Popular quotes about Innocence! Wisdom and inspiration are here!
The innocence of those who grind the faces of the poor, but refrain from pinching the bottoms of their neighbour's wives! The innocence of Ford, the innocence of Rockefeller! The nineteenth century was the Age of Innocence--that sort of innocence. With the result that we're now almost ready to say that a man is seldom more innocently employed than when making love.
Aldous HuxleyPeople who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen forget.
James A. BaldwinTo be godless is probably the first step to innocence," he said, "to lose the sense of sin and subordination, the false grief for things supposed to be lost." So by innocence you mean not an absence of experience, but an absence of illusions." An absence of need for illusions," he said. "A love of and respect for what is right before your eyes.
Anne RiceThe quality of artistry is the capacity to assume innocence at will, the quality of experiencing innocence as if for the first time.
Robert FrippIn former days, everyone found the assumption of innocence so easy; today we find fatally easy the assumption of guilt.
Carolyn HeilbrunWhen you first take someoneโs life, two people die. The person you just killed and the human being you used to be. Youโre never the same after thatโit changes you forever and not in a good way โand no matter how hard you try, you canโt go back to the innocence you had. Ever.
Sherrilyn KenyonIf national pride is ever justifiable or excusable it is when it springs, not from power or riches, grandeur or glory, but from conviction of national innocence, information and benevolence.
John AdamsEvery trait of beauty may be referred to some virtue, as to innocence, candor, generosity, modesty, or heroism. St. Pierre To cultivate the sense of the beautiful, is one of the most effectual ways of cultivating an appreciation of the divine goodness.
Christian Nestell BoveeObscurity and Innocence, twin sisters, escape temptations which would pierce their gossamer armor, in contact with the world.
Nicolas ChamfortAn innocent man is a sin before God. Inhuman and therefore untrustworthy. No man should live without absorbing the sins of his kind, the foul air of his innocence, even if it did wilt rows of angel trumpets and cause them to fall from their vines.
Toni MorrisonI was loved as a kid; I was raised with more love and emotional support than most folks could wish for my memories aged nought to ten are all bound up together in a mesh of innocence and fun.
Johnny VegasCheap thrill: moral outrage revels in its own innocence and in the guilt of the wicked Others.
Mason CooleyOne of the small consolations of old age, if you are lucky, can be at least a partial recovery of innocence.
Lawrence FaggThe whole thing of this business is to retain your enthusiasm and, in a sense, retain your innocence and try to practice as much humility as possible.
John FrankenheimerForgiveness is a selective remembering. It is a conscious choice to focus on someone's innocence instead of his or her mistakes...This serves *you*...Your body was not created to bear the burden of your overattachment to it, but was created as a container for the light of your spirit. It will more easily remember how to function perfectly when you remember the perfection in everyone.
Marianne WilliamsonChoices, more choices than we like afterward to believe, are made far backward in the innocence of childhood.
Loren EiseleyThere are Harvard grads, free thinkers, feminists, abolitionists, well-to-do people who want to go write poetry and live on a farm and cook and laugh and have a good time. As they themselves described it, it was an "inward facing" community. They were focusing on making a better existence for themselves, which I think is also the driving force of 20th century communalism in the US, the thought being that the world is corrupt, and we're going to build this little garden of innocence.
Christine JenningsThere is scarcely anything more important in the government of men than the exact - I will ever say pedantic - observance of the regular forms by which the guilt or innocence of accused persons is determined.
Winston ChurchillIt is, I suppose, the common grief of children at having to protect their parents from reality. It is bitter for the young to see what awful innocence adults grow into, that terrible vulnerability that must be sheltered from the rodent mire of childhood.
Katherine DunnWhen we are truly in this interior simplicity our whole appearance is franker, more natural. This true simplicity. . . makes us conscious of a certain openness, gentleness, innocence, gaiety, and serenity. O, how amiable this simplicity is! Who will give it to me? I leave all for this. It is the pearl of the Gospel.
Francois FenelonRemorse is virtue's root; its fair increase is fruits of innocence and blessedness.
William C. BryantAuguries of innocence "The emmet's inch and eagle's mile Make lame philosophy to smile. He who doubts from what he sees Will ne'er believe, do what you please.
William BlakeI lost my innocence at age eight, so I decided to do the same to as many young girls as I could.
PedroO! useful may it be to have shewn, that, though the vicious can sometimes pour affliction upon the good, their power is transient and their punishment certain; and that innocence, though oppressed by injustice, shall, supported by patience, finally triumph over misfortune!And, if the weak hand, that has recorded this tale, has, by its scenes, beguiled the mourner of one hour of sorrow, or, by its moral, taught him to sustain itโthe effort, however humble, has not been vain, nor is the writer unrewarded.
Ann RadcliffeLiberate yourselves from everything you know and look with complete innocence at this infinitely improbable thing before you.
Aldous HuxleyEvery time we focus on someone else's darkness, we are blocking our own view of the light. We think the person we are involved with has attacked us or has withheld love from us, when they really haven't. We focus on their guilt instead of their innocence. Frequently people are just being themselves and we start projecting our own childhood dramas onto them, pushing away the very love we want so much.
Marianne WilliamsonI might have some character traits that some might see as innocence or naive. That's because I discovered peace and happiness in my soul. And with this knowledge, I also see the beauty of human life.
Tobey MaguireAlthough a man has so well purged his mind that nothing can trouble or deceive him any more, yet he reached his present innocence through sin.
Seneca the YoungerThose who improve with age embrace the power of personal growth and personal achievement and begin to replace youth with wisdom, innocence with understanding, and lack of purpose with self-actualization.
Robert Foster BennettIn India, as elsewhere in our darkening world, religion is the poison in the blood. Where religion intervenes, mere innocence is no excuse. Yet we go on skating around this issue, speaking of religion in the fashionable language of 'respect.' What is there to respect in any of this, or in any of the crimes now being committed almost daily around the world in religion's dreaded name?
Salman RushdieMaybe innocence is a skin you must shed to build layers more resistant to the caustic truths of the world.
Hector TobarIt leaned forward, elbows on its knees, all amusement vanishing from its features, leaving its chiseled visage quietly regal, dignified. "I give you my word, Gabrielle O'Callaghan," it said softly. "I will protect you." "Right. The word of the blackest fairy, the legendary liar, the great deceiver," she mocked. How dare it offer its word like it might actually mean something? A muscle leapt in its jaw. "That is not all I have been, Gabrielle. I have been, and am, many things." "Oh, of course, silly me, I left out consummate seducer and ravager of innocence.
Karen Marie MoningRemember that every man is a variation of yourself. No man's guilt is not yours, nor is any man's innocence a thing apart.
William SaroyanMaybe there are moments between any two adults in love when the age of one of them dissolves before the other's eyes, when the first refuge of the soul at its creation is laid bare and skinless as a sunbeam through a window. Innocence and vulnerability, two unmeasurable quantities...Perhaps that is the essence of the protection's intimacy, that it dwells in camouflage and justifies itself in stillness.
Marianne WigginsThen I saw it, and it just grabbed me. That moment, that breath just before destiny, between innocence and power. He'll pull the sword free. You know it. And in that moment, the world changes. Camelot's born, Arthur's fate is sealed. He'll unite a people, be betrayed by a woman and a friend, and sire the man who'll kill him. In this moment, he's a boy. In the next he'll be a king.
Nora RobertsResentment seems to have been given us by nature for a defense, and for a defense only! It is the safeguard of justice and the security of innocence.
Adam SmithWhere were you born?" "On a battlefield," [Yossarian] answered. "No, no. In what state were you born?" "In a state of innocence.
Joseph HellerIt would be well, perhaps, if we were to spend more of our days and nights without any obstruction between us and the celestial bodies, if the poet did not speak so much from under a roof, or the saint dwell there so long. Birds do not sing in caves, nor do doves cherish their innocence in dovecots.
Henry David ThoreauHe that can apprehend and consider vice with all her baits and seeming pleasures, and yet abstain, and yet distinguish, and yet prefer that which is truly better, he is the true wayfaring Christian. I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat. Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity much rather: that which purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary.
John MiltonIt would be unwise to condemn as irrational the practice of devouring the heart and liver of an adversary while yet warm. For the highest spiritual working one must choose that victim which contains the greatest and purest force; a male child of perfect innocence and high intelligence is the most satisfactory.
Aleister CrowleyMy voice in combination with the harp - which, by the way, I use because I've played it my entire life, not to make some statement about the harp - somehow has ... coloured people's interpretations of the music and projected an idea of childlike or fairytale quality or innocence. Which sometimes prevents people from listening to the songs the way I would like them to be listened to.
Joanna Newsom