Popular quotes about Innocence! Wisdom and inspiration are here!
Purity is innocence, the innocence of lack of self. Desire is innocent unless it's connected with self.
Frederick LenzUnlike 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. LaphamDantes passed through all the stages of torture natural to prisoners in suspense. He was sustained at first by that pride of conscious innocence which is the sequence to hope; then he began to doubt his own innocence, which justified in some measure the governor's belief in his mental alienation; and then, relaxing his sentiment of pride, he addressed his supplications, not to God, but to man. God is always the last resource. Unfortunates, who ought to begin with God, do not have any hope in him till they have exhausted all other means of deliverance.
Alexandre DumasI felt I had a very innocent childhood and I feel privileged by that. But as an adult, I know that there were people who didn't have that. There are a lot of teens who haven't had as easy a childhood as me, and having literature that explores these "darker" parts helps relieve the burden and stress they may be feeling. As a writer, there is often a temptation to draw back when we write for teens - to preserve their innocence. But the reality is, if someone has already had that innocence taken in their life, then not writing about it is just brushing it under the rug.
Jay AsherThe person who takes power will never be happy with those things they gain. They have lost their essential balance and innocence. And without innocence, nothing can further, as they say in the I Ching.
Frederick LenzFor I see that then I was still all in a state of innocence, but that innocence, once lost, is lost forever.
Susan HillThere is no basis in text, tradition, or even in contemporary practice (if that were enough), for finding in the Constitution a right to demand judicial consideration of newly discovered evidence of innocence brought forward after conviction. My concern is that in making life easier for ourselves we not appear to make it harder for the lower federal courts, imposing upon them the burden of regularly analyzing newly-discovered-evidence-of-innocence claims in capital cases (in which event such federal claims, it can confidently be predicted, will become routine and even repetitive).
Antonin ScaliaSelf-knowledge is like lost innocence; however unsettling you find it, it can never be 'unthought' or 'unknown'.
Michael SandelFor let us not underestimate the Christian: the Christian, false to the point of innocence, is far above the ape-regarding Christians, a well known theory of descent becomes a mere compliment.
Friedrich NietzscheThe bourgeoisie is very fond of so-called practical types and novels with happy endings, since they soothe it with the idea that one can both accumulate capital and preserve innocence, be a beast and at the same time be happy...
Anton ChekhovIt is Australian innocence to love The naturally excessive and be proud Of a thoroughbred gelding who ran fast.
Peter PorterIt'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 McGeeYou still owe me a million dollars." I'd presented him with a bill for proving his innocence and getting him freed from prison. He had yet to pay. Couldn't imagine why. "Yeah, I was hoping we could work that out." "The interest alone is going to kill you." "What do you charge?" "Three hundred eighty-seven percent." "Is that ethical?" "It's as ethical as my dating the son of Satan.
Darynda JonesBack to my childhood where those monsters reside. They snack on innocence and dine on self esteem.
Jimmy BuffettThe question of dying becomes a wise reminder. It cures us of our innocence of the future.
Don DeLilloEven 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 NietzscheAn indiscriminate distrust of human nature is the worst consequence of a miserable condition, whether brought about by innocence or guilt. And though want of suspicion more than want of sense, sometimes leads a man into harm; yet too much suspicion is as bad as too little sense.
Herman MelvilleMost 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 RobbinsNot since Lord of the Flies has a novelist written with such perceptiveness about the potential for harm that lurks within the innocence of childhood.
Paula SharpWhat makes life complicated is the things that are on me and it is very hard to keep things simple. I see it as I am complicated and there is innocence to this.
Klaus NomiThere 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 JenningsI'm not saying eating babies should be legal, but when they're so delicious, what's the harm in it? I don't know what tastes better, their innocence or their gooey rib butter.
Zach BraffIt is not enough to be a member of the Church of Christ, one needs to be a living member, in spirit and in truth, i.e., living in the state of grace and in the presence of God, either in innocence or in sincere repentance.
Pope Pius XISmall crimes always precede great crimes. Whoever has been able to transgress the limits set by law may afterwards violate the most sacred rights; crime, like virtue, has its degrees, and never have we seen timid innocence pass suddenly to extreme licentiousness.
Jean RacineAnimals 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 ScullyI would not say that old men grow wise, for men never grow wise; and many old men retain a very attractive childishness and cheerful innocence. Elderly people are often much more romantic than younger people, and sometimes even more adventurous, having begun to realize how many things they do not know.
Gilbert K. ChestertonI think there's an element in Milady where she sees her own innocence in D'Artagnan. In the very beginning, she's using him in a pretty cynical way. When she gets to know him, she sees qualities in him that she recognizes and it's almost like trying to remake the past, but of course, it doesn't work.
Adrian HodgesHe 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.
Henry MillerIt 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 LaGraveneseInnocence has a single voice that can only say over and over again, "I didn't do it." Guilt has a thousand voices, all of them lies.
Leonard PeltierIt is a low thing to always want to be understood. Let my innocence take care of itself.
Blanche Willis HowardI'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. CrispAlthough 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 YoungerPrayer is innocence's friend; and willingly flieth incessant 'twist the earth and the sky, the carrier-pigeon of heaven.
Henry Wadsworth LongfellowFor me, a lot of the humor comes not from innocence but from characters trying to figure out how to get what they need. I don't try to be funny, but am relieved when an opportunity comes up for humor.
Akhil SharmaThey were still in the happier stage of love. They were full of brave illusions about each other, tremendous illusions, so that the communion of self with self seemed to be on a plane where no other human relations mattered. They both seemed to have arrived there with an extraordinary innocence as though a series of pure accidents had driven them together, so many accidents that at last they were forced to conclude that they were for each other. They had arrived with clean hands, or so it seemed, after no traffic with the merely curious and clandestine.
F. Scott FitzgeraldResentment 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 SmithThe deeds of love are less questionable than any action of an individual can be, for, it being founded on the rarest mutual respect, the parties incessantly stimulate each other to a loftier and purer life, and the act in which they are associated must be pure and noble indeed, for innocence and purity can have no equal. In this relation we deal with one whom we respect more religiously even than we respect our better selves, and we shall necessarily conduct as in the presence of God. What presence can be more awful to the lover than the presence of his beloved?
Henry David ThoreauUG staff is patching up wargs, and all surviving Guardians are tied up," Wraith said, "But they could probably use some medical attention. Especially the one dipshit with the idiotic Mohawk. He lost a lot of blood." "Because you ate him," Sin said wryly. Wraith blinked with exaggerated innocence. "Fighting makes me hungry.
Larissa IoneComing to the master is coming in search of your innocence, in search of your lost childhood, in search of your originality... in search of your individuality, in search of freedom.
RajneeshSo near along life's stream are the fountains of innocence and youth making fertile its sandy margin; and the voyageur will do well to replenish his vessels often at these uncontaminated sources.
Henry David ThoreauThe 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 NolanIt 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 Crowley