Quotes About Naïveté

I ended that letter, 'There is nothing in this life that is a complete tragedy - nothing - try to remember that.' Looking back, I wonder at my naiveté. Some things in life ARE complete tragedies. Ted Bundy's story may well be one of them.

There is no real parallel to this in science, which abhors error, and which concerns matters in which naïveté cannot be distinguished from ignorance.

Among other things, my own experience has led me to believe that American naivete can sometimes be more than it seems; it can hide something we Europeans can't or don't want to understand.

When your heroes reveal themselves as human, it exposes your own flaws, too. Naivete, mainly, a willingness to believe in someone, something.

We admire people who oppose the regime in totalitarian country and think they have courage or a strong moral sense or have remained true to their principles and the like. We may also smile at their naïveté, thinking, Don't they realise that their words are of no use at all against this oppressive power? That they will hath to pay dearly for their protest?

The child-like, gum-chewing naïveté , the glamour rooted in despair, the self admiring carelessness, the perfected otherness, the wispiness, the shadowy, voyeuristic, vaguely sinister aura, the pale, soft-spoken magical presence, the skin and bones…

I never pictured L.A. as a hub for amazing food, which I learned quite quickly is sheer naivete. The restaurants here are insane.

Nothing is beautiful, only people are beautiful: all aesthetics is based on this naïveté, this is its first truth. Let us immediately add its second: the only thing ugly is a degenerating person, - this defines the realm of aesthetic judgment.

In sum: the world might be far more valuable than we used to believe; we must see through the naiveté of our ideals, and while we thought that we had accorded it the highest interpretation, we may not have given our human existence a moderately fair value.

And there persisted in her a sense of Michael's dangerous innocence, his naivete, which seemed to her to be connected to his attitudes about evil. He understood good better than he did evil.

Mine was the naïveté of the living; now it is the confusion and longing of the dead. Pray when I am finished with this tale, I will go on to something greater. Punishment even would have its shape, its purpose, some conviction of meaning. I cannot imagine eternal flames. But I can imagine eternal meaning.

I had lost some of my naivete and gained strength. These women with their pointless scheming could not contain me, and I watched the volatile world of the gynaeceum with a detached eye. The Forbidden City had buried my youth, and in the monastery, I had died and come back to life. Friends, enemies and mistresses had all disappeared. I was a ghost from a lost world, still going from one season to the next and still living for one man alone.

It was everyone for themselves. To each according to his or her avarice, from each according to his or her naiveté. The sharing economy, it turned out, was the uncaring economy.

Theodore Roosevelt was less impressed. He wrote that "peace without victory is the natural ideal of the man who is too proud to fight"—a sideways shot at Wilson's manhood and his naïveté. Roosevelt also reminded Americans that in 1776 it was the Tories, the loyalists to Britain, who had preached "peace without victory," and likewise the Copperheads, or sympathizers with the slave-owning South, who preached the same during the Civil War.

Naivete is the real reason I applied to Juilliard. I wanted to study drama and not musical theater because I have a hard time dancing. I only applied there.

I don't know if it's naivete or just narcissism, but I start out with this notion that I can do anything. It's not until I get into it that I realize what I've thrown myself into, and then I will do anything not to humiliate myself. And that, I think, is the secret to my success.

What will be the physiognomy of painting, of poetry, of music, in a hundred years? No one can tell. As after the fall of Athens, of Rome, a long pause will intervene, caused by the exhaustion of consciousness itself. Humanity, to rejoin the past, must invent a second naiveté, without which the arts can never begin again.

naivete is the only road to salvation. But for those who feel and conceive life as a long agony, the question of salvation is a simple one. There is no salvation on their road.

Naiveté, optimism, generosity—we encounter them among botanists, specialists in the pure sciences, explorers, never among politicians, historians, or priests.

American courts are not all-powerful institutions. They were designed with severe limitations and placed in a political system of divided powers. To ask them to produce significant social reform is to forget their history and ignore their constraints. It is to cloud our vision with a naive and romantic belief in the triumph of rights over politics. And while romance and even naivete have their charms, they are not best exhibited in courtrooms.

There is an important difference between openness and naïveté. Not everyone has good intentions nor means me well. I remind myself I do not need to change these people, only recognize who they are.

You study, you learn, but you guard the original naivete. It has to be within you, as desire for drink is within the drunkard or love is within the lover.

If the reason people invest is to make money, then in seeking advice they are asking others to tell them how to make money. That idea has some element of naïveté.

The naïveté of human beings is truly breathtaking