Quotes & Sayings About Naive

The young and the ambitious share a common risk: appearing naive. — Scott Belsky

I pray that I am never so foolishly naive or roguishly pompous to think that I can be the captain of my own ship, for if God is not at the helm my ship will soon be at the bottom. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

It is utterly naive, futile, uninformed - to think that our species is exceptional. So designated to master the beasts of the Earth, as in the Book of Genesis! — Joyce Carol Oates

I was very naive, and I thought it was just a matter of writing my first book and sending it in, and for the rest of my life I would be writing books and collecting royalties. Nobody told me how hard it was going to be to get published. — Jerry Spinelli

Sentimental poetry differs from naive poetry in that it relates the real state at which the latter stops to ideas and applies ideas to that reality. — Friedrich Schiller

Naive enough to set off in pursuit of Truth, I had explored - to no avail - any number of disciplines. I was beginning to be confirmed in my skepticism when the notion occurred to me of consulting, as a last result, Poetry: who knows? perhaps it would be profitable, perhaps it conceals beneath its arbitrary appearances some definitive revelation ... Illusory recourse! Poetry had outstripped be in negation and cost me even my uncertainties ... — Emil Cioran

I was too young and naive then to link up the meaning of those ridiculingly defunct tennis shoes that I was forced to wear with the reality that we were on Welfare and Welfare was not designed to provide a child with any pride in its existence. — Richard Brautigan

Naive people are, more or less by definition, unaware that they're naive. — David Foster Wallace

You're an idiot,' said Mum, when I relayed to her the entire situation on Wednesday. 'Not an unintelligent idiot, but a sort of naive idiot who manages to fall into a difficult situation and then can't get out out of it because she's too awkward. — Alice Oseman

People who are too optimistic seem annoying. This is an unfortunate misinterpretation of what an optimist really is.
An optimist is neither naive, nor blind to the facts, nor in denial of grim reality. An optimist believes in the optimal usage of all options available, no matter how limited. As such, an optimist always sees the big picture. How else to keep track of all that's out there? An optimist is simply a proactive realist.
An idealist focuses only on the best aspects of all things (sometimes in detriment to reality); an optimist strives to find an effective solution. A pessimist sees limited or no choices in dark times; an optimist makes choices.
When bobbing for apples, an idealist endlessly reaches for the best apple, a pessimist settles for the first one within reach, while an optimist drains the barrel, fishes out all the apples and makes pie.
Annoying? Yes. But, oh-so tasty! — Vera Nazarian

A naive dream is extremely powerful. — Yossi Ghinsberg

I have seen conversations that I had three years ago, when I was young, in love, and naive. I've grown a lot since those days. I now know that love isn't just that abstract feeling, because there are so many other sides to it. Sometimes you learn that to truly love someone you have to just support them as a person, and step out of their view finder. Be their friend and nothing else. Sometimes you learn to walk away and find what you need. You learn you knew nothing and that's when you grow up and change your ways. There may be no fairy take endings, but that is okay, because love is much more real than that. So much less superficial. — Jennifer Megan Varnadore

It goes a long way back, some twenty years. All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was. I accepted their answers too, though they were often in contradiction and even self-contradictory. I was naive. I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer. It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: That I am nobody but myself. But first I had to discover that I am an invisible man! — Ralph Ellison

Just after Kim Jong Il's death, the official news agency put out an article saying that under Kim Jong Il's rule, the people had been like naive children without a care in the world. — Brian Reynolds Myers

I think that I was slightly naive. I thought that if I showed people the beauty of the Arctic and the beauty of the polar bears that they would care so much that they would stand up and try to make a change. — Lewis Gordon Pugh

I am amazed that without any hesitation whatsoever I can completely believe myself to be on a grand journey of massive vistas and bold ascents, only to find that they are nothing more than a figment of a frightened imagination that needed a journey but could not admit to the fear of actually taking one. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

People have murdered each other, in massive wars and guerilla actions, for many centuries, and still murder each other in the present, over Ideologies and Religions which, stated as propositions, appear neither true nor false to modern logicians- meaningless propositions that look meaningful to the linguistically naive. — Robert Anton Wilson

When I saw Arnold say that he didn't need a union, because people in his position don't need it, I thought, this is a very naive way to present yourself. It's also kinda dumb about making movies. It doesn't realize how the union movement even helps the star. — Warren Beatty

So when did these last two originate? They transcend "whenness," but if I must give a naive answer - when the Father did. When was that? There has not been a "when" when the Father has not been in existence. This, then, is true of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Put another question and I will answer it. Since when has the Son been begotten? Since as long as the Father has not been begotten. — Gregory Of Nyssa

The sacred books of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and the Veda are the best repositories of the ideas that mattered most to our ancestors, and to ignore them is an act of childish conceit. But it is equally naive to believe that whatever was written down in the past contains an absolute truth that lasts forever. — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

We no longer harbor the naive presumption that things work out for the best. — Mary T. Stimming

Your have a purity I've lost, pet. But in some ways, the important ones, you're not naive. You understand the darkness without ever having been in it. — Joey W. Hill

More than just a moral issue, hope is a spiritual and even religious choice. Hope is not a feeling; it is a decision. And the decision for hope is based on what you believe at the deepest levels - what your most basic convictions are about the world and what the future holds - all based on your faith. You choose hope, not as a naive wish, but as a choice, with your eyes wide open to the reality of the world - just like the cynics who have not made the decision for hope. — Jim Wallis

Guys behave like they're naive, but they're not stupid. They know what's going on. — Laura Schlessinger

there existed a widespread, if naive, belief that war of the kind that had convulsed Europe in past centuries had become obsolete - that the economies of nations were so closely connected with one another that even if a war were to begin, it would end quickly. Capital — Erik Larson

We all start from "naive realism," i.e., the doctrine that things
are what they seem. We think that grass is green, that stones
are hard, and that snow is cold. But physics assures us that the
greenness of grass, the hardness of stones, and the coldness of
snow are not the greenness of grass, the hardness of stones, and
the coldness of snow that we know in our own experience, but
something very different — Bertrand Russell

I am naive enough to read incessantly because I cannot, on my own, get to know enough people profoundly enough. — Harold Bloom

The idea that being scientific simply means being irreligious is a particularly naive one. It has caused a lot of confusion and will get us nowhere. — Mary Midgley

Nobody's that naive," she muttered. "Nobody's that guileless."
"He's from Nebraska." Peabody scanned her pocket unit.
"From where?"
"Nebraska." Peabody waived a hand, vaguely west ... "They still grow them pretty guileless in Nebraska. I think it's all that soy and corn. — J.D. Robb

Normative mind tends to be naive. — Toba Beta

The child's naive dream of life is the only one worth having. — Marty Rubin

Yet even the most hackneyed, shopworn science fiction or fantasy tale will feel startling and fresh to a naive reader who doesn't know the milieu is just like the one used in a thousand other stories. — Orson Scott Card

She wasn't as naive and innocent as she was in the first season. — Shiri Appleby

You're very naive and innocent, and don't understand a lot of things yet. — Olga Goa

I grew up in Indiana. I'm a late bloomer, very naive. — Arija Bareikis

The naive which is simultaneously beautiful, poetic, and idealistic, must be both intention and instinct. The essence of intention, in this sense, is freedom. Consciousness is far from intention. There is a certain enamoured contemplation of one's own naturalness or silliness which itself is unspeakably silly. Intention does not necessarily require a profound calculation or plan. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Dalai Lama was leading his country during the rigors of World War II, he was in Beijing for a year in 1954; he was up against Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai from the time that he was fifteen. So he's no newcomer or naive when it comes to politics. — Pico Iyer

Advances don't fundamentally interest me. It sounds terribly naive, but money doesn't really mean anything to me. If a lot of money came my way, I'm certainly not going to say no. But it hasn't come my way as yet, and I'm not heartbroken. — Upamanyu Chatterjee

I think kids relate to me because I have some ability to remain a little bit naive. Even during interviews. Mostly during interviews. — Cat Stevens

You with your light meter and relaxed itinerary,
Let not our naive labours have been in vain! — Derek Mahon

That was when I saw it: behind the beauty and fake innocence was something else, something cold and calculating. Even when she smiled, I could see sin so deeply ingrained in her that no cardigan could hide it. [ ... ] To anyone else, she was pure and naive, but this girl was hiding something. I knew only because the same sin had dwelled in me my entire life. The difference was she held it deep within her, and I let mine out of cage on a regular basis. — Jamie McGuire

Got you. You're mine now. For the rest of the day, week, month, year, life. Have you guessed who I am? Sometimes I think you have. Sometimes when you're standing in a crowd I feel those sultry, dark eyes of yours stop on me. Are you too afraid to come up to me and let me know how you feel? I want to moan and writhe with you and I want to go up to you and kiss your mouth and pull you to me and say "I love you I love you I love you" while stripping. I want you so bad it stings. I want to kill the ugly girls that you're always with. Do you really like those boring, naive, coy, calculating girls or is it just for sex? The seeds of love have taken hold, and if we won't burn together, I'll burn alone. — Bret Easton Ellis

But he did love people; he lived all his life, it seemed, with complete faith in people, and yet no one ever considered him either naive or a simpleton. There was something in him that told one, that convinced one (and it was so all his life afterwards) that he did not want to be a judge of men, that he would not take judgment upon himself and would not condemn anyone for anything. It seemed, even, that he accepted everything without the least condemnation, though often with deep sadness. Moreover, in this sense he even went so far that no one could either surprise or frighten him, and this even in his very early youth. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

That's what you men are always doing; it's so barbarously naive. You feel one of your loose desires for some woman, and because you desire her strongly you immediately accuse her of luring you on, of deliberately provoking and inviting the desire. — Aldous Huxley

In my high-minded and naive way, I believed the only books worth reading were the classics. — Maria Semple

this is actualy a poem

we have been called
naive
as if it were a dirty word,
whe have been called
innocent
as though with shame
our cheeks should burn
so
we visit with
the careful idols
of cynisism
to learn to sneer
and pant and walk
so as not to feel the scales
of judgement rub wrongly
but we say
some things must
remain simple
some things must remain
untouched
and pure
lest we all forget
the legacy we begot us
the health of our origins
the poetry of our fundemental selves — Jewel

When I accept an invitation for a public speaking engagement, my purpose is to share the TOMS story and our giving mission. In no way do I believe this means I endorse every single aspect of that organization. That may be naive, and you may disagree, but it is my sincere belief. — Blake Mycoskie

Naturally, also, both sides were convinced they had right on their side, not that either was remotely naive enough to think that had any possible bearing on the outcome whatsoever. — Iain Banks

Building codes are a good thing. People who throw rocks at inspectors are being naive. It's a lot like police officers; we want them around unless they stop us for a ticket. It's the same with inspectors. — Dan Phillips

What I love about 'Big Hero 6', with Baymax himself - this sentient creature who's actually a learning robot - with each experience, this naive and gullible creature becomes more aware of issues. — Roy Conli

On the song 'Dangerous,' it feels like a teenager picking up a new instrument and writing something with all of that naive excitement. — James Blunt

Children are young, but they're not naive. And they're honest. They're not going to keep wide awake if the story is boring. When they get excited you can see it in their eyes. — Chinua Achebe

Parents who let teens run around with unearned adult freedoms are naive and stupid. — Dave Ramsey

I'm happy to sacrifice a big pay cheque for my happiness, if that's not too corny a thing to say. It's probably more naive than mature to say that, maybe, but that's how I feel. — Jack Gleeson

A new country seems to follow a pattern. First come the openers, strong and brave and rather childlike. They can take care of themselves in a wilderness, but they are naive and helpless against men, and perhaps that is why they went out in the first place. When the rough edges are worn off the new land, businessmen and lawyers come in to help with the development
to solve problems of ownership, usually by removing the temptations to themselves. And finally comes culture, which is entertainment, relaxation, transport out of the pain of living. And culture can be on any level, and is.
The Church and the whorehouse arrived in the Far West simultaneously. — John Steinbeck

I have a naive outlook on life. That's who I am. — M. Night Shyamalan

Commercial comedy's often set up to feature an ironist making
devastating sport of someone who's naive or sentimental or pretentious or
pompous. — David Foster Wallace

You need to come face-to-face with the past, not as some naive, easily wounded boy, but as a grown-up, independent professional. Not to see what you want to see, but what you must see. Otherwise you'll carry around that baggage for the rest of your life. — Haruki Murakami

God help us! We have turned the holy fire of God into a circus sideshow - and naive Christians are buying this without realizing that such shenanigans are actually blasphemous.21 — John F. MacArthur Jr.

I guess I just grew up thinking that when we become adults, we get to do what we love. For work, for fun, forever. I don't know where I got that from. Seems silly now. — Crystal Woods

Methods of detoxifying and processing plants for human use are known throughout the world, and include a variety of techniques, including dehydration, application of heat, leaching, and fermentation, among others (Johns and Kubo 1988). While it is difficult to trace the origins of these methods, or to answer the questions of how certain groups learned to detoxify and process useful plants in their environment, to make a blanket claim that certain cultures were incapable of discovering plant properties, and the methods necessary for rendering them same and useful, seems naive at best. — John Rush

Most mothers entering the labor market outside the home are naive. They stagger home each evening, holding mail in their teeth, the cleaning over their arm, a lamb chop defrosting under each armpit, balancing two gallons of frozen milk between their knees, and expect one of the kids to get the door. — Erma Bombeck

There was a naive quality in 1982 around technology and the start of video games. And that's like the start of electronic music - there was this statement and, ideologically, these things to fight for. — Thomas Bangalter

I knew you could be naive, but I never thought you were stupid. He's an Eye, Sophie. They kill our kind. What part of that don't you understand?"

All I could do was blink at him.

"And this one is worse than any of the others," he continued, "because he's technically one of us. He's a traitor to his own race, and you just keep letting him in and pushing...everyone else away." He looked up at me, what I saw in his eyes made me flunch. Cal was so good at hiding his emotions that I'd never realized...God, how could I have been such an idiot? — Rachel Hawkins

It's so frustrating that everybody rags on eighties music, when there's a lot of terrific stuff out there," he said. "There's no irony to it. It's not afraid to just be happy or enthusiastic or earnest. Or to have melody. Sure, you can blame it for being naive, but isn't that refreshing next to the whiny navel-gazing that came after it? — Amanda DeWees

It would be as naive to study the song of the nightingale, as it would be ridiculous to try and win a King's Gambit against a representative of the old chess guard. — David Bronstein

You don't grow up naive in Africa. — Claire Denis

You can't just come from Kansas, go into fashion and be all naive. The fashion world is very different to where I'm from. — Lindsey Wixson

I had written a book of short stories which was published under the title of "Uncle Tom's Children". When the review of that book began to appear, I realized that I had made an awful naive mistake. I found that I had written a book which even bankers' daughters could read and weep over and feel good about. I swore to myself that if I ever wrote another book, no one would weep over it; that it would be so hard and deep that they would have to face it without the consolation of tears. — Richard Wright

take the opposite approach: Voters' lack of decisiveness changes everything. Voting is not a slight variation on shopping. Shoppers have incentives to be rational. Voters do not. The naive view of democracy, which paints it as a public forum for solving social problems, ignores more than a few frictions. It overlooks the big story inches beneath the surface. When voters talk about solving social problems, they primary aim is to boost their self-worth by casting off the workaday shackles of objectivity. — Bryan Caplan

A lot of negative words adults call the young, like 'naive,' 'impulsive' and 'way too connected online,' are all things we can turn into strengths to help us. — Adora Svitak

I think probably the most difficult challenge was just the climb and rise in show business because I went through my entire twenties with some success as a comedy writer but not much as a performer. And you have to be kind of informed and naive at the same time. — Steve Martin

I was so naive in radio technique that I knew nothing about timing. I would write pages on Honus Wagner and then get only half through by the time the show ended. I eventually learned, but there was nobody there to school me. — Waite Hoyt

America is still a government of the naive, for the naive, and by the naive. He who does not know this, nor relish it, has no inkling of the nature of his country. — Christopher Morley

It's no accident that most ads are pitched to people in their 20s and 30s. Not only are they so much cuter than their elders...but they are less likely to have gone through the transformative process of cleaning out their deceased parents' stuff. Once you go through that, you can never look at *your* stuff in the same way. You start to look at your stuff a little postmortemistically. If you've lived more than two decades as an adult consumer, you probably have quite the accumulation, even if you're not a hoarder...I'm not saying I never buy stuff, because I absolutely do. Maybe I'm less naive about the joys of accumulation. — Roz Chast

The mathematical likelihood that God exists is astronomical. But the idea that our limited human mentality can understand the true nature of God borders on the ridiculous. For this reason the religionist and the ahteist are equally naive. — Keith David Henry

You have to be either naive or power-hungry to get into politics. I wouldn't consider it myself. I am too well-informed. — Jon Bon Jovi

Maybe it's that I'm naive, but I don't think of myself as an age. — Rene Russo

But at a certain point, and I don't really know ... people have asked me this. I don't know exactly what it was that pushed me towards directing, but I think it was a naive notion that if I directed I would be able to play all the roles. A kind of greed. — Peter Bogdanovich

There is nothing wrong with loving musical theatre, but I think that it's naive to hold it superior any other musical classification, especially since these other genres have been influencing Broadway more and more in recent decades. — Stephanie D'Abruzzo

We base our ideas about the world on our personal experience, and that experience has ingrained the rate of growth of the recent past in our heads as "the way things happen." We're also limited by our imagination, which takes our experience and uses it to conjure future predictions - but often, what we know simply doesn't give us the tools to think accurately about the future. When we hear a prediction about the future that contradicts our experience-based notion of how things work, our instinct is that the prediction must be naive. If I tell you [...] that you may live to be 150, or 250, or not die at all, your instinct will be, "That's stupid - if there's one thing I know from history, it's that everybody dies." And yes, no one in the past has not died. But no one flew airplanes before airplanes were invented either. — Tim Urban

I've always thought that we, as human beings, would be naive and arrogant to pretend that we're the only life form in the galaxy. — Jonathan Frakes

The struggle is not lost. I believe we have to live, as long as we live, in the expectation and hope of changing the world for the better. That may sound naive. It may even sound sentimental. Never mind: I believe it. What are we to live for, except life itself? And, with all our doubts, with all our flaws, with all our problems, I believe that we will carry on, with God's help. — Margaret Laurence

We deny the severity of our loved one's problem not because we are naive, but because we can't know. — David Sheff

Be honest: Are you surprised that I didn't realize sooner? Are you surprised that it took me so long to even /think/ the word
death? Dying? Dead?
Do you think I was being stupid? Naive?
Try not to judge. Remember that we're the same, you and me.
I thought I would live forever too. — Lauren Oliver

He rejected traditional religious beliefs (Jewish, Christian, and Islamic) not on the basis of any reasoned argument, nor even with an expression of emotional antipathy, for he loved to use religious expressions and metaphors, but simply by saying that they are naive. — Walter J. Moore

Loss is inevitable - you have to be blind or naive to think otherwise. — Alice McDermott

Gospel hope keeps us from being muted by being either a naive Pollyanna or a despairing Cassandra. Voices of warning are meant to be heard, not just raised. — Neal A. Maxwell

Through doubt we can learn more than through naive trust, — Lee Strobel

And I went off to Stanford, I was pretty young and pretty naive. And I had a professor I really loved, who was himself a lawyer. — Sandra Day O'Connor

Sometimes the easiest way to get something done is to be a little naive about it. — Bill Joy

I do believe that in a race, it is naive to think Linux has a hope of making a dent against Microsoft starting from way behind with a fraction of the resources and amateur labor. (I feel the same about Unix. — Kenneth P. Thompson

I am naive. I make mistakes - But I don't give a rat's arse how I am perceived! — Shirley Manson

Their mistake was the mistake of Galileo. He was right that the earth revolves around the sun, but he didn't know that the entire solar system revolves around yet another center; he didn't know that the real orbit of the earth, as opposed to the relative orbit, is by no means some naive circle ... — Yevgeny Zamyatin

Had he been naive, or overambitious? Both, probably. In life, you might be a bohemian and an adventurer, but you also sought a pattern, an arrangement to help you through, even if
even as
you kicked against it. — Julian Barnes

We confess our bad qualities to others out of fear of appearing naive or ridiculous by not being aware of them. — Gerald Brenan

You're naive. We're destroyers, not saviors.
-Kanda Yuu — Katsura Hoshino

Really good work probably comes out of a willingness to disclose yourself, open yourself up in spiritual and emotional ways that risk making you look banal or melodramatic or naive or unhip or sappy, and to ask the reader really to feel something. To be willing to sort of die in order to move the reader, somehow. Even now I'm scared about how sappy this'll look in print, saying this. And the effort actually to do it, not just talk about it, requires a kind of courage I don't seem to have yet. — David Foster Wallace

I think when I first started discovering I could write songs, I was so naive. And it was after I got broken up with and had my heart sliced up into a bunch of little pieces that I was like, "I'm going to say this." I didn't even know how to play guitar. — Gwen Stefani

The reality is that most celebrity defendants are extremely unknowledgeable, naive, and vulnerable, and if they get into trouble, they usually call their lawyer friends who handle criminal cases, and if they don't know any, they call their business lawyers, who then refer them to lawyer friends of theirs. — Vincent Bugliosi