Popular quotes about Innocence! Wisdom and inspiration are here!
It is more important that innocence be protected than it is that guilt be punished, for guilt and crimes are so frequent in this world that they cannot all be punished. But if innocence itself is brought to the bar and condemned, perhaps to die, then the citizen will say, "whether I do good or whether I do evil is immaterial, for innocence itself is no protection," and if such an idea as that were to take hold in the mind of the citizen that would be the end of security whatsoever.
John AdamsI 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. CrispMistaking Palestinian military weakness for moral innocence seems to further amplify the inattention of journalists to the culture of lies.
Ilana MercerThe 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 JakesLike, you can find your dream, if you firmly believe. You have to have the innocence, and you have to have the daringness to trust.
Bai LingInnocence is always the state of being untouched. Sometimes it's synonymous with virginity, so sometimes it's quite literal, but sometimes it's more of a mental state of being untouched, of not having seen a lot of the world.
Molly CrabappleThere is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored. The reader of today looks for this motion, and rightly so, but what he has forgotten is the cost of it. His sense of evil is diluted or lacking altogether, and so he has forgotten the price of restoration. When he reads a novel, he wants either his sense tormented or his spirits raised. He wants to be transported, instantly, either to mock damnation or a mock innocence.
Flannery O'ConnorIn Baltimore, kids grow up very quickly. You're placed in a lot of situations that a child shouldn't be in and a lot of Baltimore kids lose innocence very soon.
Sheldon CandisTruly, it is a blessing and not a blasphemy when I teach that "above all things there stands the heaven of chance, the heaven of innocence, the heaven of accident, the heaven of wantonness".
Friedrich NietzscheThe human body represents to me the same universal innocence, timelessness and purity of all seed pods, suggesting the mother as well as the child, the parental as well as the descendant, conceived according to nature's longings.
Ruth BernhardBack to my childhood where those monsters reside. They snack on innocence and dine on self esteem.
Jimmy BuffettA man is not to aim at innocence, any more than he is to aim at hair, but he is to keep it.
Ralph Waldo EmersonForgiveness 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 WilliamsonInnocence is drowned in anarchy. The best lack conviction given time to think, and the worst are full of passion without mercy.
Joni MitchellWe survive until, by sheer stamina, we escape into the dim innocence of our own adulthood and its forgetfulness.
Katherine DunnThis isn't about guilt or innocence, he says. The dinosaurs weren't morally good or bad, but they're all dead.
Chuck PalahniukRyan 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-TorresPeople say you're born innocent, but it's not true. You inherit all kinds of things that you can do nothing about. You inherit your identity, your history, like a birthmark that you can't wash off. ... We are born with our heads turned back, but my mother says we have to face into the future now. You have to earn your own innocence, she says. You have to grow up and become innocent.
Hugo HamiltonThe magic, the wonder, the mystery and the innocence of a childโs heart are the seeds of creativity that will heal the world.
Michael JacksonMy detention has been worth every second if only to prove my innocence to those who truly matter most my countrymen.
Joseph EstradaIt's of more importance to community that innocence should be protected than it is that guilt should be punished
John AdamsTo the extent we are perceiving anyone's guilt -choosing to focus on the errors of their personality rather than the eternal innocence of their spirit - we're closing our hearts, deflecting a miracle and causing our own inevitable suffering.
Marianne WilliamsonI realise that I had the best of serious picture journalism. There was an innocence in our approach, especially in the 1950s and 1960s when we naively believed that by holding a mirror up to the world we could help - no matter how little - to make people aware of the human condition.
Eve ArnoldYou've had a whole lot of experience, but everything is also radically new at each moment, and you have to bring a kind of childlike second-level innocence to bear upon all situations, if you are going to be of use and you are going to really learn from the situation or the people.
Jean HoustonThe essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives for ever.
John UpdikeNobody likes to let go of the ego- it is so precious to everyone. However, once you have attained a state of egolessness, the world won't disappear, as you may think it will. The world will continue, but a change takes place within you. Something is uncovered. You start seeing everything with the wonder and innocence of a child.
Mata AmritanandamayiTo an eagle or to an owl or to a rabbit, man must seem a masterful and yet a forlorn animal; he has but two friends. In his almost universal unpopularity he points out, with pride, that these two are the dog and the horse. He believes, with an innocence peculiar to himself, that they are equally proud of this alleged confraternity. He says, 'Look at my two noble friends -- they are dumb, but they are loyal.' I have for years suspected that they are only tolerant.
Beryl MarkhamHad 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.
Sarah Moore GrimkeI wish to you sunshine, my dear one, my dear one. And treetops for you to soar past. I wish to you innocence, my child, my child. I pray you don't grow up too fast. Never know pain, my dear one, my dear one. Nor hunger nor fear nor sorrow. Never know war, my child, my child. Remember your hope for tomorrow.
Amelia Atwater-RhodesWhen we are children we seldom think of the future. This innocence leaves us free to enjoy ourselves as few adults can. The day we fret about the future is the day we leave our childhood behind.
Patrick RothfussParents don't want their children to lose that purity and innocence of childhood. We want to bottle that and hold onto that, but it's impossible.
Pete DocterIn 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 RushdieBut 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 ShelleyThe culture will not be able to persist in light of the rigid systems of its own innocence.
Michael Eric DysonThe ballpark is the star. In the age of Tris Speaker and Babe Ruth, the era of Jimmie Foxx and Ted Williams, through the empty-seats epoch of Don Buddin and Willie Tasby and unto the decades of Carl Yastrzemski and Jim Rice, the ballpark is the star. A crazy-quilt violation of city planning principles, an irregular pile of architecture, a menace to marketing consultants, Fenway Park works. It works as a symbol of New England's pride, as a repository of evergreen hopes, as a tabernacle of lost innocence. It works as a place to watch baseball.
Martin NolanI think the seventies caught the last red rays of the dying sun of this innocence, but were already a little cold and drab.
Quentin S. CrispHow often, being moved under a false cause, if the person offending makes a good defense and presents us with a just excuse, are we angry against truth and innocence itself?
Michel de MontaigneSo many times I've photographed stories that show the degradation of the planet. I had one idea to go and photograph the factories that were polluting, and to see all the deposits of garbage. But, in the end, I thought the only way to give us an incentive, to bring hope, is to show the pictures of the pristine planet - to see the innocence.
Sebastiao Salgado...and we have so far improved upon the custom of Adam and Eve, that we generally furnish forth our feasts with a portion of some delicate calf or lamb, whose unspotted innocence entitles them to the happiness of becoming our sustenance.
Nathaniel HawthorneI think that's the real loss of innocence: the first time you glimpse the boundaries that will limit your potential.
Steve ToltzIt seems to me that today, if the artist wishes to be serious - to cut out a little original niche for himself, or at least preserve his own innocence of personality - he must once more sink himself in solitude. There is too much talk and gossip; pictures are apparently made, like stock-market prices, by competition of people eager for profit; in order to do anything at all we need (so to speak) the wit and ideas of our neighbors as much as the businessmen need the funds of others to win on the market. All this traffic sharpens our intelligence and falsifies our judgment.
Edgar DegasWhere I live, nobody who's fourteen is having sex and doing major drugs. And I think if you see it in the movies, you may be influenced by it. I think it's so important to preserve your innocence.
Natalie PortmanI think that freshness and that innocence is something that is missing from a lot of female singers. I'm certainly not denying that I'm young, but I'm not fluff.
Jessica SimpsonThe word 'innocence' means 'incapable of being hurt'. To have a mind that is not capable of being hurt, does not mean that it has built up a lot of resistance - on the contrary, such a mind is dying to everything that it has known in which there has been conflict, pleasure and pain. Only then is the mind innocent; that means it can love. You cannot love with memory, love is not a matter of remembrance, of time.
Jiddu Krishnamurti