Naively Quotes

#1. It felt - nearly twenty-five hundred years after Hippocrates had naively coined the overarching term karkinos - that modern oncology was hardly any more sophisticated in its taxonomy of cancer.

Siddhartha Mukherjee

#2. And I'm a stodgy old scientist who believes, naively, that there exists an external world, that there exist objective truths about that world, and that my job is to discover some of them.

Alan Sokal

#3. As a gentleman- assuming you still have some pretensions in that direction- of honor- again, perhaps presumptuous, but still supposing your passing acquaintance with the concept- it is your duty- I won't even trouble to speculate here, but remain naively hopeful- to protect those under your care.

Connie Brockway

#4. Surely, a single bunch of carrots painted naively, just as we personally see it, is worth all the endless banalities of the Schools, all those dreary pictures concocted out of tobacco juice according to time-honored formulas?

Paul Cezanne

#5. To live in high spirits but not recklessly, to be lighthearted without swaggering or rampaging, to show trust and truthfulness but not unconditionally and not naively, and to face uncertainty with imagination instead of fatalism - this is the art of living.

David A. Nyberg

#6. Don't naively assume that negative influences have no impact on you, they do.

Mensah Oteh

#7. He groped for and cupped her hot little slew from behind, then frantically scrambled into a boy's sandcastle- molding position; but she turned over, naively ready to embrace him the way Juliet is recommended to receive her Romeo.

Vladimir Nabokov

#8. I naively thought that we could have a molecular definition for life, come up with a set of genes that would minimally define life. Nature just refuses to be so easily quantified.

Craig Venter

#9. The first time someone tried to share the Gospel with me, I naively explained that I was Jewish and born in Israel, thank you ... This was a big mistake. In certain parts of Christian America, admitting I was an Israeli-born Jew turned me into walking catnip.

Hanna Rosin

#10. The term 'cyberutopian' tends to be used only in the context of critique. Calling someone a cyberutopian implies that he or she has an unrealistic and naively overinflated sense of what technology makes possible and an insufficient understanding of the forces that govern societies.

Ethan Zuckerman

#11. I naively thought I would quit television writing, move up to Seattle, my novel would come out, and then I'd have a novel writing career, and so I found myself really stuck in this very poisonous self-pitying state and felt like I'd never write again. And I blamed Seattle for that.

Maria Semple

#12. 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

#13. We have dreamt of every woman there is, and dreamt too of the miracle that would bring us the pleasure of being a woman, for women have all the qualities - courage, passion, the capacity to love, cunning - whereas all our imagination can do is naively pile up the illusion of courage.

Jean Baudrillard

#14. All non-smokers seem to live in the belief that smokers have wandered naively through life, bereft of the knowledge that their habit is extremely bad for them.

Michael Marshall Smith

#15. Sometimes I worry Jesse could lead me into hell and I'd follow along, naively saying things like, "Is it getting hot to you?" and believing him when he told me it was fine.

Taylor Jenkins Reid

#16. Moreover, most people, assuming they had not altogether abandoned religious observances, or did not combine them naively with a thoroughly immoral way of living, had replaced normal religious practice by more or less extravagant superstitions.

Albert Camus

#17. Perhaps the biggest myth about cynicism is that it deepens with age. I think what really happens is that experience painfully rips away layers of scales from our eyes, and so we do indeed become more cynical about many of the things we naively accepted when younger.

Julian Baggini

#18. He vacated a myriad times in the naively prolonged girl.

Howard Mittelmark

#19. 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

#20. Maybe I naively subscribed to the foolish notion that my love could save him. Whatever the reason, I entered the room and sank to the carpet beside that sad and broken boy.

A Meredith Walters

#21. I'm still the person who naively thinks if I can imagine it, I can have it.

Jennifer Lee

#22. I had this strange belief, perhaps naively, that somehow, if I kept working hard, and I kept doing it with integrity, that I would get my chance.

Michael Buble

#23. It is naively assumed that the fact that the majority of people share certain ideas and feelings proves the validity of these ideas and feelings. Nothing could be further from the truth. Consensual validation as such has no bearing on reason or mental health.

Erich Fromm

#24. The most fortunate are those who 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 H. Maslow

#25. A theology that does not build on the past ignores our debt to history and naively overlooks the fact that the present is conditioned by history. A theology that relies upon the past evades the demands of the present.

Greg Nichols

#26. I realise that I had the best of serious picture journalism. There was an innocence in our approach, especially in the 1950s and 1960s when we naively believed that by holding a mirror up to the world we could help - no matter how little - to make people aware of the human condition.

Eve Arnold

#27. Aren't men funny? When they want to pay you the greatest compliment in their power, they naively tell you that you have a masculine mind. There is one compliment, incidentally, that I shall never be paying him. I cannot honestly say that he has a quickness of perception almost feminine.

Jean Webster

#28. No, he wasn't a Jain, thought the Swede, but he might as well have been - he was just as pathetically and naively nonviolent. The idiocy of the uprightness of the goals he had set.

Philip Roth

#29. Maybe I'm naively romantic, but I do believe that spice and excitement doesn't stop once a couple gets together.

Stana Katic

#30. Between what human beings so naively and stupidly fear and what they most profoundly ought to fear-i.e. what they so pathogenically and addictively do to their own selves-there is a horrendous gulf and disparity.

Kenny Smith

#31. To be careless in making decisions is to naively believe that a single decision impacts nothing more than that single decision, for a single decision can spawn a thousand others that were entirely unnecessary or it can bring peace to a thousand places we never knew existed.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

#32. The problem with modernism is that we actually believe, naively and arrogantly, that we can in some way hold any concept and grasp it - and if we cannot, they it is absurd and impossible and therefore nonexistent.

Tobin Wilson

#33. 'Pride' is my first film with a happy ending. Before, I naively thought they were a cop-out, but now I've come to believe that happy endings and wish fulfilment are an incredibly important part of our cultural life.

Joe Wright

#34. Just as we tend to assume that the world is as we see it, we naively suppose that the people are as we imagine them to be.

C. G. Jung

#35. I naively believe that self-love is 80 percent of the solution, that it helps beyond words to take yourself through the day as you would with your most beloved mental-patient relative, with great humor and lots of small treats.

Anne Lamott

#36. Perhaps naively I thought people understand what humor was, that it was invented by the human race to cope with the dark areas of life, problems and terrors.

Bill Forsyth

#37. The naively cynical measure a piece of legislation, a victory, a milestone not against the past or the limits of the possible, but against their ideas of perfection...

Rebecca Solnit

#38. The most ridiculous were those who, on their own authority, made themselves the judges and justices of the tribe. They seemed never to suspect that our judgments judge us, and that nothing exposes our weaknesses and reveals ourselves more naively than the attitude of pronouncing upon our neighbors.

Paul Valery

#39. In today's impoverished dialogue, critiques of liberalism are often naively called "conservative," as if twenty-five hundred years of Western intellectual tradition presented no other alternatives.

Camille Paglia

#40. After I left college I thought, very naively, that either you became someone interesting - an artist - or you went into academia. If you ended up in an office you were dull and lacking. And I ended up in an office.

Joshua Ferris

#41. When I was a boy, I naively thought that this thing called happiness would be something I would wake up to find every day once I could smoke, drink and fornicate.

Jeffrey Bernard

#42. One naively thinks that by winning the Olympics, it's going to be this switch, and then your life is going to be perfect, and that's not reality.

Dorothy Hamill

#43. To her mind the Senate was a place where people went to recite speeches, and she naively assumed that the speeches were useful and had a purpose, but as they did not interest her she never went again. This is a very common conception of Congress; many Congressmen share it.

Henry Adams

#44. Ignorance is never better. I may not like what I learn, but I would rather know the truth than naively give credence to something that does not exist.

Connie Brockway

#45. When you decide you want to become a television writer, you naively assume it's going to be like the writers on the old 'Dick Van Dyke Show.' You'll write something and they'll just put it on TV. But what you quickly discover is that American network television is television by committee.

Jeffrey Klarik

#46. In our wildest aberrations we dream of an equilibrium we have left behind and which we naively expect to find at the end of our errors. Childish presumption which justifies the fact that child-nations, inheriting our follies, are now directing our history.

Albert Camus

#47. I slept peacefully that night, feeling exultant and determined. Little did I know that I was making the most common and the most painful mistake women have made all throughout the ages: to naively think that with their love they can change the man they love.

Elif Shafak

#48. We've never thought too deeply about the roles things like forgetting or partisanship or inefficiency or ambiguity or hypocrisy play in our political or social life. It's been impossible to get rid of them, so we took them for granted, and we kind of thought, naively, that they're always the enemy.

Evgeny Morozov

#49. I naively thought I had to go door to door, find somebody who could record me singing some songs. I didn't know Music Row, I didn't know anything! So after six or seven months, I went back home and went to college.

David Nail

#50. Some may think that to affirm dialogue - the encounter of women and men in the world in order to transform the world - is naively and subjectively idealistic. there is nothing, however, more real or concrete than people in the world and with the world, than humans with other humans.

Paulo Freire

#51. No militia or political leader is so powerful - his name never so influential - as when he is dead, enshrined on wall posters and gateposts amid naively painted clusters of tulips and roses, the final artistic accolade of every armed martyr in Lebanon.

Robert Fisk

#52. Those who naively credit Gandhi with a conscientious or consistent pacifism might wish to ask if this did not amount to letting the Japanese imperialists do his fighting for him.

Christopher Hitchens

#53. In the winters, I enrolled in the hotel management program at Cornell University. I naively thought that I knew something about sleight-of-hand, entertainment and food, and that would be all I needed.

Ricky Jay

#54. Thanks to a lifetime of brainwashing by Disney and Lifetime and Hallmark, she naively believes glimpsing God during an epic fuck somehow translates into some kind of happily ever after with her Prince Charming.

Lauren Rowe

#55. Television should be the last mass communication medium to be naively designed and put into the world without a surgeon-general's warning.

Alan Kay

#56. I believe the answers to most problems that confront us around the world can and should be approached by engaging both friend and foe in dialogue. No, I don't naively think that dialogue always works, but I believe we should avoid the rigidity of saying that dialogue never works.

Rand Paul