ARTLESSNESS • DICTIONARY ONE.COM • Definition of Artlessness

"Artlessness" Quotes from Famous Books

... wrestles for the exact nuance, and will not let a sentence go till he has obtained its blessing. Consequently he is never finicking in his phraseology, and seldom final. The subtle artfulness of Stevenson is beyond him; but he has a rarer quality—that subtler artlessness which has belonged in some measure to all the greater writers of sentiment. It is a quality independent of the mechanics of writing; whether the author echoes the syntax of Addison or the diction of Goldsmith ...

— Washington Irving • Henry W. Boynton

... mean by that emphatic tone? What is all this bombastic sermon about? What manners are these? My friend, you are grotesque. Those lines should be repeated simply, naturally and with the utmost artlessness. Remember that it is the good La Fontaine who speaks! [accenting each syllable] the-good-La-Fon-taine—do you hear? There is but one way possible to render the lines faithfully. ...

— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various

... the examination of the sketches. He put his hand on the weak points as well as on the strong ones; he enjoyed with Wetmore the places where her artlessness had frankly offered itself instead of her art. There was something ingenuous and honest in it all that made ...

— The Coast of Bohemia • William Dean Howells

... was sitting at the window, leaning on his elbow and the back of his chair, his head drooping. Noticing that all eyes were turned on him he raised his head and smiled a smile of childlike artlessness. ...

— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy

... use a phrase which we have heard him apply to himself—"to rise above the crowd, and stand when others fall," he chose for his wife a young provincial actress, whom he had once chided for her inattention or inability, but whose artlessness of manner, purity and sweetness of nature and aptness for improvement so enlisted his sympathies that he constituted himself her friend and guide until the death of her father and brother awakened a still warmer solicitude, bringing with it the discovery that "love had been the inspiration ...

— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various

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