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 SchlegelNever 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 LarkinUnlike 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. LaphamSo 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 PynchonWe find that Good and Evil happen alike to all Men on this Side of the Grave; and as the principle Design of Tragedy is to raise Commiseration and Terror in the Minds of the Audience, we shall defeat this great End, if we always make Virtue and Innocence happy and successful.
Joseph AddisonOh,to be walking through Leningrad white night after white night, the dawn to dusk all smelting together like platinum ore, Tatiana thought, turning away to the wall, again to the wall, the wall, as ever. Alexander, my nights, my days, my every thought. You will fall away from me in just a while, won't you, and I'll be whole again, and I will go on and feel for someone else, the way everyone does. But my innocence is forever gone.
Paullina SimonsSelf-knowledge is like lost innocence; however unsettling you find it, it can never be 'unthought' or 'unknown'.
Michael SandelNever resist a sentence you like, in which language takes its own pleasure and in which, after having abused it for so long, you are stupefied by its innocence.
Jean BaudrillardMy parents are pretty liberal. But they were just you know trying to look out for my innocence or whatever. But my babysitter had "Forever" [by Judy Blume]. And I said "Well I've read Judy Blume books, can I borrow that?" And she said no, this one's not appropriate for you. Which obviously, got me really worked up. So I took it.
Lena DunhamThe 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 JakesChildren, Never look Back!" and this meant that we must never allow the future to be weighed down by memory . for children have no past, and that is the whole secret of the magical innocence of their smiles.
Milan KunderaThe 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 ChekhovIn 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 CandisThree 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 NinThe question of dying becomes a wise reminder. It cures us of our innocence of the future.
Don DeLilloFocus on guilt will always breed fear, and focus on innocence will always breed love. Any time we project guilt onto someone else, we are fortifying the experience of guilt within ourselves. Like blood on Lady MacBeth's hands, we cannot remove our own guilty feelings as long as we are judging others.
Marianne WilliamsonThe whole thing of this business is to retain your enthusiasm and, in a sense, retain your innocence and try to practice as much humility as possible.
John Frankenheimer... 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 BeecherThere 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 JenningsThe innocence of such children doesn't answer our deepest questions about this vale of tears to which we are condemned, but it helps to dispel them. That is the secret to family life.
Joyce Carol OatesRegarding the children in Israel who made the first known world change in history using the Bible Code, they left a statement which they wrote on a rock, in Hebrew: "If it is not simple, it simply will not be," meaning that they have decided that if there is not an innocence, a simplicity in the actions of the world, they are simply going to erase it.
Drunvalo MelchizedekInnocence, Once Lost, Can Never Be Regained. Darkness, Once Gazed Upon, Can Never Be Lost.
John MiltonIndia has the purity, the innocence. India knows what it wants. There is a direction. It has so much to offer.
Anil KapoorI 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 RadcliffeI 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 GordonI don't think the law exists to arrive at the truth. If it did, we wouldn't have exclusionary rules, we wouldn't have presumptions of innocence, we wouldn't have proof beyond reasonable doubt. There's an enormous difference between the role of truth in law and the role of truth in science. In law, truth is one among many goals.
Alan DershowitzMy detention has been worth every second if only to prove my innocence to those who truly matter most my countrymen.
Joseph EstradaThose 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 KramarikIt is the condition of our present state to see more than we can attain; the exactest vigilance and caution can never maintain a single day of unmingled innocence.
Samuel JohnsonO 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 FieldingThe practice of Zen mind is beginner's mind. The innocence of the first inquiryโwhat am I?โis needed throughout Zen practice. The mind of the beginner is empty, free of the habits of the expert, ready to accept, to doubt, and open to all the possibilities. It is the kind of mind which can see things as they are, which step by step and in a flash can realize the original nature of everything.
Shunryu SuzukiThere is an innocence in admiration; it is found in those to whom it has never yet occurred that they, too, might be admired some day.
Friedrich NietzscheI'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 JacksonThe essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives for ever.
John UpdikeI 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 MaguireIf 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 CampbellWhen 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 RothfussAlthough 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 Younger