NAIVE • E-FREE TRANSLATION.COM • Definition of Naive

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/nˌaɪˈiv/ Listen

adjective

naive adj.

Having native or unaffected simplicity; ingenuous; artless; frank; as, naïve manners; a naïve person; naïve and unsophisticated remarks.

Having a lack of knowledge, judgment, or experience; especially, lacking sophistication in judging the motives of others; credulous; as, a naive belief in the honesty of politicians.

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Etymology of 'Naive'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Naive" Quotes from Famous Books

... him with the naive wonder of an inexperienced man. Having paid this tribute to his superior knowledge, he regained his previous air of grave perception. "I reckon she ain't none of them. But I'm keepin' you from your work. Good-by. ...

— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte

... attractive feature of the Middle Ages is that they were so intensely human. A naive spirit appears in their formal literature, as in Chaucer's account of the Canterbury pilgrims, in their decorated religious manuscripts, in their thought, and very characteristically, in their architecture, which combines a simple naturalness with ...

— Life in a Medival City - Illustrated by York in the XVth Century • Edwin Benson

... Madame Sand to fill in the blank, in a way all her own, and her task as we have seen was completed, revolutions notwithstanding. She owns to having then felt the attraction experienced in all time by those hard hit by public calamities, "to throw themselves back on pastoral dreams, all the more naive and childlike for the brutality and darkness triumphant in the world of activity." Tired of "turning round and round in a false circle of argument, of accusing the governing minority, but only to be forced to acknowledge after all that they were ...

— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas

... dramatic conception, then, of the nineteenth century, is that of a perfectly naive hero upsetting religion, law and order in all directions, and establishing in their place the unfettered action of Humanity doing exactly what it likes, and producing order instead of confusion thereby because it likes to do what is ...

— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw

... be hoped, for the sake of their veracity, that they knew their candidate chiefly as the very good company that he always was; and had paid as little attention, as good company usually does, to so solid a work as the Treatise. Hume expresses a naive surprise, not unmixed with indignation, that Hutcheson and Leechman, both clergymen and sincere, though liberal, professors of orthodoxy, should have expressed doubts as to his fitness for becoming a professedly presbyterian teacher of presbyterian youth. The town council, ...

— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley

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