[141] while Seler, who claims that god B is a tortoise, ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... trifles, and an earnest seeking to please God in little matters, is a test of real devotion and love. Let your aim be to please our dear Lord perfectly in little things, and to attain a spirit of childlike simplicity and dependence. In proportion as self-love and self-confidence are weakened, and our will bowed to that of God, so will hindrances disappear, the internal troubles and contests which harassed the soul ...
— Daily Strength for Daily Needs • Mary W. Tileston
... Effi, and Geert, Geert. Geert, if I am not mistaken, signifies a tall and slender trunk, and so Effi may be the ivy destined to twine about it." At these words the betrothed couple looked at each other somewhat embarrassed, Effi's face showing at the same time an expression of childlike mirth, but Mrs. von Briest said: "Say what you like, Briest, and formulate your toasts to suit your own taste, but if you will allow me one request, avoid poetic imagery; it is beyond your sphere." These silencing words ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... know," he said. Suddenly, with an impulse and gesture of childlike and terrible longing, he put both his arms about Marjorie. His face wore an expression that she could never forget. Looking up at him with wide, tearless eyes, she felt in that one uncontrolled moment that she knew him better than she ever would again. She felt wonderfully old, immeasurably older ...
— Four Days - The Story of a War Marriage • Hetty Hemenway
... to that drug store and ask," concluded Edna, wisely; and with childlike confidence she turned to the ...
— A Dear Little Girl • Amy E. Blanchard
... with these there is that singular form of the religious spirit which has been so constantly misunderstood, and which, except in a very few persons, seems so rare nowadays—the faith which is implicit without being imbecile, childlike without being childish, devout with a fearless familiarity, the spirit to which the Dies Irae and the sermons of St Francis were equally natural expressions, and which, if it could sometimes exasperate ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... deserted; and the few who came and went hastened on with fluttering garments, head bent down, and a shivering sense of discomfort. The fields were bare and brown; and the landscape on the uplands rising in the distance would have been utterly sombre had not green fields of grain, like childlike faith in wintry age, relieved the gloomy outlook and prophesied of the sunshine and golden harvest of a new year ...
— Taken Alive • E. P. Roe
... stove in the store in his village has his mind filled to overflowing with the words of other men. The newspapers and the magazines have pumped him full. Much of the old brutal ignorance that had in it also a kind of beautiful childlike innocence is gone forever. The farmer by the stove is brother to the men of the cities, and if you listen you will find him talking as glibly and as senselessly as the best ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... by the window, was beating the glass impatiently with his long, thin fingers. He thought his mother showed but little impatience to see her son who had hurried with all the eagerness of childlike love to greet her. He wondered what could be her motive, and had just surmised it as the door opened and the chamberlain announced in a loud voice—"Her majesty, the widowed queen." A soft, mocking smile played upon his lips for a moment, ...
— Frederick the Great and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... bobbed about from right to left, looking out at the windows and gazing at the houses, the shops, and the crowds of people. Nothing could exceed the surprise and delight of the intellectual but childlike old man, who now for the first time in his life looked upon a large city. His enthusiasm at the sight of the ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... peculiar yearning which seems, on analysis, half pity for what has past and half fear for what may come. It is bestowed on little children, and on those whose natures, in spite of their years, are essentially childlike. For this girl's face was so pathetically young. Its sensitive lips pouted with a child's pout, its pointed chin was delicate with the delicacy that is lost when the teeth have had often to be clenched in resolve; its cheek was curved so softly, its long ...
— The Claim Jumpers • Stewart Edward White
... background his service, and to prepare the way for the narrative of the beginning of an epoch of divine speech. When priests are faithless and people careless, God's voice will often sound from lowly childlike lips. The man who is to be His instrument in carrying on His work will often come from the very centre of the old order, into which he is to breathe new life, and on which he is to ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... recorded far more than they moralized. The popular ballads are, as a rule, entirely free from didacticism in any form; that is one of the main sources of their unfailing charm. They show not only a childlike curiosity about the doings of the day and the things that befall men, but a childlike indifference to moral inference and justification. The bloodier the fray the better for ballad purposes; no one feels ...
— The Book of Old English Ballads • George Wharton Edwards
... left Philadelphia and returned to New York, where he remained for the rest of his life. This is the childlike way he writes to ...
— Four Famous American Writers: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, • Sherwin Cody
... bloom of her youthful beauty, arose, according to the simple and impressive New England rite, to consecrate herself publicly to a religious life, and to join the company of professing Christians, she was regarded with a species of deference amounting even to awe. Had it not been for the childlike, unconscious simplicity of her manners, the young people of her age would have shrunk away from her, as from one entirely out of their line of thought and feeling; but a certain natural and innocent playfulness ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... parent or friend or companion; he taught me my lessons by day and my prayers by night, and, when I passed through all the absurd ailments to which a child is heir, he sat beside my cot and lulled me to sleep, or told me stories of the war. There was a childlike and simple quality in his own nature, which made me reach out to him and confide in him as I would have done to one of my own age. Later, I scoffed at this virtue in him as something old-fashioned and credulous. That was when I had reached the ...
— Captain Macklin • Richard Harding Davis
... Superior of the Order sang the Mass, while the Bishop of Alberta seated in his Glastonbury chair suffered with an expression of childlike benignity the ritualistic ministrations of Brother Raymond, the ceremonial doffing and donning of his mitre. It was very still in the little Oratory, for it was the season when birds are hushed; and even Sir Charles Horner who was all by himself ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... drew near him in love secure Cooling his forehead's hot fever; Gently their message of innocence pure Made him a childlike believer. ...
— Poems and Songs • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... after my entry Father Pichon was surprised at the workings of grace in my soul; he thought my piety childlike and my path an easy one. My conversation with this good Father would have brought me great comfort, had it not been for the extreme difficulty I found in opening my heart. Nevertheless I made a general confession, and after it he said to me: "Before God, the Blessed Virgin, and Angels, and all the ...
— The Story of a Soul (L'Histoire d'une Ame): The Autobiography of St. Therese of Lisieux • Therese Martin (of Lisieux)
... Mr. Gorbachev's upcoming visit to America can lead to a more stable relationship. Surely no people on Earth hate war or love peace more than we Americans. But we cannot stroll into the future with childlike faith. Our differences with a system that openly proclaims and practices an alleged right to command people's lives and to export its ideology by force are deep and abiding. Logic and history compel us to accept that our relationship be guided by realism—rock-hard, ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Ronald Reagan • Ronald Reagan
... all alone in your greatness, like Moses, and that this fragile flower of the North transplanted into the little garden at Tarascon would brighten its monotony, and be sweeter to see and breathe than that everlasting baobab, arbos gigantea, diminutively confined in the mignonette pot. With her childlike eyes, and her broad brow, thoughtful and self-willed, Sonia looked at him, and she, too, dreamed—but who knows what the young girls ...
— Tartarin On The Alps • Alphonse Daudet
... tendencies in a singular manner. However, he had not yet reached the age when the fixed idea plants itself in a man's mind. In the morning, after he had dipped his head in a bucket of water, he remembered his thoughts and visions of the night but vaguely; nothing remained of his dreams save a childlike innocence, full of trustful confidence and yearning tenderness. He felt like a child again. He ran to the well, solely desirous of meeting his sweetheart's smile, and tasting the delights of the radiant morning. And during the day, when thoughts of the future sometimes made him ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... a song through the even; Features lit up by a reflex of heaven; Eyes like the skies of poor Erin, our mother, Where shadow and sunshine are chasing each other; Smiles coming seldom, but childlike and simple, Planting in each rosy cheek a sweet dimple;— thanks to the Saviour, that even thy seeming Is left to the exile to brighten ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... forget me; but she could not do that. I have thought of her so often during these weary years that she must sometimes have thought of me. Five years! She must be a woman now. My little child a woman! Yet she is sure to be childlike, sweet, and gentle. How she will grieve when she hears of my sufferings. Oh! my darling, my darling, you are not dead!" And then, looking hastily about him in the darkness, as though fearful even there of being seen, he pulled from out his breast a little packet, ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... no retort to such childlike faith. Her faith. How horribly criminal it would be to destroy it. A priceless thing—human happiness to be created out of the faith that it was the normal thing. He realized that his heart was pounding, as though ...
— The World Beyond • Raymond King Cummings
... menial respect. Took such warm, singular interest in my affairs. Wanted to be considered one of the family—sort of adopted son of mine, I suppose. Of a morning, when I would go out to my stable, with what childlike good nature he would trot out my nag, 'Please sir, I think he's getting fatter and fatter.' 'But, he don't look very clean, does he?' unwilling to be downright harsh with so affectionate a lad; 'and he seems ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... Raymond Warde without loving him, being ambitious of his name and honours, when his future had seemed brilliant in the days of good King Henry. She had borne him an only son, who worshipped her with a chivalric devotion that was almost childlike in its blindness; but the most that she could feel, in return, was a sort of motherly vanity in his outward being; and this he accepted as love, though it was as far from that as devotion to self is from devotion to another— as greed is far from generosity. She had not been more than sixteen years ...
— Via Crucis • F. Marion Crawford
... world-wide book knowledge, of universal scientific ability, such as never, perhaps, was lavished by any other man upon any other department of study. His conspicuous and beautiful love of truth, his unflinching candour, his transparent fearlessness and honesty of purpose, his childlike simplicity, his modesty of demeanour, his charming manner, his affectionate disposition, his kindliness to friends, his courtesy to opponents, his gentleness to harsh and often bitter assailants, kindled in the minds of men of science everywhere throughout the world ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... but transfer that on which they rely from the seen to the unseen. While, however, other childish things, like ghosts and fairies, can be put away, man seems to be "incurably religious," and the most completely devout natures, although childlike in their attitude towards God, give no impression of immaturity. When one compares Jesus of Nazareth with the leaders in State and Church in the Jerusalem of His day, He seems the adult and they the children. And further, those who attempt to destroy religion as an irrational survival address ...
— Some Christian Convictions - A Practical Restatement in Terms of Present-Day Thinking • Henry Sloane Coffin
... had pride in impressing his auditors with the vastness of his information, acquired by reading and study. He had, moreover, a kind of childlike vanity in making men feel that he was not only extraordinary, but greatly their superior, even when they got him to talk on their own subjects. This habit was ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... thought. Though so temperate, and with total abstinence from other animal food than milk, and from all intoxicating drinks, they are delicate and dainty to an extreme in food and beverage; and in all their sports even the old exhibit a childlike gaiety. Happiness is the end at which they aim, not as the excitement of a moment, but as the prevailing condition of the entire existence; and regard for the happiness of each other is evinced by the exquisite amenity of ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... sensuous extravagances, were in perfect keeping with the genius of an age when, for instance, a transfer of land was not held binding without the delivery of a clod. And so, what Mr. John Stuart Mill describes as "the childlike character of the religious sentiment of a rude people, who know terror, but not awe, and are often on the most intimate terms of familiarity with the objects of their adoration," makes it conceivable how that which seems to ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... ahead of all competitors. So do we make the most ignoble passions of our children our allies in the unholy task of divesting them of their childhood. And yet, who is not aware that the best men the world has seen have been those who, throughout their lives, retained the aroma of childlike simplicity which they brought with them into existence? Learning—the acquisition of specific facts—is not wisdom; it is almost incompatible with wisdom; indeed, unless the mind be powerful enough not only to fuse its facts, but to vaporize them,—to sublimate them into an impalpable atmosphere,—they ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... long years, liker must they grow; The man be more of woman, she of man: He gain in sweetness and in moral height— She mental breadth, nor fail in childward care, Nor lose the childlike ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... happiness, to one after another Geraldine courtesied and extended the narrow childlike hand of amity—even to him. Then, as though treading on invisible pink clouds, she floated out and away up-stairs, scarcely conscious of passing her brother on the stairway, who was now descending for his turn before the altar ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... Fechner's speculations took was necessitated by logic. I believe it not to have been required. Meanwhile let me lead you a little more into the detail of his thought. Inevitably one does him miserable injustice by summarizing and abridging him. For altho the type of reasoning he employs is almost childlike for simplicity, and his bare conclusions can be written on a single page, the power of the man is due altogether to the profuseness of his concrete imagination, to the multitude of the points which he considers successively, to the cumulative effect of his learning, of his ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... at the days when his father was only Earl of Anjou, he answered:—'Should not an earl's son wait on a king's son?' And when the cold corners of the King's mouth began to thaw, there was a great motion of laughter among us, part real, part childlike, to be freed from the dulness—part royal, for King and kingling both laughed, and so we could not but laugh, as by a royal necessity—part childlike again—when we felt we had laughed too long and could not stay ourselves—many midriff-shaken even to tears, as springs gush out after earthquakes—but ...
— Becket and other plays • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... room, and sat down by the side of the bed. He opened the book and began to read of Willie Reilly and his Colleen Bawn. Now and then he glanced at his Uncle and wondered at the childlike and innocent look on his face. There was a strange simplicity in his eyes ... not the simplicity of those who have not got understanding, but of those who have a deep and unchangeable knowledge that is ...
— The Foolish Lovers • St. John G. Ervine
... history as given by leading authorities, Protestant and Catholic, and in various original treatises by thinkers eminent in the history of the church. A marked influence was exercised upon me by reading sundry lives of the mediaeval saints: even the quaintest of these showed me how, in spite of childlike credulity, most noble lives had been led, well worthy to be pondered ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... abundant marks. Yet, on the whole, the labors of the missionaries tended greatly to the benefit of the Indians. Reclaimed, as the Jesuits tried to reclaim them, from their wandering life, settled in habits of peaceful industry, and reduced to a passive and childlike obedience, they would have gained more than enough to compensate them for the loss of their ferocious and miserable independence. At least, they would have escaped annihilation. The Society of Jesus aspired to the ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman
... The childlike pathos in this criminal's voice and attitude confused the listener. For the life of her she could not deal with the situation in any ordinary fashion; it seemed like a dramatic incident bungled by amateurs. Presently ...
— A Son of the Hills • Harriet T. Comstock
... was his almost childlike confidence {260} disturbed by a suspicion of bad faith, of intentional delay in issuing the passports, of excuses to hold him back at Yakutsk till the jealous fur traders could send secret complaints to St. Petersburg. Much less was he ...
— Vikings of the Pacific - The Adventures of the Explorers who Came from the West, Eastward • Agnes C. Laut
... he embarked upon a program of supplying a certain proportion of errors. He discovered that supplying a wrong answer that was consistent with the age of his contemporaries took too much of his intellect to keep his actions straight. He forgot to employ halting speech and childlike grammar. His errors were delivered in faultless grammar and excellent self-expression; his correct answers came out in the English of his companions; ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith
... to the low plane of our understanding and presents himself to us with childlike simplicity in representations, as in a guise, so that he may be made known to us in some way. Thus the Holy Spirit appeared in the form of a dove; not because he is a dove, but in this crude form he desired to be recognized, received and worshiped, ...
— Commentary on Genesis, Vol. II - Luther on Sin and the Flood • Martin Luther
... "Shan't!" His eyebrows rose in mute enquiry. "Because I don't want to," she explained with childlike candour. "I'm tired of being dragged around and plied with drink. Do you realise I've had as much as two and a half glasses of champagne to-night, out of the countless bottles you've ordered? Well, I have, and they're doing their work: I feel the spirit of independence surging ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... body, wagging a thin-haired head larger than lifesize, the Chief surveyed Fancher with icy green eyes. The eyes were large and round as a child's, but there was nothing childlike about their expression. As though to deny his physical smallness, he smoked one of the fragrant, foot-long cigars produced ...
— Rebels of the Red Planet • Charles Louis Fontenay
... of milder disposition, and won a hearty laugh for my friendly woodman. In fact, being of a childlike nature, his success as a professor of botany quite pleased him, and not content with answering my questions, he set to work to find new vegetable surprises, greatly enjoying my wonder and the sense ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... them—doing so in the spirit of a know-er and with a kindly sympathy begotten of that knowledge. For To Know—to Understand—means to give to each its rights! And, in this matter, have we to concede so much to our higher animals? The simplest form of thought contents them; the childlike adapting itself to animal uses; and, from such "small beginnings" has not our own primeval soul—the best that is within us—risen to higher glory, to become a moulder and organizer of thought—even ...
— Lola - The Thought and Speech of Animals • Henny Kindermann
... and stood behind her where she knelt. She looked so little and childlike there that he wanted to pick her up and tell her—oh, such a host of things! But he was a wise House Surgeon, and his experience on the stairs had not counted for nothing; moreover, he was a great believer in the psychological moment, so ...
— The Primrose Ring • Ruth Sawyer
... "Looks innercent, childlike, and sociable, hey?" inquired the showman, sarcastically. "Well, you just listen to what I've dug up about that. Bat Reeves has bought the strip of ground between the woodpile and the shed door by some kind of a deal he's rigged up with the widder, ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day
... 'St. Matthew Passion' are all the more impressive because every sentiment of joy in its various shades is wholly excluded; they are all based on the emotion of sorrow. The most fervent sympathy with the sufferings of the Son of Man, rising to the utmost anguish, childlike trustfulness, manly earnestness, and tenderly longing devotion to the Redeemer; repentance for the personal sins that his suffering must atone for, and passionate entreaties for mercy; an absorbed contemplation of the example offered by the sufferings of Jesus, ...
— The Standard Oratorios - Their Stories, Their Music, And Their Composers • George P. Upton
... attitude towards Schopenhauer, you may guess what chance it had of springing up. During the brilliant years of my widow-hood—eight in number—my heart has remained positively untouched by anybody but you. It's your childlike helplessness that ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... head to the zero of childlike ignorance. "No; we haven't seen anything; have we, Joe? And ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... she was, for all through life she had kept her heart full of childlike simplicity and faith, which was as pure and clear as crystal; and, looking at all matters through this transparent medium, she sometimes saw truths so profound, that other people laughed at them ...
— The Snow-Image - A Childish Miracle • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... of faith and love in him that carries him through all," said Mr. Wilmot. "His childlike nature seems to have the trustfulness that is, in itself, consolation. You said how Cocksmoor had been blessed to Margaret—I think it is the same with them all—not only Ethel and Richard, who have been immediately concerned; but that one object has been a centre and aim to elevate ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... the Christian, of despair. For several years she only wept with others when they sorrowed; fair children followed her footsteps, and it was happiness to guide their voices, as they, like the morning stars, sang together; or to listen to their evening prayer as they folded their hands in childlike devotion ere ...
— Dahcotah - Life and Legends of the Sioux Around Fort Snelling • Mary Eastman
... Miss Saltonstall is quite artless and childlike in the expression of her likes and dislikes," said Raymond, with the faintest touch of irony, "you can judge ...
— Maruja • Bret Harte
... After his release he gave himself up to science, with Rondelet, and the school of disciples who were growing up around him. They rediscovered together the Garum, that classic sauce, whose praises had been sung of old by Horace, Martial, and Ausonius; and so childlike, superstitious if you will, was the reverence in the sixteenth century for classic antiquity, that when Pellicier and Rondelet discovered that the Garum was made from the fish called Picarel—called ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... specific mildness from the land-owner, or loaner of capital, his former master. It is inevitable that there should be complaints on both sides.(439) But in the higher stages of economic culture, the relation of paternal protection and childlike obedience between the different classes of the people, which, even in medieval times, never obtained in all its purity, is certainly unrecallable. Hence it is, that all hope of a better condition of things is based only on this, ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... vigorous, even childlike in its simplicity and love of reality, accustomed to enjoy the freedom peculiar to lands where the national will is the highest law—would not brook the inflexible dogmatism of the Greek nor the iron ecclesiasticism of the Roman. The Teuton loved liberty in religion as ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... simplicity, was a sight indeed to remember. If Clive Newcome had not such a fine sense of humour, he would have blushed for his father's simplicity.—As it was, the elder's guileless goodness and childlike trustfulness endeared him immensely to his son. "Look at the old boy, Pendennis," he would say, "look at him leading up that old Miss Tidswell to the piano. Doesn't he do it like an old duke? I lay a wager she thinks she is going to be ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... together Don Quixote and St. Theresa, I am not sure that we could do better than to accept them as models. The loud laughter of an age of intellectual ribaldry and self-conceit dies away and the gaunt figure of the last of the Crusaders still stands before us heroic in his childlike refusal of compromise, his burning compassion, his deafness to ridicule. In a sense we must all be ready to accept the jeering and the scorn that were poured out on the Knight of La Mancha, if like him we are to fight, even foolishly, for ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... radiant angel answered, And with tender meaning smiled: "Ere your childlike, loving spirit, Sin and the hard world defiled, God has given me leave to seek you,— I was once that ...
— De La Salle Fifth Reader • Brothers of the Christian Schools
... His body no less than in His spirit. It is worthy of remark, that in choosing His disciples He chose plain men from the laboring classes, who had lived the most obediently to the simple, unperverted laws of nature. He chose men of good and pure bodies,—simple, natural, childlike, healthy men,—and baptized their souls with the inspiration of the ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... Enthusiasm for the past cannot inspire the best intellectual work. The heart turns to the past; but the mind looks to the future, and is forever untwisting the cords which bind us to the things that pleased a childlike fancy. To grow is to outgrow; and whatever of the past survives, survives, as the very word implies, because it is still living and applicable here and now. Let not the young believe that the age of the heroic and ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... grief My spirit speaks in me: as, many a time In childhood, at the hour of evening dusk, When all the room was still and shadowy, I, at my mother's knee, wept out my heart And knew not why I wept. And I am drawn Out of myself upon the music's tide, With nameless sorrowing, with childlike pain— As though in careless play-hours of the day I had done hurt to someone that I loved. Ah, I am homesick; and in all the world There is no knee at which I can weep out My loneliness. There is no breast ...
— Mr. Faust • Arthur Davison Ficke
... philosophy deserted him, and he stood hesitating, looking about him as if for a chance of escape. A man who had never before felt the magnetic influence of woman in her simplicity and childlike purity, he became for the moment ...
— Old Indian Days • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... thirty were less fresh in mind and body than he. He was one of those beings who die, as they have lived, children: even the privations of the hardest kind of an existence can not take away from them that purity and childlike trust which seem to be an integral part of themselves, and which, although they may be betrayed, deceived and treated harshly by life, they never wholly lose; very manly and heroic in time of need and danger, they are by nature peculiarly exposed to treasons and deceptions which astonish but do not ...
— Prince Zilah, Complete • Jules Claretie
... his instincts of gaiety, so long suppressed by his constant anxiety and disappointment, came out and betrayed themselves in roars of laughter, bursts of animal spirits and a picturesque need of childlike ...
— The Crystal Stopper • Maurice LeBlanc
... shining bald head wagged in a sort of bland humor, "your friend does not care much for der day dimes." And then shifting a steady childlike stare upon the big man, he asked: "You haf nod known ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Criminologist • John T. McIntyre
... invented the theory that British statesmen had for centuries pursued an undeviating and Machiavellian policy of keeping the more virile states of Europe at cross-purposes with one another by means of the cunning device called the Balance of Power, while behind the backs of these tricked and childlike nations Britain was meanly snapping up all the most desirable regions of the earth. According to this view it was in some mysterious way Britain's fault that France and Germany were not the best of friends, and that Russia had been alienated from her ancient ally. But the day ...
— The Expansion of Europe - The Culmination of Modern History • Ramsay Muir
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