Not Being Naive Quotes & Sayings

Tacitus laughed at the Germanic tribes who tried to stop a torrent with their shields, but it is no less naive to believe in planetary migration or to believe in the establishment by purely human means of a society fully satisfied and perfectly inoffensive and continuing to progress indefinitely. Al lthis proves that man ,thoough he has inevitably become less naive in some things, has nontheless learned nothing as far as essentials are concerned; the only thing that man is capable of when left to himself is to "commit the oldest sins the newest kind of ways," as Shakespeare would say. And the world being what it is, one is doubtless not guilty of a truism in adding that it is better to go to Heaven naively than to go intelligently to hell. — Frithjof Schuon

How is it that some celebrities, whom the average person would believe to have all the popularity a human being could want, still admit to feeling lonely? It is quite naive to assume that popularity is the remedy for loneliness. Loneliness does not necessarily equal physical solitude, it is the inability to be oneself and rightfully represented as oneself. — Criss Jami

Don't tell me there's no place for innocent hearts in this world. Don't tell me I need to accept what I don't believe in. I respect it. Don't confuse my values for my stubbornness, although I am stubborn. Don't confuse my positive attitude for being naive. Allow me to wrap my heart around you for a moment. Listen to this. Innocent hearts may not belong anywhere in this world but they are big enough for any heart in this world. Innocent hearts belong in innocent hearts. Innocent hearts belong in the hearts of those who genuinely want happiness. — Najwa Zebian

Writing for the sake of writing, writing that draws its credibility from its very existence, is a foreign idea to most Americans. As a culture, we want cash on the barrel head. We want writing to earn dollars and sense so that it makes sense to us. We have a conviction - which is naive and misplaced - that being published has to do with being "good" while not being published has to do with being "amateur." ...
"Did you write today?"
"Yes."
"Then you're a writer today."
It would be lovely if being a writer were a permanent state that we could attain to. It's not, or if it is, the permanence comes posthumously.
A page at a time, a day at a time, is the way we must live our writing lives. Credibility lies in the act of writing. That is where the dignity is. That is where the final "credit" must come from. — Julia Cameron

Good tennis players are those who beat other tennis players, and a good shot during play is one the opponent can't return. But that's not a truth about life or excellence -- it's a truth about tennis. We've created an artificial structure in which one person can't succeed without doing so at someone else's expense, and then we accuse anyone who prefers other kinds of activities of being naive because "there can be only one best -- you're it or you're not," as the teacher who delivered that much-admired you're-not-special commencement speech declared. You see the sleight of hand here? The question isn't whether everyone playing a competitive game can win or whether every student can be above average. Of course they can't. The question that we're discouraged from asking is why our games are competitive -- or our students are compulsively ranked against one another -- in the first place. — Alfie Kohn

Naive optimism and pervasive pessimism are both to be avoided, therefore. It's not an easy balance to maintain, to be asked to work away in the Ninevehs of our lives without being so conscious of the coming cataclysm that we are not serious citizens of our communities and nations. By living and sharing the gospel of Jesus Christ, we are doing the most relevant thing we can do by way of helping. (There are civic and other chores to be done, of course.) Day in and day out, the gospel is the one thing that is most relevant, and we are to be of good cheer. — Neal A. Maxwell

I oscillate between being cynical and being naive on a regular basis. I always think that not much shocks me until something much too obvious does. — Rabih Alameddine

Being positive in a negative situation is not naive. It's leadership. — Ralph Marston

I don't really date. I have a weird vision of relationships because my parents have known each other since second grade, and they got married right out of college. I've always thought that's what it's supposed to be like, and if it's not, then I don't want to waste my time on it. Even when I was 14, I was like, 'I'm not gonna marry this person. What's the point of doing it?' It's not me being naive. I just know what it's supposed to be like, and I think until I feel that, I cannot be bothered. — Dakota Fanning

Designing for me is a very complex process. There are many ideas that I want to express in one object, very often contradictory. The creative process in Miu Miu is completely different from that of Prada. Miu Miu is not as complicated and thought out as Prada. Rather than being young, Miu Miu is immediate Prada is very sophisticated and considered; Miu Miu is much more naive. The solution, when I am working on Miu Miu, has to come immediately, instinctively, spontaneously with whatever is available at the moment. If I think three times, I stop. — Miuccia Prada

In her business, there were many who laughed at honest men, calling them easy pickings. That was a fallacy. Being honest did not make one naive. A dishonest fool and an honest fool were equally easy to scam; you just went about it in different ways. However, a man who was honest and clever was always, always more difficult to scam than someone who was both dishonest and clever. — Brandon Sanderson

You think that I am naive, but it is you who are naive. You have no idea what is happening inside of you when you look at a painting. You think that you are getting close to art voluntarily, enticed by its beauty, that this intimacy is taking place in an atmosphere of freedom and that delight is being born in you spontaneously, lured by the divine rod of Beauty. In truth, a hand has grabbed you by the scruff of the neck, led you to this painting and has thrown you to your knees. A will mightier than your own told you to attempt to experience the appropriate emotions. Whose hand and whose will? That hand is not the hand of a single man, the will is collective, born in an interhuman dimension, quite alien to you. So you do not admire at all, you merely try to admire. — Witold Gombrowicz

I have to wonder if you're not being slightly naive here. I mean, are you saying that you want nothing for people? You have no motives? Everybody has motives. Name the person, the circumstances, I'll name the motive. Even saints have motives
to feel like saints, probably ... But still, the point of any relationship is obtaining something from another person. — Tom Rachman

I sometimes find, especially among my peers, that authenticity is not a ... means of growing in holiness, but a convenient cover for endless introspection, doubt, uncertainty, anger, and worldliness. So that if other Christians seem pure, assured, and happy we despise them for being inauthentic.
Granted, the church shouldn't be happy-clappy naive about life's struggles. Plenty of psalms show us godly ways to be real with our negative emotions. But the church should not apologize for preaching a confident Christ and exhorting us to trust Him in all things. Church is not meant to foster an existential crisis of faith every week — Kevin DeYoung

A human being, any human being at all, has so perishingly few chances to stay right there, to let go of time and fall into the moment. And to love someone without measure, explode with passion ... A few times when we are children, maybe, for those of us who are allowed to be ... But after that? How many breaths are we allowed to take beyond the confines of ourselves? How many pure emotions make us cheer out loud without a sense of shame? How many chances do we get to be blessed by amnesia? All passion is childish, it's banal and naive, it's nothing we learn, it's instinctive, and so it overwhelms us ... Overturns us ... It bears us away in a flood ... All other emotions belong to the earth, but passion inhabits the universe. That is the reason why passion is worth something. Not for what it gives us, but for what it demands that we risk - our dignity, the puzzlement of others in their condescending shaking heads ... — Fredrik Backman

Children, I always think, are just putting on a performance of being naive and not understanding anything. I have worked with children in films, and they're treated as adults and they just drop the pretense of being children. — Wallace Shawn

I'm not an activist per se, but I have strong feelings about things. People can jump on celebrities for being ill-informed or naive, but I've got a right to say what I believe. — Ed Harris

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

It would be a very naive sort of dogmatism to assume that there exists an absolute reality of things which is the same for all living beings. Reality is not a unique and homogeneous thing; it is immensely diversified, having as many different schemes and patterns as there are different organisms. Every organism is, so to speak, a monadic being. It has a world of its own because it has an experience of its own. The phenomena that we find in the life of a certain biological species are not transferable to any other species. The experiences - and therefore the realities - of two different organisms are incommensurable with one another. In the world of a fly, says Uexkull, we find only "fly things"; in the world of a sea urchin we find only "sea urchin things. — Ernst Cassirer

What you don't get necessarily at drama school is a gigantic mix of people. At university, there's people from every social background, and you get to go through that period of being naive and not quite sure who you're going to be. — Tom Riley

I've inspected your profile. You are not stupid. Misguided, idealistic, naive, certainly, but not stupid. You must know how societies work. You must at least have an inkling. They work on force, power and coercion. People don't behave themselves because they're nice. That's the liberal fallacy. People behave themselves because if they don't they'll be punished. All this is known. It isn't even debatable. Civilisation after civilisation, society after society, species after species, all show the same pattern. Society is control: control is reward and punishment. Reward is being allowed to partake of the fruits of that society and, as a general but not unbreakable rule, not being punished without cause. — Anonymous

She was very fond of thinking and getting at the truth of things, but was so far from being pedantic, so full of youthful ways that from the first moment one began to love all these originalities in her, and to accept them. [ ... ] This naive combination in her of the child and the thinking woman, this childlike and absolutely genuine thirst for truth and justice, and absolute faith in her impulses
all this lighted up her face with a fine glow of sincerity, giving it a lofty, spiritual beauty, and one began to understand that it was not so easy to gauge the full significance of that beauty which was not all at once apparent to every ordinary unsympathetic eye. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

If ... deceit is fundamental to animal communication, then there must be strong selection to spot deception and this ought, in turn, to select for a degree of self-deception, rendering some facts and motives unconscious so as not to betray - by the subtle signs of self-knowledge - the deception being practiced.' Thus, 'the conventional view that natural selection favors nervous systems which produce ever more accurate images of the world must be a very naive view of mental evolution. — Robert Trivers

People said it because other people said it. They did not know why it was being said and heard everywhere. They did not give or ask for reasons. 'Reason,' Dr. Pritchett had told them, 'is the most naive of all superstitions.'
'The source of public opinion?' said Claude Slagenhop in a public radio speech. 'There is no source of public opinion. It is spontaneously general. It is a reflex of the collective instinct of the collective mind. — Ayn Rand

I'm not being naive; I realise there's no such thing as a pure reading. But I'd rather keep myself as far out of it as I can. — Anne Michaels

One might conclude that only clever people remain free, but it's not so: foolish men also remain free if they know how to hide their folly. And the clever ones are locked away if they show their cleverness. The others who remain free are those who have the right to be whatever they want. My brother was a nobody, a happy man, not clever enough to be feared and not foolish enough for no one to know what he might do; he was too cowardly to be an outlaw, too naive to be bad, too lazy to be someone's enemy. In a word, he was destined by divine providence to be greeted by people without respect, to be recognized for his value without being asked to show it. — Mesa Selimovic

Sentimental Humanitarianism: A Dangerous Temptation Gregg argues that sentimental humanitarianism: Reduces most debates to exchanges of feelings. Common responses to disagreements are "you can't say that" or "that's hurtful" or "that offends me." But in quoting British novelist Ian McEwan, Gregg says there is nothing virtuous about being offended. Is naive of human nature. It assumes everyone is of good will. Rather, Gregg says we have to acknowledge that there are some groups of people in which rational conversation is not possible. Doesn't take free choice seriously. It claims all evil emanates from bad education and unjust structures, but this is hardly the full story. Evil is a free choice of each individual, and Gregg says it's not something that can be explained away by the fact that someone is wealthier than — Anonymous

Choose to see the pure Soul within all beings, even though they may not see it within themselves. Choose to honor the sovereign reality of all beings, even though their words or actions may hurt you. Choose to transform through ecstasy and Grace, even though drama and trauma may seem more natural to you. Choose to live in this miraculous Now moment, even though nostalgia, regrets and fear may entice you to not be Present. Choose to be a blessing to the World and All Life, even though circumstances may encourage you to harden your heart. Choose to love others, even though it may seem naive. Choose to love God with all your being, and know that this is all that is really required. Choose to Live Heaven. Aliyah Ziondra — Tachira Tachi-Ren

I always think of my films within the context of where aesthetics meet economics. That's the nature of making art - not being naive about what is possible and getting what you need to tell the story you want to tell. — Ira Sachs

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

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

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