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puerile
in a sentence

show 47 more with this conextual meaning
  • That's so puerile I can't find words to-'†   (source)
  • And even those who fought in our courts and legislature over questions of liberty, in truth meant things that are minor at best and puerile at worst.†   (source)
  • Rather than let the pink bully her, she had fought back, splashing the room with complementary hues of orange and green and red—a bright carnation bookcase here, an apricot bedspread there—and thus had vanquished the omnipresent and puerile stain.†   (source)
  • A puerile tear dimmed my eye while I looked--a tear of disappointment and impatience; ashamed of it, I wiped it away.   (source)
  • Her campaign proved her to be puerile and feckless.
  • But the only concession he could wring from his mother, with the puerile argument that it was the instrument of the angels, was to substitute the harp for the piano.†   (source)
  • Still, because he thought he knew her better than anyone else, Florentino Ariza could not understand why a woman of such puerile resources should be so popular--a woman, moreover, who never stopped talking in bed about the grief she felt for her dead husband.†   (source)
  • It had been something so unexpected for them both that they wanted to resolve it not with shouts, tears, and intermediaries, as was the custom in the Caribbean, but with the wisdom of the nations of Europe, and there was so much vacillation as to whether their loyalties lay here or over there that they ended up mired in a puerile situation that did not belong anywhere.†   (source)
  • But I also realize that I was at that time in many ways afflicted by a staggeringly puerile inexperience: far from my mind was any idea that Nathan—despite his manic tone of voice, the hectic oratory, the sweat, the walleyed expression, the frazzled tension, the whole portrait he presented of one whose entire nervous system down to its minutest ganglia was in the throes of a fiery convulsion—might be dangerously disturbed.†   (source)
  • They shared in the torpor of the town and in its puerile agitations.†   (source)
  • There will be images derived from pictures of the Enemy as He appeared during the discreditable episode known as the Incarnation: there will be vaguer--perhaps quite savage and puerile-images associated with the other two Persons.†   (source)
  • Yet, she said to herself, from the dawn of time odes have been sung to love; wreaths heaped and roses; and if you asked nine people out of ten they would say they wanted nothing but this—love; while the women, judging from her own experience, would all the time be feeling, This is not what we want; there is nothing more tedious, puerile, and inhumane than this; yet it is also beautiful and necessary.†   (source)
  • This attempt to divert the conversation was too puerile, and Mrs. Honeychurch resented it.†   (source)
  • What was pride in the former becomes puerile vanity and paltry ostentation in the latter.†   (source)
  • A useful and graciously austere half-light which dissipates puerile fears and obviates falls.†   (source)
  • At times, Jean Valjean suffered so greatly that he became puerile.†   (source)
  • They are called fathers and mothers by the civil code, which is puerile and honest.†   (source)
  • Carol was deft, and won shy praise from Kennicott, but as her shoulder blades began to sting, she wondered how many millions of women had lied to themselves during the death-rimmed years through which they had pretended to enjoy the puerile methods persisting in housework.†   (source)
  • Always, in Paris or in Bonn, Max Gottlieb had looked to America as a land which, in its freedom from Royalist tradition, in its contact with realities of cornfields and blizzards and townmeetings, had set its face against the puerile pride of war.†   (source)
  • It seemed to him necessary, at that moment, to proclaim, by some habitual gesture of this sort, his recovered hold on the actual: he had an almost puerile wish to let his companion see that, their flight over, he had landed on his feet.†   (source)
  • A single word from Mamma would have been an admission that further intercourse with me was within the bounds of possibility, and that might perhaps have appeared to me more terrible still, as indicating that, with such a punishment as was in store for me, mere silence, and even anger, were relatively puerile.†   (source)
  • Burne opened the paper and read: " 'He who is not with me is against me, as that gentleman said who was notoriously capable of only coarse distinctions and puerile generalities.'†   (source)
  • Least of all things Martin desired such another peeping, puerile, irritable restlessness as he had shared with Orchid Pickerbaugh, but as he went to bed in a room with old prints and a four-poster, it was disturbing to know that somewhere near him was Joyce Lanyon.†   (source)
  • The puerility of the attempt disarmed Lily's indignation: did it not prove how horribly the poor creature was frightened?†   (source)
  • —The Duchess, as Swann calls her," she added ironically, with a smile which proved that she was merely quoting, and would not, herself, accept the least responsibility for a classification so puerile and absurd.†   (source)
  • She felt that in the turbulence of the drama she was discovering a history more important than the commonplace chronicles which dealt with senators and their pompous puerilities.†   (source)
  • Puerile they may be; but these sublime puerilities were peculiar to Saint Francis d'Assisi and of Marcus Aurelius.†   (source)
  • A puerile tear dimmed my eye while I looked — a tear of disappointment and impatience; ashamed of it, I wiped it away.†   (source)
  • The latter Youth (who used to be called Heigh-ho Dobbin, Gee-ho Dobbin, and by many other names indicative of puerile contempt) was the quietest, the clumsiest, and, as it seemed, the dullest of all Dr. Swishtail's young gentlemen.†   (source)
  • The Americans do not affect a brutal indifference to a future state; they affect no puerile pride in despising perils which they hope to escape from.†   (source)
  • He began spontaneously to consider whether it would be possible to carry out that puerile notion of Rosamond's which had often made him angry, namely, that they should quit Middlemarch without seeing anything beyond that preface.†   (source)
  • All the domestic controversies of the Americans at first appear to a stranger to be so incomprehensible and so puerile that he is at a loss whether to pity a people which takes such arrant trifles in good earnest, or to envy the happiness which enables it to discuss them.†   (source)
  • The Raven had no sooner made his unsuccessful and puerile effort, than he was succeeded by le Daim-Mose, or the Moose; a middle aged warrior who was particularly skilful in the use of the tomahawk, and from whose attempt the spectators confidently looked for gratification.†   (source)
  • If an oppressive law were passed, the liberties of the people would still be protected by the means by which that law would be put in execution: the majority cannot descend to the details and (as I will venture to style them) the puerilities of administrative tyranny.†   (source)
  • Nevertheless, your subjects, Sire, have been deprived of it; and we cannot refrain from saying that in this respect your government has fallen into puerile extremes.†   (source)
  • These persons then displayed towards each other precisely the same puerile jealousies which animate the men of democracies, the same eagerness to snatch the smallest advantages which their equals contested, and the same desire to parade ostentatiously those of which they were in possession.†   (source)
  • The expedient would have been puerile.†   (source)
  • Chapter XV: Of The Gravity Of The Americans, And Why It Does Not Prevent Them From Often Committing Inconsiderate Actions Men who live in democratic countries do not value the simple, turbulent, or coarse diversions in which the people indulge in aristocratic communities: such diversions are thought by them to be puerile or insipid.†   (source)
  • Above all, he was wrong in that after he had picked up the scent again on the bridge of Austerlitz, he played that formidable and puerile game of keeping such a man at the end of a thread.†   (source)
  • Men living at such times are impatient of figures; to their eyes symbols appear to be the puerile artifice which is used to conceal or to set off truths, which should more naturally be bared to the light of open day: they are unmoved by ceremonial observances, and they are predisposed to attach a secondary importance to the details of public worship.†   (source)
  • These ideas, puerile, as we have just said, and at the same time senile, conveyed to him, by their very childishness, a tolerably just notion of the influence of gold lace on the imaginations of young girls.†   (source)
  • Puerile they may be; but these sublime puerilities were peculiar to Saint Francis d'Assisi and of Marcus Aurelius.†   (source)
  • It is thus that, athwart the cloud which formed about him, when all his hopes were extinguished one after the other, M. Mabeuf remained rather puerilely, but profoundly serene.†   (source)
  • But this puerile spirit did not last long.†   (source)
  • The English make it long in all words of the /hostile/-class; in America it is commonly short, even in /puerile/.†   (source)
  • Thus all hesitations disappeared, and there arose a national consciousness so soaring and so blatant that it began to dismiss all British usage and opinion as puerile and idiotic.†   (source)
  • But I have rested too long on a doctrine which can be of no use to a Christian writer; for as he cannot introduce into his works any of that heavenly host which make a part of his creed, so it is horrid puerility to search the heathen theology for any of those deities who have been long since dethroned from their immortality.†   (source)
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