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Infantile   /ˈɪnfəntɪl/   Listen
Infantile

adjective
1.
Indicating a lack of maturity.  Synonym: childish.  "Infantile behavior"
2.
Of or relating to infants or infancy.
3.
Being or befitting or characteristic of an infant.



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"Infantile" Quotes from Famous Books



... temper," said a voice from one of the beds. "Petting and spoiling all day long." The voice came from an old woman, with a soft, withered face and infantile ...
— Women of the Country • Gertrude Bone

... surface of Orient idols! O, hewn by the workmen of cunning Cathay For the sword-hilts of kings and their saddles and bridles! O, carved for Athene! O, chosen to-day For the match now proceeding Betwixt those two leading And infantile ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 4, 1914 • Various

... yet remain full of charity for his neighbor. Profoundly individual, and profoundly attached to his ideas, like all Anglo-Saxons, and in fact like all who have acquired the Protestant habit of free inquiry, he nevertheless had for the Church a docility almost naive and infantile; and this was because he recognized in her the authority and the action of ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott

... others during her progress to the scaffold; it is the head of a lovely girl, wearing a headdress composed of a turban with a lappet. The hair is of a rich fair chestnut hue; the dark eyes are moistened with recent tears; a perfectly farmed nose surmounts an infantile mouth; unfortunately, the loss of tone in the picture since it was painted has destroyed the original fair complexion. The age of the subject may be twenty, or perhaps ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... Infantile Paralysis. Another disease that has been unpleasantly famous of late is also caused and spread by a germ. This is a form of laming or crippling of certain muscles in childhood known as infantile paralysis. It is not a common disease, though during the last ...
— A Handbook of Health • Woods Hutchinson

... understood, conveys the gist of long and delicate explanations; and where the life is known even YEA and NAY become luminous. In the closest of all relations - that of a love well founded and equally shared - speech is half discarded, like a roundabout, infantile process or a ceremony of formal etiquette; and the two communicate directly by their presences, and with few looks and fewer words contrive to share their good and evil and uphold each other's hearts in joy. For love ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson

... beasts, the oldest Palaeotherium; Older than the trees, the oldest Cryptogami; Older than the hills, those infantile eruptions ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte

... sepulchres. There was a large amphora, the "Warrior Vase" (Fig. 6). The men wear apparently a close- fitting coat of mail over a chiton, which reaches with its fringes half down the thigh. The shield is circular, with a half-moon cut out at the bottom. The art is infantile. Other warriors carry long oval shields reaching, at least, from neck to shin. [Footnote: Schuchardt, Schliemann's Excavations, pp. 279-285.] They wear round leather caps, their enemies have helmets. On a Mycenaean painted stele, apparently of the same ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang

... owed his preservation. He would have struck his forehead against a low doorway in the darkness; but she touched the lintel with her finger and then laid her tiny hand on Barrington's tall shoulder, laughing and saying in infantile English: ...
— Kimono • John Paris

... gramma, we ain't," proclaimed the children in a shrill shout. They danced around the table, removing the knives and forks; their innocent, pinky faces were full of cherubic glee. This occasion was, metaphorically speaking, a whole flock of jubilant infantile larks for them. They loved company with all their souls, and they also felt always a pleasant titillation of their youthful spirits when they saw their grandmother in perturbation. Unless, indeed, they themselves ...
— Jane Field - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

... body of Hannah Achsah Stillwell which she was hed nurse in the family of Howard Neville eskire for years and brung up mostly by hand his children and never felt she done enuf for them not sparin herself with infantile elements walkin nites and the like, pashunt and gentle not cross-grained like some which the poor little things they can't help theirselves teethin and the like, respeckful to her betters knoin her ...
— Bessie Bradford's Prize • Joanna H. Mathews

... she fell on her knees with her arms outstretched to the rampaging ball of white fluff and high spirits, the which thinking it some new game squatted back on its hind legs with the front ones wide apart, gave an infantile squeak, and whizzed round three times apparently for luck, as tears welled up in the child's large eyes and trickled ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest

... Maine at Township Letter B. A sharper harshness of articulation in stray passengers told us that we were approaching the vocal influence of the name Androscoggin. People talked as if, instead of ivory ring or coral rattle to develop their infantile teeth, they had bitten upon pine knots. Voices were resinous and astringent. An opera, with a chorus drummed up in those regions, could dispense ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various

... what awe, what infantile impatience, We eyed the artifice when issued out, And racked our brains about the Regulations, And tried to think we had them free from doubt! As Rome's old Fathers, reverently leaning In secret cellars o'er the Sibyl's strain, Beyond the fact that several pars Had something vague to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 12, 1917 • Various

... his fare. He looked at it, but not with the surly doubt and general disposition to try it on which is not unknown among normal cabmen. But this was no normal, perhaps, no human, cabman. He looked at it with a dull and infantile astonishment, clearly quite genuine. "Do you know, sir," he said, "you've only given me 1s.8d?" I remarked, with some surprise, that I did know it. "Now you know, sir," said he in a kindly, appealing, reasonable way, "you know that ain't the fare from Euston." "Euston," I ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton

... seemed to have been born liars. The falsehoods of their lives extended from cradle to grave. Prevarication, misrepresentation, and dishonesty of speech appeared in their first utterances and was as natural to them as any of their infantile diseases, and was a sort of moral croup or spiritual scarlatina. But many have been placed in circumstances where this tendency has day by day, and hour by hour, been called to larger development. They have gone from attainment to attainment, ...
— The Abominations of Modern Society • Rev. T. De Witt Talmage

... much," she answered, with that delicious smile. It had an infantile simplicity about it which contrasted most piquantly ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen

... blew soft as on a summer morning. A land-bird flew into the ship. To-day the wind has veered round, but the weather continues charming. The sea is covered with multitudes of small flying-fish. An infantile water-spout appeared, and died in its birth. Mr. ——-, the consul, has been giving me an account of the agreeable society in the Sandwich Islands! A magnificent sunset, the sight of which compensates ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca

... rice, etc. after a newly-wedded pair; and the ceremony of breaking a cake over a bride's head as she first enters her husband's house is not forgotten. Who has not eaten the "child's cheese," and been forbidden to depart from the infantile home before drinking the young one's health, on every occasion the nursery was entered before the christening. Maidens dream, as often as they have the chance, on "children's cheese" and brides' cakes, in order to obtain glimpses in their slumbers ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant

... history was, then, the most pretentious as it was the most infantile of deceptions. Old Clio ought to be represented with a sphinx's head, mutton-chop whiskers, and one of those padded bonnets which babies wore to keep them from bashing their little brains out ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans

... spoiled her, had not her temperament fortunately been one not easily injured by unrestrained liberty of action. Before she was able to walk, he would take her to the forge, and keep her for hours on a sheepskin in one corner, whence she watched, with infantile delight, the blast of the furnace, and the shower of sparks that fell from the anvil, and where she often slept, lulled by the monotonous chorus of trip and sledge. As she grew older, the mystery of bellows and ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans

... to meet the minister at the front door, her father lagging after her with the infantile ...
— The Lady of the Aroostook • W. D. Howells

... James, a precocious and clever child like all the infantile monarchs of the house of Stewart, had been established at Stirling, always a favourite residence of the Scotch Kings, where he held his baby Court in peace while his mother pined in England, and the Scotch ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant

... live thing in the show," chuckled Neale to Luke. "I can remember him when I was a little fellow and was first taken into the ring as the 'Infantile Wonder of the Ages'. I rode Scalawag. He was so fat then that I couldn't have rolled ...
— The Corner House Girls Growing Up - What Happened First, What Came Next. And How It Ended • Grace Brooks Hill

... the popular name papo given to women's genital organs. 'Papo' is the crop of birds, and is derived from 'papar' (Latin, papare), to eat soft food such as we call pap. With this representation of infantile food is connected the term leche [milk] as applied to the ejaculated genital fluid." Cleland, it may be added, in the most remarkable of English erotic novels, The Memoirs of Fanny Hill, refers to "the compressive exsuction with which the sensitive mechanism of that part [the vagina] ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... the small negroes of the pygmy type, the so-called Negritos. It is not known how far they represent a distinct and perhaps earlier experiment in negro-making, though this is the prevailing view; or whether the negro type, with its tendency to infantile characters due to the early closing of the cranial sutures, is apt to throw off dwarfed forms in an occasional way. At any rate, in Africa there are several groups of pygmies in the Congo region, as well as the Bushmen and allied stocks in South Africa. Then the Andaman Islanders, the Semang of ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett

... swooped in opposite directions upon the youngster. Morley dashed between them and pinned the infantile messenger by the neck, holding him in safety. Then from the corner of his street he sent him on his way, swindled, happy, and sticky with vile, cheap candy from the Italian's ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry

... earliest girlhood, had gone through one of those emotional experiences that are the infantile diseases of the heart. She had fancied herself beloved of a youth of her own age; had secretly returned his devotion, and had seen it reft from her by another. Such an incident, as inevitable as the measles, sometimes, like that ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton

... Crozer, for among this infantile army of spies and messengers, the fame of Crozer had gone forth and was resented by his rivals. ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson

... to the trapper he suffered his wandering glances to stray towards the intellectual and nearly infantile beauty of Inez, as one might be supposed to gaze upon the loveliness of an ethereal being. It was very evident that he now saw, for the first time, one of those females, of whom the fathers of his tribe so often spoke, and who were considered ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper

... infantile rejoinder deserved no answer, and it received none. Shortly afterwards Maud entered and whispered that Nellie was wanted upstairs. As soon as his wife had gone Edward Henry ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett

... lay on her lap, the smallest, saddest specimen of infantile deformity. It had a large head—larger than most infants have—but its body was thin, elfish, and distorted, every joint and limb being twisted in some way or other. You could not say that any portion of the child was ...
— A Noble Life • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik

... as gifts or those ordered by the clergy were religious in subject for the sake of appropriateness. It is interesting to note the sweet childlike attitude of all lower Europe toward the church in these years, a sort of infantile way of leaving everything in its hands, all knowledge, all wisdom, all power. It was not even necessary to read or write, as the clergy conveniently concerned themselves with literacy. As late as the beginning of the Fifteenth Century Philip the ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee

... two months previously their youngest son, Frank, had been married to Miss Katherine Sefton, of Auburn, N.Y., and the young couple had settled down in Garden City, Long Island. That was the summer when the epidemic of infantile paralysis swept over the larger part of the United States. The young bride was stricken; the case was unusually rapid and unusually severe; at the moment of the Pages' arrival, they were informed that there was practically ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume II • Burton J. Hendrick

... in infantile tones an equivocal-looking woman whose pale-rose tunic, painted cheeks, and locks shining with essences betrayed wretched pretensions to a youth long passed away—' is it true that Nyssia has two pupils in each eye? It seems to me that must be very ...
— King Candaules • Theophile Gautier

... adult, at least—all signs of rape disappear in three or four days. Young and delicate children may suffer from a vaginal discharge, with swelling of the external genitals, simulating an attempt at rape. Infantile leucorrhoea is common, and many innocent people have been exposed to danger from false charges of rape on children, instituted as a means of levying blackmail. A knowledge of these facts suggests the necessity ...
— Aids to Forensic Medicine and Toxicology • W. G. Aitchison Robertson

... calf, colt, pup, foal, kitten; lamb, lambkin^; aurelia^, caterpillar, cocoon, nymph, nympha^, orphan, pupa, staddle^. girl; lass, lassie; wench, miss, damsel, demoiselle; maid, maiden; virgin; hoyden. Adj. infantine^, infantile; puerile; boyish, girlish, childish, babyish, kittenish; baby; newborn, unfledged, new-fledged, callow. in the cradle, in swaddling clothes, in long clothes, in arms, in leading strings; at the breast; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... the propagation of the species. The entire generative organs are sometimes wanting. The womb may have failed for some reason to grow with the rest of the body, it remains (as it is known) as an "infantile womb." Occasionally the womb grows together, that is, it is solid instead of being a hollow organ. The mouth of the womb may be too small, representing what is called "a pin head opening." The natural opening is large enough to admit a lead pencil, a "pin head opening" ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol 2 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague

... infantile corruption of Louisa. The full name is Louise de la Ram['e]e, authoress of Under Two Flags (1867), ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer

... religion, what occasion could there have been for this caution? 1 Cor. i. 26 unquestionably carries with it the plainest intimation that persons of rank or power were not wholly wanting in that assembly. Indeed, lists of the names of various illustrious persons who embraced Christianity, in its weak and infantile state, are given by Blondel, p. 235 de Episcopis et Presbyteris: also by Wetstein, in his Preface to Origen's Dia. ...
— Americanism Contrasted with Foreignism, Romanism, and Bogus Democracy in the Light of Reason, History, and Scripture; • William Gannaway Brownlow

... may cook him in a thousand ways, but it is doubtful whether, even with the finest sauce, a pompano will taste half as good as the infantile muskellunge, several pounds under the legal weight, fried unskilfully in pork fat by a horny-handed woodsman, kneeling before an open fire, eighteen minutes after you had given up all hope of having fish for dinner, and had resigned yourself to the ...
— How to Cook Fish • Olive Green

... step forward. She was thinking what a sweet babe she was, thus to accept the surface of things. How did she know that this laughing, light-spoken gallant, seemingly so open and artless—oh! more infantile than her very self!—was not deep and complex? Or that it was not he and Flora on whose case she was being lured to speculate? The boat, of whose large breathings and pulsings she became growingly aware, offered no reply. Presently from the right shore, off before them, came a ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable

... recommended sea-air, and Mrs. Pipchin, who conducted an infantile boarding house of a very select description at Brighton, and whose scale of charges was high, was entrusted with the care of Paul's health when he was little ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol III • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.

... they have been able to consider the social evil from an altogether new point of view. Certain very ugly facts, which touch the home and which intimately concern motherhood and the welfare of children, were brought forth—facts concerning infantile blindness, almost one-third of which is caused by excesses on the part of the fathers; facts concerning certain forms of ill health in married women, and the increase of sterility due to the spread of specific diseases among men. The horrible results to innocent women and ...
— What eight million women want • Rheta Childe Dorr

... mere sullenness, almost infantile in its outward petulant expression. He attempted to meet her glance, and he was ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini

... There are, it appears to me, occult heights in the doctrine of Christ designed by the Supreme Wisdom to counteract corresponding occult depths in the Mystery of Darkness. I do not think it is at all necessary, or even possible, for us to scale these heights or fathom those depths, with our present infantile intelligence, but if we realize how completely the law of our being receives its fulfilment in Christ as far as we know that law, may we not well conceive that there are yet deeper phases of that law the existence of which we can only faintly surmise by intuition? Occasionally just the fringe of ...
— The Dore Lectures on Mental Science • Thomas Troward

... clambered on her father's knee, it was to learn the chants that he hummed from old manuscripts and missals, and it was the contrapuntal fancies of the Elizabethan composers that he gave her to play on the virginal, or the preludes of Bach on the clavichord. Her infantile graces at these instruments were the delight and amazement of her parents. She warbled this old-time music as other children do the vulgar songs of the hour; she seemed less anxious to learn the operatic music which she heard in her mother's class-rooms, ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore

... money to promote it. "The strength and beauty of the man," says Mr. Emerson, "lay in the natural goodness and justice of his mind, which in manhood and in old age, after dealing all his life with weighty private and public interests, left an infantile innocence of which we have no second or third example,—the strength of a chief united to the modesty of a child. He returned from the courts and Congresses to sit down with unaltered humility, in the church, or in the ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar

... some obscure and oblique propensity to darken the darkness of southern crime or vice by an infusion of northern seriousness, of introspective cynicism and reflective intensity in wrong-doing, into the easy levity and infantile simplicity of spontaneous wickedness which distinguished the moral and social corruption of renascent Italy. Proof enough of this has already been adduced to make any protestation or appeal against such an estimate as preposterous in ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... management of the infant, these hereditary tendencies to weakness and disease and their corresponding signs in the iris become more and more pronounced, proceeding through the various stages of incumbrance from acute, infantile diseases through chronic catarrhal conditions to the ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr

... over Fresh Cow's Milk was strikingly demonstrated by the experiments of the Sheffield Corporation Scheme for Reducing Infantile Mortality, given in a paper by ALBERT E. NAISH, M.A., M.B., B.C., Cantab., Assistant Physician, Sheffield Royal Hospital, in the September 3rd issue of the Medical Officer. For the purpose of these experiments our milk was used with ...
— Reform Cookery Book (4th edition) - Up-To-Date Health Cookery for the Twentieth Century. • Mrs. Mill

... at Work" (313. 80-92), Mr. Newell has classed a large number of children's games and songs, some of which now find their representatives in the kindergarten, this education of the child by itself having been so modified as to form part of the infantile curriculum of study. Among such games are: "Threading the Needle," "Draw a Bucket of Water," "Here I Brew and here I Bake," "Here we come gathering Nuts of May," "When I was a Shoemaker," "Do, do, pity my Case," "As we go round the Mulberry Bush," "Who'll ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain

... words and discussion of normal instances, instead of by collection and observation of the unusual and irregular, and by experimental production of variety. If we think of a subject still in this infantile and almost pre-scientific stage, Bacon's words and formulae are far from inapplicable; they are, within their limitations, quite necessary and wholesome. A subject in this stage, strange to say, exists,—psychology; now hesitatingly beginning ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge

... treasury—and triumphant Populism take it for granted that 'twas on these curious disks that our "infant industry" cut its teeth. The "In God We Trust" inscription may be regarded as a barbaric hoodoo to prevent infantile bellyache or the evil eye, but the dollar mark will be entirely unintelligible to a people so many thousand years removed from the savage superstition of metallic money. Of course woman will have ruled the world so long that "tyrant man" will be regarded as ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann

... persistence, which listens to no excuse, and from which there is no appeal; and very soon recognising this stern though beneficent discipline, it soon becomes extremely careful not to transgress. These general truths hold throughout adult life as well as throughout infantile life. If further proof be needed that the natural reaction is not only the most efficient penalty, but that no humanly devised penalty can replace it, we have such further proof in the notorious ill-success of our ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various

... people owe their homely mouths to infantile habits. Sucking the thumb, and these horrible "pacificators" or "baby comforters" are responsible for some ill-shaped mouths. A large mouth, if not malformed, is not ugly unless filled with bad teeth or set in a disagreeable expression. ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter

... will notice, on going along one of our side streets, a young child, its eyes bubbling over with tears, and red from irritation and inflammation, who has strayed from its parents' residence. Sometimes it will have a stick of candy in its infantile fists, or else an apple, or a slice of bread, butter, and molasses to console it in its wanderings. It is very seldom, however, that these children do not find their way back to their parents, unless that there is foul play, as in such instances ...
— The Secrets Of The Great City • Edward Winslow Martin

... be hugged, you dears! Come and be hugged!" Before she knelt down and enveloped their shrinking little persons Mr. Brumley was able to observe that they were pretty little things, but not the beautiful children he could have imagined from Lady Harman. Peeping through their infantile delicacy, hints all too manifest of Sir Isaac's characteristically pointed nose gave Mr. Brumley a ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells

... one of those shrill, long-drawn whistles without which in Europe no train can start. It had a peevish, infantile sound, like the squeak of a nursery toy. But it was as ominous as though some one had ...
— With the French in France and Salonika • Richard Harding Davis

... kitten, with wobbly legs and an infantile mew, made the first breach in the wall. She took care of it, loved it, petted it, and began to smile semi-occasionally. She, too, said "please" and "thank you." My husband suggested that we order ten kittens, but I let the good work go on with one, for the time being. Gradually, ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed

... a Sunday School class of his childhood and his infantile horror for the tale of a tempter on a high mountain offering the possession of all the ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck

... infantile childishness of a Provencal Christmas. He never saw anything prettier in his life, he said, than a Noel procession on the coast of the Mediterranean. A beautiful young woman and an equally lovely child sat on a donkey, which an old fisherman in a flowing brown gown ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson

... subtle, persistent protection of sons and daughters by their mothers against the intolerant, jealous, possessive Old Man. But that was a thing, of the remote past. Little was left of those ancient struggles now but a few infantile dreams and nightmares. The greater human community, human society, was made for good. And being made, it had taken over the ancient tasks of the woman, one by one, until now in its modern forms it cherished more sedulously than she did, it educated, it housed and comforted, it clothed and served ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells

... later infantile period, the child, besides wanting to exhibit his own body, shows marked interest in looking at the bodies of others, and marked curiosity on sex-questions in general. He particularly wants to know "where babies come from." If his questions are unfortunately met ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury

... the varied mental powers bestowed on men. He says, "The mind of one man is marked by infantile weakness, of another by a giant's strength. Nothing can elevate the former, nothing permanently depress and overpower the latter. . . . In the case of certain persons, the reasoning powers preponderate; in that of others, the imagination. One man has little judgment, ...
— The Doctrines of Predestination, Reprobation, and Election • Robert Wallace

... merely blowing bubbles for our infantile amusement? Surely he has been too solemn. We could have sworn that some of the passages were written, if not with tears in his eyes, at least with a genuine sensibility to the solemn and romantic elements of life. Or was he carried away for a time into real mysticism ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen

... all small boys in Nome, at one time or another, made swift and hazardous dashes of a few hundred yards, in huge chopping bowls purloined from their mothers' pantries; and drawn by any one dog that was available for the instant, and would tamely submit to the degradation. An infantile amusement, they felt now, in the face of this real Sporting Event that was engaging the attention of the entire town. And to complete the feeling that this was indeed no mere child's play, the Woman came to them with two cups of hot tea to warm them up, and steady their nerves on the trail. ...
— Baldy of Nome • Esther Birdsall Darling

... earlier period in the female than in the male, and that this period is retarded in the ill-nourished female, is a confirmation of the view that femaleness is an expression of the tendency to store nutriment, and explains also the infantile somatic characters of woman. Finally, the fact that polyandry is found almost exclusively in poor countries, coupled with the fact that ethnologists uniformly report a scarcity of women in those countries, permits us to attribute polyandry to a scarcity of women ...
— Sex and Society • William I. Thomas

... tall, soft, and stout, with ample and shapely arms, shoulders, and hips. With her small head, little ears, pretty lips, and roguish eye, she, being a very large creature, presented an immensity of half womanly, half infantile loveliness which smote even grave men with a desire to clasp her in their arms and kiss her. This desire had scattered the desultory intellectual culture of Sir Charles at first sight. His imagination invested her with the taste for the fine arts which ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw

... in the palace, at luncheons with Mrs. Conger, at a feast with the Imperial Princess, at a tea with the Princess Tsai Chen, and at the palaces of many of the princesses. She is a very quiet little woman, and looked almost infantile as she gazed at one with her big, black eyes. She is very circumspect in her movements, and with such a mother and father as she had, I should think may be very brilliant. Naturally she had to be specially dignified and sedate ...
— Court Life in China • Isaac Taylor Headland

... success, Jeremiah." Ronny continued to laugh as Jerry performed an infantile solo with a white celluloid rattle. "Where is Marjorie? I asked you ...
— Marjorie Dean, College Sophomore • Pauline Lester

... will of your Father which is in heaven that one of these little ones should perish." A Christian Church which took seriously its vocation to go before the Lord and to prepare His ways would be effectively and vigorously concerned with problems so prosaic as the rate of infantile mortality and the allied questions of housing and sanitation, with the insistence that the conditions of life among the poorer classes of the community shall be such as make decent living possible, and with the provision of a minimum of leisure and of ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson

... face, which is often wonderfully human—although the absence of any protuberant nose gives it often a curiously infantile aspect, monkeys, and especially apes, resemble us most closely in the hand and arm. The hand has well-formed fingers, with nails, and the skin of the palm is lined and furrowed like our own. The thumb ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 344, August 5, 1882 • Various

... doors for himself, stepped back across the pavement in another stride, and held the portal ajar. Henry had no alternative but to pass beneath the commissionaire's bended and respectful head. Once within the gorgeous twilit hall of the Louvre, Henry was set upon by two very diminutive and infantile replicas of the commissionaire, one of whom staggered away with his overcoat, while the other secured the remainder of the booty in the shape of his hat, muffler, and stick, and left Henry naked. ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett

... this story of the discourse between a vulture and a jackal as happened of old. Indeed, the occurrence took place in the forest of Naimisha. Once upon a time a Brahmana had, after great difficulties, obtained a son of large expansive eyes. The child died of infantile convulsions. Some (amongst his kinsmen), exceedingly agitated by grief and indulging in loud lamentations, took up the boy of tender years, that sole wealth of his family. Taking the deceased child they proceeded in the direction of the crematorium. Arrived there, they began ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown

... mother's sitting-room. And as he leant upon the mantelpiece, his tall, splendid figure in its scarlet coat outlined against the bright blaze, his eye took in—perhaps for the first time—the immense number of portraits of himself which decorated this apartment—himself in every stage, from infantile days upward, through the toy rocking-horse period to the real dog companion—in Eton collars and Fourth of June hats—in cricketing flannels and Oxford Bullingdon groups—and then not so many, until one taken last year. ...
— Three Weeks • Elinor Glyn

... eyes, the oval face, and the fine, sensitive mouth and thought of the youth's claim to the crime battered sobriquet of The Oskaloosa Kid. The man wondered if the mystery of the clanking chain would prove as harmlessly infantile as these two whom some accident of hilarious fate had cast in the ...
— The Oakdale Affair • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... door was slowly turned, the tapestry curtain moved forward and a little fair-haired girl, with an infantile expression of face and looking years younger than her eighteen summers, tripped a few steps ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade

... explained that it was by that system that Albert Duerer had been taught. This, of course, accounts for our having infant prodigies in art, as well as music and the drama. The rapidity with which Master Hoffmann was followed by infantile Lizsts and little Otto Hegner as soon as it became apparent that there was a demand for such phenomena, seems to indicate that in music at all events supply will follow demand as a matter of course, and if the infant ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss

... insipid levelling morality to which the modern stage is tied down, would not admit of such admirable passions as these scenes are filled with. A puritanical obtuseness of sentiment, a stupid infantile goodness, is creeping among us, instead of the vigorous passions, and virtues clad in flesh and blood, with which the old dramatists present us. Those noble and liberal casuists could discern in the differences, the quarrels, the animosities of men, a beauty and truth of moral ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb

... the impression they produced. There was a boat at the bottom of the hill, and the wagon and horses were driven into the boat. A man and boy began propelling the long sweeps or oars. He watched the proceeding in infantile wonder and especially remembered how the water dropped in sparkling crystals from the oar blades. The boy had on a red cap or fez with a tassel. That boy, that cap and that oar with the sparkling dripping water from the blade were to him the brightest pictures and greatest ...
— Sustained honor - The Age of Liberty Established • John R. Musick,

... was a time when the piano was keyless, as a baby is toothless. Suppose that sounding boards have a period of immaturity and that the whole mechanism of the instrument is in a state that can only be characterized as infantile. If a master musician attempts to play on such a piano his performance would by no means be an indication of his ability. A competent critic who could hear the performance but not see the musician would promptly declare that no really great musician was touching ...
— Elementary Theosophy • L. W. Rogers

... grateful. But when Mr. Bhaer came, Jo neglected her playfellows, and dismay and desolation fell upon their little souls. Daisy, who was fond of going about peddling kisses, lost her best customer and became bankrupt. Demi, with infantile penetration, soon discovered that Dodo like to play with 'the bear-man' better than she did him, but though hurt, he concealed his anguish, for he hadn't the heart to insult a rival who kept a mine of chocolate drops in his waistcoat pocket, and a watch that could be taken out of its case ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott

... the boat and scamper up the sand, where old Disney, who has been dredging for oysters in the great bed below, crowns his basket with little Ray, and bears him off perched aloft on his bent back. Vivia walks beside the old slave in her infantile dignity, and disregards the sundry attempts of Ray's outstretched arms, till of a sudden the beating play of hoofs runs along the ground, and Beltran, with his morning's game, races by on his fiery mustang, and, scarcely ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various

... read this story in its own language—the simple easy- flowing Old-French, with its infantile syntax, and naive but effective efforts at distinction and what we now call style. There are various editions of the old French text; but the two easiest to get and also to read are that of Professor Suchier, and my own. Those in search of learning will ...
— Aucassin and Nicolette - translated from the Old French • Anonymous

... pleasurable, to sport awhile with Nature's prettiest playthings; the praises of children are always at the tip of my—pen, that is, tongue, you remember, and often have I told the world, in all the pride of print, of my fond infantile predilections: then let this little Chanson be added to the rest; we will ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper

... Oakes with a certain quiet satisfaction. It had come to his ears that Oakes had been heard to complain of the infantile nature and unworthiness of the last two cases to which he had been assigned. He had even said that he hoped some day to be given a problem which should be beyond the reasoning powers of a child of six. It seemed to Mr. Snyder that Oakes was about to ...
— Death At The Excelsior • P. G. Wodehouse

... extent. Their birthrate [sic] stood at 20 per thousand in 1876, and has now actually fallen to about 8 per thousand. The longevity of Quakers is well known, and the returns of deaths given by their Society show that the great majority live to between seventy and ninety years. Infantile mortality is practically unknown among them, although none of the special steps so dear to most social reformers have been taken for the protection of infant life. The Quakers are well known to be very earnest Christians, and to give the best example of religious morality. ...
— Birth Control • Halliday G. Sutherland

... return until his object was attained; but he always found it impossible to fix his attention upon the ruins around him, whilst in his mind he retained an image that seemed alone the rightful possessor of his thoughts. Ianthe was unconscious of his love, and was ever the same frank infantile being he had first known. She always seemed to part from him with reluctance; but it was because she had no longer any one with whom she could visit her favourite haunts, whilst her guardian was occupied in sketching or uncovering some fragment which had yet escaped the destructive ...
— The Vampyre; A Tale • John William Polidori

... has come when love would have them no longer infantile, but capable of standing and walking, "not to speak of trying to climb." Such a short and easy method of dealing with Roman Catholic dogma and ritual cannot be commended for its intelligence; it is quite possible to be on the same side as Browning without being as crude ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden

... was to throw it overboard. Repressing this natural instinct, he endeavored to quiet the infantile turbulence with offers of biscuit, fresh candy, gingercakes, and apples, but without effect. The young bewailer would have nothing to do with any of ...
— The Squirrel Inn • Frank R. Stockton

... body is almost always clearly shown. A child with rickets, unable to exercise his body in free play, as a rule shows a flabbiness of mind in keeping with his useless muscles and yielding bones. Such children talk late, are infantile in their habits and ways of thought, and are more emotional and unstable than healthy children of the same age. The connection between bodily ailments and instability of nervous control is even more clearly seen in the ...
— The Nervous Child • Hector Charles Cameron

... smile at that. No one with a heart that was not infantile could dress and talk as Orlando's mother dressed and talked; and so Louise said softly: "I am sure her heart is a thousand years younger than mine—or younger than mine was." And then she blushed, and Orlando blushed, for he understood what was in her ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... on the solid shoulder of her son, in a coaxing humor almost infantile, different suddenly from her habitual manner, and, her cheek against his, she remained tenderly leaning, as if to say in a confident abandonment of her will: "I am still troubled a little by those night undertakings; but, when I reflect, what you wish ...
— Ramuntcho • Pierre Loti

... the prophylactic power of vaccination, I could never force myself—until an occasion to be told of—to submit to it. In infancy, no doubt, I was vaccinated, for the operation has left a small and very faint cicatrix on my arm, but infantile vaccination, if unrepeated, is but a feeble ...
— Doctor Therne • H. Rider Haggard

... group sat in pitying wonder. She wondered what affliction had made a cripple of this wholesome-looking bonny creature. She thought of ghastly things she had read concerning the dreadful after effects of infantile paralysis, but rejected the suggestion, because no matter what else of dread and woe the girl's eyes had betrayed the face was too plump and the body, which she could feel touching hers, too firm and well nourished to betoken a present and wasting ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb

... summer had been hard for nine-year-old Jimmie and the baby. They drooped like flowers in baked ground. Since Jimmie's infantile paralysis, three years before, he had been able to walk very little, and school had seemed out of the question. Unable to read or to run and play, he had ...
— Across the Fruited Plain • Florence Crannell Means

... had produced its result. Perhaps there had only been this lacking. It was hard to say, but for that brief instant of time Annixter was looking at Hilma, the woman. She was no longer the young girl upon whom he might look down, to whom he might condescend, whose little, infantile graces were to be ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris

... promises to God, foolish, desperate, infantile promises; trying to placate Him in His might with my resolutions for better things, trying to strike bargains, at the last moment, with the Master of Life and Death—even protesting that I'd forgive ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer

... "mixed up," as poor little Allie had said, that, even with the aid of the rejected slate, it would, I believe, have lain beyond the powers of the most accomplished arithmetician to solve. No wonder that it had puzzled Allie's infantile brains. To recall and set it down here, at this length of time, would be quite impossible; nor would the reader care to have it inflicted upon him. Days, weeks, and years, peanuts, pence, and dollars, were involved in the statement he made, or attempted to make, for me to work out the solution ...
— Uncle Rutherford's Nieces - A Story for Girls • Joanna H. Mathews

... the little prattler was pouring forth her infantile sorrows in her mother's ear, that the voice of William Hinkley was heard, calling ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms

... a queen that shadowed the pale temples of this little bourgeoise. So heavy was it that it tipped her head backward, and the position thrust her chin out a little. It was a charming poise, innocent, confiding, almost infantile. ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris

... were complaining. Already settlers were drifting in to Pawnee station and Minden on the railway to the west, and besieging old Tintop at regimental head-quarters at Fort Ransom, and stirring up "screamers" in the columns of the infantile dailies at Butte and Braska, alleging apathy on part of the authorities and cowardice on that of the cavalry. Already letters had passed between the officers of the Eleventh at the cantonment and their comrades ...
— Under Fire • Charles King

... shady sources of your years into heat, bustle, and storm. Your dreams are now faint, flickering shadows, that play like fire-flies in the coppices of leafy June. They have no rule but the rule of infantile desire; they have no joys to promise greater than the joys that belong to your passing life; they have no terrors but such terrors as the darkness of a Spring night makes. They do not take hold on your soul as the dreams of youth and ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell

... the ten volumes will probably agree with me that the naive indecencies of the text are rather gaudis-serie than prurience; and, when delivered with mirth and humour, they are rather the "excrements of wit" than designed for debauching the mind. Crude and indelicate with infantile plainness; even gross and, at times, "nasty" in their terrible frankness, they cannot be accused of corrupting suggestiveness or subtle insinuation of vicious sentiment. Theirs is a coarseness of language, not of idea; they are indecent, not depraved; and the pure and perfect naturalness of ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton

... stated that, unlike most mothers in high life, the Duchess nursed this illustrious child at her own breast, and so mingled her life with its life that nothing thenceforth could divide them. The wee Princess passed happily through the perils of infantile ailments. She cut her teeth as easily as most children, with the help of her gold-mounted coral—and very nice teeth they were, though a little too prominent according to the early pictures. If the infant Prince Albert reminded his grandmamma of a "weasel," his "pretty cousin" might have ...
— Queen Victoria, her girlhood and womanhood • Grace Greenwood

... heaven, we are no longer insular. I don't say we have no native talent. We have heaps of it, pyramids of it, all around. But where, for the genuine thrill, would England be but for her good fortune in being able to draw on a seemingly inexhaustible supply of anguished souls from the Continent—infantile wide-eyed Slavs, Titan Teutons, greatly blighted Scandinavians, all of them different, but all of them raving in one common darkness and with one common gesture plucking out their vitals for exportation? There ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm

... morning, however, the great works were all stopped. There was a general holiday, and as this was at the cost of the firm, it gave general satisfaction. All the people of North End, except the aged, infirm and infantile, were trooping down the valley, on the rough road between the foot of the West Ridge and the side of the river, to a fete to be given them at Rockhold on the occasion of the marriage of old Aaron Rockharrt's granddaughter, Corona ...
— For Woman's Love • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth

... said Obed Chute. "We are well aware that in actual wars we have as yet done but little in comparison with our possibilities and capabilities. In the revolutionary war, Sir, we were crude and unformed—we were infants, Sir, and our efforts were infantile. The swaddling bands of the colonial system had all along restrained the free play of the national muscle; and throughout the war there was not time for full development. Still, Sir, from that point of view, as an infant nation, we did remarkable well—re-markable. ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille



Words linked to "Infantile" :   immature, infantile autism, young, infancy



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