Quotes About Naive
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Oh, stop talking," I cried, in a hunted tone. "I can't bear it. If you are going to arrest me, get it over."
"I'd rather NOT arrest you, if we can find a way out. You look so young, so new to Crime! Even your excuse for being here is so naive, that I - won't you tell me why you wrote a love letter, if you are not in love? And whom you sent it to? That's important, you see, as it bears on the case. I intend," he said, "to be judgdicial[sic], unimpassioned, and quite fair."
"I wrote a love letter" I explained, feeling rather cheered, "but it was not intended for any one, Do you see? It was just a love letter."
"Oh," he said. "Of course. It is often done. And after that?"
"Well, it had to go somewhere. At least I felt that way about it. So I made up a name from some malted milk tablets - - "
"Malted milk tablets!" he said, looking bewildered.
"Just as I was thinking up a name to send it to," I explained, "Hannah - that's mother's maid, you know - brought in some hot milk and some malted milk tablets, and I took the name from them."
"Look here," he said, "I'm unpredjudiced and quite calm, but isn't the `mother's maid' rather piling it on?"
"Hannah is mother's maid, and she brought in the milk and the tablets, I should think," I said, growing sarcastic, "that so far it is clear to the dullest mind."
"Go on," he said, leaning back and closing his eyes. "You named the letter ~ Mary Roberts Rinehart
Why movie and dance critics are taking 'The Company' seriously, I can't imagine. Are they impressed by Altman's reputation and naive sincerity? By the fluid semi-documentary approach? ~ Robert Gottlieb
WE END UP with the following situation: on the one hand, we have a news agenda dominated by reports of the workings of a highly complicated social science that wrestles with problems of near cosmic scale and incomprehensible difficulty, upon which it periodically delivers pronouncements at once pessimistic and resigned; and on the other hand, we have a host of inchoate, naive, innocent, impassioned but powerful longings that are carefully concealed and mostly go unmentioned for fear of sacrificing claims to decency and adult seriousness. ~ Alain De Botton
The inner lawyer, the rose-colored mirror, naive realism, and the myth of pure evil - these mechanisms all conspire to weave for us a web of significance upon which angels and demons fight it out. Our ever-judging minds then give us constant flashes of approval and disapproval, along with the certainty that we are on the side of the angels. From this vantage point it all seems so silly, all this moralism, righteousness, and hypocrisy. It's beyond silly; it is tragic, for it suggests that human beings will never achieve a state of lasting peace and harmony. ~ Jonathan Haidt
The woman I was seems hopelessly naive. I envy her. ~ Lisa Unger
A naive, excitable teenaged reader is a beautiful thing. Someone who's never heard of Elizabeth Bennet or Jay Gatsby, until you tell him. And they all still believe in truth. That's the fun of it. ~ Holly LeCraw
Be not the one who debunks but the one who assembles, not the one who lifts the rugs from under the feet of the naive believers but the one who offers arenas in which to gather. ~ Bruno Latour
It never works that way. Once that ugliness has been forced into you, it becomes part of your blood, dilutes it, races through your heart and back out again, staining everything as it goes. The ugliness never goes away, never comes out, no matter what you do. Anyone who thinks otherwise is naive. All you can do is hope to control it. ~ Dennis Lehane
Actually, no. I may be inexperienced compared to your other women, but I'm not naive, nor am I stupid. It occurred to me this morning. You've known me for two years and never so much as asked me to coffee and then all of a sudden, you want access to my panties.'
I like your panties,' he said with a feral grin.
Ethan! Be serious. ~ Lucy Monroe
That taught me one lesson which is that you're naive to believe that bands can change the world. Bands are very naive to think that just if their audience thinks that they can change the world, that they can. That was quite a lesson for my career, really. ~ Billy Bragg
Everyone knows that life isn't fair. Saying it's not fair suggests that you think life is supposed to be fair, which makes you look immature and naive. ~ Travis Bradberry
This isn't a spotless life. There is much ahead, my immaculate little peach. And there is no way to say it other than to say it: marriage is indeed this horribly complex thing for which you appear to be ill prepared and about which you seem to be utterly naive. That's okay. A lot of people are. You can learn along the way. A good way to start would be to let fall your notions about "perfect couples." It's really such an impossible thing to either perceive honestly in others or live up to when others believe it about us. It does nothing but box some people in and shut other people out, and it ultimately makes just about everyone feel like shit. A perfect couple is a wholly private thing. No one but the two people in the perfect relationship know for certain whether they're in one. Its only defining quality is that it's composed of two people who feel perfectly right about sharing their lives with each other, even during the hard times. ~ Cheryl Strayed
One naive pro-natalist assumption is that because death is a bad thing, procreation, which can be considered the antonym of death is a god thing, but the naive defect in that assumption is that it ignores the obvious fact that procreation is an essential (and the ultimate cause) of death ~ Jiwoon Hwang
I'm too busy acting like I'm not Naive. I've seen it all, I was here first. ~ Kurt Cobain
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
Children are naive-they trust everyone. School is bad enough, but, if you put a child anywhere in the vicinity of a church, you're asking for trouble. ~ Frank Zappa
There was a time we tormented one another with excessive honesty in the naive belief it would save us. ~ Stanislaw Lem
I think there has to be an underlying sexuality. There has to be a perverseness to the clothes. There is a hidden agenda in the fragility of romance. It's like a Story of O. I am not big on women looking naive. There has to be a sinister aspect, whether it's melancholy of sadomasochist. I think everyone has a deep sexuality, and sometimes it's good to use a little of it-and sometimes a lot of it-like a masquerade. ~ Alexander McQueen
However, though belief on faith alone may be comforting, it is wholly arbitrary and thus does nothing to ensure that you are more correct than anyone else. So it cannot properly be described as knowledge, but rather as a mere wish, a desire that something be true or false, or else it is a naive trust in guesswork or hearsay. ~ Richard Carrier
I have a naive trust in the universe - that at some level it all makes sense, and we can get glimpses of that sense if we try. ~ Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Every culture that's ever existed has operated under the illusion that it understood 95% of reality and that the other 5% would be delivered in the next 18 months, and from Egypt forward they've been running around believing they had a perfect grip on things and yet we look back at every society that preceded us with great smugness at how naive they all were. Well, it never occurs to us, then, that maybe we're whistling in the dark too! That the universe is stranger than you CAN suppose, and that that openness that that perception imparts is a great joy, a great blessing, because then you can live your life not in service to some fascistic metaphor but in service to the living mystery: the fact that you're not going to understand it; it is not going to yield to logic; or magic; or any other technique that's been developed ... ~ Terence McKenna
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
How unbelievably naive we both were that night. We clung hard to each other, making vows we couldn't keep and should never have spoken aloud. That's how love is sometimes. I already loved him more than I'd ever loved anything or anyone. I knew he needed me absolutely, and I wanted him to go on needing me forever. ~ Paula McLain
Open mind all the way. Because people have had eyewitness accounts, they've seen things, they swear they've seen things, and I tend to believe in people rather than - maybe I'm a little naive, but my optimistic outlook on life is to sort of be positive and take everyone at face value. ~ Rhys Darby
When I started my airline business, I didn't know everything, right? If I start up a newspaper tomorrow, I might get ripped off by journalists. You'd be naive to think you know everything from day one. ~ Tony Fernandes
When you are honest, loving, and kind people may think that you are weak, naive, and a fool but be loving, kind, and honest anyway. ~ Debasish Mridha
I had been gullible, naive, soft, pliable. That's why I got taken advantage of. To survive, you have to have a tough skin. ~ Tia Carrere
Usually naive interviewers hover between two mutually contradictory convictions: one, that a text we call creative develops almost instantaneously in the mystic heat of inspirational raptus; or the other, that the writer has followed a recipe, a kind of secret set of rules that they would like to see revealed.
There is no set of rules, or, rather, there are many, varied and flexible rules ... ~ Umberto Eco
How naive Lore had been, despite being the daughter of a father no one spoke of, despite the strange, incomplete conversations at her mother's deathbed; how again and again she was caught up short by the discovery that other people had stories they didn't tell, or told stories that weren't entirely true. How mostly you got odd chunks torn from the whole, impossible truly to understand in their damaged form. ~ Pamela Erens
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
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
Simon: You always were wise beyond your years.
Cassandra: No I wasn't. I used to be consciously naive. ~ Dodie Smith
I'm still a bit of a romantic and an idealist and hopelessly naive. ~ Brit Marling
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
Often times leaders can become so content with delegating others to find solutions to the problems that they are oblivious to the fact that they're part of it. ~ VaeEshia Ratcliff Davis
The U.S. can still maintain research institutions, such as Caltech, that are the envy of the world, yet it would be hubristic and naive to think that this position is sustainable without investing in science education and basic research. ~ Ahmed Zewail
When I did the sitcom I was too naive. I thought, Well, they know what they're talking about, let's do that. ~ Jeff Foxworthy
If capitalist realism is so seamless, and if current forms of resistance are so hopeless and impotent, where can an effective challenge come from? A moral critique of capitalism, emphasizing the ways in which it leads to suffering, only reinforces capitalist realism. Poverty, famine and war can be presented as an inevitable part of reality, while the hope that these forms of suffering could be eliminated easily painted as naive utopianism. Capitalist realism can only be threatened if it is shown to be in some way inconsistent or untenable; if, that is to say, capitalism's ostensible 'realism' turns out to be nothing of the sort. ~ Mark Fisher
I think the main function of contemporary irony is to protect the
speaker from being interpreted as naive or sentimental. ~ David Foster Wallace
In most cases, people, even wicked people, are far more naive and simple-hearted than one generally assumes. And so are we. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky
It is a political fight between a group of well-financed, well-organized people whose freedom, livelihood, finances, reputations, or liberty is being threatened by disclosures of child sexual abuse and--on the other hand--a group of well-meaning, ill-organized, underfinanced, and often terribly naive academics who expect fair play. ~ Anna C. Salter
Let me go back to a comfortable analogy for me - sports ... basketball. I use it because you're naive if you don't see the national full-court press picking away right now: A good point guard drives through a full court press, protecting the ball, keeping her eye on the basket ... and she knows exactly when to pass the ball so that the team can WIN. ~ Sarah Palin
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
And yet, for all this, for all that he was unparalleled in depicting tyrants knee-deep in blood, Shakespeare was a little naive. Because his monsters had doubts, bad dreams, pangs of conscience, guilt. They saw the spirits of those they had killed rising in front of them. But in real life, under real terror, what guilty conscience? What bad dreams? That was all sentimentality, false optimism, a hope that the world would be as we wanted it to be, rather than as it was. Those who chopped the wood and made the chips fly, those who smoked Belomory behind their desks at the Big House, those who signed the orders and made the telephone calls, closing a dossier and with it a life: how few of them had bad dreams, or ever saw the spirits of the dead rising to reproach them." (p 94) ~ Julian Barnes
When I was getting my education, I fell in love with the writings of Peter Drucker. He was my hero. I had a naive belief that when I became a manager, it was going to be like Peter Drucker's books. That is, I was going to be the effective executive. I was going to talk to people about their goals. I was going to help them actualize. ~ Guy Kawasaki
I don't care about convincing the people who think I'm naive or an idiot. I'm interested in how do I inspire the people who are open-minded that there's a different way of seeing the world. ~ Simon Sinek
Sascha looked torn. Should she cram my head full of newfound terror that the world would reject me, or let me wander into the big, scary out-there, like a naive lamb prancing to the slaughter? ~ Robin Wasserman
I'm able to laugh now, because I've gone through a lot of mental and physical therapy to heal over the years, my music's been wonderful for me. But I was a shell of my former self at one point. I was not myself. To be fair, I was about 19, so ... I went to Catholic school and all this crazy stuff happened, and I was going, 'Oh, is this just the way adults are?' I was very naive. ~ Lady Gaga
Back home, Huxley drew from this experience to compose a series of audacious attacks against the Romantic love of wilderness. The worship of nature, he wrote, is "a modern, artificial, and somewhat precarious invention of refined minds." Byron and Wordsworth could only rhapsodize about their love of nature because the English countryside had already been "enslaved to man." In the tropics, he observed, where forests dripped with venom and vines, Romantic poets were notably absent. Tropical peoples knew something Englishmen didn't. "Nature," Huxley wrote, "is always alien and inhuman, and occasionally diabolic." And he meant always: Even in the gentle woods of Westermain, the Romantics were naive in assuming that the environment was humane, that it would not callously snuff out their lives with a bolt of lightning or a sudden cold snap. After three days amid the Tuckamore, I was inclined to agree. ~ Robert Moor
The child's naive dream of life is the only one worth having. ~ Marty Rubin
Sallie Mae sounds like a naive and barefoot hillbilly girl but in fact they are a ruthless and aggressive conglomeration of bullies located in a tall brick building somewhere in Kansas. I picture it to be the tallest building in that state and I have decided they hire their employees straight out of prison. ~ David Sedaris
Each solution has its origin in the imagination of someone" - Rydgley Naive, "Lyamnay's Shadows ~ Annarita Faggioni
If you're anything like me,
You bite your nails,
And laugh when you're nervous.
You promise people the world,
because that's what they want from you.
You like giving them what they want...
But darling, you need to stop,
If you're anything like me,
You knock on wood every time you make plans.
You cross your fingers, hold your breath,
Wish on lucky numbers and eyelashes
Your superstitions were the lone survivors of the shipwreck.
Rest In Peace, to your naive bravado...
If life gets too good now,
Darling, it scares you.
If you're anything like me,
You never wanted to lock your door,
Your secret garden gate or your diary drawer
Didn't want to face the you you don't know anymore
For fear she was much better before...
But Darling, now you have to.
If you're anything like me,
There's a justice system in your head
For names you'll never speak again,
And you make your ruthless rulings.
Each new enemy turns to steel
They become the bars that confine you,
In your own little golden prison cell...
But Darling, there is where you meet yourself.
If you're anything like me
You've grown to hate your pride
To love your thighs
And no amount of friends at 25
Will fill the empty seats
At the lunch tables of your past
The teams that picked you last...
But Darling, you keep trying.
If yo ~ Taylor Swift
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
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
I think its naive to think you can push yourself as hard as someone else can push you, but I work really hard on my own. I know my body. ~ Charlie Weber
For Tammy Duckworth to blame the junior senator from Illinois for Islamic terror shows that she is a naive fool not fit for office in the Senate. ~ Mark Kirk
Guys behave like they're naive, but they're not stupid. They know what's going on. ~ Laura Schlessinger
We Jews continue to be amazed with the ease by which Christian Americans have fallen into our hands. While the naive Americans wait for Khrushchev to bury them, we have taught them to submit to our every demand. ~ Harold Wallace Rosenthal
Growing up, I'd been the girl who'd try anything once. I'd thought that attitude made me brave. Turned out, it just made me stupid. Naive and unsuspecting and vulnerable." ~ Tamar ~ A.L. Jackson
Ivanov: A naive man is a fool. But you women are clever enough to be naive so that it comes out in you as engaging and healthy and warm, and not so silly as it might seem. Only why do you all behave like this? While a man is healthy and strong and in good spirits, you pay him no attention, but as soon as he rolls down the slippery slope and starts complaining about his woes, you hang on his neck. ~ Anton Chekhov
High School. Society's bright idea to put all their aggressive, naive youth into one environment to torment and emotionally scar each other for life. ~ Chris Colfer
You are so sweet. This is unbelievable. Some schmo talks to you every two weeks, buys you a meal, during which he talks about himself, dry-humps you, touches your hand once and you think he smells like roses. Maybe he is a white knight on a steed, who will carry you off into the future, so you can live happily ever after and, finally, maybe get it on. ~ H. Raven Rose
Break a bone..and as the broken part heals it becomes the strongest part in it ... get hit by a virus, survive that and "supposedly" it can never get u again ... observe how ur skin that gets rubbed on a surface often becomes thicker and more rough with time ... remember how naive you were before and with each incident and accident with people that you've had ..it brought you to the "knowing better" person you are now ... you cant be stronger..if life doesn't try you every now and then ... and after each trial..it promises a stronger more immune version of you ~ Eman Farouk
We want a president who is as much like an American tourist as possible. Someone with the same goofy grin, the same innocent intentions, the same naive trust; a president with no conception of foreign policy and no discernible connection to the U.S. government, whose Nice Guyism will narrow the gap between the U.S. and us until nobody can tell the difference. ~ Florence King
He sighed again, but I couldn't see the fate of his dolphin logo person. I was completely fixated on his eyes. They're a pretty amazing combination of green and bronze. "I don't know what's going on, but it's weird, and it shouldn't be. I'm a decent guy."
"Of course you are." I sighed. And caved. Apparently, my Phillite defenses were worthless around this particular specimen, no matter that he couldn't seem to make up his mind whether I was worth noticing or not.
Truth: Yes,I am that naive.
"Good.So.Friday after school. We can meet down here."
I could just see Amanda's face when she caught us on our way into the dark depths of the school. "No."
"Fine.Your house."
"God,no!"
"Do you make everything this complicated?" he asked. "No. Don't answer that. Would you come to my house?"
That sounded doable.If we were at his place, I could leave whenever I wanted. "okay."
As I watched, he did a slo-mo, surprisingly graceful flop onto the floor. "Finally!"
I stepped over him and headed for the stairs. ~ Melissa Jensen
I knew it would be hard when I promised you my best," he said, drying my tears in turn.
I'd been naive to think the suffering was mine alone. He suffered, too. Just differently. ~ L.R.W. Lee
I want to hear raucous music, to see faces, to brush against bodies, to drink fiery Benedictine. Beautiful women and handsome men arouse fierce desires in me. I want to dance. I want drugs. I want to know perverse people, to be intimate with them. I never look at naive faces. I want to bite into life, and to be torn by it. ~ Anais Nin
This, she thought, isn't just for today. It's for everything. For the heartache that still felt like a punch in the gut each time it struck, fresh as new, at unpredictable moments; for the smiling lies and the mental images she couldn't shake; for the shame of having been so naive.
For the way loneliness is worse when you return to it after a reprieve - like the soul's version of putting on a wet bathing suit, clammy and miserable.
And this, Karou thought, no longer smiling, is for the irretrievable. ~ Laini Taylor
The UFO community?" I said. "Why would government spies want to infiltrate that?" "Oh, Jon," said Steven. "Don't be naive. ~ Jon Ronson
After fulfilling its destructive urge towards everything that is noble and good on earth, it [naive Religion] sketches, in its opium intoxication, a picture of the future situation, which differs drastically from the order of this world, since everything changes and is renewed. ~ Bruno Bauer
But engineers can be really naive about themselves; they think because they can design a pc board and it's right and it works, that everything they do or believe is going to be just that right. ~ R.A. MacAvoy
Too often people view idealists as naive. ~ Jacqueline Novogratz
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
One lives in the naive notion that "later" there will be more room than in the entire past. ~ Elias Canetti
The sciences need philosophy; philosophy, in turn, needs the sciences. On both sides, certain naive minds, too confident in their own forces and satisfied with ideas entirely too superficial, believed in the universal value of a single method. On both side a severe critique must lead each method back to its just limits, and teach them to ask aid of the other methods and manners of approach which, by their convergence, will permit the mind to embrace the diverse aspects of reality ~ Fulton J. Sheen
I am naive. I make mistakes - But I don't give a rat's arse how I am perceived! ~ Shirley Manson
(...) one should never be too naive regarding the quality of the current philosophical culture, or imagine that the most recent thinking is in any meaningful sense more advanced or more authoritative than that of a century or a millennium or two millennia ago. There are certain perennial problems to which all interesting philosophy returns again and again; but there are no such things as logical discoveries that consign any of the older answers to obsolescence. Certain classical answers to those problems endure and recur, sometimes because they remain far more powerful than the answers (or evasions) produced by later schools of thought. And, conversely, weaker answers often enjoy greater favor than their rivals simply because they are in keeping with the prejudices of the age. ~ David Bentley Hart
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
'The West Wing' was really important for me for a lot of reasons. It was the first thing I did when I got out to Los Angeles. I'd just finished school, and I was so naive. ~ Claire Coffee
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
From naive simplicity we arrive at more profound simplicity. ~ Albert Schweitzer
In its natural state, the child tells the literal truth because it is too naive to think of anything else. Blurting out the complete truth is considered adorable in the young, right smack up to the moment that the child says, 'Mommy, is this the fat lady you can't stand? ~ Judith Martin
Young girls today are very mistaken to be thinking that their sense of self-worth and their acknowledgment of their beauty depends on whether a man will give that to them or not. Such naïveté! And so what will happen when the man changes his mind about her? Tells her she's not beautiful enough? That she's not good enough? Cheats on her? Leaves her? Then what happens? She will lose all her self-worth, she will think she is not good enough, she is not beautiful enough, because all of those feelings depended on the man in the first place! And along with the loss of the man, it will all be lost as well! Mothers, teach your daughters better. It pains me to see such naive innocence right under my nose! Such naïveté does no good for any girl. It is better for a girl to be worldly-wise and have street-smarts! That's what a girl needs to have in life! Not wide-eyed delusional innocence! The sense of self-worth and acknowledgment of being beautiful must not come from a man, it must come from inside the woman herself, men will come and men will go and their coming and going must not take an effect on the woman's sense of worth and beauty. ~ C. JoyBell C.
I reviewed in thought the modern era of raps and apparitions, beginning with the knockings of 1848, at the hamlet of Hydesville, N.Y., and ending with grotesque phenomena at Cambridge, Mass.; I evoked the anklebones and other anatomical castanets of the Fox sisters (as described by the sages of the University of Buffalo ); the mysteriously uniform type of delicate adolescent in bleak Epworth or Tedworth, radiating the same disturbances as in old Peru; solemn Victorian orgies with roses falling and accordions floating to the strains of sacred music; professional imposters regurgitating moist cheesecloth; Mr. Duncan, a lady medium's dignified husband, who, when asked if he would submit to a search, excused himself on the ground of soiled underwear; old Alfred Russel Wallace, the naive naturalist, refusing to believe that the white form with bare feet and unperforated earlobes before him, at a private pandemonium in Boston, could be prim Miss Cook whom he had just seen asleep, in her curtained corner, all dressed in black, wearing laced-up boots and earrings; two other investigators, small, puny, but reasonably intelligent and active men, closely clinging with arms and legs about Eusapia, a large, plump elderly female reeking of garlic, who still managed to fool them; and the skeptical and embarrassed magician, instructed by charming young Margery's "control" not to get lost in the bathrobe's lining but to follow up the left stocking until he reached the bare thigh - upon the wa ~ Vladimir Nabokov
If we weren't already doing it this way, is this the way we would start? ~ Paul Depodesta
I'm not naive enough to pretend that on its own cinema can capture the very soul of significant social and cultural problems. ~ David Puttnam
Business is an establishment that gives you the legal, even though unethical, right to screw the naive-right, left, and in the middle. ~ W.C. Fields
It's a very naive idea to think that the chef is cooking everything, and, on top of it, is irreplaceable. That would mean that basically he is the only genius, and there are idiots all around him, which doesn't make sense. ~ Eric Ripert
The man could kiss. She'd thought his kisses were irresistible all those years ago when she'd been young and naive. Now, as an adult, she knew she'd never be able to resist him or his kiss. ~ Cat Johnson
Oh, what a tangled web do parents weave when they think that their children are naive. ~ Ogden Nash
As an artist she finds Dick's work hopelessly naive, yet she is a lover of certain kinds of bad art, art which offers a transparency into the hopes and desires of the person who made it. Bad art makes the viewer much more active. (Years later Chris would realise that her fondness for bad art is exactly like Jane Eyre's attraction to Rochester, a mean horse-faced junkie: bad characters invite invention. ~ Chris Kraus
Greatest discoveries come from passionate scientists with naive curiosity ~ Craig Mello
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
I think a lot of times we don't pay enough attention to people with a positive attitude because we assume they are naive or stupid or unschooled. ~ Amy Adams
Early in the morning, I fell in love with the girl that later on became my wife. At that time, we were so naive. I wanted to charm her, so I read her Capital by Marx. I thought somehow she would be convinced by the strength of his criticism about capital. ~ Shimon Peres
In fact, the summum bonum of his ethic, the earning of more and more money, combined with the strict avoidance of all spontaneous enjoyment of life, is above all completely devoid of any eudaemonistic, not to say hedonistic, admixture. It is thought of so purely as an end in itself, that from the point of view of the happiness of, or utility to, the single individual, it appears entirely transcendental and absolutely irrational. Man is dominated by the making of money, by acquisition as the ultimate purpose of his life. Economic acquisition is no longer subordinated to man as the means for the satisfaction of his material needs. This reversal of what we should call the natural relationship, so irrational from a naive point of view, is evidently as definitely a leading principle of capitalism as it is foreign to all peoples not under capitalistic influence. ~ Max Weber
The time when a nation most craves ease may be the moment when it can least afford to let down its guard. The moment when it most wishes it could address its domestic needs may be the moment when it most urgently has to confront an external threat. The nation that survives is the one that rises to meet that moment: that has the wisdom to recognize the threat and the will to turn it back, and that does so before it is too late. The naive notion that we can preserve freedom by exuding goodwill is not only silly, but dangerous. The more adherents it wins, the more it tempts the aggressor. ~ Richard M. Nixon
I came to London to make my dreams come true - big, naive head on me at twenty-two. Going to work every day physically hurts.' I hadn't realised how strongly I felt about my lack of a career, my Groundhog Day existence, until I uttered those last two words and realised I wasn't exaggerating. A kind of agony wrapped me in its razor-edged wires every day as I cycled to the Sugar Pot, to Kenneth and to my hideaway cupboard; it was dull, like my skin was smeared with a strong numbing cream. ~ Melanie Murphy
It's easy to be a naive idealist. It's easy to be a cynical realist. It's quite another thing to have no illusions and still hold the inner flame. ~ Marie-Louise Von Franz