Naiveté Quotes

“What is it that the child has to teach?

The child naively believes that everything should be fair
and everyone should be honest,
that only good should prevail,
that everybody should have what they want
and there should be no pain or sadness.

The child believes the world should be perfect
and is outraged to discover it is not.

And the child is right.”
― Tzvi Freeman, Wisdom to Heal the Earth - Meditations and Teachings of the Lubavitcher Rebbe

“We are never as steeped in history as when we pretend not to be, but if we stop pretending we may gain in understanding what we lose in false innocence. Naiveté is often an excuse for those who exercise power. For those upon whom that power is exercised, naiveté is always a mistake.”
― Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History

“You claim to want love, but how can that be if you have not yet met the person you love? Rather, you desire its advantages: touch, security, and company. Love is born from another person—their touch, their company, their ideas. Love is a hand that knocks on our doors and owns no door of its own for you to knock on. When dealing with people, we are each too unique and changing to be labeled and be fitted to another person’s prerequisite needs. And so, it is our lovers who introduce us to our desire. Until then, it is not love that we want. If we claim, alone in our homes, to so badly want love, or marriage, we likely want that other thing.”
― Karl Kristian Flores, The Goodbye Song

“We somehow have led ourselves to believe that our questions are big enough to encircle life, and that life is small enough to be contained by the answers. The real question might be, are we ignorant or just plain stupid?”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“Thou didst not know, who tottered, wandering on high
That fate had made thee for the pleasure of the wind,
With those great careless wings,
Nor yet did I.”
― Robert Frost

“Yes, Chevalier, you are young, your speeches illustrate it; you are wanting in experience; the day will come, and I await it, when you will be seasoned; then, my dear, you will no longer speak so well of mankind, for you will have made its acquaintance. ‘Twas men's ingratitude dried out my heart, their perfidy which destroyed in me those baleful virtues for which, perhaps, like you, I was also born.”
― Marquis de Sade, Philosophy in the Boudoir

“Modern man is rather like a bisected wasp which goes on sucking jam and pretends that the loss of its abdomen does not matter”
― George Orwell, Essays

“I felt experienced without feeling that I, personally, had been through anything.”
― Elaine Dundy, The Dud Avocado

“If you love her, you cannot see her […] Because love is blind.”
― William Shakespeare, The Two Gentlemen of Verona

“They denied the paradox by swallowing it whole.”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

“Wide-eyed but still confident: a perfect candidate for ruin.”
― A.D. Aliwat, In Limbo

“The most naive is sometimes the most knowing. It happens.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Miserables