Quotes About Innocence

If I could, Sister James, I would certainly choose to live in innocence. But innocence can only be wisdom in a world without evil. Situations arise and we are confronted with wrongdoing and the need to act.

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.

People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen forget.

Childish fantasy, like the sheath over the bud, not only protects but curbs the terrible budding spirit, protects not only innocence from the world, but the world from the power of innocence.

I don't think that on a daily basis, people need to be so concerned with others think. When someone comes forward and is an individual, such as a Lady Gaga or a Katy Perry, people respond to them because there is that sense of innocence. It's obviously dress up and theatre. I never lost that I think part of that is growing up gay and part is growing up overweight. You never lose that, and I never want to lose touch with that whimsy, that sense of innocence. I also love the reaction it elicits in people. I like that it makes other people happy.

We drank a toast to innocence, we drank a toast to now. And tried to reach beyond the emptiness, but neither one knew how.

blessing the boats (at saint mary’s) may the tide that is entering even now the lip of our understanding carry you out beyond the face of fear may you kiss the wind then turn from it certain that it will love your back may you open your eyes to water water waving forever and may you in your innocence sail through this to that

The 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.

[In old age] there is a childlike innocence, often, that has nothing to do with the childishness of senility. The moments become precious . . .

Three 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.

The 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.

A man is not to aim at innocence, any more than he is to aim at hair, but he is to keep it.

There 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.

If there's anything to learn from the history of movies, it's that corruption leads to further corruption, not to innocence.

This isn't about guilt or innocence, he says. The dinosaurs weren't morally good or bad, but they're all dead.

When 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.

Alas! innocence is but a poor substitute for experience.

A cheerful temper, joined with innocence will make beauty attractive, knowledge delightful, and wit good-natured.

I had discovered that love might be a pastime as well as a tragedy, and I gave myself to it with pagan innocence.

Happiness is above all things the calm, glad certainty of innocence.

Whether we knew many who died on September 11 or personally knew none, we all lost something on that day. Innocence. Security. A trust that our homeland would always be safe.

Ignorance is innocence - stupidity comes with experience

Resistance is weakness and fear masquerading as strength. What the ego sees as weakness is your Being in its purity, innocence, and power. What it sees as strength is weakness.

I'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.

It is hard and perhaps impossible for many people to recognize the difference between innocence and naiveté.

Innocence eroded into nightmare. All because of very bad touch. Love, corrupted.

One of my favorite things is watching my children learn something new. The combination of innocence and excitement makes a parent feel truly alive, even if only for a second and peripherally.

By the laws of rectitude accused Persons, however atrocious their offences, are allowed to make their defence, and by a verdict of a Jury of their Peers, they are either convicted, or acquitted. I have some times thought that we Women are hardly dealt by since strictly speaking, we cannot legally be tried by our Peers, for men are not our Peers, and yet upon their breath our guilt or innocence depends— thus are our privileges in this, as in many other respects tyrannically abridged, and we are forced to yield to necessity.

Innocence dwells with Wisdom, but never with ignorance.

They 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.

People talk vaguely about the innocence of a little child, but they take mighty good care not to let it out of their sight for twenty minutes.

There is an innocence in lying which is the sign of good faith in a cause.

Innocence and optimism have one basic failing: they have no fundamental depth.

When you laugh with good-hearted innocence at your own creations, you are free.

No one is safe from slander. The best way is to pay no attention to it, but live in innocence and let the world talk.

For when man comes to front the everlasting God, and look the splendor of His judgments in the face, personal integrity, the dream of spotlessness and innocence, vanishes into thin air: your decencies and your church-goings and your regularities and your attachment to a correct school and party, your gospel formulas of sound doctrine--what is all that, in front of the blaze of the wrath to come?

My voice in combination with the harp - which, by the way, I use because I've played it my entire life, not to make some statement about the harp - somehow has ... coloured people's interpretations of the music and projected an idea of childlike or fairytale quality or innocence. Which sometimes prevents people from listening to the songs the way I would like them to be listened to.

Innocence has nothing to dread.

The writer cannot abandon himself simply to inspiration, and feign innocence vis a vis language, because language is never innocent.

As long as you stay as a good hearted person, you will keep the innocence in your face.

I think scent is sensual. I guess evoking a mood or a spirit is key, and I think with the women's fragrances we have evoked different types, moods or sensibilities of a woman - whether it's Daisy with the sweetness and the innocence or Lola which is more provocative, sexy and sultry.

Back then they had Elvis and they thought Elvis was so risqué. So everyone has their perception to what innocence is.

Those who have lost an infant are never, as it were, without an infant child. Their other children grow up to manhood and womanhood, and suffer all the changes of mortality; but this one alone is rendered an immortal child; for death has arrested it with his kindly harshness, and blessed it into an eternal image of youth and innocence.

The word 'innocence' means a mind that is incapable of being hurt.

Louis Malle was the best filmmaker I've ever worked with. He was such an artist. He was dealing with the theme of innocence and experience.

Rosemary bubbled with delight at the trunks. Her naivete responded whole-heartedly to the expensive simplicity of the Divers, unaware of its complexity and its lack of innocence, unaware that it was all a selection of quality rather than quantity from the run of the world's bazaar; and that the simplicity of behavior also, the nursery-like peace and good will, the emphasis on the simpler virtues, was part of a desperate bargain with the gods and had been attained through struggles she could not have guessed at.

Innocence is lucky if it finds the same protection as guilt

I will love you as misfortune loves orphans, as fire loves innocence, and as justice loves to sit and watch while everything goes wrong.