Popular quotes about Innocence! Wisdom and inspiration are here!
Prudishness is pretense of innocence without innocence. Women have to remain prudish as long as men are sentimental, dense, and evil enough to demand of them eternal innocence and lack of education. For innocence is the only thing which can ennoble lack of education.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich SchlegelThere 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 ChabonSlave camps under the flag of freedom, massacres justified by philanthropy or the taste of the superhuman, cripple judgment. On the day when crime puts on the apparel of innocence, through a curious reversal peculiar to our age, it is innocence that is called on to justify itself. The purpose of this essay is to accept and study that strange challenge.
Albert CamusNever such innocence, Never before or since, As changed itself to past Without a word--the men Leaving the gardens tidy, The thousands of marriages Lasting a little while longer: Never such innocence again.
Philip LarkinWhen grown people speak of the innocence of children, they dont really know what they mean. Pressed, they will go a step further and say, Well, ignorance then. The child is neither. There is no crime which a boy of eleven had not envisaged long ago. His only innocence is, he may not be old enough to desire the fruits of it...his ignorance is, he does not know how to commit it...
William FaulknerVictims suggest innocence. And innocence, by the inexorable logic that governs all relational terms, suggests guilt.
Susan SontagCrime butchers innocence to secure a throne, and innocence struggles with all its might against the attempts of crime.
Maximilien RobespierreUnlike 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 suppose I could say that to be interested in innocence already suggests a remove from innocence, perhaps a longing for something that is lost.
Quentin S. CrispPeople who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state on innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.
James A. BaldwinAt that time, I was still in an experimental stage, trying to blend Western drawing techniques and Chinese brushwork together. It was harder for me back then... But that piece is special and important, because it represents vigilance and innocence; the kind of precious innocence only present at the beginning of a new artistic exploration.
Liu DanYou do not have to incriminate yourself. But once you assert your innocence, and once you say you didn't do anything wrong, you can't then use the Fifth Amendment to say, 'I'm not answering questions.'
Rush LimbaughMere anarchy is loosed upon the world, the blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned.
William Butler YeatsWriting takes a combination of sophistication and innocence; it takes conscience, our belief that something is beautiful because it is right.
Anne LamottIt doesnโt make sense, itโs not logical, itโs not a safe profession or a smart profession if you wanna make money or have a living or have a family. So the fact that we keep doing [theatre] means weโre getting something from it that is almost childlike in its innocence.
Santino FontanaThe pain comes from knowing that we have never been safe, and therefore will never be safe again. It comes from knowing we can never be so ignorant again. It comes from knowing we can never be children again. Losing innocence. Remembering heaven. That was the essence of hell.
John JakesAn uncomfortable feeling is not an enemy. It's a gift that says, "Get honest; inquire." We reach out for alcohol, or television, or credit cards, so we can focus out there and not have to look at the feeling. And that's as it should be, because in our innocence we haven't known how. So now what we can do is reach out for a paper and a pencil, write thought down, and investigate.
Byron Katiewe have to listen to the child we once were, the child who still exists inside us. That child understands magic moments. We can stifle its cries, but we cannot silence its voice.The child we once were is still there. Blessed are the children, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.If we are not reborn if we cannot learn to look at life with the innocence and the enthusiasm o childhood it makes no sense to go on living.
Paulo CoelhoI'm just glad I was able to return to some of that innocence and beauty I had as a child when I started my own family, and my children brought me back some of that spirit.
Angelina JoliePsychedelics helped me to escape.. albeit momentarily.. from the prison of my mind. It over-rode the habit patterns of thought and I was able to taste innocence again. Looking at sensations freshly without the conceptual overly was very profound.
Ram DassIt's still possible to savor the remarkable foods that millennia of human ingenuity have teased from milk. A sip of milk itself or a scoop of ice cream can be a Proustian draft of youth's innocence and energy and possibility, while a morsel of fine cheese is a rich meditation on maturity, the fulfillment of possibility, the way of all flesh.
Harold McGee... pure and intelligent women can be deceived and misled by the baser sort, their very innocence and experience making them credulous and the helpless tools of the guilty and bold.
Catharine BeecherForgiveness 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 WilliamsonAwakening is waking up from the daytime dream and realizing that who you thought you were is not limited to thought, emotion or form. Beyond the imaginary seeker, beyond concepts and beliefs, there is a field of innocence and purity. We are this deep peace and sacredness, which is absolute and beyond all intellectual understanding. I invite you to recognize this Essence of Being and to directly realize the illusion of all psychological suffering due to misidentification, misperception of separation and attachment to conditioned thought.
Katie DavisIf 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?
Germaine GreerThis isn't about guilt or innocence, he says. The dinosaurs weren't morally good or bad, but they're all dead.
Chuck PalahniukRemorse is virtue's root; its fair increase is fruits of innocence and blessedness.
William C. BryantI 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 RadcliffeAnimals have this way of constantly confronting us with ultimate questions - about truth and falsehood, guilt and innocence, God and sanctity and the soul - forcing us to define ourselves and our relationship to the world.
Matthew ScullyCyborg writing must not be about the Fall, the imagination of a once-upon-a-time wholeness before language, before writing, before Man. Cyborg writing is about the power to survive, not on the basis of original innocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them as other...
Donna J. HarawayThe magic, the wonder, the mystery and the innocence of a childโs heart are the seeds of creativity that will heal the world.
Michael JacksonThose that expose themselves as knowing the truth, lose the battle of innocence and humility and eventually pull a trigger at the universe. Wisdom chooses the unknown to be its reason.
Akiane KramarikMy body Healed quickly. But the wound to my psyche was deep. Wide. First aid, too little, too late, left me hemorrhaging inside, the blood unstaunched by psychological bandage or love's healing magic. Eventually it scabbed over, a thick, ugly welt of memory. I work to conceal it, but no matter how hard I try, once in a while something makes me pick at it until the scarring bleeds. In my arms, Ashante cries, innocence ripped apart by circumstance. Bloodied by inhuman will. Time will prove a tourniquet. But she will always be at risk of infection. (124)
Ellen HopkinsIn 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.
Henry David ThoreauI'm going to search for my star until I find it. It's hidden in the drawer of innocence, wrapped in a scarf of wonder.
Michael JacksonInnocence is impossible when people have never had the choice of becoming corrupt by dominating others.
Sheila RowbothamI'm not sure if there is a cultural loss of innocence specifically associated with the seventies. The oil crisis? The Watergate scandal? I really don't know. There's nothing there on the scale of Hiroshima.
Quentin S. CrispThe 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.
H. L. MenckenI categorically declare first my absolute innocence, second my lack of criminal intent, and third my effusive apologies.
Jack VanceWhere 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 Thoreau