"Puerile" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... good deal more in a similar style, for his lordship loved composing florid despatches. But this one had a bad reception when it was sent home to England. "At this puerile piece of business," says the plain spoken Stocqueler, "the commonsense of the British community at large revolted. The ministers of religion protested against it as a most unpardonable homage to an idolatrous temple. Ridiculed by the Press of India and England, and laughed at by the members of his ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... that "in those eight are these four, and in these four are those eight;" with sundry remarks on the mystical value of the number eight, with which I need not trouble the reader. With St. Ambrose, however, this puerile systematization is quite subordinate to a very forcible and truthful exposition of the real nature of the Christian life. But the classification he employs furnishes ground for farther subtleties to future divines; and in a MS. of the thirteenth century I find some expressions in this ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... doing five. Argument was useless, and I was reluctant to apply the stick, as the Arabs would have done when they saw their porters trifling with their pockets. Determining, however, not to be frustrated in this puerile manner, I ordered the bugler to sound the march, and started with the mules and coast-men, trusting to Sheikh and Baraka to bring on the Wanyamuezi as soon as they could move them. The same day we crossed the Mgazi where we found several ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke
... eggs of the Curculionidae. We know where the egg is—at the base of the acorn, because the tenderest and most juicy tissues of the fruit are there. But how did it get there, so far from the point of entry? A very trifling question, it is true; puerile even, if you will. Do not let us disdain to ask it; science is ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... women that will live for ever in the hearts and minds of her readers. In the present redundant age of novel writers and novel-readers, and when one would suppose the supply must far exceed the demand from the amount of puerile and often at the same time prurient literature in the department of fiction that daily flows from the press, it is refreshing to turn to the vigorous and, above all, healthy moral tone of this lady's works. To the present generation they ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... aggregation of sun systems, visible in the telescopic field, is not stationary, but is revolving with inconceivable rapidity about some unknown and infinitely remote centre of the universe, how immeasurably vast does the conception become, and how unutterably puerile and fatuous the thought of Mr. Darwin's little whirligig as the author of it all! No wonder the inspired Psalmist exclaims; "The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament showeth his handiwork." But listen to the Darwinian exclamation: "The heavens ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... Presumption, puerile vanity, insubordination, feather-headedness, inability to grasp many different ideas at a glance, want of scientific sense, simple and stupid ignorance, here is the summary of our history for a year!... The Opposition, which ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... more learned or eloquent Passion of dandling and caressing infants scarcely born Perfection: but I will not buy it so dear as it costs Plato will have nobody marry before thirty Prudent and just man may be intemperate and inconsistent Puerile simplicities of our children Shelter my own weakness under these great reputations Socrates kept a confounded scolding wife The authors, with whom I converse There is no recompense becomes virtue To do well where there was danger was the ...
— Widger's Quotations from The Essays of Montaigne • David Widger
... jumble of incongruities; Herbert Spencer jostled with Charles Bradlaugh, Matthew Arnold with Samuel Smiles; in one breath he lauded George Eliot, in the next was enthusiastic over a novel by Mrs. Henry Wood; from puerile facetiae he passed to speculations on the origin of being, and with equally light heart. Save for Pilgrim's Progress and Robinson Crusoe, he had read no English classic; since boyhood, indeed, he had probably read no book at all, for much diet of newspapers rendered him all but incapable of ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... an unattainable one. Any closer union of the British Empire attempted with this object would absolutely fail. The unwieldy weapon would break in our hands. The ideal is as impracticable as it is puerile ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 9: The Expansion of England • John Morley
... "Empfindsame Reise," and comment is made upon the purpose of the Journey, the gathering of material for anatomical study of the human heart. The notes are numerous and lengthy, constituting a quarter to a third of the book, but are replete with padding, pointless babble and occasional puerile inaccuracies. They are largely attempts to explain and to moralize upon Yorick's emotions,—averbose, childish, witless commentary. The Wortregister contains fourteen pages in double columns of explanations, in general differing very ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... romance possessed the field. The Yellow Book and similar strange exotics of the first period withered and died, and the cult of literature (!) for the British Home was shortly afterwards in full blast. There followed an avalanche of insufferably dull and puerile magazines, in which the word Sex was strictly taboo, and the ideal aimed at was apparently the extreme opposite to real life. It was odd how suddenly the sex note—(as I will call it for want of a better ...
— Modern marriage and how to bear it • Maud Churton Braby
... wrought when he forgets himself in returning to the love of his wife. The almost physical dismissal of the serpent into the fountain, which is neither averred nor denied, like a devil cast out as in old times, is puerile; but Hawthorne was, in other tales, not averse to a naturalistic explanation of his mysteries, as if a basis of matter of fact, however irrelevant essentially, gave more plausibility to their truth. If the snake is "egotism," if it is the torture of self in ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... and beefsteak. To be hungry is so vulgar! One should live by nothing grosser than inhalation, and should never have an appetite greater than that of a healthy bumble-bee. But, thanks to the robust, latter-day theory, that the best saints have the best bodies, this puerile class is diminishing. For who can doubt that the senses are entitled to their full blossom? Gustation was meant to be delightful; and cooking is certainly half as good as tasting. At times one may have longed for the old Roman custom of two meals a day, and going to bed ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... guide, "thou seest here the glorious result of a philosophical mind, gifted with unabatable ardour of experiment. Thou wilt acknowledge that, compared with the triumph which SUCH A MIND enjoys, the conquests of heroes are puerile, and the splendour of monarchy is dim!" During this strain, I fancied I could perceive the human being, alluded to by my guide, retire apart in conversation with another distinguished friend of humanity, by those unwearied exertions the condition ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... third act, between Elvira and her brother Alvaro, is not at all young-ladyish, and has some strong turns of feeling. The end of the play, with the stabbing of the Princess and the accusation of Agnes by Elvira, is puerile, but was doubtless welcome to a sentimental audience. It is a bad play, but not ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... holiest of deities when his rottenness was concealed by ivory and gold, and his libidinous head was lighted up by sunbeams from above. Here is Lord Byron connecting, in the portrait of some poor melodramatic hero possibly, some noble quality of courage or perseverance with scorn the most puerile and senseless. Prone enough is poor degraded human nature to find something grand in scorn; but, after this arbitrary combination of Lord Byron's, never again does the poor man think of scorn but it suggests to him moral greatness, nor ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... fragile basis on which human knowledge may be said to have depended, during the obscurity and barbarity of the middle ages, when the progress of true knowledge was obstructed by the most absurd fancies, and puerile conceits: when conjectures, caprices, and dreams supplied the place of the most useful sciences, and of the most important truths, the subsequent illustrative reflections may serve as a guide to direct the attention of the reader to other delusions, ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... rations being more regular and assured if we broke a window, or the law in some way, and gave ourselves up. For the nonce, however, three weeks would pass, and with them all our woes. The idea of eighteen weeks occurred to nobody; it would have been too farcical, too puerile. That starvation must have killed us long ere the period had fled, would have been our axiom, if it were pertinent to the issue, when the 'pros' and 'cons' of the situation were being eagerly discussed on the ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... to-day, and nothing authentic, except that some of the enemy's transports are in the James River, and landing some troops, a puerile demonstration, perhaps. The number landed at West Point, it seems, was insignificant. It may be the armies of the United States are demoralized, and if so, if Grant be beaten, I shall look for a speedy end of the invasion. It is ...
— A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital • John Beauchamp Jones
... first printed, in 1791, in The Bee. It is adapted to an old and sweet air, to which, however, very puerile words were attached. ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel , Volume I. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... this distraction. At the best, it is difficult to know what to select and what to eliminate as objects of attention among its thronged streets, its glittering shops, its gaudy advertisements of shows and amusements. It is perhaps to the credit of many city boys that the very first puerile spirit of adventure looking abroad in the world for material upon which to exercise itself, seems to center about the railroad. The impulse is not unlike that which excites the ...
— The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets • Jane Addams
... ruffian opposite him were talking, but like strangers who had met by chance, and not at all after the fashion of friends who have met at a rendezvous. They spoke in the jargon of their pretended rank in life, not that puerile slang met with in romances descriptive of low life, but that obscene, vulgar dialect which it is impossible to render, so changeable and diverse is the signification ...
— Monsieur Lecoq • Emile Gaboriau
... is the true secret of all disquiet. We are troubled and careful, and tossed from one stormy billow to another, and swept over by all the winds that blow, because we see not God, our Father, in the face of Jesus. 'Show us the Father, and it sufficeth us,' is either a puerile petition, or the deepest and noblest prayer of the human heart. Blessed are they who have learned what it is to see, and know where that great sight ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... chance of my being such would no longer exist. Practically I had complete control of the work of the office, and was thus, metaphorically speaking, able to work with untied hands. It may seem almost puerile to say this to men of business experience, but there is a current notion, spread among all classes, that because the Naval Observatory has able and learned professors, therefore they must be able to do good and satisfactory work, which may be ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb
... this last book and the rest, on which account he sometimes called it the greater Dunciad; and it would have been easy for him, with a shallow Warburtonian ingenuity, to invent links that might have satisfied a mere verbal sense of connection. But he disdained this puerile expedient. The fact was, and could not be disguised from any penetrating eye, that the poem was not a pursuit of the former subjects; it had arisen spontaneously at various times, by looking at the same general theme of dulness (which, in Pope's ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... subjects, they had a delicate, exquisite savour. They talked for hours and hours without being tired, and for the pleasure of being near to, and listening to, each other. Fernanda chatted in all the joy of her heart without minding the timidity of her adorer, and with the enjoyment of seeing the puerile pains he took to avoid his confession of love, knowing that she could have him at her feet directly she gave the sign. The moment came at last. One day the beautiful widow determined to declare herself. They were talking of marriage and second marriages. Luis began to get excited, ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds
... stimulating throughout the land. What of young Randolph Churchill, who, despite his halting speech, foppish mien and rather coarse fibre of mind, was yet the greatest Parliamentarian of his day? What of Justin Huntly McCarthy, under his puerile mask a most dark, most dangerous conspirator, who, lightly swinging the sacred lamp of burlesque, irradiated with fearful clarity the wrath and sorrow of Ireland? What of Blocker Warton? What of the eloquent atheist, Charles Bradlaugh, pleading at the Bar, striding past the furious ...
— The Works of Max Beerbohm • Max Beerbohm
... unquestionably a very fine writer. His Muse was as well qualified as the Graces themselves to dress out a Venus; and he could even adorn the brows of a conqueror with fragrant and beautiful wreaths. But he had some puerile and low thoughts, which unaccountably mixed with the elegant and the noble, like schoolboys or a mob admitted into a palace. There was also an intemperance and a luxuriancy in his wit which he did not enough restrain. ...
— Dialogues of the Dead • Lord Lyttelton
... the dial, but would not believe it until he had gaped at his own watch, which had stopped at half-past three. Then he bounded to his feet in a puerile passion, and there lay the little garden, a lake of sunlight as he remembered it, swallowed up entirely in the ...
— The Camera Fiend • E.W. Hornung
... I weet, without exclusion of later modes of speech, makes his poem neither ancient nor modern. His mention of Mars and Bellona, and his comparison of Marlborough to the eagle that bears the thunder of Jupiter, are all puerile and unaffecting; and yet more despicable is the long tale told by Lewis in his despair, of Brute and Troynovante, and the teeth of Cadmus, with his similes of the raven and eagle, and wolf and lion. By the help of such easy fictions, and vulgar topicks, without acquaintance with life, and without ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... modern people have adopted Newton's Law of Gravitation, and Darwin's theory of the Origin of Species, and applied it to explain many phenomena or to justify certain procedures, which in the light of fuller knowledge seem to modern people puerile and ludicrous. But the early people obviously took these procedures seriously and regarded their actions as rational. The fact that their early biological theory was inadequate ought not to mislead modern scholars and encourage them ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... either my love or my grief; that, when I opened my heart to you, you pierced it with a mocking glance, and that, when I closed it, it seemed to me I felt within it a treasure that none but you could dispense? Shall I speak of all the frailty and all the mysteries which seem puerile to those who do not respect them? Shall I tell you that when you left me in anger I shut myself up to read your first letters; that there is a favorite waltz that I never played in vain when I felt too keenly the suffering ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... the briefest outdoor excursion without permission, and then solely in a covered palkee, or the hermetically sealed interior of a blinded carriage. (Cries of 'Shame.') In the Zenana, she is restricted to the occupation of puerile gossipings, or listening to apocryphal fairy tales of so scandalising an impropriety that I shrink to pollute my ears by the repetition even of the ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... night, the old decent loyalties to the edifice men and women have built up to protect themselves from the beast in them. Yet how would it have stood the assault of honest passion, sheer human longing knocking at its walls? If she could but love a man at last! but this was no more love than the puerile effort of a meagre discontent to make itself more safe, more closely cherished, more ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... on its very first pages you see that the author is deficient in every mental preparation to accomplish the aim of his novel. He not only has not the slightest understanding of the new positive philosophy, but even of the old ideal systems his knowledge is merely superficial and puerile. You could laugh at the heroes of the novel alone as you read their silly and 'hashy' discussions on the young generation had not the novel as a whole been founded on these ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... that station, if the journal succeeds, will secure you position and fortune; if it fail, you fail with it. But we will not speak of failure; I must have it succeed. Our interest, then, is the same. Before that interest all puerile vanities fade away. Nominally, I say, you are editor-in-chief; but all the real work of editing will, at first, be done ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... then no hell?—No! The mercy of God tends as greatly towards the principle of GOOD as "the inhumanity of man" towards cruelty, so that he would consign his brother men to flames of hell during eternity for the puerile mistakes committed during a few years, or perhaps for a slight difference in belief. The writer has heard of a minister who wished to impress his "flock" with the reality of an eternity of hell flames, and to demonstrate the fallacy of ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel
... month of May, with the little group of black nuns, with discreet babble, with puerile and lifeless laughter, Gracieuse, at all hours, went to church. Hastening their steps under the frequent showers, they went together through the graveyard, full of roses; together, always together, the little clandestine betrothed, in light colored ...
— Ramuntcho • Pierre Loti
... enter into the army from the puerile vanity of wearing a red coat and an epaulette; nor to save himself the trouble of pursuing his studies; nor because he thought the army a good lounge, or a happy escape from parental control; ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. VII - Patronage • Maria Edgeworth
... Mike said, shaking his head. "I know when I'm beaten." He'd been going to suggest that the Brainchild was a training ship, from Snookums' "learning" periods, but that seemed rather obvious and puerile now. ...
— Unwise Child • Gordon Randall Garrett
... as he described the chateau, the gardens, the burly tutor, and beautiful Madame, or laughed over his childish remembrances of the toad's teeth in Claude Mignon's pocket; whilst Monsieur Crapaud sat well-bred and silent, with a world of comprehension in his fiery eyes. Whoever thinks this puerile must remember that my hero was a Frenchman, and a young Frenchman, with a prescriptive right to chatter for chattering's sake, and also that he had not a very highly cultivated mind of his own to converse with, even if the most highly cultivated ...
— Frances Kane's Fortune • L. T. Meade
... onward looking are marvellous in 'Paul the aged, and now also a prisoner of Jesus Christ.' Forgetfulness of the past and eager anticipation for the future are, we sometimes think, the child's prerogatives. They may be ignoble and puerile, or they may be worthy and great. All depends on the future to which we look. If it be the creation of our fancies, we are babies for trusting it. If it be, as Paul's was, the revelation of God's purposes, we cannot do a wiser thing ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... visible that the Poet had his Eye upon Ovid's Account of the universal Deluge, the Reader may observe with how much Judgment he has avoided every thing that is redundant or puerile in the Latin Poet. We do not here see the Wolf swimming among the Sheep, nor any of those wanton Imaginations, which Seneca found fault with, [1] as unbecoming [the [2]] great Catastrophe of Nature. If our Poet has imitated that Verse ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... country for those pursuits and those engagements which demand their attention as men, Christians, and patriots, while the very persons to whom has been allotted this great interest, this important trust, stand before you as the advocates of a reduction, of a puerile system which has never invigorated the mind, or raised up great men in any country; which can never lay deep and broad the foundations of intellectual grandeur and power anywhere, but which is characterized by that superficiality which ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... connection with the events of the artist's life and the history of his works, has enabled me to detect in his character a persistent oscillation. Continual contradictions between great and generous ideas upon the one side, and puerile ideas upon the other; between the will and the word, thought and action; an excessive irritability and the highest degree of susceptibility; constant love for others, great activity in doing good, sudden sympathies, great outbursts of enthusiasm, great fears; ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... made him arbitrary and puerile, life outside has made him lukewarm. Therefore it seems that God has withdrawn Himself from him, and the proof of this is that He has taken away all ability from the priesthood. There are no priests ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... consisted of only five battleships dating from 1891-2, except one whose date was 1908; two cruisers, dating from 1911 and 1914; and a microscopic light flotilla. "To see there a serious danger, it would be puerile," says Admiral Dartige himself; and far from feeling elated at the success of the operation, he tells us that he "suffered at being constrained by events to use force against a neutral and weak nation." But he had to do it: though not a matter to be proud of, it was a precaution ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott
... which will be satisfied only when the sources of it are probed to the core. The Church authorities repeat a series of phrases which they are pleased to call answers to objections; they treat the most serious grounds of perplexity as if they were puerile and trifling; while it is notorious that for a century past extremely able men have either not known what to say about them, or have not said what they thought. On the Continent the peculiar English view has scarcely a single ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... evening after dinner, between Cesar, his wife, and his daughter, for the purpose of making out the list of guests and addressing the invitations,—which a stationer had sent home that morning, printed on pink paper, in flowing English writing, and in the formula of commonplace and puerile civility. ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... Dorne, and he admits the part he played, on the representation of Bainrothe; and, through the evidence of a newspaper advertisement, of the previous autumn, which had met his eye, to satisfy the puerile scruples of this really good but ignorant man—going no deeper than the surface in his code of morals—they were obliged to tear out the record of their names, and take refuge temporarily in the long-boat, before he would swear to Miriam, ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... To him the declaration of the American President that "we can have no sympathy with those who seek to seize the power of government to advance their own personal interests or ambition" was a mere gesture, too puerile to ...
— Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him • Joseph P. Tumulty
... according to his agreement, but seemingly without any intention or desire to yield me satisfaction on the subject under discussion; for, after a great deal of conversation, consisting on his part of trifling evasion and puerile excuses for withholding his assent to the measure, though at the same time professing the most implicit submission to your wishes, I found myself without any other resource than the one of employing that exclusive authority with which ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VIII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... the King worked with the greatest regularity. Etiquette, carefully observed, though stripped of the ancient minutiae, recalled the old usages of the French monarchy. All that had been suppressed was what was puerile and weariness for the courtiers ...
— The Duchess of Berry and the Court of Charles X • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... come to her—come on what cold blast from heaven, or him? But in pity for herself, let her not ask them! We seem to see the man turn from her, not "looking in her eyes," and seem to catch the thought, so puerile yet so instinctive, that flashes through his mind. "I never meant to 'change'; why does she put it into my head." . . . And then, doomed ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... which he purposed to wreck upon Alkmaar. Already he gloated in anticipation over the havoc which would soon be let loose within those walls. Such ravings, if invented by the pen of fiction, would seem a puerile caricature; proceeding, authentically, from his own, they still appear almost too exaggerated for belief. 'If I take Alkmaar,' he wrote to Philip, 'I am resolved not to leave a single creature alive; the knife shall be put to every throat. Since the example of Harlem has proved of no use, perhaps ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... time, place, positions of the body, and ceremonial observances in general. Take baptism for an example. Apart from erroneous notions concerning the efficacy of baptism, which will be referred to under another head, the writings of the church fathers abound with the most minute and puerile details concerning how the act is to be performed—details of catechism, of consecration of waters, of dressing and undressing, exorcism, anointing from head to foot with oil, the laying on of hands, etc., all ...
— The Last Reformation • F. G. [Frederick George] Smith
... Naturalisme, la vérité, la science, were repeated some half-a-dozen times. Hardly able to believe my eyes, I read that you should write, with as little imagination as possible, that plot in a novel or in a play was illiterate and puerile, and that the art of M. Scribe was an art of strings and wires, etc. I rose up from breakfast, ordered my coffee, and stirred the sugar, a little dizzy, like one who has received a violent blow on ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... mock solemnity, '"The Rellum," should be printed on vellum.' He too, like Tennyson, was variable. But this depended on whom he found. In the presence of a stranger he was grave and silent. He would never venture on puerile jokes like this of his 'Rellum' - a frequent playfulness, when at his ease, which contrasted so unexpectedly with his impenetrable exterior. He was either gauging the unknown person, or feeling that he was being gauged. Monckton Milnes was another. ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... view, decidedly eccentric. Gray Kidds is one of those individuals whose peculiarity it is never to have been a boy. Kidds at fifteen had whiskers as voluminous as he now has at six-and-twenty, and as he gambolled heavily amongst his more puerile schoolfellows, visitors to the playground used to ask the assistant masters who that man was playing with the boys. They evidently had an uneasy notion that a private lunatic asylum formed a branch of the educational establishment, and that Gray Kidds was a harmless ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... to cast a spell over him, and for two or three days at a time he would avoid her, as though she were some dissolving agency which would destroy all his power of will should he approach too closely. However, these paroxysms of puerile fear, these wild surgings of his rebellious brain, always ended in thrills of the gentlest tenderness, with yearnings to love and be loved, which he concealed ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... the Japanese loans were put upon the market. The result was, so it has been said, to encourage extravagance in expenditure and to lead Japan to suppose that whenever she wanted money for any purpose she had only to come to Europe and ask for it. The financial experts who so argue, if such puerile assertions can be dignified by the name of argument, talk as if Japan were like a child with a new toy. The Japanese statesmen—in which term I of course include the Mikado, one of the world's greatest statesmen—are by no means so simple as some of these financial experts would have ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... and the unexpected issue of that contest, will long be remembered by every man who was educated at Dr. Swishtail's famous school. The latter Youth (who used to be called Heigh-ho Dobbin, Gee-ho Dobbin, and by many other names indicative of puerile contempt) was the quietest, the clumsiest, and, as it seemed, the dullest of all Dr. Swishtail's young gentlemen. His parent was a grocer in the city: and it was bruited abroad that he was admitted into Dr. Swishtail's academy upon what are called "mutual principles"—that is to say, ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... before the Virgin's image, the melancholy prince performed his private devotions. The horrors of the scene were depicted with a childish minuteness of detail, as though the painter had sought to produce an impression of moral anguish by the accumulation of physical sufferings; and just such puerile images of the wrath to come may have haunted the mysterious recesses of the Duke's imagination. Crescenti had told Odo how the dying man's thoughts had seemed to centre upon this dreadful subject, and how again and again, amid his ravings, he had cried out that the picture ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... sooner made his unsuccessful and puerile effort, than he was succeeded by le Daim-Mose, or the Moose; a middle aged warrior who was particularly skilful in the use of the tomahawk, and from whose attempt the spectators confidently looked for gratification. This man had none of the good nature of the ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... like setting fire to the house, he said, for the sake of making the pumps play.[41] As he admitted so much, he is not open to attack on this side, except from those who hold the theory that no books ought to be written which may not prudently be put into the hands of the young,—a puerile and contemptible doctrine that must emasculate all literature and all art, by excluding the most interesting of human relations and the most powerful of human passions. There is not a single composition of the first rank outside of ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... victim could not have escaped by complaining to the monitor. No. Death before dishonour. But the side not so seamy of this picture of school life is the extraordinary power of honour among boys. Of course the laws of the secret society might well terrify a puerile informer. But the sentiment of honour is even more strong than fear, and will probably outlast the very disagreeable circumstances ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... do not believe that any man in the United States (or, at least, I have never heard of any) teaches that, if a person only is baptized and receives the Lord's Supper, [he] is safe exclusive of repentance. What a puerile conduct some men manifest in trying to prove that the doctrine with which Mr. Shober has charged me is erroneous, when no man nor class of men contend for it! They are all the while fighting their own shadows. If the reader will take the trouble ...
— American Lutheranism - Volume 1: Early History of American Lutheranism and The Tennessee Synod • Friedrich Bente
... calmest people do the silliest things,'' and in 1892, at the congress for criminal anthropology, "The crowd is never frontal and rarely occipital; it is mainly spinal. It always contains something childish, puerile, quite feminine.'' He, Garnier, and Dekterew, showed at the same congress how frequently the mob is excited to all possible excesses by lunatics and drunkards. Lombroso, Laschi, etc., tell of many cruelties ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... sudden changes and desertions in his passenger-lists, gave the situation no thought. But Elsa saw a mild danger, all the more alluring because it hung nebulously. For years she had walked in conformity with the cramped and puerile laws that govern society. She had obeyed most of them from habit, others from necessity. What harm could there be in having a little fling? He was so amazingly like outwardly, so astonishingly unlike inwardly, that the situation held for her a subtle fascination against which she was in ...
— Parrot & Co. • Harold MacGrath
... contemporaneous outrages are to be relied upon (and he is very strongly corroborated), the officers commanding this military prison sadly abused their trust. Even the highest of those officials indulged in such petty exhibitions of puerile spite as to be altogether unworthy of his station, or even the name ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... under some difficulties. It has, of course, to contend with the undisguised opposition of authority. This is hardly a matter for marvel, and perhaps not even a matter for regret. A prudential regard for the knees of puerile knickerbockers and the corresponding region of feminine frocks may explain a good deal of parental discouragement in the matter; and there is little public sympathy to counteract this, for it is felt that the total decay of these mimes would not be a serious loss ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... history, not by their outward appearance, but by their inward significancy. In speaking of the Turks, we may for a moment yield to the romance which attends on their name and their actions, as we may admire the beauty of some beast of prey; but, as it would be idle and puerile to praise its shape or skin, and form no further judgment upon it, so in like manner it is unreal and unphilosophical to interest ourselves in the mere adventures and successes of the Turks, without going on to view them in their moral aspect also. No race casts so broad and dark ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... towards the path left us. It is at such spots as these remembrance comes full upon us, and that we feel how little our intentions have swayed our career or influenced our actions; the aspirations, the resolves of youth, are either looked upon as puerile follies, or a most distant day settled on for their realization. The principles we fondly looked to, like our guide-stars, are dimly visible, not seen; the friends we cherished are changed and gone; the scenes themselves seem no longer the sunshine and the shade we loved; and, in fact, ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... thinking about, as he sat by David's bedside, was David's attitude toward that threatened return of his. For David had opposed it, offering a dozen trivial, almost puerile reasons. Had shown indeed, a dogged obstinacy and an irritability that were somehow oddly like fear. David afraid! David, whose life and heart were open books! David, whose eyes never wavered, nor ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... is puerile and your tactics are baleful. Your Ministers branded the Bolshevists as criminals, and the French government publicly announced that it would enter into no relations with them. In spite of that, all the Allied governments ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... brilliant madman, sometimes sparkling with wit and imagination, but often dirty and ridiculous. Saint-Amant possessed plenty of imagination and capacity for exquisite poetical feeling, but he lacked taste and too often was puerile. Wiser than they, yet themselves verbose, long-winded, slow, and spun out, Desportes translated into French verse Italian poetry of the sixteenth century, often with very happy turns of expression, ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... seated him in his armed chair, I knelt before him, and threw my head in his lap, there I gave a loose to my grief, and mingled my tears with those which were now flowing in streams down his manly cheeks. To endeavour to describe what I felt, upon this melancholy event, would be puerile in the extreme; none but those who have been placed in a similar situation are capable of comprehending the distress which enters the soul of such a husband and child, who had witnessed the last sad moments of such ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 1 • Henry Hunt
... the doctrine of metempsychosis, or, as it is commonly called, the "transmigration of souls." No doubt, there is a great deal connected with this doctrine in the Buddhist books that cannot but appear to us puerile and shocking; but still, we do not well, we do not justly, if, as do so many, we fasten such strange fancies on Buddha, or on Buddhism, as though it were from these that they sprang. So far from Sakya-muni being the originator of the theory of transmigration, ...
— Religion in Japan • George A. Cobbold, B.A.
... and Eleanor Roosevelt. There they competed on alternate forums with literate gardeners and stuttering horticultural amateurs. Stolon, rhizome and culm became words replacing crankshaft and piston in the popular vocabulary; the puerile reports Gootes fabricated under my name as the man responsible for the phenomenon were syndicated in newspapers from coast to coast, and a query as to rates was received from ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... almost demoniac, intellect, and no lack, in its own way, of courage and generosity)—there is, at present, little of cheering, satisfying sign. In the West, California, &c., "society" is yet unform'd, puerile, seemingly unconscious of anything above a driving business, or to liberally spend the money made by it, in the usual ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... Frenchman's family was the same as those he had known in the past, even to the patterns of the wallpaper and movables. But the jeunes, he perceived with regret, were totally different from their forerunners. They were much more shallow and puerile, much less really clever. The secrets they wrested from the Universe were not such important and interesting secrets as had been wrested by the old jeunes. This he believed and deplored until one day he ...
— Trent's Last Case - The Woman in Black • E.C. (Edmund Clerihew) Bentley
... frequently saluted him as King, a title which he affected to reject with indignation; and he disdained to imitate other states by raising a private standard of his own, preferring not to compromise his real power by puerile displays of dignity; and he lamented the foolish ambition of his children, who would ruin him, he said, by aiming, each, at becoming a vizier. Therefore he did not place his hope or confidence in them, but in the adventurers of ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - ALI PACHA • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... of this conclusion are evidently added by M. Rabou, and are not derived from Balzac at all,—especially the unnecessary reincarnation of Vautrin. There is no trace of the master's hand here. The character is made so silly and puerile, and is so out of keeping with Balzac's strong portrait, which never weakens, that the translator has thought best, in justice to Vautrin, to omit all that is not absolutely necessary to connect the ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac
... Russians with bright and mystical eyes; the English, with heads uncovered, intoning songs of religious gravity; the Greeks and Roumanians of aquiline profile; the Scandinavians, white and red; the North Americans, with the noisiness of a somewhat puerile enthusiasm; the Hebrews without a country, friends of the nation of socialistic revolutions; the Italians, as spirited as a choir of heroic tenors; the Spanish and South Americans, tireless in their huzzas. They were students and apprentices who ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... decoyed to the Rhine by a puerile conspiracy, how could I best get the small change for ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... for reasons unknown to us, to show forth his power, and work a miracle in the sight of the faithful; for how can we explain all these things without having recourse to the miraculous? All that is said of persons who being dead chew under ground in their graves, is so pitiful, so puerile, that it is not worthy of being seriously refuted. Everybody owns that too often people are buried who are not quite dead. There are but too many instances of this in ancient and modern histories. The thesis ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... him, for instance, the wise man is the equal of God; not His adorer, not His servant, not His suppliant, but His associate, His relation. He differs from God in time alone. Hence all prayer is needless he says, and the forms of external worship are superfluous and puerile. It is foolish to beg for that which you can impart to yourself. "What need is there of vows? Make yourself happy." Nay, in the intolerable arrogance which marked the worst aberration of Stoicism, the wise man is under certain aspects placed even higher than God—higher ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... then composed is entitled "Handsome Nell," and is the (p. 009) first he ever wrote. He himself speaks of it as very puerile and silly—a verdict which Chambers endorses, but in which I cannot agree. Simple and artless it no doubt is, but with a touch of that grace which bespeaks the true poet. Here is one verse which, for directness of ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... the superb kingdom of France, it was requisite that the former should await for some time the audience which the latter accorded. I am sure that when the peace with Frederick was agitated, the face of Louis XV was not more grave and serious than during this puerile debate about etiquette. The duc de Choiseul, who had the control of foreign affairs, was in the apartment to receive his Danish majesty, with his colleagues, the duc de Praslin, the comte de Saint-Florentin (whom I have called by anticipation duc de la Vrilliere), M. ...
— "Written by Herself" • Baron Etienne Leon Lamothe-Langon
... past. I had none; if indeed, I had any motive in undertaking this work, it was to seek for political principles. Thus far I have attained to scarcely more than one; and this is so simple that will seem puerile, and that I hardly dare express it. Nevertheless I have adhered to it, and in what the reader is about to peruse my judgments are all derived from that; its truth is the measure of theirs. It consists wholly ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... brought her water. It was a woman's tragedy, but written by a woman in man's attire, determined to write a very masculine, vigorous work, but succeeding in producing only a plated piece, in which everything was puerile, artificial, and conventional, from the first word to the last line. It was an olla podrida, in which Shakspeare hobnobbed with Campistron, Theophile Gautier locked arms with Dorat, Plutarch was dovetailed with the Mantua-Makers' Journal of Fashions. Cleopatra spouted long speeches ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... skeptical, and with reason, of the good faith of this committee. Every act, beginning with the mild and ineffective one of 1867, designed to remedy the appalling conditions in tenement houses, had been stubbornly opposed by the landlords; and even after these puerile measures had finally been passed, the landlords had resisted their enforcement. Whether it was because of the bitter criticisms levelled at him, or because he saw that it would be a good time to dispose of his ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... toiling in the pursuit of knowledge. His love of reading seemed to have increased in proportion to his acquirements, which were equally great: his representing himself as an infidel was better perhaps understood by his master, who believed it to be only puerile vanity; and therefore Coleridge considered the flogging he received on this occasion, a just and appropriate punishment; and it was so, for as a boy he had not thought deep enough on an equally important ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... that this will satisfy His Imperial Majesty concerning the puerile and trivial sophistry with which the adversaries have perverted our article. For we know that we believe aright and in harmony with the Church catholic of Christ. But if the adversaries will renew this controversy, there will be no want ...
— The Apology of the Augsburg Confession • Philip Melanchthon
... spheres of ritual, of dogmatic theology, and of casuistical morality, under the New. As Man gradually shifts the centre of gravity of his being from the religious to the secular side of his life, this puerile element in religion—the element of ultra-formalism, of irrationality, of unreality—tends, like a morbid growth, to draw to itself the vital energies of what was once a healthy organism but is now ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... character of some of his questions. Take those relating to the arrangement of the house, for example. The pretence that the information would be valuable to him, should he ever again be cast away, was altogether too puerile for consideration; he required the information—and very cleverly extracted it from the unsuspecting Billy, too—for some entirely different reason. But what was ...
— The Strange Adventures of Eric Blackburn • Harry Collingwood
... may at least claim:—that of calling forth the passions and engaging the sympathy of the reader by means hitherto unemployed by preceding authors. Puerile superstition and exploded manners, Gothic castles and chimeras, are the materials usually employed for this end. The incidents of Indian hostility, and the perils of the Western wilderness, are far more suitable; and for a native of America to overlook these would ...
— Edgar Huntley • Charles Brockden Brown
... these were niceties for which the audience cared little. The enthusiasm of the orator infected all who heard him; his ardour and his noble bearing put fire into the most frigid conceit, and gave dignity to the most puerile allusion. ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Mediterranee sur de freles navires pour venir s'asseoir au foyer de la nationalite Corse, des hommes graves tels que Boswel et Volney obeissaient sans doute a un sentiment bien plus eleve qu' au besoin vulgaire d'une puerile curiosite.' Histoire de Pascal Paoli, par A. Arrighi, i. 231. By every Corsican of any education the name of Boswell is known and honoured. One of them told me that it was in Boswell's pages that ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... and just man may be intemperate and inconsistent Prudent man, when I imagine him in this posture Psalms of King David: promiscuous, indiscreet Public weal requires that men should betray, and lie Puerile simplicities of our children Pure cowardice that makes our belief so pliable Put us into a way of extending and diversifying difficulties Pyrrho's hog Quiet repose and a profound sleep without dreams Rage compelled ...
— Quotes and Images From The Works of Michel De Montaigne • Michel De Montaigne
... set of statements about the Being, good or bad, sublime or silly, are equally Myths, it may be urged. Very well; but one set, the loftier set, is fitter to survive, and does survive, in what we still commonly call Religion; while the other set, the puerile set of statements, is fairly near to extinction, and is usually called Mythology. One set has been the root of a goodly tree: the other set is being lopped off, like ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... county curiosities. Star, bird, flower, and insect, were more than resources, they were the friends of her lonely life, and awoke many a keen feeling of interest, many an aspiration of admiring adoration that carried her through her dreary hours. And though Miss Fennimore thought her science puerile, her credulity extensive, and her observations inaccurate, yet she deemed even this ladylike dabbling worthy of respect as an element of rational pleasure and self-training, and tried to make Bertha respect it, and abstain from inundating Miss Charlecote with sesquipedalian names ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... doorkeepers from sleep; murder, not only in its heart, but tucked securely in its belt. No 'law-courts talk' for one of his breed; no nice adjustment of penalty to offence; no concern as to possible consequences. The Rajput, with his blood up, is daring to the point of recklessness; deaf to puerile promptings of prudence or mercy; a sword, seeking its victim; insatiate till the thrust has ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... in each episode with song, and a man further explained it in bald narrative. The acts of the play proper were interrupted by tableaux vivants of Old Testament scenes, from Adam and Eve onwards. There was much, you see, that was puerile, even ridiculous; and every now and then some one would open the door of the dusky auditorium, and a shaft of sunshine would fly in from the outside world to remind me further how unreal was all this gloomy make-believe. Nay, during the entr'acte I went out, like everybody else, and lunched ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... with the first strong feminine character he had met; that her personality was overpowering his in the first clash. With a last effort he forced his eyes to steadiness and succeeded in sneering at her, though he felt that somehow the sneer was ineffectual, puerile. And then she smiled at him, deliberately, with a disdain that maddened him and brought a dark flush to his face that reached to his temples. And then her ...
— The Boss of the Lazy Y • Charles Alden Seltzer
... stand upon a par with the speculations of those who are less practised in business; and who, with perhaps purer intentions, have not so effectual means of judging. It is besides an effect of vulgar and puerile malignity to imagine that every Statesman is of course corrupt: and that his opinion, upon every constitutional point, is solely ...
— Thoughts on the Present Discontents - and Speeches • Edmund Burke
... first of my performances, and done at an early period of life, when my heart glowed with honest warm simplicity; unacquainted and uncorrupted with the ways of a wicked world. The performance is indeed, very puerile and silly; but I am always pleased with it, as it recalls to my mind those happy days when my heart was yet honest, and my tongue was sincere. The subject of it was a young girl who really deserved all the praises I have bestowed on her. I not only had this opinion of her then—but I actually ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... command in person, although he was only a civilian, but his troops had no heart to oppose the Manchus, and the devices to which he resorted to make his military power appear more formidable were both puerile and ineffective. Yet one passage may be quoted to his credit if it gave his opponent an advantage. It is affirmed on good authority that he could have obtained a material advantage if he would only ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... scarcely less important than the conquest of Granada; and they doubted some sinister motive, or deeper policy than appeared in the conduct of the French king. He was influenced, however, by no deeper policy than the cravings of a puerile ambition. [21] ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V2 • William H. Prescott
... higher and more intellectual doctrine of gnan (Knowledge of the Supreme Soul)." The conception of the all-comprehending impersonal Brahma has, indeed, lost vitality; for the educated also the externals of the popular religion have lost their significance and become puerile. But for them also, the objects of popular bhakti, Ram and Krishna, are as much epical as religious heroes. Hinduism needs an object of bhakti for her educated people. The fact explains several of the ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison
... smother the accents of human sympathy; and before proceeding any further, I hope your Honor will appoint some counsel to confer with and advise the prisoner. Her isolation appeals to every noble instinct of manhood, and it were indeed puerile tribute to our lamented General Darrington, to bring his granddaughter before this tribunal, without the aid and defence of legal advisers. Justice itself would not be welcome to me, if unjustly won. My friend, Mr. Hazelton, who is present, has expressed his desire to defend the prisoner; ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... found to take upon himself the doom with which he was threatened; and that Antinous unhesitatingly laid down his life for his patron. "Greater love hath no man than this," and Hadrian's ostentatious lamentation, and even his deification of his friend, seems puerile in comparison with the devotion ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... imagination never permitted him to mingle in childish plays; and his natural aversion to tyranny prevented him from paying due attention to his school duties. But he was always actively employed; and although his endeavours were prosecuted with puerile precipitancy, yet his aim and thoughts were constantly directed to those great objects which have employed the thoughts of the greatest among men; and though his studies were not followed up according to school discipline, they were not the less ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... face, which might have been called out by the enthusiastic praise that followed the lawyer's confession. But he was painfully conscious of what now seemed to him a monstrous situation! Here was, he believed, the actual accomplice of the road agents calmly receiving the complacent and puerile confessions of the men who were seeking to outwit them. Could he, in ordinary justice to them, to himself, or the mission he conceived he was pursuing, refrain from exposing her, or warning them privately? But was he certain? Was a vague remembrance of a profile momentarily seen—and, ...
— In a Hollow of the Hills • Bret Harte
... songs or romances of adventure, either the rich bounty of lyrical styles or the naive, touching crudity of the Christian drama. The seventeenth century turned disdainfully away from the monuments of national genius discovered by it; finding them sometimes shocking in their rudeness, sometimes puerile in their refinements. These unfortunate exhumations, indeed, only serve to strengthen its cult for a simple, correct beauty, the models of which are found in Greece and Rome. Why dream of penetrating the darkness of our origin? Contemporary society is far too self-satisfied to seek distraction ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... Dastas—i. e., fisher—Satyravata,' the man who loves justice and truth,' strikingly corresponding to the Chaldean Khasisatra. Nor is the Puranic version of the Legend of the Deluge to be despised, though it be of recent date, and full of fantastic and often puerile details. In certain aspects it is less Aryanized than that of Brahmana or than the Mahabharata; and, above all, it gives some circumstances omitted in these earlier versions, which must yet have belonged to the original foundation, since they appear in the Babylonian legend; ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... nationality of Saint Pat-rick, you are still only upon the threshold of your inquiries; for you next find before you for examination a vast variety of miracles, accredited to him, which you must examine, weeding out such as are puerile and are manifestly not well established, and retaining such as are proved to your satisfaction. You will be struck at once with the novel and interesting character of some of them. Prince Caradoc ...
— Saint Patrick - 1887 • Heman White Chaplin
... cannot refrain from asking you, Mr. Hazen, I am in such ignorance as to her real attitude towards me; her conduct is so mysterious; the reasons she gives for it so puerile." ...
— The Chief Legatee • Anna Katharine Green
... of the man?—not in his theories, which were puerile, but in his observations, which were magnificent. He was the first observational astronomer, the founder of the splendid system of practical astronomy which has culminated in the present ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... fresh and holy Earth. Too long has our love of picture and poem, and of all that the glorious impulse to create in beauty achieves, been fickle as the wind; based on discordant fancies and distorted tradition. Symbolism in art, at present means only an arbitrary and puerile substitution of one object or caprice for another. The most successful poetic simile is often as thoroughly conventional, and consequently as perishable, as possible. In short, we are not in an age when there is one poetry alike for all men; ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... caligraphist[TN-110] and sworn expert in the courts of law. Joseph Prudhomme is the synthesis of bourgeois imbecility; radiant, serene, and self-satisfied; letting fall from his fat lips "one weak, washy, everlasting flood" of puerile aphorisms and inane circumlocutions. He says, "The car of the state floats on a precipice." "This sword is the proudest day of my life."—Henri Monnier, Grandeur et D['e]cadence de ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... venison horse, equine cow, bovine bull, taurine sheep, ovine wolf, lupine hog, porcine bear, ursine fox, vulpine cat, feline dog, canine fish, piscatorial mouse, vermin rat, rodent mankind, humanity man, masculine woman, feminine childish, infantile boyish, puerile ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... mysteries, and altars; you have been taught prayers and told, God is here, who listens and will answer you; and you believed, for you were not of an age to inquire. Since then, you have discarded these baubles of your childhood, to conceive a less feminine and less puerile God, than this God of the Christian tabernacles; but the first dazzling glare has not departed from your eyes; the real light that you have thought to see has been blended, unknown to yourself, with that false brightness which fascinated you on your entrance ...
— Raphael - Pages Of The Book Of Life At Twenty • Alphonse de Lamartine
... means that man's goal is the world; this world meaning earth carried to a state higher and with elimination of its evils is the state they call heaven. This theory, on the face of it, is absurd and puerile because it cannot be. There cannot be good without evil, or evil without good. To live in a world where there is all good and no evil, is what Sanskrit logicians call ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... Marguerite noticed with distress an expression of fear, like that of a child detected in a fault. The noble girl was unable to reconcile the majestic and terrible expression of that bald head, denuded by science and by toil, with the puerile smile, the eager servility exhibited on the lips and countenance of the old man. She suffered from the contrast of that greatness to that littleness, and resolved to use her utmost influence to restore her father's sense of dignity before the solemn day on which he was to reappear in the bosom ...
— The Alkahest • Honore de Balzac
... had a screw loose somewhere." They believe that the sun and moon and all the starry hosts of heaven revolve on the inside of this hollow sphere. All our astronomy goes by the board. They look upon it as puerile and contemptible. The founder of the sect had said he would rise from the dead to confirm its truth. His disciples kept his body till the Board of Health ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... evidence that the menace was thoroughly understood, for the whole day shift was toiling at the ice, chopping it, thawing it, shoveling it away, although its tremendous thickness made their efforts seem puerile. Everywhere there was manifested a frantic haste, a grim, strained eagerness that was ...
— The Iron Trail • Rex Beach
... its secret, sometimes puerile, often perplexing; but in its maker there is another and a more interesting one yet. Eliminate Caligula, and Nero, Domitian, Commodus, Caracalla and Heliogabalus would never have been. It was he who gave them both raison ...
— Imperial Purple • Edgar Saltus
... were the special black (or rather grey) beasts of the literary reformers of the time. In a considerable number there are references to actual personages of the time—references which stand on a very different footing of identification from the puerile guessings at the personality of the interlocutors so often referred to. Sometimes these references are avowed: "Un des muletiers de la Reine de Navarre," "Le Roi Francois montre sa generosite," "Un President de Grenoble," "Une femme d'Alencon," and ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. I. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... Sallust was read in the school at Paderborn. It is supposed that Tacitus was known to Wittikind or Dittmar: both relate visions, and several puerile circumstances; but they write with precision, and shew, on many occasions, great ...
— The Life of Hugo Grotius • Charles Butler
... of nature" did appear, on the theistic hypothesis, to be "superfluous" (which it is by no means intended here to admit), it would be nothing less than puerile to prefer rejecting the hypothesis to conceiving that the appearance of superfluity was probably due to human ignorance; and this especially might be expected from naturalists to whom the interdependence of nature and the harmony and ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... monarchy, is scarcely less curious to contemplate. The sagacious counsellor, the long-experienced governor, who has for years wielded the powers of the state, may be reduced to obscurity and impotence by a word—a word of puerile passion, kindled perhaps by a silly intrigue. A great ruler is displaced at the caprice of a dotard. When Count Laski entered the presence of the king, he was in reality the governor of Poland; Europe acknowledged him amongst ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... intellectual scale. The "Pastoral Care" was addressed to the Roman clergy, with whom, if anywhere, something of the old culture still lingered. The "Dialogues" were intended for the barbarians. The book is addressed to Theodolinda, the Lombard queen. It is a book full of wonderful, not to say puerile, stories, in which a religious lesson or moral is always conveyed, but not always one that carries conviction to the mind of the modern Christian. It reflects the policy of converting the barbarians by condescending to their tastes, and belongs to the same ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... the wisdom of this gentleman, or his opinion of ours, who could first think of representing this nation in such a state, as no friend can look upon but with horror, and scarcely an enemy without compassion, and afterwards of diverting himself with such inadequate, impracticable, puerile methods for our relief! If these had been the dreams of some unknown, unnamed, and nameless writer, they would excite no alarm; their weakness had been an antidote to their malignity. But as they are universally believed to be written by the hand, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... This puerile exploit took place not fourscore years ago, and already has this play of Dumas disappeared beneath the wave of oblivion, its very name being recalled only by special students of the history of the French stage, while the Comedie-Francaise continues, year in and year out, to act the best of Racine's ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews |
