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naive
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show 189 more with this conextual meaning
  • He never considered himself naive.   (source)
    naive = too trusting and optimistic
  • You think you're so grown-up, don't you? But you're so naive.   (source)
    naive = lacking the understanding that comes from experience
  • Some people say they were negligent parents; others that they were merely distant, or naive.   (source)
    naive = too optimistic (without understanding that typically comes with experience)
  • I struggled to explain the purpose of my letter and posed a series of naive questions that had been running through my mind:   (source)
    naive = childlike (due to a lack of understanding)
  • "Don't pretend to be naïve, Wade," Sorrento said.   (source)
    naïve = overly trusting (in an unsophisticated childlike manner)
  • Either they are naive and believe they are searching for the long-lost Cup of Christ...   (source)
    naive = too quick to believe things
  • I thought about the dozens of black people I'd met who had complained bitterly about Walter's prosecution, and I was starting to see Chapman as either naive or willfully indifferent—or worse.   (source)
    naive = too trusting (in a childlike manner)
  • 'You're so naive,' said Ron, 'you think just because you're all honourable and trustworthy —'   (source)
    naive = too trusting
  • I was no longer that naive young woman.   (source)
  • But I just felt stupid and naive after those guys took off.   (source)
    naive = too trusting and unsophisticated
  • "…the queendom had always been a naive, optimistic place," Bibwit read.   (source)
    naive = too trusting
  • And because of this, business and law students today might look at Morrie as foolishly naive about his contributions.†   (source)
  • I was fourteen and had never made less than an A. I was smart, but I was as naive as they come.†   (source)
  • People were so naive about plants, Ellie thought.†   (source)
  • They liked being the sophisticated city kids who could explain how things worked to the naive country boy.†   (source)
  • I mean, the strangest thing is how idiotic I feel, how naive and foolish.†   (source)
  • Perhaps the naive foreigners thought that removing us from the war would lessen our hatred for the RUF.†   (source)
  • Too naive, too easily manipulated.†   (source)
  • I naively thought.†   (source)
  • " He gave me his adoring smile, the one that said, "I love it when you're so naive.†   (source)
  • I am not so naive as to believe that this will be the case for all.†   (source)
  • "Susie," my mother said, bracing up under the weight of it, a weight that she naively hoped might lighten someday, not knowing that it would only go on to hurt in new and varied ways for the rest of her life.†   (source)
  • I was naive and desperately lonely.†   (source)
  • I was naive. back then, but I was blessed with a sensitivity that told me there was something terribly wrong in David's life.†   (source)
  • Gogol watches them, knowing that it's all in jest—they're not the type to do something so impulsive, so naive, to blunder, as his own parents had done.†   (source)
  • James Stewart plays a naive, idealistic man sent into the Senate, where everyone believes they can take advantage of him.†   (source)
  • He was too young, too stupid, too optimistic, too naive.†   (source)
  • She is seventeen, a subservient, naïve, lonely girl.†   (source)
  • How naive had I been?†   (source)
  • He attacked everything in life with a mixture of extraordinary genius and naive incompetence and it was often difficult to tell which was which.†   (source)
  • It may sound stupid and naive, but not once when I was heading to the farms did I even consider that the party would be coed.†   (source)
  • Despite Tim's opinion that she was naive, she seemed far more mature than most people our age.†   (source)
  • I chose intelligence—I naively thought I'd end up like James Bond.†   (source)
  • Helen was the second-eldest of my sisters, all of whom were gentle, naive, talkative, and curious, which is why Mommy kept them off the street and away from men at all times.†   (source)
  • I've heard foreign visitors complain that the Congolese are greedy, naive, and inefficient.†   (source)
  • Belief in one's identity as a poet or writer prior to the acid test of publication is as naive and harmless as the youthful belief in one's immortality… and the inevitable disillusionment is just as painful.†   (source)
  • Much more naive.†   (source)
  • His techniques were too new, his skills too great, the men around him too naive, as if they had never before experienced a falsehood.†   (source)
  • That may not be true in naive ghost stories, but most literary ghosts—the kind that occur in stories of lasting interest—have to do with things beyond themselves.†   (source)
  • I sometimes think we were too unquestioning, Adam, too naive.†   (source)
  • Miss Cowper in English, whose first words were "This fall, we will be reading Jane Eyre by Miss Charlotte Bronte, and I am not naive enough to believe that you will all like it."†   (source)
  • Young, yes, and politically naive, but even so the American war in Vietnam seemed to me wrong.†   (source)
  • You may be naive about the world of books and publishing, but not that naive.†   (source)
  • Too many adults are naive or close-minded about what their children are going through.†   (source)
  • Adel was not too naïve to know that the world was a fundamentally unfair place; he only had to gaze out the window of his bedroom.†   (source)
  • You gentlemen here, forgive me, but you are just a bunch of naive dreamers.†   (source)
  • That was naïve.†   (source)
  • Naturally hardly anyone was naive enough to give his property to the enemy of his own free will.†   (source)
  • How come a kid as streetwise as you seem to be is so naive when it comes to real life?†   (source)
  • It was all fascinating, and Mack realized again that there was much in the world about which he was naïve.†   (source)
  • Naive perhaps.†   (source)
  • She's got me wondering, though, whether I naively bought into the idea that Nathaniel could get better with such a passive approach.†   (source)
  • You are naive.†   (source)
  • It is our one-year anniversary and I am fat with love, even though people kept telling and telling us the first year was going to be so hard, as if we were naive children marching off to war.†   (source)
  • They're not warriors, they don't carry battle Marks— Don't be naive, Maryse," said the Inquisitor.†   (source)
  • Is there anyone here so naive he believes the Harkonnens have quietly packed up and walked away from all this merely because the Emperor ordered it?†   (source)
  • A lot of young people are terribly naive.†   (source)
  • The blank videotape sitting on the bench beside us suddenly seemed like an incredible embarrassment, a sharp reminder of our blind, naive optimism.†   (source)
  • Freud said that both Darwin's theory of evolution and his own psychoanalysis had resulted in an affront to mankind's naive egoism.†   (source)
  • Beforehand I'd known nothing about mizuage; I was still a naive girl with little understanding.†   (source)
  • "No. You're not naive enough to think that.†   (source)
  • And he knew what the doctors were thinking: "He's new here, he's green, he's naïve."†   (source)
  • You—Aunty, do you know the stuff in that thing makes Dr. Goebbels look like a naive little country boy?†   (source)
  • These reporters were thus either so naive and gullible that they ought to be packed off to other assignments, or they were people who quite consciously betrayed their journalistic function.†   (source)
  • That strikes me as naive, for someone who once lived in my city and saw, at least on the screens, how many secrets we kept from one another.†   (source)
  • His hopes of succeeding accelerated when one day Perry produced a pastel drawing he had made-a large, in no way technically naive portrait of Jesus.†   (source)
  • Josie had been so naive, thinking that once she belonged, she was firmly entrenched.†   (source)
  • I'm not naive enough to think I can change Fairfield overnight, but over the past weeks my perceptions of certain people have changed.†   (source)
  • He called us naive firebrands, adding that we would mellow with age.†   (source)
  • I realize that some naive sliver of me hoped that he was better than this.†   (source)
  • In just over a year in the United States, they had come to see their blind faith in America's bounty as naive to the point of comedy.†   (source)
  • When she'd worked in David Henry's office she had been so young, so lonely and naive, that she imagined herself as some sort of vessel to be filled up with love.†   (source)
  • Looking back, I couldn't believe how naive I was, just how many clues I missed.†   (source)
  • Stoddard could not refuse the assurance for which Mandy so naively angled.†   (source)
  • Don't be naive," he said.†   (source)
  • You know what is naive?†   (source)
  • It would be naïve to suppose that people abuse information only when they are acting as experts or as agents of commerce.†   (source)
  • Morena laughed, a throaty, crazy laugh that said, Oh, you naive and innocent straight girl, you can't even tell that I am a bulld'agger on the outs, not just up in this joint where one cannot get any dick …. and how I will relish turning you out.†   (source)
  • This person is so stupid and naïve that I can make a lot of money off them.†   (source)
  • He'd finished the get-acquainted part and was talking about the need for readiness and the folly of being naive about the other side's intentions.†   (source)
  • Her world had been very small, and she was naive to the way the legal system worked.†   (source)
  • We were all pretty naive and innocent back then.†   (source)
  • Occasionally, in my naive way, I tried to cheer her up with stories.†   (source)
  • "I was really naïve when I enlisted, but the army has a way of shocking that out of you," Mortenson says.†   (source)
  • At Carl Hayden, he'd be teaching programming, a subject no one else knew anything about, so he somewhat naively assumed that it would be hard for anybody to boss him around.†   (source)
  • Corinthians was naive, but she was not a complete fool.†   (source)
  • Cynical, naïve, kind, cruel, soft as down, hard as tungsten steel.†   (source)
  • It was the mission of boot camp to quickly convert recruits' naive boyish fervor into something American society had never generated before: a mass-produced, numerically immense cadre of warrior-specialists at once technically sophisticated and emotionally impervious to the horrors of battle.†   (source)
  • But that means nothing to the man, who doesn't know from the mark of angels, so he says, Show me something God can do, and the angel, naive like all angels, points to the man.†   (source)
  • "Look, Em," she said, "I'm not naive.†   (source)
  • Celeste, with her cold hand on my arm, spoke with contempt of men as the originators of these pictures, and Estelle, who now held Claudia on her lap, emphasized to me, the naive colonial, that vampires had not made such horrors themselves but merely collected them, confirming over and over that men were capable of far greater evil than vampires.†   (source)
  • Don't be so naive, Uncle.†   (source)
  • You know, you're such a pure and naive young man that I almost feel sorry for you.†   (source)
  • As always, he was extremely upbeat and positive without sounding naïve.†   (source)
  • He exudes a sort of wide-eyed openness that Cedric already senses some of the women find endearing and the guys, mostly, naive.†   (source)
  • Horace, that is the most stunningly naive and cowardly bit of wishful thinking that I've ever heard."†   (source)
  • He was naive and fragile.†   (source)
  • Alain was so naive and sincere as to try to give the gallery owner's daughter an honest answer.†   (source)
  • Short and curvy, she was also incredibly naive, which was alternately annoying and endearing.†   (source)
  • She considered Aden an evil city, where God used Satan to show her how fragile and fragmented the world was, how delicate the balance between evil and good, and how naïve she was in her faith.†   (source)
  • It's her mother, but she's not naive."†   (source)
  • Then you re more naive than I imagined, Henri.†   (source)
  • The former were usually too wise and the latter, thankfully, too naive.†   (source)
  • This might sound like naive optimism when in fact treatment is often long and hard, and not every story has a happy ending.†   (source)
  • Naive as she was, she knew immediately what Seivarden meant.†   (source)
  • I was naive.†   (source)
  • Apparently it was from naïvely confiding the truth of his mission to the wrong people that led to his capture.†   (source)
  • She was young for her rank, barely thirty, with wide brown eyes that had never had a chance to be naive.†   (source)
  • Tía Alicia considered the American films naive and overly optimistic but too much fun to resist.†   (source)
  • Behind the reception counter was Dewey Beemis, the combination receptionist and security guard, who had worked at the Post for over twenty years, since an insanely egotistical billionaire had founded it with the naive and hopeless intention of toppling the politically connected Times from its perch of power and prestige.†   (source)
  • Cedra was her best hope; the girl was young, naive, and gullible.†   (source)
  • You're naive, man.†   (source)
  • At the same time, though, people are so naive about what happens on the field.†   (source)
  • "Reason, my dear fellow, is the most naive of all superstitions.†   (source)
  • Later people would tell me that this is naive—but I knew—and I remembered what Granpa said about "words."†   (source)
  • Well, if we started out with the naive approach, which was, if this regional accent is stereotyped as being unintelligent, let's make sure we never use it in any application that would imply a need for intelligence, then those stereotypes would be strong reinforced.†   (source)
  • "Don't go all naïve on me."†   (source)
  • Liberalism—and I use that term imprecisely and in the abstract, meaning only what I thought at a particular time in reaction against my environment—gave me the opportunity to sharpen my rather charming, naïve political and social views.†   (source)
  • Ceylon floats on the Indian Ocean and holds its naive mountains, drawings of cassowary and boar who leap without perspective across imagined 'desertum' and plain.†   (source)
  • I appreciated her gentle, laconic manner and understanding mien toward my youth and naivety.†   (source)
  • You are naive.†   (source)
  • Just naive.†   (source)
  • What if he hangs out here all the time looking for naive young tourists from Ann Arbor, Michigan, to kidnap and send to Saudi Arabia to be some sheikh's seventeenth bride?†   (source)
  • It is naïve to say that enlightened statesmen will adjust the different interests, making them all subservient to the public good.†   (source)
  • "An agreement signed during a time of friendship and in the spirit of good will," retorted Jensin Brent, a younger, golden-haired man with an innocent face that often gave him an advantage over people who judged him naive.†   (source)
  • She's as dumb and naive as me.†   (source)
  • It was a naive and sentimental time, and men spoke in windy phrases.†   (source)
  • In my mind, I kept seeing a beautiful, fragile young girl, naively walking up the steps in the rain to a motel room.†   (source)
  • …and sweaty and sloshed around in tunnels with our boys—helped harvest our Chinee fishponds—got stung by our bees—learned to handle a p-suit and went up with me to make adjustments on solar battery—helped Anna butcher a hog and learned about tanning leather—sat with Grandpaw and was respectful to his naive notions about Terra—washed dishes with Milla, something no male in our family ever did—rolled on floor with babies and puppies—learned to grind flour and swapped recipes with Mum.†   (source)
  • It came from a book he had read once about wealthy, naive Americans wandering among the Arabs of North Africa.†   (source)
  • I was more naïve.†   (source)
  • I wasn't so naive to think it would be all that easy for him this time.†   (source)
  • He believed that any man who professed it must be incredibly naive.†   (source)
  • As I had suspected they would be, my discoveries were naive ones, like those of a child.†   (source)
  • The naive and uncritical wonder that had drawn her to Rupert and his experiments bad completely vanished.†   (source)
  • The act itself closes with Domenico, to whom the naive Niccolo started it off by spilling his secret, trying to get in to see Duke Angelo and betray his dear friend.†   (source)
  • 'Feldshon, you're either stupid or naive or both.†   (source)
  • This one was written out of a childish faith in the eternal strength of parents, a naive belief that age and wear could be overcome by an effort of will, that all she needed was a good pep talk to rechargea flagging spirit.†   (source)
  • He couldn't quite explain to me what the outfit was that sent him on African tours—or I might have been too naive to understand.†   (source)
  • They can take care of themselves in a wilderness, but they are naive and helpless against men, and perhaps that is why they went out in the first place.†   (source)
  • And at several times he suddenly became scared on account of such thoughts and wished that he would also be gifted with the ability to participate in all of this childlike-naive occupations of the daytime with passion and with his heart, really to live, really to act, really to enjoy and to live instead of just standing by as a spectator.†   (source)
  • "You're very naive, Wells," I said casually, "if you think this book can be closed.†   (source)
  • This naively childish smell was as intimate and understandable as a word whispered in the dark.†   (source)
  • BERENGER: [naively] That's very true …. it seems to mount from my stomach ….†   (source)
  • She had that naive face that he associated, for no good reason, with the Middle West-because it said "Show me," perhaps.†   (source)
  • Her TP pattern was naive and not deeply responsive.†   (source)
  • It sounds as if the Martians were quite naive.†   (source)
  • She was so naive, so unconscious of herself in relation to other people, that it had never entered her head that people could discuss her behind her back.†   (source)
  • "We are creators, and yet we naively play the role of 'the created.'†   (source)
  • "Maybe I was naive," he said in a halting voice freighted with emotion.†   (source)
  • I'm not naive and I'm beyond romanticizing war and what I had to do there.†   (source)
  • Langdon gazed down at the marble relief and felt suddenly naive.†   (source)
  • We were two naive kids, and neither of us knew much about dating or carrying on a romance.†   (source)
  • " I am tempted to bring up the word friends, but I'm not that naive.†   (source)
  • I looked at Jess once, wondering if we seemed naive to be so interested in something like a murder.†   (source)
  • He was not naive, he merely permitted himself no distractions.†   (source)
  • He was naive about the reality I was trying to explain to him.†   (source)
  • Today that makes me feel terrible for that little naïve girl.†   (source)
  • And he was unbearably naive with regard to certain elementary moral issues.†   (source)
  • Do you remember when I said that she was naive sometimes?†   (source)
  • His voice has a naive sincerity in it, a quiet, even tone, and his vision is of a vast nature.†   (source)
  • "But I can't believe I was so naive," she replied bitterly.†   (source)
  • I felt a naive confidence that because I had a real job, I was protected.†   (source)
  • I was naive and young and before you know it I fell in love with him.†   (source)
  • How naive of her to think it could be so simple.†   (source)
  • Dr. Cigrand would have been a cold man indeed to have dashed that sweet, naïve adoration.†   (source)
  • He has that tremendous, almost naive honor—and what a powerful force that truly is.†   (source)
  • I wasn't anywhere near that naive, or drunk, for him to try that story.†   (source)
  • Sometimes I thought it was naive of us to attribute softer sentiments to my father.†   (source)
  • "How charmingly naive," said the queen, followed by another spill of laughter.†   (source)
  • "In many ways, Piter is quite naive," the Baron said.†   (source)
  • Dr. Erland's gaze filled with pity, as if she were a naive child.†   (source)
  • It's a pretty convincing story—if you're a young, naive, and tipsy girl.†   (source)
  • Somehow, he was still naive enough to think that more good than bad could come from the union.†   (source)
  • Nobody ever says it, but only the naive accept his above-the-fray posture.†   (source)
  • She wasn't naive enough to deny that modern culture had its own seductions.†   (source)
  • Compared with the rest of them, I get off easy: "naïve surrealism with a twist of feminist lemon."†   (source)
  • Blomkvist was, as always, a naive do-gooder.†   (source)
  • Perhaps naively, she had imagined that they would be a couple forever.†   (source)
  • Before the genocide, I probably was naive in terms of believing people, trusting people.†   (source)
  • The boy was not entirely naive, however.†   (source)
  • Does that sound naive and embarrassingly patriotic and old-fashioned?†   (source)
  • Naively, perhaps, I hadn't known I would have to deal with this question every day: Who knew?†   (source)
  • Despite her outward appearance, Andrea was a bit naive about men.†   (source)
  • As for Frank Zhang, he has a good heart, but he's hopelessly naïve and inexperienced.†   (source)
  • As I said it, I knew it was a naive hope.†   (source)
  • What, you think I'm too naive or something?†   (source)
  • I may be dumb and young and naive, but I'm not stupid.†   (source)
  • Some naïve part of me hoped the deserter would at least make it out of the city.†   (source)
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