Popular quotes about Innocence! Wisdom and inspiration are here!
I prefer to have all of this apparatus - historical, literary, critical - and then, beyond initial innocence and naiveté, to try to achieve a new innocence, a new naiveté.
Frank Moore CrossSlave 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 CamusFor that purpose Christ instituted holy baptism, thereby to clothe you with his righteousness. It is tantamount to his saying, My righteousness shall be your righteousness; my innocence, your innocence. Your sins indeed are great, but by baptism I bestow on you my righteousness; I strip death from you and clothe you with my life.
Martin LutherZen says that if you drop knowledge - and within knowledge everything is included; your name, your identity, everything, because this has been given to you by others - if you drop all that has been given by others, you will have a totally different quality to your being: innocence. This will be a crucifixion of the persona, the personality, and there will be a resurrection of your innocence. You will become a child again, reborn.
RajneeshFor I see that then I was still all in a state of innocence, but that innocence, once lost, is lost forever.
Susan HillSo the city became the material expression of a particular loss of innocence – not sexual or political innocence but somehow a shared dream of what a city might at its best prove to be – 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 PynchonI read Norman Lock’s The Boy in His Winter with delight and amazement. Styled in the vernacular of a rapidly changing America, it stays true to the themes of Mark Twain’s original: class relations, race and slavery, childhood innocence, moral hypocrisy—and, of course, the stark beauty and unforgiving nature of America’s greatest river. I finished this absolutely elegant narrative feeling that Huck Finn has never been more alive.
David OshinskyYou 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 LimbaughThere is an innate innocence in the concious Vata personality. A delicate, sensitive, and aware nature reveals the graceful Vata component of any type.
Maya TiwariThree or four threads may be agitated, like telegraph wires, at the same time, and if I were to tap them all I would reveal such a mixture of innocence and duplicity, generosity and calculation, fear and courage, I cannot tell the whole truth simply because I would have to write four journals at once.
Anais NinThere is another more subtle way in which the innocence of childhood is lost: when the child is infected with the desire to become somebody. Contemplate the crowds of people who are striving might and main to become, not what Nature intended them to be- musicians, cooks, mechanics, carpenters, gardeners, inventors- but "somebody": to become successful, famous, powerful; to become something that will bring not quiet and self-fulfillment, but self-glorification and self-expansion
Anthony de MelloAll that the world most needs today, is combined in the most seductive manner in his art, — the three great stimulants of exhausted people: brutality, artificiality and innocence (idiocy).
Friedrich NietzscheIt'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 McGeeBack to my childhood where those monsters reside. They snack on innocence and dine on self esteem.
Jimmy BuffettI started writing books for children because I could illustrate them myself and because, in my innocence, I thought they'd be easier.
Mark HaddonIt's come at last," she thought, "the time when you can no longer stand between your children and heartache. When there wasn't enough food in the house you pretended that you weren't hungry so they could have more. In the cold of a winter's night you got up and put your blanket on their bed so they wouldn't be cold. You'd kill anyone who tried to harm them - I tried my best to kill that man in the hallway. Then one sunny day, they walk out in all innocence and they walk right into the grief that you'd give your life to spare them from.
Betty SmithWhat an unbearable creature he must have been in those days--and yet in those days he had been comparatively innocent. That was another mystery: it sometimes seemed to him that venial sins--impatience, an unimportant lie, pride, a neglected opportunity--cut you off from grace more completely than the worst sins of all. Then, in his innocence, he had felt no love for anyone; now in his corruption he had learnt.
Graham GreeneAn 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 MelvilleThe presumption of innocence is not just a legal concept. In commonplace terms, it rests on that generosity of spirit which assumes the best, not the worst, of the stranger.
Kingman Brewster, Jr.Awakening 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 DavisWhen 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. BryantSmall 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 RacineI like spring, but it is too young. I like summer, but it is too proud. So I like best of all autumn, because its leaves are a little yellow, its tone mellower, its colours richer, and it is tinged a little with sorrow and a premonition of death. Its golden richness speaks not of the innocence of spring, nor of the power of summer, but of the mellowness and kindly wisdom of approaching age. It knows the limitations of life and is content.
Lin YutangHalloween wraps fear in innocence, as though it were a lightly sour sweet. Let terror, then, be turned into a treat.
Nick GordonThe magic, the wonder, the mystery and the innocence of a child’s heart are the seeds of creativity that will heal the world.
Michael JacksonHe 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 LaGraveneseI 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 MaguireThe State insists that, by thus quarantining the general reading public against books not too rugged for grown men and women in order to shield juvenile innocence, it is exercising its power to promote the general welfare. Surely this is to burn the house to roast the pig...The incidence of this enactment is to reduce the adult population of Michigan to reading only what is fit for children.
Felix FrankfurterI'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. CrispOnce a child is confronted with the concept of death there's a certain innocence that goes.
Patsy KensitHow beautiful is sorrow when it is dressed by virgin innocence! it makes felicity in others seem deformed.
William DavenantIt is hard and perhaps impossible for many people to recognize the difference between innocence and naiveté.
M. F. K. FisherWe can all pretend to be cynical and scheming, but when we’re faced with purity and innocence, the cynical mask drops off.
Federico FelliniIt 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 ThoreauMost men die many times in their lives. The man we become invariably slaughters the child we once were. His knowledge of the world murders the babe's innocence. from Time Untime by Sherrilyn Kenyon
Sherrilyn KenyonOur civilization has decided that determining the guilt or innocence of men is a thing too important to be trusted to trained men. When it wants a library catalogued, or the solar system discovered, or any trifle of that kind, it uses up its specialists. But when it wishes anything done which is really serious, it collects twelve of the ordinary men standing round. The same thing was done, if I remember right, by the Founder of Christianity.
Gilbert K. ChestertonEmotional truths woven by lawyers in the court of law are apparently more important than the truths of actual events. I have grown to fear for those whose innocence became trapped within the legal system.
Neil deGrasse TysonPuzzles are like songs - A good puzzle can give you all the pleasure of being duped that a mystery story can. It has surface innocence, surprise, the revelation of a concealed meaning, and the catharsis of solution.
Stephen SondheimBut say, my brothers, what can the child do that even the lion could not do? Why must the preying lion still become a child? The child is innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a sacred 'Yes.' For the game of creation, my brothers, a sacred 'Yes' is needed: the spirit now wills his own will, and he who had been lost to the world now conquers his own world.
Friedrich NietzscheThere was no more good or evil in this world than we imagine there to be, either out of greed or out of innocence. Or sometimes madness.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon