Quotes About Naïveté

In the naïveté of youth, her parents had seemed like towering presences, omnipotent and all-knowing. But they weren't that; they were just two broken people.

She'd even thought she was ready for it—this beginning of the end—but now she saw her naïveté. There was no "ready" for death, especially not when it came for a young man you loved.

think about lightly swirling the wine in my hand, as would anyone who considers herself a true wine connoisseur, or so I think, to let it breathe, to intensify its bouquet, its aroma. But I don't. This afternoon I don't want to be a connoisseur. I want to enjoy my wine with the charming naïveté of a dilettante,

The long tradition of naiveté and self-righteousness that disfigures our intellectual history, however, must serve as a warning to the third world, if such a warning is needed, as to how our protestations of sincerity and benign intent are to be interpreted.

I've been thinking back to when I was younger, before I had a clue about benzos or purple drank or even weed. I was so innocent. I wish I could go back and be that dumbshit kid again, naïve and full of hope.

Most have simply seen and done too much; as the Rolling Stones have been proving for ten years, you have to work for innocence. You have to win it, or you end up with nothing more than a strained naïveté.

Surely--But I am very off from that. From surely. From indeed. From the decent arrow that was my clean naivete and my faith. This morning, men deliver wounds and death. They will deliver death and wounds tomorrow. And I doubt all. You. Or a violet.

gurus who will do the simplistic thinking for us and remove us from the suffering that forges larger and larger consciousness. They foster narcissism, naiveté, self-absorption, and indifference to others, promise magic versus the daily work of constructing our lives, and reward us with only superficial engagements with the

Highfalutin moral principles are impossible guides to foreign policy. At worst, they reflect hypocrisy; at best, extreme naivete.

She was kindhearted and forgiving, generous and naïve.

I wouldn't say that I dislike the young. I'm simply not a fan of naïveté.

If you're going to exude naivete, you can't really... walk out there like it's a Sting show. You can't be that well put together and then have this kind of innocent bravado.

I was young for my age. Not as naïve as they expected. I don't know why I seem to bring that out in people.

The social and political naivete of modern corporate boffins is frightening, they read me and just take bits, all the cute technology, and miss about fifteen levels of irony.

Yes, Evangeline loathed this place, but she loathed more the vanity and naivete and willful ignorance that had landed her here.

Naïveté was in fact warmly embraced. It proved a useful alternative to describing an action or statement as ingenuous, an adjective which contemporary users were apt to confuse with ingenious.19

I'm often characterized as an optimistic writer, and certainly my 'Neanderthal Parallax' and 'WWW' trilogies shade toward the utopian. I like to think that's not simple naivete, but rather a reasonable approach.

They think in terms of a sentimental ballad. And that's what terrifies you about them. It isn't their cruelty, it isn't even their shrewdness - it's their extraordinary naivete. Everything in their whole bloody world is a cliche. Everything is born out of a cliche, rests on a cliche, survives by a cliche. And they believe in the cliches - there's no hope

I never thought in terms of typing myself, because I wasn't that successful. After an actor has done a few pieces of work, his naïveté is the part of the craft he has to nurture most.

shall I spend much of your time pointing out the degree to which televisual values influence the contemporary mood of jaded weltschmerz, self-mocking materialism, blank indifference, and the delusion that cynicism and naïveté are mutually exclusive?

It's probably part of my naïveté that I don't want to put the issue in political terms when it's probably irreducibly political. Something has happened where we've decided on a personal level that it's all right to abdicate our individual responsibility to the common good and let government worry about the common good while we all go about our individual self-interested business and struggle to gratify our various appetites.

naïveté is the last true terrible sin in the theology of millennial America.

Life was an ongoing war against unseen and usually undefined enemies. Your own naiveté was one of those enemies. You had to battle it, and improvise, and guard your back. See

Reason in this newer philosophy took its starting point with childish naivete in its own integrity and trustworthiness.