Quotes About Innocence

When grown people speak of the innocence of children, they dont really know what they mean. Pressed, they will go a step further and say, Well, ignorance then. The child is neither. There is no crime which a boy of eleven had not envisaged long ago. His only innocence is, he may not be old enough to desire the fruits of it...his ignorance is, he does not know how to commit it...

Innocence always calls mutely for protection when we would be so much wiser to guard ourselves against it: innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.

Zen 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.

Over the years Woodstock got glorified and romanticised and became the event that symbolised Utopia. It's the last page of our collective memory of the age of innocence. Then things turned ugly and would never be the same again.

Oh,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.

Self-knowledge is like lost innocence; however unsettling you find it, it can never be 'unthought' or 'unknown'.

In former days, everyone found the assumption of innocence so easy; today we find fatally easy the assumption of guilt.

Innocence is like polished armor; it adorns and defends.

Mistaking Palestinian military weakness for moral innocence seems to further amplify the inattention of journalists to the culture of lies.

The paradox of publicity is that even as we do it, we know it's killing off the chance of another reader happening across our book in the ideal state of innocence.

Great things demand that we either remain silent about them or speak in a great manner: in a great manner, that is-cynically and with innocence.

For 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.

In 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.

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.

Cheap thrill: moral outrage revels in its own innocence and in the guilt of the wicked Others.

It is Australian innocence to love The naturally excessive and be proud Of a thoroughbred gelding who ran fast.

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

Innocence is not pure so much as pleased, Always expectant, bright-eyed, self-enclosed

Social media is great, I guess, but it feels like technology is the sapper of innocence.

I suppose there's a melancholy tone at the back of the American mind, a sense of something lost. And it's the lost world of Thomas Jefferson. It is the lost sense of innocence that we could live with a very minimal state, with a vast sense of space in which to work out freedom.

I never had innocence.

There is scarcely anything more important in the government of men than the exact - I will ever say pedantic - observance of the regular forms by which the guilt or innocence of accused persons is determined.

It 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.

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

I wanted to be born at the farthest limit of the world. I'll explore it, I said to myself, biting big chunks from it. And when I want, I'll go straight to the core. This is the way of the world I thought in my innocence, round and around the layers of peel until the taste becomes certain.

People 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.

A feeling heart is a blessing that no one, who has it, would be without; and it is a moral security of innocence; since the heart that is able to partake of the distress of another, cannot wilfully give it.

Cyborg writing must not be about the Fall, the imagination of a once-upon-a-time wholeness before language, before writing, before Man. Cyborg writing is about the power to survive, not on the basis of original innocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them as other...

Halloween wraps fear in innocence, as though it were a lightly sour sweet. Let terror, then, be turned into a treat.

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.

Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence.

I 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.

O Innocence, with laughing eyes! Thou art a cherub from the skies, A wanderer from heaven.

There 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.

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.

Innocence is impossible when people have never had the choice of becoming corrupt by dominating others.

Nobody 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.

To 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.

How beautiful is sorrow when it is dressed by virgin innocence! it makes felicity in others seem deformed.

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.

The thing about Zen is that it pushes contradictions to their ultimate limit where one has to choose between madness and innocence. And Zen. suggests that we may be driving toward one or the other on a cosmic scale. Driving toward them because, one way or the other, as madmen or innocents, we are already there. It might be good to open our eyes and see.

The essence of art is to recapturel the fantasy and the imagination of a child again, but without the innocence of a child.

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.

To 'justify' means nothing else than to acquit of guilt him (her) who was accused as if his own innocence were confirmed.

Everything good is costly, and the development of the personality is one of the most costly of all things. It will cost you your innocence, your illusions, your certainty. (10)