Quotes About Innocence

I feel almost as if I had been born in a vacuum of innocence, and then had to come to terms with the fact that actually, I was born into the middle of history - the rather grimy normality of the 70s, which did, indeed, retain some traces of human innocence, but were also girded about by the demons of experience.

Childish fantasy, like the sheath over the bud, not only protects but curbs the terrible budding spirit, protects not only innocence from the world, but the world from the power of innocence.

Zen says that if you drop knowledge - and within knowledge everything is included; your name, your identity, everything, because this has been given to you by others - if you drop all that has been given by others, you will have a totally different quality to your being: innocence. This will be a crucifixion of the persona, the personality, and there will be a resurrection of your innocence. You will become a child again, reborn.

For I see that then I was still all in a state of innocence, but that innocence, once lost, is lost forever.

The decision of such judges as Claudius and his Senate is worth very little in the question of a man's innocence or guilt; but the sentence was that Seneca should be banished to the island of Corsica.

In former days, everyone found the assumption of innocence so easy; today we find fatally easy the assumption of guilt.

There is no sweeter innocence than our gentle sin

The paradox of publicity is that even as we do it, we know it's killing off the chance of another reader happening across our book in the ideal state of innocence.

Writing itself, if not misunderstood and abused, becomes a way of empowering the writing self. It converts anger and disappointment into deliberate and durable aggression, the writer's main source of energy. It converts sorrow and self-pity into empathy, the writer's main means of relating to otherness. Similarly, his wounded innocence turns into irony, his silliness into wit, his guilt into judgment, his oddness into originality, his perverseness into his stinger.

To the former child migrants, who came to Australia from a home far away, led to believe this land would be a new beginning, when only to find it was not a beginning, but an end, an end of innocence - we apologise and we are sorry. To the mothers who lost the maternal right to love and care for their child - we apologise, and we are sorry.

After thee accumulation of too much history we have lost our innocence, we cannot easily believe in any explanations. We describe rather than feel, we touch rather than explore, we lust rather than adore.

The young, in their innocence, are often wise and capable of teaching the old.

Stay out of the court of self-judgment, for there is no presumption of innocence.

Wisdom comes only with innocence.

Unicorns are not to be forgiven." The magician felt himself growing giddy with jealousy, not only of the touch but of something like a secret that was moving between Molly and the unicorn. "Unicorns are for beginnings," he said, "for innocence and purity, for newness. Unicorns are for young girls." Molly was stroking the unicorn's throat as timidly as though she were blind. She dried her grimy tears on the white mane. "You don't know much about unicorns," she said.

It is easy, retrospectively, to endow one's youth with a false precocity or a false innocence; to tamper with the dates marking one's stature on the edge of the door.

The courage of children and beasts is a function of innocence.

Regarding local residents attempting to ban sex shops from their neighborhoods: You show me a parent who says he's worried about his child's innocence and I'll show you a homeowner trying to maintain equity.

All that the world most needs today, is combined in the most seductive manner in his art, — the three great stimulants of exhausted people: brutality, artificiality and innocence (idiocy).

... to be "literary" appeared to my deluded innocence as an unending romance.

One of the small consolations of old age, if you are lucky, can be at least a partial recovery of innocence.

Most really good fiction is compelled into being. It comes from a kind of uncalculated innocence. You need not have your ending in mind before you commence. Indeed, you need not be certain of exactly what's going to transpire on page 2. If you know the whole story in advance, your novel is probably dead before you begin it. Give it some room to breathe, to change direction, to surprise you. Writing a novel is not so much a project as a journey, a voyage, an adventure.

If women understand by emancipation the adoption of the masculine role then we are lost indeed. If women can supply no counterbalance to the blindness of male drive the aggressive society will run to its lunatic extremes at ever-escalating speed. Who will safeguard the despised animal faculties of compassion, empathy, innocence and sensuality?

In her lived an innocence of soul of which she seemed unaware.

If blue is dream what then innocence? What awaits the heart if Love bears no arrows?

The innocence of such children doesn't answer our deepest questions about this vale of tears to which we are condemned, but it helps to dispel them. That is the secret to family life.

Innocence is drowned in anarchy. The best lack conviction given time to think, and the worst are full of passion without mercy.

This isn't about guilt or innocence, he says. The dinosaurs weren't morally good or bad, but they're all dead.

I wanted to be born at the farthest limit of the world. I'll explore it, I said to myself, biting big chunks from it. And when I want, I'll go straight to the core. This is the way of the world I thought in my innocence, round and around the layers of peel until the taste becomes certain.

Ryan Stout, a straight-arrow-looking kind of guy, shocks the crowd into laughter with his inventive interplay between innocence and a jarringly twisted point of view. He goes from loony to weirdly logical. With him, it’s more than clever writing; his comedy is based on clear and clever thinking.

I feel I lost my innocence to cancer.

I did gardening and cooking and drawing and reading to try take the pressure off the music - just being eclectic and putting the fun back in and bringing more innocence in again is really important.

O innocence, how glorious and happy a portion art thou to the breast that possesses thee! thou fearest neither the eyes nor the tongues of men. Truth, the most powerful of all things, is thy strongest friend; and the brighter the light is in which thou art displayed, the more it discovers thy transcendent beauties.

He is trying to recapture his innocence, yet all he succeeds in doing (by writing) is to inoculate the world with a virus of his disillusionment.

It wasn't the intention to do something important, or to even relate about social issues. The ground is so fertile in the justice world, dealing with the death penalty and the Innocence Project, for characters that have a moral ambiguity, which we were both attracted to. It's the idea that everybody has their reasons. Whatever their actions are, whether you agree with them or not, you can understand why they're feeling that way, in terms of racism or even the death penalty.

In Homer and Chaucer there is more of the innocence and serenity of youth than in the more modern and moral poets. The Iliad is not Sabbath but morning reading, and men cling to this old song, because they still have moments of unbaptized and uncommitted life, which give them an appetite for more.

Whether we knew many who died on September 11 or personally knew none, we all lost something on that day. Innocence. Security. A trust that our homeland would always be safe.

Ignorance is innocence - stupidity comes with experience

Though Snow White might triumph in the tale, she will undoubtedly acquire a mirror after she marries, matures, and has children, and as the mirror reflects her aging and loss of beauty, she will be confronted by a young girl whose innocence and youth will spark her envy and hatred and perhaps drive her to eliminate her “competition.” It appears as though there is a vicious cycle that entraps women up through today. Everything is played out under the male gaze.

The termination is not based on innocence or guilt, but on biology. The sociopath personality is fraudulent. They are impostors within the human species. Killing a sociopath is equivalent to killing God. Neither exists in reality. They are empty shells of imagination, said Chiron

Had Adam tenderly reproved his wife, and endeavored to lead her to repentance instead of sharing in her guilt, I should be much more ready to accord to man that superiority which he claims; but as the facts stand disclosed by the sacred historian, it appears to me that to say the least, there was as much weakness exhibited by Adam as by Eve. They both fell from innocence, and consequently from happiness, but not from equality.

The Puritan, of course, is not entirely devoid of aesthetic feeling. He has a taste for good form; he responds to style; he is even capable of something approaching a purely aesthetic emotion. But he fears this aesthetic emotion as an insinuating distraction from his chief business in life: the sober consideration of the all-important problem of conduct. Art is a temptation, a seduction, a Lorelei, and the Good Man may safely have traffic with it when it is broken to moral uses--in other words, when its innocence is pumped out of it, and it is purged of gusto.

How beautiful is sorrow when it is dressed by virgin innocence! it makes felicity in others seem deformed.

By the laws of rectitude accused Persons, however atrocious their offences, are allowed to make their defence, and by a verdict of a Jury of their Peers, they are either convicted, or acquitted. I have some times thought that we Women are hardly dealt by since strictly speaking, we cannot legally be tried by our Peers, for men are not our Peers, and yet upon their breath our guilt or innocence depends— thus are our privileges in this, as in many other respects tyrannically abridged, and we are forced to yield to necessity.

Early in life she had discovered the important truth that nothing looks so like innocence as an indiscretion; and by a series of reckless escapades, half of them quite harmless, she had acquired all the privileges of a personality.

No matter what mistakes we might have made yesterday, today is the day we can retrieve our innocence.

For when man comes to front the everlasting God, and look the splendor of His judgments in the face, personal integrity, the dream of spotlessness and innocence, vanishes into thin air: your decencies and your church-goings and your regularities and your attachment to a correct school and party, your gospel formulas of sound doctrine--what is all that, in front of the blaze of the wrath to come?

Our civilization has decided that determining the guilt or innocence of men is a thing too important to be trusted to trained men. When it wants a library catalogued, or the solar system discovered, or any trifle of that kind, it uses up its specialists. But when it wishes anything done which is really serious, it collects twelve of the ordinary men standing round. The same thing was done, if I remember right, by the Founder of Christianity.