Popular quotes about Innocence! Wisdom and inspiration are here!
There are no moments more painful for a parent than those in which you contemplate your child's perfect innocence of some imminent pain, misfortune, or sorrow. That innocence (like every kind of innocence children have) is rooted in their trust of you, one that you will shortly be obliged to betray; whether it is fair or not, whether you can help it or not, you are always the ultimate guarantor or destroyer of that innocence.
Michael ChabonUnlike any other business in the United States, sports must preserve an illusion of perfect innocence. The mounting of this illusion defines the purpose and accounts for the immense wealth of American sports. It is the ceremony of innocence that the fans pay to see - not the game or the match or the bout, but the ritual portrayal of a world in which time stops and all hope remains plausible, in which everybody present can recover the blameless expectations of a child, where the forces of light always triumph over the powers of darkness.
Lewis H. LaphamI know you have the capability to understand right from wrong because you hate people who harm children. Well, why not despise people who harm animals? It's hypocritical! Why protect one and violate the other when neither one wants or deserves the abuse? They just wish it would end. Stop praising the innocence in children then ignoring or making fun of the innocence in animals.
Gary YourofskyThe quality of artistry is the capacity to assume innocence at will, the quality of experiencing innocence as if for the first time.
Robert FrippSo the city became the material expression of a particular loss of innocence โ not sexual or political innocence but somehow a shared dream of what a city might at its best prove to be โ its inhabitants became, and have remained, an embittered and amnesiac race, wounded but unable to connect through memory to the moment of injury, unable to summon the face of their violator.
Thomas Pynchon... No photograph ever was good, yet, of anybody - hunger and thirst and utter wretchedness overtake the outlaw who invented it! It transforms into desperadoes the weakest of men; depicts sinless innocence upon the pictured faces of ruffians; gives the wise man the stupid leer of a fool, and the fool an expression of more than earthly wisdom.
Mark TwainThe 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.
Frederic FarrarSelf-knowledge is like lost innocence; however unsettling you find it, it can never be 'unthought' or 'unknown'.
Michael SandelInnocence was gone from all our acts. Our habitual state of rebellion became a serious political crime.
Anais NinEven in the lust of knowledge I feel only my will's delight in begetting and becoming; and if there be innocence in my knowledge it is because my procreative will is in it.
Friedrich NietzscheI didn't do what they said I did. I may have done enough so that I don't know if I can prove my innocence.
Dick MorrisMost 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.
Tom RobbinsTo be a writer you need to see things as they are, and to see things as they are you need a certain basic innocence.
Tobias WolffThe smell of good bread baking, like the sound of lightly flowing water, is indescribable in its evocation of innocence and delight... [Breadmaking is] one of those almost hypnotic businesses, like a dance from some ancient ceremony. It leaves you filled with one of the world's sweetest smells... there is no chiropractic treatment, no Yoga exercise, no hour of meditation in a music-throbbing chapel. that will leave you emptier of bad thoughts than this homely ceremony of making bread.
M. F. K. FisherEnjoyment and innocence are the most bashful things: both do not want to be sought.
Friedrich NietzscheRyan 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, itโs more than clever writing; his comedy is based on clear and clever thinking.
Ben Fong-TorresO 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.
Henry FieldingA compelling and important story of First Word War Scotland, a time when women redefined the word hope as the world was losing its innocence. Andrea MacPherson writes beautifully, balancing the lives of her characters between history and the poetry of gesture, secrets and love.
Ami McKayI was first sexually exploited when I was seven, by a distant cousin at a family wedding. Even after that I was routinely molested by older cousins and their friends. See, my innocence was taken away and I became mature at one bloody incident. I believe I never had a childhood. I grew up as an elderly person. And that's what my femininity brought upon me. Of course, in a patriarchal society, hijras' bodies are thought of as toys.
Laxmi Narayan TripathiIt 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.
Richard LaGraveneseThere have always been poets who performed. Blake sang his Songs of Innocence and Experience to parties of friends.
Adrian MitchellIf we are to reach real peace in this world and if we are to carry on a real war against war, we shall have to begin with children; and if they will grow up in their natural innocence, we won't have to struggle; we won't have to pass fruitless idle resolutions, but we shall go from love to love and peace to peace, until at last all the corners of the world are covered with that peace and love for which consciously or unconsciously the whole world is hungering.
Mahatma GandhiIf you go to a master to study and learn the techniques, you diligently follow all the instructions the master puts upon you. But then comes the time for using the rules in your own way and not being bound by them....You can actually forget the rules because they have been assimilated. You are an artist. Your own innocence now is of one who has become an artist, who has been, as it were, transmuted.... You can't have creativity unless you leave behind the bounded, the fixed, all the rules.
Joseph CampbellThe Seasons Difference is a suave and urbane comedy about several immense abstractions - faith, innocence, loneliness, and love.
Orville PrescottNot even the brightest future can make up for the fact that no roads lead back to what came before - to the innocence of childhood or the first time we fell in love.
Jo NesboThose 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 BennettBut her's was the misery of innocence, which, like a cloud that passes over the fair moon, for a while hides, but cannot tarnish its brightness.
Mary Wollstonecraft ShelleyAdolescence is usually typified by an unanswerable combination of innocence and insolence.
Alice Thomas EllisMaybe 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 WigginsConscience, that boon companion who sets a man free under the strong breastplate of innocence, that bids him on and fear not.
Dante AlighieriEarly 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.
Oscar WildeThe beloved's innocence brutalizes the lover. As the singing of a mad person behind you on the train enrages you, its beautiful animal-like teeth shining amid black planes of paint. As Helen enrages history. Senza uscita.
Anne CarsonI think the heartbreak of September 11 - America's grief not only over the loss of life but also the loss of our own innocence -has expanded us as people because it has tenderized our hearts. On a psychological level, the American people have matured as a result of that awful day.
Marianne WilliamsonThe writer cannot abandon himself simply to inspiration, and feign innocence vis a vis language, because language is never innocent.
Juan GoytisoloHe that is conscious of guilt cannot bear the innocence of others:So they will try to reduce all others to their own level.
Charles JamesMany children fly like birds, guess other people's dreams, and speak with ghosts, but ... they all outgrow it when they lose their innocence.
Isabel Allende