100 Naive Quotes

Following is our list of naive quotations and slogans full of insightful wisdom and perspective about being naive.

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Famous Naive Quotes

Innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm. — Graham Greene

You are very familiar with Western ways, but you are too young. You go everywhere to follow the big news, but the questions you ask are too simple -- sometimes naive. — Jiang Zemin

The innocent is the person who explains nothing. — Albert Camus

We are more naive than those of the Middle Ages, and more frightened, for we can be made to believe almost anything. — Neil Postman

Not knowing anything is the sweetest life. — Sophocles

I am not innocent. Innocence is a science of the sublime. And I am only at the very beginning of the apprenticeship. — Helene Cixous

Children are born innocent. Before they are domesticated they live in the moment, love without fear, and don't even think about the opinions of others. — Miguel Angel Ruiz

I have never known so much naive conviction allied to greater intellectual poverty. — Claude Levi-Strauss

It's innocence when it charms us, ignorance when it doesn't. - Mignon McLaughlin

It's innocence when it charms us, ignorance when it doesn't. — Mignon McLaughlin

... pure and intelligent women can be deceived and misled by the baser sort, their very innocence and experience making them credulous and the helpless tools of the guilty and bold. — Catharine Beecher

Youth is easily deceived because it is quick to hope. — Aristotle

The trust of the innocent is the liar's most useful tool. - Stephen King

The trust of the innocent is the liar's most useful tool. — Stephen King

I am skeptical in principle, gullible in practice. — Mason Cooley

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

Innocence always calls mutely for protection when we would be so much wiser to guard ourselves against it: innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm. — Graham Greene

Short Naive Quotes

  • I'm not so naive as to think that everybody always succeeds, right? — Michael Saylor
  • Pop art is the American Dream, optimistic, generous, and naive! — Robert Indiana
  • Dare to be naive. — Richard Buckminster Fuller
  • I was so naive as a kid I used to sneak behind the barn and do nothing. — Johnny Carson
  • Every true genius is bound to be naive. — Friedrich Schiller
  • We will never have a perfect world, but it's not romantic or naive to work toward a better one. — Steven Pinker
  • I liked when I was naive and I thought it was just about making good music. — Sia Furler
  • Anybody who comes to you and says he has a perfect language is either naive or a salesman. — Bjarne Stroustrup
  • When I was 15, I was naive, looked like a grey mouse and felt second choice. — Kim Wilde
  • It is well for the heart to be naive and the mind not to be. — Anatole France

Naive Image Quotes

Naive quote Being positive in a negative situation is not naive. It's leadership.
Being positive in a negative situation is not naive. It's leadership.

I'm Not Naive Quotes

I look for the good in people. Sometimes I get hurt for it, but it's rare and it's worth it. You may hear me say optimistic things that sound naive. I'm not naive. I've read too much history to be naive. I just think love wins out over the darker parts of human nature in the end. — Lex Fridman

I’m not so naive as to think that everybody always succeeds, right? I mean, half of Shakespeare‘s stories are tragedies – right? — Michael Saylor

I'm not interested in building wealth, which is kind of naive and probably frowned on, living in America. It's something that people don't necessarily understand, but if I die poor, I die poor. — Richard Armitage

I'm too busy acting like I'm not Naive. I've seen it all, I was here first. — Kurt Cobain

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

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'm not naive to the fact that I'm an out gay actor. — Ellen Page

I'm not so naive that I didn't know or didn't suspect that, at some point, someone was going to say "You're writing about the occult." My wizarding world is a world of imagination. I think it is a moral world. — J. K. Rowling

I'm not ready to let the youthful part of myself go yet. If maturity means becoming a cynic, if you have to kill the part of yourself that is naive and romantic and idealistic - the part of you that you treasure most - to claim maturity, is it not better to die young but with your humanity intact? — Kenneth Cain

As a scientist, I want to go to Mars and back to asteroids and the Moon because I'm a scientist. But I can tell you, I'm not so naive a scientist to think that the nation might not have geopolitical reasons for going into space. — Neil deGrasse Tyson

Being Naive Quotes

It would be extremely naive to expect the dominant classes to develop a type of education that would enable subordinate classes to perceive social injustices critically. — Paulo Freire

Let's not be naive, we're not talking about a simple political battle; it is a destructive pretension against the plan of God. We are not talking about a mere bill, but rather a machination of the Father of Lies that seeks to confuse and deceive the children of God. — Pope Francis

Help each other to live and to grow in the Christian faith so as to be valiant witnesses of the Lord. Be united, but not closed. Be humble, but not fearful. Be simple, but not naive. Be thoughtful, but not complicated. Enter into dialogue with others, but be yourselves. — Pope Benedict XVI

I think it's taken me this long to really trust myself, but now I do, I really do. Thanks to my experience and wisdom, I've learned not to be so naive and trusting. Today I question everything and listen to my instincts. — Deborra-Lee Furness

It's a naive domestic Burgundy without any breeding, but I think you'll be amused by its presumption. — James Thurber

In a restaurant one is both observed and unobserved. Joy and sorrow can be displayed and observed "unwittingly," the writer scowling naively and the diners wondering, What the hell is he doing? — David Mamet

Children are always looking at the world as if it was for the first time in their lives. So, we should always look to the world with the eyes of a child. I am not saying be naive, I am saying be innocent in the sense of discovering things. — Paulo Coelho

A cheese may disappoint. It may be dull, it may be naive, it may be oversophisticated. Yet it remains cheese, milk's leap toward immortality. — Clifton Fadiman

My first record was about childhood. There were a lot of nursery rhyme and fairytale references; it was all about being naive. — Mika

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

Don't Be Naive Quotes

It's rather naive, apart from being ethically objectionable, to assume that our investigators travel around the country with bags of money trying to bribe witnesses to lie on the witness stand. We just don't operate that way. — Jim Garrison

I think the first experience scared the hell out of me. Within months of my initial marriage [on Angela Bowie], I realized I had done a really naive and rather stupid thing. . . . I don't think either of us had any real resolve about being together. The result was it made me wary of relationships. — David Bowie

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

These days there are a lot of people who just want to be famous. I think that comes from a naive place, because those people generally don't know what it's like. — Catherine Keener

Especially from my experience as a quant in a hedge fund - I naively went in there thinking that I would be making the market more efficient and then was like, oh my God, I'm part of this terrible system that is blowing up the world's economy, and I don't want to be a part of that. — Cathy O'Neil

Primitive, naive drawing can also be good drawing but it's hard to pull off. I don't think most submitters realize that. — Robert Mankoff

I believe that everything is political, and as such it should concern all of us. Authors who claim they don't deal with politics in their work are being naive, because even that is a political stance. — Elena Poniatowska

Artists will come into my office and say, "I just came from another label and they said you're research guys, you're data guys." I don't know what that means. Everybody who says that is being naive. — Monte Lipman

I don't think we should ever be at war. That's kind of naive, I suppose. — Sandy Duncan

The field (of filmmaking) is suddenly sexy, ... so it's deluged with these wannabes who say 'I don't want to be a secret agent, I'll be a filmmaker.' I think a lot of people are really kind of naive. — John Landis

People Writing About Naive

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Read quotes by Graham Greene

Graham Greene
quotes on writing, love

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Read quotes by Jiang Zemin

Jiang Zemin
quotes on love, happiness and education

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Read quotes by Albert Camus

Albert Camus
quotes on love, life and absurdity

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Read quotes by Neil Postman

Neil Postman
quotes on technology

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Read quotes by Sophocles

Sophocles
quotes on life, love and fate

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Read quotes by Helene Cixous

Helene Cixous
quotes on love, life and writing

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More Naive Quotes

How can you and I really expect to glide naively through life, as if to say, 'Lord, give me experience, but not grief, not sorrow, not pain, not opposition, not betrayal, and certainly not to be forsaken. Keep from me, Lord, all those experiences which made Thee what Thou art! Then, let me come and dwell with Thee and fully share Thy joy!' — Neal A. Maxwell

Everyone's opinions about things change over time. Nothing is constant. Everything changes. And to hold onto some dogged idea forever is a little rigid and maybe naive. — Frida Kahlo

The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everyone else, and nobody was going to bomb them. At Rotterdam, London, Warsaw, and half a hundred other places, they put their rather naive theory into operation. They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind. — Sir Arthur Harris, 1st Baronet

The stupid neither forgive nor forget; the naive forgive and forget; the wise forgive but do not forget. — Thomas Szasz

Rich kids gave us their old clothes. They were the best clothes we ever had. We were these very pure, naive, poor children. The rich kids called us a lot of names but it never bothered us because we didn't know what the words meant. — River Phoenix

I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naive or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman. — Anais Nin

It is naive to think that self-assertiveness is easy. To live self-assertively--which means to live authentically--is an act of high courage. That is why so many people spend the better part of their lives in hiding--from others and also from themselves. — Nathaniel Branden

(`Stairway to Heaven' is) a nice pleasant, well-meaning naive little song, very English. It's not the definitive Led Zeppelin song. `Kashmir' is. — Robert Plant

A veterinarian who naively gave PETA some of the animals, thinking they would find them homes, and examined the dead bodies of others, testified that they were 'healthy' and 'adoptable.' — Nathan Winograd

We look at the ancient Greeks with their gods on a mountain top throwing lightning bolts and say, 'Those ancient Greeks. They were so silly. So primitive and naive. Not like our religions. We have burning bushes talking to people and guys walking on water. We're ...sophisticated.' — Paul Provenza

(Some people) have a wonderful capacity to appreciate again and again, freshly and naively, the basic goods of life, with awe, pleasure, wonder, and even ecstasy. — Abraham Maslow

Once the amateur's naive approach and humble willingness to learn fades away, the creative spirit of good photography dies with it. Every professional should remain always in his heart an amateur. — Alfred Eisenstaedt

At times, in medicine, you feel you are inside a colossal and impossibly complex machine whose gears will turn for you only according to their own arbitrary rhythm. The notion that human caring, the effort to do better for people, might make a difference can seem hopelessly naive. But it isn't. — Atul Gawande

There is something I call social intelligence. You can do a lot in life on your own and you can do all kinds of stuff, but if you're really bad with people, if you're really naive or aggressive and push people away, if you don't know the political environment you're in, it invalidates all the things you know. You're not going to get anywhere. — Robert Greene

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. — Vera Nazarian

Is not life exactly what it ought to be, in a certain sense? Isn't it only the naive who find all of this baffling? If you've a notion of what man's heart is, wouldn't you say that maybe the whole effort of man on earth to build a civilization is simply man's frantic and frightened attempt to hide himself from himself? — Richard Wright

Philosophical reflection could not leave the relation of mind and spirit in the obscurity which had satisfied the needs of the naive consciousness. — Wilhelm Wundt

It's naive and even irresponsible for a grownup today to get her or his information about foreign policy and war and peace exclusively from the administration in power. It's essential to have other sources of information, to check those against one's own common sense, and to form your own judgment as to whether we ought to go to or persist in war. — Daniel Ellsberg

The greatest sin is appearing naive or old-fashioned so that somebody can give you a sort of a very cool arch smile and devastate you with one extraordinarily crafted line that puts kind of a hole in your pretentious balloon. — David Foster Wallace

Now Christianity sounded good at first to the naive convert. Love, peace and charity - what's wrong with that? I'll tell you what's wrong - a series of unprecedented horrors perpetrated by so-called Christians: The Inquisition, the Conquistadores, the American Indian wars, slavery, Hiroshima and the present-day Bible Belt. — William S. Burroughs

I hate that blacks and Hispanics are pitted against each other I really do, call me naive, I grew up in an adopted family where my mom is Christian and Caucasian, my dad is Jewish, my sister is Mexican and I don't know, I don't tan so well. I think I'm mostly Irish. — Andrew Breitbart

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

So yes I know how angry, or naive, or self-destructive, or messed up, or even deluded I sound weaving my way through these life stories at times. But beautiful things. Graceful things. Hopeful things can sometimes appear in dark places. — Lidia Yuknavitch

The state of interbeing is a vulnerable state. It is the vulnerability of the naive altruist, of the trusting lover, of the unguarded sharer. To enter it, one must leave behind the seeming shelter of a control-based life, protected by walls of cynicism, judgment, and blame. — Charles Eisenstein

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