Top 934 Naive Quotes & Sayings - Page 16

You never in a million years thought that you would ever end up in a Woody Allen film even though that might be your dream, and there you are. Suddenly you've got one. But you're not playing the quintessential Woody Allen heroine, which is somebody that's full of self-doubt and heartbreakingly naïve. Chloe in Match Point was a nightmare in some ways and totally entitled, and felt like everything was going to be all right. Most of the women in Woody Allen films feel like everything's awful. I didn't understand what to do. But some of the confusion is helpful.

More than just a moral issue, hope is a spiritual and even religious choice. Hope is not a feeling; it is a decision. And the decision for hope is based on what you believe at the deepest levels - what your most basic convictions are about the world and what the future holds - all based on your faith. You choose hope, not as a naive wish, but as a choice, with your eyes wide open to the reality of the world - just like the cynics who have not made the decision for hope.

Postmodern irony and cynicism's become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what's wrong, because they'll look sentimental and naive to all the weary ironists. Irony's gone from liberating to enslaving. ... The postmodern founders' patricidal work was great, but patricide produces orphans, and no amount of revelry can make up for the fact that writers my age have been literary orphans throughout our formative years.

Naive optimism and pervasive pessimism are both to be avoided, therefore. It's not an easy balance to maintain, to be asked to work away in the Ninevehs of our lives without being so conscious of the coming cataclysm that we are not serious citizens of our communities and nations. By living and sharing the gospel of Jesus Christ, we are doing the most relevant thing we can do by way of helping. (There are civic and other chores to be done, of course.) Day in and day out, the gospel is the one thing that is most relevant, and we are to be of good cheer.

To speak of ‘limits to growth’ under a capitalistic market economy is as meaningless as to speak of limits of warfare under a warrior society. The moral pieties, that are voiced today by many well-meaning environmentalists, are as naive as the moral pieties of multinationals are manipulative. Capitalism can no more be ‘persuaded’ to limit growth than a human being can be ‘persuaded’ to stop breathing. Attempts to ‘green’ capitalism, to make it ‘ecological’, are doomed by the very nature of the system as a system of endless growth.

When I pray, I never pray for myself, always for others, or else I hold a silly, naive, or deadly serious dialogue with what is deepest inside me, which for the sake of convenience I call God. Praying to God for something for yourself strikes me as being too childish for words. To pray for another's well-being is something I find childish as well; one should only pray that another should have enough strength to shoulder his burden. If you do that, you lend him some of your own strength.

Please don't take him away from this world. Please don't let him die here in my arms, not after everything we've been through together, not after You've taken so many others. Please, I beg You, let him live. I am willing to sacrifice anything to make this happen- I'm willing to do anything You ask. Maybe you'll laugh at me for such a naive promise, but I mean it in earnest, and I don't care if it makes no sense or seems impossible. Let him live. Please. I can't bear this a second time. Tell me there is still good in this world. Tell me there is still hope for all of us.

I've always liked the idea of inventing stuff. My father told me, because I was naïve, I would think things could work and therefore do them, because I would have no doubt even though there was no solid foundation for this confidence. I don't think I would be a real inventor. But when I set out to do animation, which was my first step into film-making, I realised I could achieve this idea. I could take some elements, create a sort of clumsy invention, and make them work for the camera.

Designing for me is a very complex process. There are many ideas that I want to express in one object, very often contradictory. The creative process in Miu Miu is completely different from that of Prada. Miu Miu is not as complicated and thought out as Prada. Rather than being young, Miu Miu is immediate Prada is very sophisticated and considered; Miu Miu is much more naive. The solution, when I am working on Miu Miu, has to come immediately, instinctively, spontaneously with whatever is available at the moment. If I think three times, I stop.

In any big spectacular, it's really difficult to have enough voices to cover all the vocal parts. To give the audience the complete experience they're expecting, there is some reinforcement, some playback that everybody's hearing. Sometimes it's background vocals, but sometimes it will be actually vocal tracks. It's so hard to ensure, with no safety net ... you're not gonna get another shot at it, you have to have stability. I think it's very naïve of a lot of people to think that when you see someone open their mouth, they're really singing.

Maybe it's naïve, but I would love to believe that once you grow to love some aspect of a culture-its music, for instance -you can never again think of the people of that culture as less than yourself. I would like to believe that if I am deeply moved by a song originating from some place other than my own homeland, then I have in some way shared an experience with the people of that culture. I have been pleasantly contaminated. I can identify in some small way with it and its people.

If you're going to point out the ridiculousness of a rule, it's naïve to think that you can break it. It's the same way that rappers have embraced capitalism. Some people say they liked it better when rap was a literal protest form in the '90s. But I think it's more a form of protest today, because it's telling the story of what happens once something forbidden is within reach. I think rap is more political today when it speaks about luxury watches than it does about fighting the power.

As to the human race. There are many pretty and winning things about the human race. It is perhaps the poorest of all the inventions of all the gods but it has never suspected it once. There is nothing prettier than its naive and complacent appreciation of itself. It comes out frankly and proclaims without bashfulness or any sign of a blush that it is the noblest work of God. It has had a billion opportunities to know better, but all signs fail with this ass. I could say harsh things about it but I cannot bring myself to do it-it is like hitting a child.

Every four years the naive half who vote are encouraged to believe that if we can elect a really nice man or woman President everything will be all right. But it won't be. Any individual who is able to raise $25 million to be considered presidential is not going to be much use to the people at large. He will represent oil, or aerospace, or banking, or whatever moneyed entities are paying for him. Certainly he will never represent the people of the country, and they know it. Hence, the sense of despair throughout the land as incomes fall, businesses fail and there is no redress.

Now, almost twenty years since my last job in book publishing, I know that there are far more socially inept people in book than in magazine publishing. At the time, however, I just didn't feel I was enough: smart enough, savvy enough, well read enough, educated enough, charming enough. Much of this was probably because I was very naive, and didn't really know how to behave in an office. This made me a terrible assistant, which in turn made me a terrible junior book editor.

The transition from Religion to Scientific contemplation is a violent, dangerous leap, which is not to be recommended. In order to make this transition, art is far rather to be employed to relieve the mind overburdened with emotions. Out of the illogical comes much good. It is so firmly rooted in the passions, in language, in art, in religion, and generally in everything which gives value to life. It is only the naive people who can believe that the nature of man can be changed into a purely logical one. We have yet to learn that others can suffer, and this can never be completely learned.

I have a perhaps naive point of view informed by my own kind of snowflake-in-the-unique-sense rather than the political sense, personal story. I mean I feel like my experiences are so hard to map onto any kind of generalized identity. For example, I'm a black person, but I come from a very particular black experience which is not unlike the experience of the Barack Obama. I have an African mother and a white father and I feel like I have a different experience of being a black person as a result of that identity than someone who is from the descendants of slaves.

You say you are a nameless man. You are not to your wife and to your child. You will not long remain so to your immediate colleagues if you can answer their simple questions when they come into your office. You are not nameless to me. Do not remain nameless to yourself — it is too sad a way to be. Know your place in the world and evaluate yourself fairly, not in terms of the naïve ideals of your own youth, nor in terms of what you erroneously imagine your teacher's ideals are.

I don't know about [Rex] Tillerson, but I do know that John Bolton doesn't get it. He still believes in regime change. He's still a big cheerleader for the Iraq war. He's promoted a nuclear attack by Israel on Iran. He wants to do regime change in Iran. So, I think John Bolton is so far out of it and has such a naive understanding of the world. If he were to be the assistant or the undersecretary for Tillerson, I'm an out automatic no on Bolton.

Rational thinking which is free from assumptions ends therefore in mysticism. To relate oneself in the spirit of reverence for life to the multiform manifestations of the will-to-live which together constitute the world is ethical mysticism. All profound world-view is mysticism, the essence of which is just this: that out of my unsophisticated and naïve existence in the world there comes, as a result of thought about self and the world, spiritual self-devotion to the mysterious infinite Will which is continuously manifested in the universe.

Men and women ... do you not realize that the State is the worst enemy you have? It is a machine that crushes you in order to sustain the ruling class, your masters. Like naïve children you put your trust in your political leaders. You make it possible for them to creep into your confidence, only to have them betray you to the first bidder. But even where there is no direct betrayal, the labour politicians make common cause with your enemies to keep you in leash, to prevent your direct action. The State is the pillar of capitalism, and it is ridiculous to expect any redress from it.

The greatest economic minds of the 19th century, all of them without exception, considered economic growth as a temporary necessity. When all human needs are satisfied, then we will have a stable economy, reproducing every year the same things. We will stop straining ourselves worrying about development or growth. How naïve they were! One more reason to be reluctant about predicting the future. No doubt they were wiser than me, but even they made such a mistake!

We live, understandably enough, with the sense of urgency; our clock, like Baudelaire's, has had the hands removed and bears the legend, "It is later than you think." But with us it is always a little too late for mind, yet never too late for honest stupidity; always a little too late for understanding, never too late for righteous, bewildered wrath; always too late for thought, never too late for naïve moralizing. We seem to like to condemn our finest but not our worst qualities by pitting them against the exigency of time.

I like playing... I don't know. I think that's what was really exciting about playing Knives, too, from the beginning was that you get to kind of do both of that. She's almost like two different people, but that's what's cool about it, because I get to show her growth and that's the thing that's really cool about Knives, you get to really see her grow up from being meek and innocent and naïve at the beginning to this powerful girl who is going for what she really believes in and what she really wants.

Now, in the sixties we were naive, like children. Everybody went back to their rooms and said 'We didn't get a wonderful world of just flowers and peace and happy chocolate, and it won't be just pretty and beautiful all the time,' and just like babies everyone went back to their rooms and sulked. 'We're going to stay in our rooms and play rock and roll and not do anything else, because the world's a nasty horrible place, because it didn't give us everything we cried for.' Right? Crying for it wasn't enough.

Sometimes differences arise partly from incomplete information. We are finite. And we should admit that there are cases of uncertainty. But often the differences become exacerbated because of sinful inclinations underneath the surface, which incline us to prefer our own ideas and not to submit to what is less comfortable. We must be cautious about accusing anyone else of sin. We don't know people's hearts. But we must also avoid being naïve about the subtlety of sin and the corrupting effects of sin on the mind - our own minds, not only the mind of the other fellow.

We think of women at every age: while still children, we fondle with a naïve sensuality the breasts of those grown-up girls kissing us and cuddling us in their arms; at the age of ten, we dream of love; at fifteen, love comes along; at sixty, it is still with us, and if dead men in their tombs have any thought in their heads, it is how to make their way underground to the nearby grave, lift the shroud of the dear departed women, and mingle with her in her sleep

It goes a long way back, some twenty years. All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was. I accepted their answers too, though they were often in contradiction and even self-contradictory. I was naive. I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer. It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: That I am nobody but myself. But first I had to discover that I am an invisible man!

If... deceit is fundamental to animal communication, then there must be strong selection to spot deception and this ought, in turn, to select for a degree of self-deception, rendering some facts and motives unconscious so as not to betray - by the subtle signs of self-knowledge - the deception being practiced.' Thus, 'the conventional view that natural selection favors nervous systems which produce ever more accurate images of the world must be a very naive view of mental evolution.

I absolutely never thought I would! But it's something to look forward to in my career. I'm not just the young, leading guy who falls in love, simple and naive. Even just doing Enjolras recently in Les Mis. I used to cover Marius and thought: "Oh, that's simple. What I should be doing." But then when I got Enjolras, I hadn't even thought about it. He's more powerful, sure of himself, a leader. It was nice! It was much harder singing, passionate, declamatory. Which was awesome - and now this!

I go into every meeting, into every room and for every speech understanding the standard deviation, the Bell Curve. I know there are about 10-15 percent of people in the room, who say, "I've been trying to say this for years. Finally. I agree. Yes, yes, yes." I know there are about 15 percent of the people in the room who think I'm an idiot, who think I don't know what I'm talking about, who think I'm naive or I have oversimplified everything. The majority who are open to the ideal.

Like a lot of people, I had this naive hope that Barack Obama would fix everything quickly. You know, the culture of celebrity in this country leads us away from democratic ways of thinking and into this hero worship. And so of course, one man cannot swoop in and fix everything on his own. It's much more complicated and difficult than that, and progressives in this country since then have had to come to terms with the fact that we need to do more than actually get out of our house and vote. It's an ongoing process to turn the tide.

If we want to postulate a deity capable of engineering all the organized complexity in the world, either instantaneously or by guiding evolution, that deity must have been vastly complex in the first place. The creationist, whether a naive Bible-thumper or an educated bishop, simply postulates an already existing being of prodigious intelligence and complexity. If we are going to allow ourselves the luxury of postulating organized complexity without offering an explanation, we might as well make a job of it and simply postulate the existence of life as we know it!

I really can't tell other people how to live their life or how to approach different things. What I can tell them - and I truly believe this, I don't think it's being naïve and I don't think it's being in denial - I really believe that the way you think influences the way you feel, and the way you feel influences the way you act.