Good ORMs provide the best of both worlds. Basic tasks such as loading a single object from the database by ID and then writing it back after changes are made shouldn't require you to write any SQL, because everyone already knows what that SQL looks like, just let the ORM do it for you. A query builder component that allows you to programmatically build queries of medium complexity is also essential. And for anything not covered in the previous two cases, it should be possible to just write raw SQL or something like it without the ORM fighting you for it.

My preferred ORM is Doctrine and it provides all of these features. It has its own variant of SQL called DQL that lets you effectively write complex select queries as raw SQL with a bunch of object-specific conveniences built in, and get back an array of objects.