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Naive   /nˌaɪˈiv/   Listen
Naive

adjective
1.
Marked by or showing unaffected simplicity and lack of guile or worldly experience.  Synonym: naif.  "The naive assumption that things can only get better" , "This naive simple creature with wide friendly eyes so eager to believe appearances"
2.
Of or created by one without formal training; simple or naive in style.  Synonym: primitive.
3.
Inexperienced.
4.
Lacking information or instruction.  Synonyms: unenlightened, uninstructed.
5.
Not initiated; deficient in relevant experience.  Synonyms: uninitiate, uninitiated.  "He took part in the experiment as a naive subject"



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"Naive" Quotes from Famous Books



... made to steal the Arab since he had come into the Captain's possession. It was a dangerous undertaking, for the horse had the naive habit of relegating man to his proper place, either by ignoring his presence, or by quietly kicking him into eternity with the same indifference that he would switch a fly with his tail. Jose might feed ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown

... so engagingly naive in this compliment that Sylvia found it impossible to be formal. She smiled ...
— The Top of the World • Ethel M. Dell

... literally something the single cell has made of itself by sub-dividing and differentiating. In the process, the cell mass often goes through stages which stand out as individualities in themselves, that appear on the surface absolutely unrelated. So the caterpillar and the butterfly, to the naive child, seem as far apart as worm and bird. In the case of the frog, the tadpole as a first sketch seems completely an impossible and wild absurdity. Yet we know that there is an orderly progression of events, a propagation ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.

... more exact and deep study of reality, but it was precisely by means of this character that he succeeded, as no one else could do, in expressing the elevated ideas of his serene and calm soul, profound inspiration and naive ...
— Fra Angelico • J. B. Supino

... in Mr. Champney's sitting-room, although she would have preferred the public dining-room. Mr. Champneys was an abstemious man, but the girl was frankly greedy with the naive greed of one who had been heretofore stinted. She had seldom had what she really craved, and at best she had never had enough of it. To be allowed to order what and as much as she pleased, to be served first, to have her wishes consulted at all, was a new, amazing, ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler

... hoping that it would not be with the airs of Lucia and Traviata that she would become famous. As if in answer, the child began to hum the celebrated waltz, a moment after a beautiful Ave Maria, composed by a Fleming at the end of the fifteenth century, a quick, sobbing rhythm, expressive of naive petulance at delay in the Virgin's intercession. Mr. Innes called it natural music—music which the modern Church abhorred and shamefully ostracised; and the conversation turned on the incurably bad taste and the musical misdeeds of a certain priest, Father Gordon, whom Mr. ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore

... consisted principally of French provincial girls, sent to Paris to finish their education. Some of them Erica liked exceedingly; every one of them was to her a curious and interesting study. She liked to hear them talk about their home life, and, above all things, to hear their simple, naive remarks about religion. Of course she was on her honor not to enter into discussions with them, and they regarded all English as heretics, and did not trouble themselves to distinguish between the different grades. But there was nothing to prevent her from observing and listening, ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall

... the heart, Celia had taken a violent fancy to this pale-blooded hypochondriac, and made no secret of the fact that she regarded him as her especial property. Nothing is so flattering to the vanity as the preference of a child, that naive, spontaneous affection to which it is impossible to impute mercenary motives. And Joel had responded by becoming Celia's abject slave. He ignored the other children for the most part, seldom betraying, ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith

... Jackson had been seriously doubted. As it was, he lost many votes through a report that he had been guilty of saying that "he was as strong for Jackson as any reasonable man should be." The Governor himself, in his naive account of the canvass, acknowledges the damaging nature of this accusation, and comforts himself with quoting an indiscretion of Kinney's, who opposed a projected canal on the ground that "it would flood ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay

... This naive suggestion did not affect him as much as the fact that this fair young girl had confessed herself his friend. He did not look at Myrtle now; he stared straight ahead, at the wall paper, and his brow was furrowed as ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces and Uncle John • Edith Van Dyne

... instinctively that he was going to have to keep the number of his immediate associates small. They were going to have to know his secret, and no man is so naive as not to realize that while one person can keep a secret, it becomes twice as hard for two and from that point on the likelihood fades in ...
— The Common Man • Guy McCord (AKA Dallas McCord Reynolds)

... from the unconscious, naive folk-song type of Haydn, we find highly wrought instrumental melodies; although such was his inborn spontaneity of expression that we are never aware of the labor expended. His works are quite as clear as those of Haydn, but they show a more conscious ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding

... epigrams to say to Mr. Smith to-night. How delightfully rustic we all are! So naive! I am going to order dinner, and add up the household ...
— The Green Carnation • Robert Smythe Hichens

... the ancient law. But it does not work. There is no justice in exchanging a German eye and a French. French eyes see beauty in everything. To the German eye the sense of beauty has been denied. You cannot compare a beast and a man. In the old days, when there were wolves, it was the custom of the naive people of those days to torture a wolf if they caught one. They put him to death with the same refinements which were requisitioned for human criminals. This meant nothing to the wolf. The mere fact that he had been caught was what tortured him. And so I think it will be with ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy

... the claim of the specialist that I would repudiate. People are too apt to suppose that in order to discuss morals a man must have exceptional moral gifts. I would dispute that naive supposition. I am an ingenuous enquirer with, I think, some capacity for religious feeling, but neither a prophet nor a saint. On the whole I should be inclined to classify myself as a bad man rather than a good; not indeed as any sort ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells

... there fell on him a great temptation: Why should he not cut St. Guthlac's throat, and instal himself in his cell, that he might have the honour and glory of sainthood? But St. Guthlac perceived the inward temptation (which is told with the naive honesty of those half-savage times), and rebuked the offender into confession, and all went ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley

... fancies. Conversations with the Twin Sailors filled many of the pages; accounts of Paul's "adventures" occupied others. Sometimes it seemed impossible that a child of eleven should have written them, then would come an expression so boyish and naive that Miss Trevor laughed delightedly over it. When she finished the book and closed it she found Stephen Kane at her elbow. He removed his pipe and ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922 • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... falseness of her position in the midst of a court noted for its gallantry contributed much, no doubt, to draw a veil of melancholy over a face where the charms and the vivacity of love must have shone in earlier days. Obliged to repress the naive impulses and emotions of a woman when she simply feels them instead of reflecting about them, passion was still virgin in the depths of her heart. Her principal attraction came, in fact, from this innate youth, which sometimes, however, played her false, and gave to her ideas ...
— The Recruit • Honore de Balzac

... of peaceful married life. The prince liked early hours and country pleasures, and the Queen, like a loyal wife, not merely consented to his tastes, but made them absolutely her own. Before she had been married a year, she made the naive pretty confession that 'formerly I was too happy to go to London and wretched to leave it, and now, since the blessed hour of my marriage, and still more since the summer, I dislike and am unhappy to leave the country, and would ...
— Queen Victoria • Anonymous

... This naive extract from the records of the First Church of Windsor, Connecticut, will show the way in which the question of "singing by rule" was often settled in the churches, and it also gives a very amusing glimpse of the colonial manner of ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle

... to allow this theory to "have its day, as all things have." How far Schiller penetrated its arena we cannot say, but he wrote several essays, imbued in its spirit, upon aesthetic subjects; notably, "Grace and Dignity," "Naive and Sentimental Poetry," and "Letters on the Aesthetic ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton

... devotion, an exquisite loyalty. The tyrannical man, the monster, the Black Man, find a place here like the Lestrigons and the Cyclops of Homer only to inspire horror by contrast with softer manners; they are almost what the wicked man is in the naive imagination of a child brought up by a mother in the ideas of a gentle and pious morality. The primitive man of Teutonism is revolting by his purposeless brutality, by a love of evil that only gives him skill ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various

... halt in front of it, and two hundred pairs of eyes, brimful with simple faith and simple trust, gazed in reverence on the naive wax figure behind the grating, within its throne of rough stone and whitewash. It was dressed in blue calico spangled with tinsel, and had a crown on its head made of gilt paper and a veil of coarse tarlatan. Two china pots containing artificial flowers were placed on ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy

... wild letters in which a young man points a pistol at a refusal, letters full of boyish casuistry and the incoherent reasoning of an idealist; a delicious tissue of words embroidered here and there by the naive utterances that women love so well—unconscious revelations of the ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac

... at the present time is in a state of chaos owing to this double origin. Its external motives—the expression of love and fear, etc.—are too material and naive for the abstract ideas of the future. In the search for more subtle expression, our modern reformers have looked to the past for help. Isadora Duncan has forged a link between the Greek dancing and that of the future. In this she is working on parallel lines to the painters who are looking ...
— Concerning the Spiritual in Art • Wassily Kandinsky

... into the Union till September 9, 1850, and yet that the first session of its State Legislature had met, legislated, and adjourned by April 22, 1850, some appreciation may be had of the speed limit—if there was a limit. The record of the naive self-sufficiency of that Legislature is ...
— California, Romantic and Resourceful • John F. Davis

... story is as old as human speech,—and perhaps even antedates it. A naive acceptance of the supernatural was unquestionably one of the primal attributes of human intelligence. The ghost story may thus quite conceivably be the first form of tale ever invented. It makes its appearance ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various

... become a collaborator. In such a way he must have planned with Mansfield over Brummell; thus he may have worked with Julia Marlowe, telling her some of the romantic incidents he had drawn from his mother's own Maryland love story for "Barbara Frietchie." In the same naive spirit, he consulted, by letter, with Arthur Byron for his "stardom" in "Major Andre"—which waned so ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: The Moth and the Flame • Clyde Fitch

... look had passed from her face; so also had the world-wise expression. There was something in her present naive frankness that prevented it ...
— The Gentle Art of Cooking Wives • Elizabeth Strong Worthington

... priests had resolved to take against Jesus was quite in conformity with the established law. The procedure against the "corrupter" (mesith), who sought to injure the purity of religion, is explained in the Talmud, with details, the naive impudence of which provokes a smile. A judicial ambush is there made an essential part of the examination of criminals. When a man was accused of being a "corrupter," two witnesses were suborned who were concealed behind a partition. ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan

... good sense. Without vailing the character of the voluptuous queen, or concealing the poetical aspects of her romantic history, he delineates the events in her life, for which she is now chiefly remembered, with a naive simplicity that becomes piquant from its apparent artlessness. Nor does he indulge, to any disagreeable excess, in the superfluous moralizing which a less shrewd writer would have deemed essential to the effect. He leaves the story to assert its ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various

... threw his arms behind his head, leaning back on them, Flaxman saw the eyes darken and the naive boyish mouth contract, and knew that under all these brave words there ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... these had arisen by natural laws from a primitive unformed material was known to the Greeks, was developed by the Romans, and even received the approval of early Christian Fathers, who wrote long before the idea had been invented that the naive legends of the Old Testament were an authoritative and literal account of the origin of the world. After a long interval, in which scientific thought was stifled by theological dogmatism, the theory of evolution, particularly in its application to animals, ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell

... weight and grossness of material bodies. And thus our philosopher is punished in the sinning part; his contempt of the earthly has led him into an abuse of abstract reasoning, and this abuse has made him the dupe of a very naive physical metaphor. ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet

... Chinon, and it was urged that it, a male fief, was not capable of alienation. Philip was not inclined to accept this reason as final and the negotiations hung fire, much to the distress of the Duchess of Bourbon, who feared a breach between her husband and brother. Naive are the phrases in one of her letters ...
— Charles the Bold - Last Duke Of Burgundy, 1433-1477 • Ruth Putnam

... touched, as our forefathers must have been, at the recital of the boundless suffering and the overwhelming concatenation of sin and expiation in the lives of the Recken and Frauen of the Nibelungen Legend. That naive singer has remained nameless and unknown, who about the end of the 12th century wrote down this legend in poetic form, thus preserving forever our most precious relic of Germanic Folksepic. A powerful story it is of sin and suffering: ...
— Legends of the Rhine • Wilhelm Ruland

... their savings to invest with Granger. And Granger turned the receipts over to the great masters of his company, minus his large commission. Granger was only one tentacle of the company, one machine for extracting money from naive, land-hungry citizens. The powerful, cunning men—or man—behind it ...
— The Plunderer • Henry Oyen

... new books, and new people are always a joy to me," she said, in a glow of naive enthusiasm. And then she blushed slightly lest he should discover a personal application in the last-named, or even in the ...
— Pearl of Pearl Island • John Oxenham

... again at intervals, finding her naive love and humble adoration and obedience very pleasant; and, meeting her once at a peasant's fair, he jestingly yielded to the burlesque solicitations of a mountebank in a white mitre, paid a small fee, and went through an absurd ceremony of ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton

... at me attentively; he is very naive, in reality. Then, very slowly, he put one hand in his pocket and drew out the whole bundle of money. It looked ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon

... Meanwhile great changes were made in labor organizations. Many of the old unions were reorganized, and numerous local amalgamations took place. Most of the organizations now took the form of secret societies whose initiations were marked with naive formalism and whose routines were directed by a group of officers with royal titles and fortified by signs, passwords, and ritual. Some of these orders decorated the faithful with high-sounding degrees. The societies adopted fantastic names such as "The Supreme Mechanical Order of the Sun," "The ...
— The Armies of Labor - Volume 40 in The Chronicles Of America Series • Samuel P. Orth

... solemnity of their matter gave rise to a further danger; it demanded some relief, and that relief was secured by the juxtaposition of comic scenes beside scenes of gravest import. Such comedy was occasionally not without grace—a passage of pastoral, a song, a naive piece of gaiety; but buffoonery or vulgar riot was more to the taste of the populace. It was pushed to the furthest limit, until in 1548 the Parlement of Paris thought fit to interdict the performance of sacred dramas which had lost the sense of reverence and even of common propriety. They ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden

... that always looked a little sleepy under their long lashes, kept straying about the cheerful rooms with naive admiration. Presently she drew on her cotton gloves. 'I guess I must ...
— My Antonia • Willa Cather

... earliest form, a spontaneous and instinctive endeavor to shape the facts of the world to meet the needs of the imagination, the cravings of the heart. It involves a free, poetic dealing with realities in accordance with the law of mental growth; it is the naive activity of the young imagination of the race, untrammelled by the necessity of ...
— Fairy Tales Every Child Should Know • Various

... time to see one-tenth of the beauties and interesting objects of Rome. He wanted to get me home, he said, to have me all to himself, and to see me safely installed as the mistress of Grassdale Manor, just as single-minded, as naive, and piquante as I was; and as if I had been some frail butterfly, he expressed himself fearful of rubbing the silver off my wings by bringing me into contact with society, especially that of Paris and ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte

... she go?" asked Mrs. Blackwell in naive surprise, looking at him with a counterpart of the eyes we had seen in the picture. "I hope you don't think ...
— The Ear in the Wall • Arthur B. Reeve

... marvellous resemblance this acute and unscrupulous womanhood bore to Lady Holme's, even through all its obvious difference from hers. All her little mannerisms of voice, look, manner and movement, were there but turned towards commonness, even towards a naive but very self-conscious impropriety. Had she been a public performer instead of merely a woman of the world, the whole audience must have at once recognised the imitation. As it was, her many friends in the house noticed it, and during the short progress of ...
— The Woman With The Fan • Robert Hichens

... all morning. When he was called in to dinner, he saw at once that Tighe had laid his spell upon her. She was again the sullen, resentful girl of yesterday. Suspicion filmed her eyes. The eager light of faith in him that had quickened them while she listened for his answers to her naive questions about the great world ...
— The Sheriff's Son • William MacLeod Raine

... me," panted the boy breathlessly, and quite innocent of this naive way of expressing himself, for it never occurred to him how pitifully small his chances of escape had been in pitting himself, a mere lad, against nearly a hundred of the active warriors ...
— The Peril Finders • George Manville Fenn

... Camber, smiling in her naive way, "we only have one servant, except Ah Tsong, her name is Mrs. Powis. She is visiting her daughter who is married. We made the poor old ...
— Bat Wing • Sax Rohmer

... In this naive history we learn to look at life from the Esquimaux point of view. Mr. Hall's sympathetic nature fitted him for this difficult task; and having accomplished it well, he is enabled, by his vivid descriptions, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various

... exercise. Dick felt something of his old tenderness return to this wholesome, pretty girl at his side; perhaps he betrayed it in his voice, or in an unconscious lingering by her bridle-rein, but she accepted it with a naive reserve which he naturally attributed to the effect of his own previous preoccupation. He bore it so gently, however, that it awakened her interest, and, possibly, her pique. Her reserve relaxed, and by the time they returned to the hacienda they ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte

... fully proved that the artists, as a class, have never been false to religion. From the poets of the dark ages sprang a literature strange and marvellous, but full of naive faith, and bearing striking witness to the activity of the human spirit even in those dim centuries: I mean the literature of 'visions and legends.' And to estimate the importance of these consolatory creations aright, we must remember ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... perceived that the letters of our dear girl were more constrained and formal than before. It was as if she was writing now rather to comply with a sense of duty than to give vent to the light-hearted gaiety and naive enjoyment which breathed in every line of her earlier communications. So at least it seemed to us, and again the old suspicion presented itself to my mind, and I feared that all was not ...
— The Lost Stradivarius • John Meade Falkner

... tyranny that followed. Cooking is a weird mystery to me. As for Bill and the Kid, courtesy forbids detailed comment. The Kid had been uniformly successful in disguising the most familiar articles of diet; and Bill was perhaps least unsuccessful in the making of flapjacks. According to his naive statement, he had discovered the trick of mixing the batter while manufacturing photographer's mounting paste. His statement was never questioned. My only criticism on his flapjacks was simply that he left ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt

... name recalls the delightful story of "Rab and his Friends" in "Horae Subsicivae," with its naive description of a very original "tyke" of a doggie—a biography which had so lived in my recollection that when a queer little fluffy dumpling of a puppy was given me I could not help giving it the old familiar name, little knowing how aptly true the name would prove ...
— Wild Nature Won By Kindness • Elizabeth Brightwen

... said that Browne attained to any great generalizations regarding embryogeny on the basis of his rather naive experiments, but they are indicative of the effects of the "new learning" in one area of biology. Actually, Browne appears more comfortable in the search for patterns conforming to the quincunx, as in The Garden of Cyrus, and although ...
— Medical Investigation in Seventeenth Century England - Papers Read at a Clark Library Seminar, October 14, 1967 • Charles W. Bodemer

... had played her part admirably, showing that a young girl, however simple and naive, has the instinct of dissimulation, which only requires opportunity to ...
— The Regent's Daughter • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)

... or so Japanese officers passed through Kiev, too. They were bound for the front, escorting their guns and ammunition. How curious they looked beside the big, naive Russians. They were like porcelain figurines with impenetrable, yellow faces, mask-like, and tiny hands and feet. What a finished product they appear, and yet they go to the front and observe the latest methods of warfare and multiply their merchant ...
— Trapped in 'Black Russia' - Letters June-November 1915 • Ruth Pierce

... in the case of so consummate an artist does not matter (unless to the solemn and naive mind), Maupassant of all writers of fiction demands least forgiveness from his readers. He does not require forgiveness because he is ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad

... "Danger!" The naive question angered the cowboy. "Oh, no we ain't in any danger, not a bit in the world. We're just as safe as if we was sittin' on a keg of powder with the fuse lit. There's nothin' in the world can hurt us except this little old Mizoo, an' it wouldn't ...
— Prairie Flowers • James B. Hendryx

... found something to interest you at last!" said Miss Melhuish, in naive triumph. "Yes—burglars! But don't speak so loud. It's supposed to be kept a great secret. I really oughtn't to tell ...
— The Amateur Cracksman • E. W. Hornung

... the girl to tell me much of her life in Nebraska; of her friends and their amusements. Hers had been the usual story of any fresh wholesome girl. The social life in a small town had limited her experiences, but had kept her deliciously naive and sweet. ...
— The Lady and Sada San - A Sequel to The Lady of the Decoration • Frances Little

... not poet enough—nor the eighteenth century naive enough—to create a legend in sober earnest. But the fact that he throws "Rule, Britannia" eight centuries back to the time of Alfred the Great, before whom this glorious pageant of his country's future is prophetically unrolled, serves to illustrate the retrospective ...
— Chosen Peoples • Israel Zangwill

... another glimpse of that awful winter. His naive words are, "Chie-ke-nayelle, a Slavi from Fort Norman, was a winning fellow, handsome, gracious, the possessor of a happy countenance. On his features played always a smile of contentment and ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron

... you can do very well, Alvin, though of course not half so well as Mike, for nobody can do that," was the naive argument ...
— The Launch Boys' Adventures in Northern Waters • Edward S. Ellis

... with a duet ("Schelm! halt fest") in which Agatha's fear and anxiety are charmingly contrasted with the lightsome and cheery nature of Annchen, her attendant, and this in turn is followed by a naive and coquettish arietta ("Kommt ein schlanker Bursch gegangen") sung by the latter. Annchen departs, and Agatha, opening her window and letting the moonlight flood the room, sings the famous scena and prayer, ...
— The Standard Operas (12th edition) • George P. Upton

... valley, and at once breasted the couloir leading to the Col, where we had them well in sight. They found the ascent much "harder on the collar" than they expected: fortunately the sole of the huge gutter yielded a trickle of water. The upper part was, to their naive surprise, mere climbing on all fours; and they reached the summit, visible from our halting-place, in two hours. Here they also were summarily stopped by perpendicular rocks on either side, and by the deep gorge or crevasse, shedding seawards ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 2 • Richard Burton

... the paper. "'Tis a posy, and fairly enough writ." He read the lines, blushing like a girl. They were very naive, and ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade

... she prefers it, Wisdom. "Only that?" says wicked Doris; but Clarice helps him from replying to the scoffer by going on to ask whether the fruit of Wisdom is not happiness? "And, Madame, the making others happy." "Dear me," says naive Lucinde, half under her breath, "I must be a philosophe, for I have been told a hundred times that it only depended on myself to be happy by making others happy." There is more wickedness from Doris; but Ariste, with a contemptuous smile, ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury

... about God. The contemporary sermon on Deity minimizes or leaves out divine transcendence; thus it starves one fundamental impulse in man—the need and desire to look up. Instead of this transcendence modern preaching emphasizes immanence, often to a naive and ludicrous degree. God is the being who is like us. Under the influence of that monistic idealism, which is a derived philosophy of the humanistic impulse, preaching lays all the emphasis upon divine immanence in sharpest ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch

... took the train for the next station, Tambak. No European had ever done such a thing before apparently, and there was quite a fuss at the station to find a first or even a second-class ticket. And during the search the railway officials displayed the most naive curiosity, and questioned the traveller without restraint. Arrived at Tambak X. descended, and immediately the station-master hurried forward and politely assured him that he had made a mistake, since Gombong, the large town, was the next station but one. He obviously could not ...
— From Jungle to Java - The Trivial Impressions of a Short Excursion to Netherlands India • Arthur Keyser

... further thoroughly discusses Entente's plans for passage through Belgium, Calais, and England. France doubtful protectors, Barnardiston's insinuations relative Flushing question, both perfidious and naive postulates dressing plan of battle against threatening Franco-British invasion ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War from the Beginning to March 1915, Vol 1, No. 2 - Who Began the War, and Why? • Various

... impossible to be offended with such charming self- complacency,—the naive conceit of the man was as harmless as the delight of a fair girl who has made her first conquest, and Theos smiling, kept the flowers. By this time the surrounding throng had broken up into little knots and groups,—all ill-humor on the part of the populace ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli

... reference to the early annals of human speech." Among the Algonquins the sun-god Michabo was represented as a hare, his name being compounded of michi, "great," and wabos, "a hare"; yet wabos also meant "white," so that the god was doubtless originally called simply "the Great White One." The same naive process has made bears of the Arkadians, whose name, like that of the Lykians, merely signified that they were "children of light"; and the metamorphosis of Kallisto, mother of Arkas, into a bear, and of Lykaon into a wolf, rests apparently ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske

... Seth smiled at the naive simplicity of the suggestion. He did not detect the guile at first. But it dawned on him presently and he smiled more. She had said she was not going to ...
— The Watchers of the Plains - A Tale of the Western Prairies • Ridgewell Cullum

... Shrink, flinch, wince, blench, quail. Shun, avoid, eschew. Shy, bashful, diffident, modest, coy, timid, shrinking. Sign, omen, auspice, portent, prognostic, augury, foretoken, adumbration, presage, indication. Simple, innocent, artless, unsophisticated, naive. Skilful, skilled, expert, adept, apt, proficient, adroit, dexterous, deft, clever, ingenious. Skin, hide, pelt, fell. Sleepy, drowsy, slumberous, somnolent, sluggish, torpid, dull, lethargic. Slovenly, slatternly, dowdy, frowsy, blowzy. Sly, crafty, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor

... a story from one of Joffre's aides. Joffre, by the way, is the quietest, sweetest, most naive, and babylike individual I ever met. All of the women, as well as the men, are in love with him. When he met Nancy, at a garden party, he kissed her on both cheeks. Nancy, as you may imagine, was ecstatically ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane

... necessarily take for granted, because they are precisely the same as those to which he has been accustomed at home. Writing for a German public, the Professor draws morals from American life which delight an English reader by their naive and elementary superfluousness. In all unconsciousness, Professor Muensterberg has written a most valuable essay on the essential kinship of the British and American peoples as ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson

... talked freely, speaking with a slight Belgian accent, but fluently enough. He seemed to have a naive spirit of drollery, and he related quite amusingly an experience ...
— Through the Wall • Cleveland Moffett

... of the primates is the character of their self-consciousness. This useful faculty, that can probe so-deep, has one naive defect—it relies too readily on its own findings. It doesn't suspect enough its own unconfessed predilections. It assumes that it can be completely impartial—but isn't. To instance an obvious way in which it will betray them: beings that are intensely self-conscious and aware of ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day Jr.

... itself is hardly as novel as its contemporary advocates appear to maintain; and free verse goes back far in our English speech and song. But the new generation believes that it has made a discovery in reverting to sensations rather than thought, to the naive reproduction of retinal and muscular impressions, as if this were the ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry

... of the days of the Spanish explorers in their themes, the Aztec myth of El Dorado, and the fabled Fountain of Youth, sought by Ponce de Leon. In their way, these are the loveliest fountains on the Exposition grounds, though they differ so from all the rest that comparison is not easy. The naive conception of the Fountain of Youth and the realistic strength of that of El Dorado lead visitors back to them again and again. They are hidden fountains, as their prototypes were hidden. Each terminates one of the two open colonnades with a central ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber

... these divisions included several courts, and the whole was disposed around a principal court, the court of honor. The entire assemblage of edifices was nothing more than one vast ground-floor. "The design followed in the arrangement of these composite dwellings," it has been said, is almost naive in its simplicity: the plan is merely divided into as many right parallelograms as there are services to be provided for, and these rectangles are so disposed as to touch along one side or at one of the angles, but they never interfere with or command one another; they are contiguous or adjacent ...
— The American Architect and Building News, Vol. 27, No. 733, January 11, 1890 • Various

... no note of time." These Sicilian expressions are replaced in Tuscany by the similar one: Il tempo delle novelle passa presto ("Time passes quickly in stories"). Sometimes the narrator will bring himself or herself into the story in a very naive manner; as, for example, when a name is wanted. So in telling a Sicilian story which is another version of "The Fair Angiola" given in our text, the narrator, Gna Sabbedda, continues: "The old woman ...
— Italian Popular Tales • Thomas Frederick Crane

... or other forms thus reduced to angularity argues, of course, no affectation of quaintness on the part of the worker, but was the unavoidable outcome of her way of work. There is a pronounced and early limit to art of this rather naive kind, but that there is art in some of the very simplest and most modest peasant work built up on those lines no artist will deny. The art in it is usually in proportion to its modesty. Nothing is more futile than ...
— Art in Needlework - A Book about Embroidery • Lewis F. Day

... a measure of Anita's earnest naive personality. Or was he a very clever scoundrel, with irony lurking in his soft voice, and a chuckle that he could ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, March 1930 • Various

... French have had to pay the same penalty as other ill managed Democracies; Bankruptcies direct or indirect with galloping inflation and enormous devaluations with as a consequence impoverishment of naive depositors and credulous pension fund participants, wars for which France was badly prepared with millions of dead and prisoners and with occupation of France as a result. The culprits, the elected politicians, have either died ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine

... at him in the half-lit room with very flattering admiration.... Seen thus, with her scarlet lips a little parted—disclosing pearls,—and with her naive dark eyes aglow, she was quite incredibly pretty and caressable. She had almost forgotten until now that this stalwart soldier, too, was in love with her. But now her spirits were rising venturously, and she knew that she liked Ned Musgrave. He ...
— The Line of Love - Dizain des Mariages • James Branch Cabell

... fragment of the skin of a newly killed kid; the wolf had devoured the beast, and the shepherd was keeping this corpus delicti to prove to his superior, the agent, that he was innocent of the murder. There was something naive in his honesty—as if a shepherd could not eat a kid as well as any wolf, and keep a portion of its skin! The agent, no doubt, would hand it on to his lord, by way of confirmation and verification. Another time I saw ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas

... naive to assume that an increase of black cadets from four to nine would stir much interest when other statistics suggested that black officers had a limited future in the service. As Secretary Royall pointed out, even if the total number of black ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.

... again, or rather also," flung back the stout girl. "I must take all the cracks and the chuckles and presently some naive little freshie will amble along and ask me if I happen to be one of the soap bubbles she just blew off her penny pipe," and the pneumatic cheeks puffed out in ...
— Jane Allen: Junior • Edith Bancroft

... and handed me a card with courtesy. It was quite refreshing to meet such a man in Paris in 1869—so naive, so unassuming, so free from that aggressive self-esteem which characterized Frenchmen before the war. Since I had arrived in the capital under the circumstances that amused John Turner so consumedly, I had been tempted ...
— Dross • Henry Seton Merriman

... nervous, product of a society perhaps not quite as free and Nietzschean as it deemed itself, but yet cultivated and illuminated and refined, it nevertheless seemed exuberantly sound. The sweet, broad, diatonic idiom, the humor, the sleepy Bavarian accent, the pert, naive, little folk-tunes it employed, the tranquil, touching, childlike tones, the close of "Tod und Verklaerung," with its wondrous unfolding of corolla upon corolla, were refreshing indeed after all the burning chromaticism of Wagner, the sultry air ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld

... If traditional folkways are subjected to rational or ethical examination they are no longer naive and unconscious. It may then be found that they are gross, absurd, or inexpedient. They may still be preserved by conventionalization. Conventionalization creates a set of conditions under which a thing may be ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner

... Charleston and Gibraltar, and the yellow fever having just broken out at the former place, he had determined to take a trip (his first) to Europe in this ship; having, as he said, already visited every state in the Union, and seen all that was to be seen there. He described to me, in a very naive and original manner, his sensations on passing by Tarifa, which was the first walled town he had ever seen. I related to him the history of that place, to which he listened with great attention. He made divers attempts to learn from me who I was; ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow

... abruptly halted in her naive speech, as if she had come face to face with something she had not ...
— Tharon of Lost Valley • Vingie E. Roe

... forceful, frank, naive. She was impressed by his nearness; but Lane saw that it was the fact of his being a soldier with a record, not his mere physical propinquity that affected her. She seemed both bold and shy. But she did not show any ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey

... rather not," he decided quietly. "I know you mean to be kind but that sort of thing—well, I don't think I understand it. Besides," he added with a sudden naive relief, as he clutched at a fugitive but plausible thought, "if I did you would not believe the things which I have been ...
— The Tempting of Tavernake • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... at the boy's amazement. There was a subtle sympathy between these two that surprised me, for Ruth Schuyler was fastidious in her choice of friends. But he amused her, and he was never really impertinent—merely naive and unconventional. ...
— Vicky Van • Carolyn Wells

... in order to get—what had he sought?—a silly, ugly, great house, a temper-destroying motor-car, a number of disrespectful, abject servants; thwarted intrigues for a party-fund baronetcy as the crest of his life, perhaps. You cannot imagine the littleness of those former times; their naive, queer absurdities! And for the first time in my existence I thought of these things without bitterness. In the former days I had seen wickedness, I had seen tragedy, but now I saw only the extraordinary ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells

... This singularly naive give-and-take fashion of asking a favour of a God recalls the old Scotch epitaph cited ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio

... whereupon, Apollo angrily aroused the pretended sleeper, and charged him with the theft; but the child stoutly denied all knowledge of it, and so cleverly did he play his part, that he even inquired in the most naive manner what sort of animals cows were. Apollo threatened to throw him into Tartarus if he would not confess the truth, but all to no purpose. At last, he seized the babe in his arms, and brought him into the presence of his august father, who was seated in the council chamber of the gods. ...
— Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome • E.M. Berens

... now that I have had the pleasure of meeting you, I will see you safe for at least part of your way home," he said, passing by her naive query "Why an honor?" as a thing to be answered only by that smile ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various

... intimate ways in which economic and political rights are inextricably entangled together. It made one realize afresh that only a President who kept himself innocent of any knowledge of secret treaties during the war, could be naive enough to believe that the promise to return complete sovereignty retaining only economic rights is a satisfactory solution. It threw fresh light upon the contention that at most and at worst Japan had only taken over German rights, and that since we had acquiesced ...
— China, Japan and the U.S.A. - Present-Day Conditions in the Far East and Their Bearing - on the Washington Conference • John Dewey

... pleasant good-night as she left the dining-room, and was delighted with her naive expressions of admiration and appreciation of his ...
— Patty in Paris • Carolyn Wells

... about noon, when there was a long discussion of the points at issue. Workman after workman came to the platform and gave his view. Some of the speeches were a little naive, as when one soldier said that Comrades Lenin and Trotsky had often before pointed out difficult roads, and that whenever they had been followed they had shown the way to victory, and that therefore, though there was much in the Central Committee's theses that was hard to ...
— The Crisis in Russia - 1920 • Arthur Ransome

... much to love in you!" and she made her heart's confession with a perfectly naive candour. "I daresay you don't see it yourself, ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli

... right sat David Lloyd George, with thick gray hair and snapping Celtic eyes. Alert and magnetic, he was on the edge of his chair, questioning and interrupting. Frankly ignorant of the details of continental geography and politics, naive in his inquiries, he possessed the capacity for acquiring effective information at lightning speed. Unfortunately he was not over-critical and the source of his information was not invariably the highest authority; he was prone to accept the views of journalists rather than those ...
— Woodrow Wilson and the World War - A Chronicle of Our Own Times. • Charles Seymour

... whole rose, in beautiful symmetrical lines, a wooden belfry, tapering from a square tower into a delicately modelled spire. To complete and accentuate the note of the picturesque, the superstructure was held in its place by rude modern beams, propping the tower with a naive disregard of decorative embellishment. We knew it at once as the quaint and ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd

... am of my presence of mind! "Hallo," I said instantly in a loud and naive tone, "somebody's breaking your windows, Schomberg. Would you please tell one of your boys to bring out here a pack of cards and a couple of lights? And ...
— Falk • Joseph Conrad

... at night in her dressing-gown (her beautiful hair, released from its ribbons, streaming down her neck and shoulders), and comes most unexpectedly upon him. He is young. The senior, over whose face "a smile flickers for a moment" when the heroine says something naive, and whom she (entirely misunderstanding her feelings) thinks she hates, smokes unostentatiously; but though a little inclined to quiet "chaff," he is a man of deep feeling. By and by he will open out and gather her up in his arms. The scorner's chair is filled. I see him, shadow-like, ...
— My Lady Nicotine - A Study in Smoke • J. M. Barrie

... secret," Keith laughed. "Tell you later. Fire away!" He tasted the soup, while Jenny looked at five little letter biscuits in her own plate. She spelt them out E T K I H—KEITH. He watched her, enjoying the spectacle of the naive mind in action as the light darted into her face. "I've got JENNY," he said, embarrassed. She craned, and read the letters with open eyes of marvel. They both beamed afresh ...
— Nocturne • Frank Swinnerton

... strangers, would be pleased on these occasions to put on a little winning graciousness, giving her hand with the air of a small princess to any one soliciting the honour of a dance; and she was seldom without some tall partner, attracted by her gentillesse and naive prattle—a moustached Austrian or Prussian officer, perhaps, in white or blue uniform, or one of her counts or barons, with a bit of ribbon dangling from his button-hole; or, if all else failed, there was always her father, who was ever ready to indulge her in any of her fancies, ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter

... half-smiling, half-tender reproach at him. "You know who I mean, Bob. And I'm not going to have him put in danger on our account," she added with naive dogmatism. ...
— Gunsight Pass - How Oil Came to the Cattle Country and Brought a New West • William MacLeod Raine

... days hunting in strange places; and at last, in a dingy East-side employment-office, he came upon his Schatz. She was buxom and hearty, and fairly oozed good-nature at every pore; she had only been a week in the country, and was evidently naive enough for any purpose whatever. She had no golden hair like Dorothea, but was swarthy—her German was complicated with a Hungarian accent, and with strange words that one had not come upon in Goethe and Freitag, and could ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair

... him, without having encountered the keen inquiring suspicious glances of the Squire. The others dispersed according to their pleasure—Mr Waters joining the party up-stairs, while Mr Proctor followed Jack Wentworth and Wodehouse to the door with naive natural curiosity. When the excellent man recollected that he was listening to private conversation, and met Wodehouse's look of sulky insolence, he turned back again, much fluttered and disturbed. He had an interest in the matter, though the two in whose hands it now lay ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant

... to the young heart, for it is full of nature and love and fortunate happenings. What could be more charming than the spirit in which the hero throws away the vegetables in his garden and puts in flowers? What more naive than his spyings, his fiddlings? The strength of the story lies in the fact that while its head is in the clouds, its feet are on the ground. There is no sentimentalizing, no breaking down of class distinctions; the good-for-nothing marries his lady-love, ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various

... seaside front, a member of a troupe then appearing called The Boy Guardsmen. He was a sweet child. Fourteen years old he was, and he gave me cigarettes, and he drank rum and stout, and was one of the most naive and cleanly simple youths I ever met. He had an angelic trust in the good of everything and everybody. He worshipped me because I bought him a book he wanted. He believed that the ladies appearing in the same bill at his hall ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke

... off with a reservation like that, Miss Copley. You made a naive, but very wise, remark this afternoon when you said you might just as well tell me something, especially as I was bound to find it out anyway. Stick to that maxim. It will save me time and ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston

... about the old man, and Ryder had small difficulty in drawing nearer the circle. A green-turbaned Arab, with the profile of a Washington and the naive eyes of youth, whispered to him courteously that it was the tale of the Third Kaland, and the Prince Azib was in the palace of the forty damsels who were farewelling him, as they were to depart, according to custom, ...
— The Fortieth Door • Mary Hastings Bradley

... such a short time ago that he was taking his first stumbling steps along the dim hallways of language. I have been turning back to the journal I began shortly after his birth and kept up for so long, the naive journal of a young mother registering her wonder at the unfolding mysteries of life. It became less minute and less meticulous, I notice, as the years slipped past, and after the advent of Poppsy and Pee-Wee the entries seem a bit hurried and often incoherent. But I have dutifully noted how ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer

... result of negotiations begun under such unfavourable auspices, though the value of concessions, to the observance of which nothing constrained the Sultan, seems problematical, and was certainly less than the ambassador, in his naive vanity, hastened to assume ...
— De Orbe Novo, Volume 1 (of 2) - The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D'Anghera • Trans. by Francis Augustus MacNutt

... Rachel now became inquisitive, calculating, It seemed to be saying: "One day I may be able to make use of this piece of goods." But there was a certain careless good-humour in it, too. What he saw was a naive young maid, with agreeable features, and a fine, fresh complexion, and rather reddish hair. (He did not approve of the colour of the hair.) He found pleasure in regarding her, and in the perception that he had abashed her. Yes, he liked to see her timid and downcast before him. He was an old ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett



Words linked to "Naive" :   gullible, uninformed, naive realism, inexperient, ingenuous, fleeceable, unsophisticated, innate, inexperienced, simple, sophisticated, innocent, unworldly, childlike, fine arts, beaux arts, unlearned, untrained, dewy-eyed, round-eyed, green, wide-eyed, unconditioned, simple-minded, credulous



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