"Ingenuousness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... mortified with contemplating an unlucky imperfection in the very framing and construction of my soul; namely, a blundering inaccuracy of her olfactory organs in hitting the scent of craft or design in my fellow-creatures. I do not mean any compliment to my ingenuousness, or to hint that the defect is in consequence of the unsuspicious simplicity of conscious truth or honour: I take it to be, in some, why or other, an imperfection in the mental sight; or, metaphor apart, some modification of dulness. ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... with an ingenuousness calculated to allay my unpleasant fancies, "the Utah chief is a noble fellow—un hombre de bien—besides, he would have done anything for his old friend—whose death greatly grieved him. That is just why you see him here in ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... laughing or languid according to her varying mood. Lela's face is pale as moonbeams; filial solicitude and divine sorrow have left their chastening impression upon her exquisite lineaments. Her countenance is Madonna-like in purity, ingenuousness, ...
— The Story of a Summer - Or, Journal Leaves from Chappaqua • Cecilia Cleveland
... speaking, and remained standing. He had said these things in a loud, rapid, hoarse voice, with a sort of irritated and savage ingenuousness. Once he paused to salute some one in the crowd. The sort of affirmations which he seemed to fling out before him at random came like hiccoughs, and to each he added the gesture of a wood-cutter who is splitting wood. When he had finished, ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... different, all are purely her own. She is a creature of contrasts, and suggests at once all that is innocent and all that is perverse. She has the pure blue eyes of a child, eyes that are cloudless, that gleam with a wicked ingenuousness, that close in the utter abasement of weariness, that open wide in all the expressionlessness of surprise. Her naivete is perfect, and perfect, too, is that strange, subtle smile of comprehension that closes the period. A great impersonal artist, ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... Dress; Miss Sedgwick's view of it; connected with virtues. Mrs. Hancock. Exposure of Health. Affectation; of extreme sensibility; of insensibility. Conversation for Effect. Entertainments. Nominal Morality. Two guards, Moral Independence, and Ingenuousness. Dangers in regard to your own Sex. Envy. The Swiss sisters. Jealousy. Detraction. Ridicule. Flattery. Cultivate Gentleness. Dr. Bowring in regard to Ladies in the East. Kind Feelings. "The art of being Pleased." Good Sense. Good Taste. ...
— The Young Maiden • A. B. (Artemas Bowers) Muzzey
... him a fair statement of the whole acting scheme, defending his own share in it as far only as he could then, in a soberer moment, feel his motives to deserve, and acknowledging, with perfect ingenuousness, that his concession had been attended with such partial good as to make his judgment in it very doubtful. He was anxious, while vindicating himself, to say nothing unkind of the others: but there ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... observing the absolute ingenuousness of the boy, Thorpe used to take him from time to time on some of his daily trips to the pines. Necessarily he explained partially his position and the need of secrecy. Wallace was immensely excited and important at learning a secret ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... his own opinions and feelings upon that subject; and that he became, perhaps almost unconsciously, the supporter of a cause of which he disapproved. That he should have been under any temptation to suppress or soften any important opinion, or to deviate in any respect from that ingenuousness and good faith which naturally belonged to his character, is a circumstance which cannot be sufficiently lamented. But if there are any who feel disposed to pass a very severe censure upon Park's conduct, let his situation at the time when he was preparing his ...
— The Journal Of A Mission To The Interior Of Africa, In The Year 1805 • Mungo Park
... standeth without the vail of the temple, nor have its mystic recesses ever disclosed to her scrutinizing vision actual 'Man.' Let us not however harshly dispel such illusions, neither drench with the cold flood of unnecessary ingenuousness the glowing embers of myrrh and frankincense. Occasionally, perchance, some sinful human, conscious within himself of no demerits beyond his fellows, may repine at passing comparison with this shadowy ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... and with the greatest ingenuousness, he recounted to the Prince the whole history of ...
— New Arabian Nights • Robert Louis Stevenson
... yet only the shell had changed. They had led decent enough lives and no doubt could fall honestly and romantically in love today. In fact, they appeared to be demonstrating the possibility, with the eternal ingenuousness of the male. And yet nature had played them this scurvy trick. The young heart in the old shell. Grown-up boys with a foot in the grave. Dependent upon mind and address alone to win a woman's regard, while the woman dreamed ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... I knew it. Exactly what I always feared. That fiery spirit, you used to say, which is kindling in the boy, and renders him so susceptible to impressions of the beautiful and grand—the ingenuousness which reveals his whole soul in his eyes—the tenderness of feeling which melts him into weeping sympathy at every tale of sorrow—the manly courage which impels him to the summit of giant oaks, ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... the Garden of Eden at Scotland Yard—probably because the unwary might have thought him full of innocence. His smooth, bronzed boyish face showed ingenuousness and candour in every line. A glittering diamond pin adorned his necktie, a massive gold chain spanned his waistcoat, a gold ring with a single great ruby was on his finger. That was the only ostentation about him, and his quiet, well-cut clothes ...
— The Grell Mystery • Frank Froest
... promised the young bank clerk. "I want to see more of what makes the wheels go round." And he laughed at his own ingenuousness. ...
— Tom Swift and his War Tank - or, Doing his Bit for Uncle Sam • Victor Appleton
... simplicity that betokened perfect purity of thought Nor was this extraordinary confidence without its advantages to Eve; for, thrown so early among the artificial and calculating, it served to keep her own ingenuousness of character active, and prevented that cold, selfish, and unattractive sophistication, that mere women of fashion are apt to fall into, from their isolated and factitious mode of existence. When Eve, therefore, put the questions to her nurse, that have already been mentioned, ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... considered a very original and delightful young man. He was fresh in from the range, but he had the polish of a university education over his roughness, and what I know now to be inborn coarseness was then accepted for ingenuousness. He passed current in the best society of the capital, where he was coddled as a butterfly of new species. We met; he made love to me, and I—I am afraid that I encouraged him ...
— Claim Number One • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... examples some descriptive compounds, which call to mind the infancy of nations, and strike us equally in the American and Biscayan languages, by a certain ingenuousness of expression. In Tamanac, the wasp (uane-imu), father (im-de) of honey (uane);* (* It may not be unnecessary here to acquaint the reader that honey is produced by an insect of South America, belonging to, or nearly allied, to the wasp genus. This honey, ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... of music a perplexing one. Now, to the observer who sees things relatively, it must seem strange that the modern man who happens to be gifted with exceptional talent should as a child and a youth so seldom be blessed with the quality of ingenuousness and of simple individuality, that he is so little able to have these qualities at all. As a matter of fact, men of rare talent, like Goethe and Wagner, much more often attain to ingenuousness in manhood ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... met his, with all the contrition, affection, and ingenuousness that even he wished to see there; and they put their ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Elizabeth Wetherell
... added, with charming vivacity and ingenuousness: "Ah, how willingly I shall kiss ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... the young person who called on me a good many years ago, so many that he has probably forgotten his literary effort,—and read as specimens of his literary workmanship lines like those which I will favor you with presently? He was an able-bodied, grown-up young person, whose ingenuousness interested me; and I am sure if I thought he would ever be pained to see his maiden effort in print, I would deny myself the pleasure of submitting it to the reader. The following is an exact transcript of the lines he showed me, and which I took ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... whatever might have been her companion's confederation. In the prescience of a true lover, he knew that she must have been deceived and kept in utter ignorance of it. There was no look of it in her lovely, guileless eyes; her very impulsiveness and ingenuousness would have long since betrayed the secret. Was it left for him, at this very outset of his passion, to be the one to tell her? Could he bear to see those frank, beautiful eyes dimmed with shame and sorrow? His ...
— In a Hollow of the Hills • Bret Harte
... seemed to be her pleasure that night to be like everybody else. She did it on opulent lines; there was a richness in her agreement that the going was as hard as iron on the Ellenborough course, and a soft ingenuousness in her inquiries about punkahs and the brain-fever bird that might have aroused suspicion, but after a brief struggle to respond to the unusualness she ought to have represented, Alicia's guests gratefully accepted her on their own terms instead. She expanded in the light and the glow and the ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... writers for little ones chose to be unknown, for it would be ungenerous to disparage by name these ladies who considered their productions edifying, and in their ingenuousness never dreamed that their stories were devoid of every quality that makes a child's book of value to the child. They were literally unconscious that their tales lacked that simplicity and directness in style, and they themselves that knowledge of human nature, absolutely ...
— Forgotten Books of the American Nursery - A History of the Development of the American Story-Book • Rosalie V. Halsey
... the sword of resistance against Philip III., Tassoni penned two philippics against Spaniards, which are the firmest, most embittered expression of patriotism as it then existed. He had the acuteness to perceive that the Spanish state was no longer in its prime of vigor, and the noble ingenuousness to dream that Italian princes might be roused to sink their rancors in a common effort after independence. As a matter of fact, Estensi, Medici, Farnesi, Gonzaghi, all the reigning houses as yet unabsorbed by Church or Spain, preferred the ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... One is rather surprised to find the facts of the case so unfairly represented in addressing unlearned readers; who are entitled to the largest amount of ingenuousness, and to entire sincerity of statement. The ...
— The Last Twelve Verses of the Gospel According to S. Mark • John Burgon
... what can you expect when YOUR boy is obliged, month after month and year after year, to associate with other boys? After all, he was a GOOD boy, said Constance, often to herself and now and then to Samuel. For Constance, his charm was eternally renewed. His smile, his frequent ingenuousness, his funny self-conscious gesture when he wanted to 'get round' her—these characteristics remained; and his pure heart remained; she could read that in his eyes. Samuel was inimical to his tastes for sports and his triumphs therein. But Constance had pride in all that. She liked to ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... we are blamed is modesty; to discover them to one's friends, in ingenuousness, is confidence; but to preach them to all the world, if one does not take care, ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... do in the matter of Madame Piriac's impending visit to Audrey Moze at Flank Hall, and through the texture of these difficult topics she could see, as it were, shining the sprightly simplicity, the utter ingenuousness, the entirely reliable fidelity of Mr. Gilman. She felt, rather than consciously realised, that he was a dull man. But she liked his dullness; it reassured her; it was tranquillising; it was even adorable. She liked also his attitude towards Moze. She had never ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... yours. However, you will see that I have done an act of kindness to one deserving woman. I allude to Madame de Hatzfeld. When I showed her her husband's letter she stood weeping, and in a tone of mingled grief and ingenuousness said, "It is indeed his writing!" This went to my heart, and I said, "Well, madame, throw the letter into the fire, and then I shall have no proof against your husband." She burned the letter, and was restored ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... earth without wincing, for the sole purpose of procuring embers at which to roast their chestnuts. I will not return to the subject of the gun; you know all about it. It seems that there was some good in this explosive gun, and that he who invented it united a sort of genius with ingenuousness, inexperience, and ignorance enough to make one weep. Nothing can be said against the private character of the man. He had a few debts, and his tradespeople felt considerable anxiety when he left Vienna one morning on foot. He had no sooner reached Switzerland than he sent ...
— Samuel Brohl & Company • Victor Cherbuliez
... these two men shows Wiglaf to have been simply a great, big-hearted, overgrown boy in the whole affair. All claims of his having had an eye on the throne of Northumbria fade away under the delightful ingenuousness of his attitude as expressed ...
— Love Conquers All • Robert C. Benchley
... strangely and beautifully arisen, like a palace in a dream, and absorbed his being. Although their acquaintance could hardly be numbered by months, there was no living person of whom he had seen so much, or to whom he had opened his heart and mind with such profuse ingenuousness. Nor on her part, though apparently shrinking from egotism, had there ever been any intellectual reserve. On the contrary, although never authoritative, and, even when touching on her convictions, suggesting rather than dictating ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... loses the freshness and simplicity that won me,—the sweetness and ingenuousness that enchained me!" he cried impetuously. "Wait till she has been flattered and spoiled by a vain and deceiving world; till she learns to prize the admiration of many better than the true love of one; till she ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... Francis; but Italy is not Germany nor England, and the thirteenth century would have been astonished indeed at the prudery of the Bollandists. The incident is simply a new manifestation of Francis's character, with its ingenuousness, its exaggerations, its longing to establish a complete harmony, a literal correspondence, ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... N. veracity; truthfulness, frankness, &c. adj.; truth, sincerity, candor, unreserve|!, honesty, fidelity; plain dealing, bona fides[Lat]; love of truth; probity &c. 939; ingenuousness &c (artlessness) 703. the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth; honest truth, sober truth &c (fact) 494; unvarnished tale; light of truth. V. speak the truth, tell the truth; speak by the card; paint in its true colors, show oneself in one's true colors; make a clean breast &c (disclose) ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... success by the reason that mere acquaintances, as well as strangers, invariably underestimated him. For one thing, his skin was so tender, his eyes so blue and innocent, his mouth so wide and sensitive, his forehead so white and high, that he gave the impression of almost childish simplicity and ingenuousness. For another thing, he dressed with such meticulous regard for the fashion, and he moved about with such indolent amiability, that his clothes and his manners distracted attention from what ...
— Rope • Holworthy Hall
... culture as lightly as a flower. Even after he had left college, he retained the sunny outlook, the gladsomeness and the bloom of boyhood. Wherever he went he carried with him an atmosphere of joy. Fresh ingenuousness and glowing enthusiasm were part of his charm. There was a rich vein of the romantic in his character, but the cast of his mind was philosophical. He had no patience with superficiality masquerading as wisdom, and was quick to detect a fallacy in reasoning. A shining trait in him was truthfulness. ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... enough when the latest witness had before him the actual pictures on which the first description had been based; even then crooked noses became straight, large mouths small, disdain was turned to affability and ingenuousness to guile; but where this guide was lacking the descriptions were ...
— An Adventure With A Genius • Alleyne Ireland
... Mr. Belknap," she said at last, and with charming ingenuousness, "this is not a matter for my judgment; I rely upon you entirely; pray do not hesitate, but continue your investigations in whatever direction your judgment leads you. I wish Mr. Lamotte was here to confer ...
— The Diamond Coterie • Lawrence L. Lynch
... passed between the two women and the lady. Wonder not, that a perverse wife makes a listening husband. The event, however, as thou wilt find, justified the old observation, That listners seldom hear good of themselves. Conscious of their own demerits, if I may guess by myself, [There's ingenuousness, Jack!] and fearful of censure, they seldom find themselves disappointed. There is something of sense, after all in these proverbs, in these phrases, in ...
— Clarissa, Volume 5 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... the narration. He was not used to the address of falshood; and strongly warned as he had previously been of the iniquity of the train, the ingenuousness of his mind induced him at first without reflection to yield an easy credit to the story that was told him. It was related with fluency, plausibility, and gravity; and it was accompanied with a manner seemingly artless and humane, which it was scarcely ...
— Imogen - A Pastoral Romance • William Godwin
... on, with an air of simple and charming ingenuousness; while I reflected that here possibly was a light and aimless creature whom I had mentally convicted of ungracious designs, that, although his presence in Wallencamp, as a representative of the great world I believed I had left behind me, was ...
— Cape Cod Folks • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... portrayed; and yet with that simplicity and ingenuousness which carries with it a conviction of the ...
— The Narrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave • William Wells Brown
... whose long strides are not easy to keep pace with. They walk more slowly when out of sight. Oh, the delightful dawdle back through the vague shadows of evening in sweetly scented lanes! How merrily she prattles with charming ingenuousness, while he watches her expressive features, a new strange thrill ...
— When the Birds Begin to Sing • Winifred Graham
... of tea and drank it in little quick, nervous gulps. She looked deliriously young, and fragile and appealing, her delicate slenderness revealed by the flimsy garment she wore. Excitement and anticipation lent a glow to her eyes, colour to her cheeks. Al, glancing expertly at the ingenuousness of her artfully simple coiffure, the slim limpness of her body, her wide-eyed gaze, laughed a wise ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... and then proceeded to explain with rather unnecessary ingenuousness: "I'm still more vexed with the state of things that it's typical of—I suppose I mean the restrictedness of this civilized life. When you want to do anything in the bush, you take the ax and set about it; but here you're continually ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss
... identity—that is, if he himself knew them, he was never known to maintain the same moral temperament for a week together. Never did there exist a being so capricious and unstable. At one time, you found him all ingenuousness and candor; at another, no earthly power could extort a syllable of truth from his lips. For whole days, if not for weeks together, he dealt in nothing but the wildest fiction, and the most extraordinary ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... at her steadfastly. "Such ingenuousness," he said, presently, "is overpowering. Mr. Clyde, how do you do? Do you think it is going to ...
— The Associate Hermits • Frank R. Stockton
... assassinate, lest she should be blamed for not having yielded to it. She said that the schalischim appeared furious, that he had shouted a great deal, and that he had then fallen asleep. Salammbo told no more, through shame perhaps, or else because she was led by her extreme ingenuousness to attach but little importance to the soldier's kisses. Moreover, it all floated through her head in a melancholy and misty fashion, like the recollection of a depressing dream; and she would not have known in what way or in ...
— Salammbo • Gustave Flaubert
... of psalm-singings were not forgotten. You lived, an idealized memory of pure and pious harmony, in the hearts of your old church friends. Warmly did they fight for your "way of singing;" with most undeniable and open partiality, with most dubious ingenuousness and rectitude, did your old neighbor, Captain Pelatiah Allyn, conduct that hot July music-meeting, counting up boldly sixty-three votes in favor of your way, when there were only forty-three voters on your side of the alley, and crowding a final decision in your favor. It ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... struck speechless. In the face of such candour, such perfect ingenuousness, he was at a loss for ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... a sort of naive ingenuousness in a letter to the Lords of Council of the year 1607. In this letter he exhorts them not to present to him any 'sute wherof none of yourselves can guess what the vallew may prove,' but rather to help him to cut off superfluous expenses, as far as was consistent ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... a self-consciousness about all forced things, and the hallmark of the Bohemian is an absolute ingenuousness." ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... terrible allegory of "La Coupe et les Levres:" the idea recurs throughout his works, conspicuously in the Confession d'un Enfant du Siecle, which is Madame Sand's best apology. But if his excesses had destroyed his ingenuousness, she destroyed his faith in human nature, and on her will ever rest the brand he set in the burning ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... image of his person, upholding all things by the word of his power," we go on to consider the purpose for which he came on earth, and all that he did and suffered for us; surely if we have a spark of ingenuousness left within us, we shall condemn ourselves as guilty of the blackest ingratitude, in rarely noticing, or coldly turning away, on whatever shallow pretences, from the contemplation of these miracles of mercy. For those baser minds however on which fear ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... bounded along the brow of the cliffs; while Valancourt often stopped to speak with the travellers, and with social feeling to point out to them the peculiar objects of his admiration. St. Aubert was pleased with him: 'Here is the real ingenuousness and ardour of youth,' said he to himself; 'this young man has ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... he worked harder than any common miner, that his reserve was unbroken, and his life one continual self-denial. There were thirty men in all who worked for him, and by them all he was respected and feared rather than liked. There was a chilling reserve wrapped about him, an utter absence of ingenuousness and frankness of character, that prevented any affection growing up amongst the men for their master, and his attitude towards them was summed up in the answer he gave to an acquaintance who once asked him how he got on with his men, ...
— A Girl of the Klondike • Victoria Cross
... of the electorate in this, the most important departure Canada ever made, because prompt action seemed the only way, and time was lacking for debate about what seemed the next thing that had to be done. In fact, the Canadian people, regarded collectively, felt and acted in this case with as much ingenuousness as did those Tyrolese mountaineers, bred, according to Heine, to know nothing of politics save that they had an Emperor who wore a white coat and ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... in front of him. He turned in his disconcerting, monumental way and looked at his questioner, who had imitated with a perfect ingenuousness his own brief pause before the word mother. ...
— The Last Hope • Henry Seton Merriman
... arduous of real concerns. If we are led up to none of the enkindled summits of the soul, and plunged into none of its abysses, that is no reason why we should fail to be struck by the pale flame of strenuous self-possession, or touched by the ingenuousness and simplicity of the speaker's accents. A generation continually excited by narratives, as sterile as vehement, of storm and stress and spiritual shipwreck, might do well, if it knew the things that pertained to its peace, to ponder this unvarnished ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 3 (of 3) - Essay 2: The Death of Mr Mill - Essay 3: Mr Mill's Autobiography • John Morley
... feeling or idea of real affection until he met LAURA. He fell for a moment under the spell of her fascination, and then, with cold logic, he analyzed her, and found out that, while outwardly she had every sign of girlhood,—ingenuousness, sweetness of character and possibility of affection,—spiritually and mentally she was nothing more than a moral wreck. He observed keenly her efforts to win him and her disappointment at her failure—not that she cared so much for him personally, but ...
— The Easiest Way - Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911 • Eugene Walter
... ingenuousness with which Ela put these questions, and the plaintive appeal against the hard requirements of social laws in the mountains, which was expressed in his voice and accent, were so indescribably ludicrous that both my husband and myself laughed convulsively. ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor
... ancestors; and the wonted fires of Apicius and Sardanapalus may still live in St. James's-street and Waterloo-place; but commend us to the board, where each guest, like a true feeler, brings half the entertainment along with him. This brings us to notice Christmas, a Poem, by Edward Moxon, full of ingenuousness and good feeling, in Crabbe-like measure; but, captious reader, suspect not a pun on the poet of England's hearth—for a more unfortunate name than ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 348, December 27, 1828 • Various
... mother's death. When he viewed himself in the looking-glass, he smiled involuntarily; the appearance of youth returned. He curled his mustache and moved his head this way and that. He thought about some new clothes which he was to have. He owned to himself, with perfect ingenuousness, that he was, in his way, as a man, as good-looking as Ida herself. Suddenly he remembered how Abby had looked when she was a young girl and he had married her; he had not compared himself so favorably with her. The image of his dead wife, as a young girl, was much fairer in his mind than ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... other, is hardly conceivable; but on board ship, at sea, en tete-a-tete for days and weeks and months together, could mean nothing but mental torture, an exquisite absurdity of torment. He was a simple soul. His hopelessly masculine ingenuousness is displayed in a touching way by his care to procure some woman to attend on Flora. The condition of guaranteed perfect respectability gave him moments of anxious thought. When he remembered suddenly his steward's wife he must have exclaimed eureka with particular ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... attainments, to whom she is most devotedly attached,—the mother of a little girl as lovely as herself, and the delight of all who have the happiness of her acquaintance, to whom she is endeared not merely by her remarkable sweetness of temper and kindness of heart, but by the singular ingenuousness and openness of character which communicate an indescribable charm to her conversation. She is as transparent as water. You may see every colour, every shade of a mind as lofty and beautiful as her person. ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... just 'busting' himself with Titanic intellectualities, but who is a readable dramatic critic.... Mr. Hale is a modest and sensible, as well as an acute and sound critic.... Most people will be surprised and delighted with Mr. Hale's simplicity, perspicuity and ingenuousness." ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... had lain awake the greater part of the night mourning for her friend who was gone. Now, as she tried to give her attention to her aunt and to the vexed question of the propriety of crape on the body, she thought, with girlish ingenuousness, that she wanted Peter more than she had ever wanted him before, and that she could do nothing until she had seen him. And across her grief came one great flash of joy as she realized that in all her troubles and sorrows she ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... room. Wirz was still engrossed in his writing, and did not look around. I was emboldened to reach down for another handful. This was also successfully transferred, the hand wiped off on the back of the shirt, and the face wore its expression of infantile ingenuousness. Still Wirz did not look up. I kept dipping up handful after handful, until I had gotten about a quart in the left hand pocket. After each handful I rubbed my hand off on the back of my shirt and waited an instant for a summons to the desk. ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... of La Font's acting is the complete truth in one short sentence: Nature's triumph over art; reversing the copy-book axiom! But the Lord deliver us from Plessy's mechanical ingenuousness!! ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 2 (of 3), 1857-1870 • Charles Dickens
... to pounce. He glanced at his uncle's judicial mask, knowing utterly the distaste for sentimental encounters that it covered. He detested his aunt's aloofness. He was almost angry with this little woman's ingenuousness that put her so candidly at ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... values. Her eyes were ever gaping in astonishment at what Mrs. Hawley-Crowles and her sister regarded as the most moderate of expenditures, and it was only when the Beaubien herself mildly hinted to them that ingenuousness was one of the girl's greatest social assets, that they learned to smile indulgently at her wonder, even while inwardly pitying her dense ignorance and ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... cup of legend; we were intoxicated with poetry and with love. But, alas! it was only love of vague forms; of tints roseal and azure; of metaphysical phantoms. The real woman, seen close, revolted our ingenuousness: we would have had her a queen or a goddess, and to draw ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... into a child of wonderful loveliness. Possessing her mother's beauty of feature and complexion and her father's refinement of feeling, she added to them a truthful simplicity and frank ingenuousness of manner which won all hearts to her. Much as they might despise her mother, everybody loved and pitied Bessie, whose life was a kind of scramble, and who early learned to think and act for herself, and to know there was a difference between her ...
— Bessie's Fortune - A Novel • Mary J. Holmes
... eyes. In broken English, with a childlike ingenuousness of demeanor, he informed me that he was a first-class locksmith—first-glass he called it—who had been sent by the management to open a reluctant trunk. He had entered my room, I was led to ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... would not ordinarily be a query of agitating importance. Nor yet is the exact proportion of his yearly salary of national interest. No one ever accused this agile gentleman of setting up for a millionaire while his ingenuousness touching his wife's property is ...
— The Onlooker, Volume 1, Part 2 • Various
... he thought more contemptuously of Mary Ann. Idealise her as he might, see all that was best in her as he tried to do, she remained common and commonplace enough. Her ingenuousness, while from one point of view it was charming, from another was but a pleasant synonym for silliness. And it might not be ingenuousness—or silliness—after all! For was Mary Ann as innocent as she looked? The guilelessness of the dove might very ...
— Merely Mary Ann • Israel Zangwill
... to whom the book doubtless recalled the memory of their spring-time, shared Falstaff's ingenuousness, and remained faithful to Lyly; if men or letters, after some years of enthusiasm, ceased to imitate him, his book was for a long time continuously read, and it was reprinted again and again even in the reign of Charles I. It was translated into ...
— The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare • J. J. Jusserand
... very different. There was a child-like openness and ingenuousness of manner about her which quickly revealed to the observer not only the salient points, but also the finer gradations, of her character and temperament; and I believe that I had a clearer insight into both at the time that I thus hastily offered myself, than many men who do the same ...
— For Treasure Bound • Harry Collingwood
... object of suspicion to these rascals and my life would not be worth an hour's purchase. With the young girl's warnings ringing in my ears, I felt that my one chance of safety and of circumventing these criminals lay in my seeming ingenuousness and ...
— Castles in the Air • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... young lady—a misfortune that can scarcely be retrieved in her lifetime. It is easy to recognise a woman whose soul has been fostered in that of her mother. Such women ordinarily possess a milder disposition, a more amiable ingenuousness, with a certain simplicity of heart which, without being prejudicial in the least to her mind, adds a new charm to the noble and generous virtues which become the mother of a family. Those habits of confidence and abandonment contracted from childhood have made frankness and sincerity ...
— Serious Hours of a Young Lady • Charles Sainte-Foi
... boldness in it; it was simply a truthful expression of a pure and noble nature, the spontaneous outburst of a holy affection responding to the sacred love of his own heart, and the avowal aroused a profound reverence for an ingenuousness that was as rare as it ...
— His Heart's Queen • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... receive a Dumfries Newspaper with a criticism in it? The author is one Gilfillan, a young Dissenting Minister in Dundee; a person of great talent, ingenuousness, enthusiasm, and other virtues; whose position as a Preacher of bare old Calvinism under penalty of death sometimes makes me tremble for him. He has written in that same Newspaper about all the notablest men of his time; ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... the Moor, is the most perfect type of the despot of that age, and, as a kind of natural product, almost disarms our moral judgement. Notwithstanding the profound immorality of the means he employed, he used them with perfect ingenuousness; no o ne would probably have been more astonished than himself to learn that for the choice of means as well as of ends a human being is morally.responsible; he would rather have reckoned it as a singular virtue that, so far as possible, he had abstained from too free a use of the punishment ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... when he came to present himself to his aunt at Brighton, and good looks were always a title to the fickle old lady's favour. Nor did his blushes and awkwardness take away from it: she was pleased with these healthy tokens of the young gentleman's ingenuousness. ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... any stamp of candour: it was simply a finely-formed, square, smooth young brow. And the slow absent glance he cast around at the upper windows of the houses had neither more dissimulation in it, nor more ingenuousness, than belongs to a youthful well-opened eyelid with its unwearied breadth of gaze; to perfectly pellucid lenses; to the undimmed dark of a rich brown iris; and to a pure cerulean-tinted angle of whiteness streaked with the delicate shadows ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... dissimulation and envy exist not among them. When they deceive their enemies and their rivals, it is because they consider themselves in a state of warfare with them; but in other circumstances they are frank and ingenuous. It is this ingenuousness alone that has scandalised you respecting our women, who, hearing love constantly spoken of, and surrounded by its seductions and examples, conceal not their sentiments, and if it may be so expressed, give even, to gallantry a character of innocence; ...
— Corinne, Volume 1 (of 2) - Or Italy • Mme de Stael
... to communicate the whole truth; but the warmth of his manner inspired me with some degree of ingenuousness. I did not hide from him my former hopes and my present destitute condition. He listened to my tale with no expressions of sympathy, and when I had finished, abruptly inquired whether I had any objection to a voyage to Europe? I answered in the negative. He then said that ...
— Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist - (A Fragment) • Charles Brockden Brown
... more preparation to go visiting, and Mrs. Clemens and Mrs. Howells seem to have exchanged visits infrequently. For Mark Twain, perhaps, it was just as well that his wife did not always go with him; his absent-mindedness and boyish ingenuousness often led him into difficulties which Mrs. Clemens sometimes found embarrassing. In the foregoing letter they were planning a visit to Cambridge. In the one that follows they seem to have made it—with certain results, perhaps not altogether ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... I'll put it off for a month or two, TOBY," he said, blushing with the ingenuousness of youth. "You see I'm so fresh from college, that it would ill become me to plunge into public affairs. It's all very well for a young fellow like me to get up at the Union; but here it's different. You're very good to say that great ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98 February 15, 1890 • Various
... really pretty, said nothing, and gave pleasure by her very lack of artificiality. To her I might have been favourably inclined because of her ignorance, had she not gloried in this, and tried to emphasize her difference from the others by a piquant ingenuousness. One day I discovered that she had plenty of wit, and straightway ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... common observer. The lessening of the bloom, the mournful character of a dove-like eye, and a look of thoughtfulness, on a brow that he had ever known devoid of care and open as day with youthful ingenuousness, were the symptoms that first gave the alarm to her father, whose previous losses, and whose solitariness, as respects the ties of the world, had rendered him keenly alive to impressions of such a nature. The ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... perpetuated by Christine Nilsson and the painter Ary Scheffer, Marguerite is a good deal of a grande dame, and against the German critics it might appositely be pleaded that there are more traces of childish ingenuousness in her rejoicing over the casket of jewels than in any of her other utterances. The episode is poetically justified, of course, by the eighth scene of Goethe's drama, and there was not wanting one German writer who boldly ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... at that period evidently understood Lord Byron better than either his future bride or myself; but this speaks more for Moore's shrewdness than for Byron's ingenuousness of character. ...
— Lady Byron Vindicated • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... failed to conceal the bent of his mind toward those with whom he is now in intimate concert. Sincerity had least place of all the virtues in his breast; and his hypocrisy, somewhat hidden by the apparent ingenuousness and conciliatory address of his manner, became manifest in actions and votes, rather than in words. He was, so far as can now be ascertained, one of the prime movers of the Senatorial cabal, or caucus, which ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... her own will in the end, and it was little likely that she would allow the establishment to await the influx of Merrifields, though certainly Gillian had done nothing displeasing all that evening except that terrible blushing, for which piece of ingenuousness her aunt loved ...
— Beechcroft at Rockstone • Charlotte M. Yonge
... such childish ingenuousness, and in so cheerful and jesting a tone, that the cardinal listened to her as if intoxicated, and with unconcealed admiration he looked into that delicate, childishly pure face, over which no trace of sorrow nor any sign of care ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... funny to be missed. She is a violent partisan and at once takes strong sides, and if her favorite team fails to bat well she characterizes the opposing pitcher as a "horrid creature;" or when the teams have finished practicing she wants to know, with charming ingenuousness, "which won." But as she gets deeper into the principles of the game her remarks become less frequent and her questions more to the point, until her well-timed attempts to applaud good plays and the anxious ...
— Base-Ball - How to Become a Player • John M. Ward
... open confession. The inexperience of youth, Mr. Waverley, lays it open to the plans of the more designing and artful; and one of your friends at least—I mean Mac-Ivor of Glennaquoich—ranks high in the latter class, as, from your apparent ingenuousness, youth, and unacquaintance with the manners of the Highlands, I should be disposed to place you among the former. In such a case, a false step, or error like yours, which I shall be happy to consider as involuntary, may be atoned for, and I would willingly act as intercessor. But as you must ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... have enjoyed together, when they were matrons, and I the companion of their sons. And now, when all are gone, and time is crowding me to the grave, the nobleness of their characters, the simplicity of their bearing in the discharge of their household duties, and the ingenuousness of their manners in social intercourse, is a cherished, venerated memory. None of these women were ever in a boarding-school, never received a lesson in the art of entering a drawing-room or captivating a beau. ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... disposition caused so much misfortune to France, was born here. Happy too had it been for him, had he here closed his eyes before he entered upon the wider theatre of the world! During his early days passed at Navarre, he is said to have shewn an ingenuousness of disposition and some traits of generosity, which gave rise to hopes that were miserably falsified by his future life.—The present edifice, however, a modern French Chateau, retains nothing more than the name of the structure which was built by the ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. II. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... my youth, I was governed by too many illusions. Morbid scepticism was succeeded in me by too much kindliness and ingenuousness. A thousand times over I was duped by dreams of an archangelic fusion of the opposing forces in ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... examples of ingenuousness are sufficiently characteristic of the morality of the system. In La Maison Tellier Guy de Maupassant has depicted with his masterly pen the psychology of the prostitute, the ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... similar nature, he thought "that he was given that way rather than otherwise." She explicitly denies that her governess ever advised her to marry the admiral without the consent of the council; but relates with great apparent ingenuousness, the hints which Mrs. Ashley had thrown out of his attachment to her, and the artful attempts which she had made to discover how her pupil stood ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... Her ingenuousness tickled him. He missed her comic touches upon men and things, but the fever shown by her manner ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Square, feeling not a whit less jealous than she had set out. There seemed, it is true, something about Bridget Rosser to which she was scarcely accustomed in her own personal friends; something difficult to describe. It might be due to an innate ingenuousness, or, in part, to the quasi-Bohemian life she had probably lived during the last ...
— Enter Bridget • Thomas Cobb
... entered. He was thin, rather frail-looking, with a boyish ingenuousness and a slightly foolish smile, despite his seven children. But his wife was a ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... apropos," while a surgeon was sounding his bladder to ascertain whether he had a stone. "I never saw a fellow more astonished than he was," wrote Lord Sefton in his reply, "at seeing me laugh as soon as the operation was over. Nothing could be more first-rate than the royal Edward's ingenuousness. One does not know which to admire most—the delicacy of his attachment to Madame St. Laurent, the refinement of his sentiments towards the Duke of Clarence, or his own perfect disinterestedness in ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey
... 'n' we-uns hain't no different." He had begun calling Bob by his first name with child-like ingenuousness. ...
— Sunlight Patch • Credo Fitch Harris
... sat down to what Sam called "Pump-pie-King pie with raisins and mince." The expression on Sam's face was celestial. No other word could describe it. There was also an underlying expression of triumph which made me suspicious of his apparent ingenuousness, and as the lubras had done little else but make faces at themselves in the looking-glass for two days (I was beginning to hate that looking-glass), I appealed ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn |
