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 naivetรฉ, to try to achieve a new innocence, a new naivetรฉ.
Frank Moore CrossWe lost our innocence in the Fall, and our turn to it is through the Redemption which was brought about by Christ's death and by our slow participation in it. Sentimentality is a skipping of this process in its concrete reality and an early arrival at a mock state of innocence, which strongly suggests its opposite.
Flannery O'ConnorWhen 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...
William FaulknerI feel almost as if I had been born in a vacuum of innocence, and then had to come to terms with the fact that actually, I was born into the middle of history - the rather grimy normality of the 70s, which did, indeed, retain some traces of human innocence, but were also girded about by the demons of experience.
Quentin S. CrispPeople 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.
James A. BaldwinFor 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 LutherAt that time, I was still in an experimental stage, trying to blend Western drawing techniques and Chinese brushwork together. It was harder for me back then... But that piece is special and important, because it represents vigilance and innocence; the kind of precious innocence only present at the beginning of a new artistic exploration.
Liu DanI think innocence is something that adults project upon children that's not really there.
Donna TarttAmerica has a hold on imaginations that no other country does. I think that is partly because it is an immigrant country and there is still a kind of innocence in America that translates very well everywhere in the world.
Pico IyerA library is a place where you can lose your innocence without losing your virginity.
Germaine GreerInnocence of heart and violence of feeling are necessary in any kind of superior achievement: The arts cannot exist without them.
Louise BoganArt is the fatal net which catches these strange moments on the wing like mysterious butterflies, fleeing the innocence and distraction of common men.
Giorgio de ChiricoAnd that's what innocence is. It's simple and trusting like a child, not judgmental and committed to one narrow point of view. If you are locked into a pattern of thinking and responding, your creativity gets blocked. You miss the freshness and magic of the moment. Learn to be innocent again, and that freshness never fades.
Michael JacksonA girl is Innocence playing in the mud, Beauty standing on its head, and Motherhood dragging a doll by the foot.
Alan BeckIt'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 SmithAn 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 MelvilleMore than fantasy or even science fiction, Ray Bradbury wrote horror, and like so many great horror writers he was himself utterly without fear, of anything. He wasn't afraid of looking uncool - he wasn't scared to openly love innocence, or to be optimistic, or to write sentimentally when he felt that way.
Lev GrossmanThe 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 FrankenheimerNot 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 SharpEvery act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being.
Albert CamusI'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 BraffIf blue is dream what then innocence? What awaits the heart if Love bears no arrows?
Federico Garcia LorcaEnjoyment and innocence are the most bashful things: both do not want to be sought.
Friedrich NietzscheInnocence, Once Lost, Can Never Be Regained. Darkness, Once Gazed Upon, Can Never Be Lost.
John MiltonRyan Stout, a straight-arrow-looking kind of guy, shocks the crowd into laughter with his inventive interplay between innocence and a jarringly twisted point of view. He goes from loony to weirdly logical. With him, itโs more than clever writing; his comedy is based on clear and clever thinking.
Ben Fong-TorresThrough private investment capitalism kept raising the productivity of labor to new heights. Parents were able to earn enough so their offspring did not have to join the work force at an early age. This produced something unique in history: Childhood, a time when the young could experience the innocence of play and opportunity of schooling before entering the world of work.
Richard EbelingI 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. ChestertonUnlike any other business in the United States, sports must preserve an illusion of perfect innocence.
Lewis H. LaphamIt 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, with laughing eyes! Thou art a cherub from the skies, A wanderer from heaven.
Harvey RiceThere's no limit to what you can dream. You expect the unexpected, you believe in magic, in fairy tales, and in possibilities. Then you grow older and that innocence is shattered and somewhere along the way the reality of life gets in the way and you're hit by the realization that you can't be all you wanted to be, you just might have to settle for a little bit less.
Cecelia AhernYour Christians, whom one persecutes in vain, have something in them that surpasses the human. They lead a life of such innocence,that the heavens owe them some recognition: that they arise the stronger the more they are beaten down is hardly the result of common virtues.
Pierre CorneilleI would love to be fooled. The innocence of child for the first time, seeing something and being in wonder is something that I long for because I'm tainted.
Criss AngelResistance 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.
Eckhart TolleThe Seasons Difference is a suave and urbane comedy about several immense abstractions - faith, innocence, loneliness, and love.
Orville PrescottMaybe there are moments between any two adults in love when the age of one of them dissolves before the other's eyes, when the first refuge of the soul at its creation is laid bare and skinless as a sunbeam through a window. Innocence and vulnerability, two unmeasurable quantities...Perhaps that is the essence of the protection's intimacy, that it dwells in camouflage and justifies itself in stillness.
Marianne WigginsPeople 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.
Hector Hugh MunroEverything 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)
Sheldon B. KoppUG 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 IoneIt 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 ThoreauA man writes to throw off the poison which he has accumulated because of his false way of life. He 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. No man would set a word down on paper if he had the courage to live out what he believed in.
Henry MillerI feel like I'm a much better person when I'm developing my imagination and my innocence and my vulnerability. I like that version of me better than the version where I'm just working on my analytical mind.
Brit MarlingSo many times I've photographed stories that show the degradation of the planet. I had one idea to go and photograph the factories that were polluting, and to see all the deposits of garbage. But, in the end, I thought the only way to give us an incentive, to bring hope, is to show the pictures of the pristine planet - to see the innocence.
Sebastiao SalgadoFor 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?
Frederick William RobertsonOur 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. ChestertonTruth is, most of us contain a splashing, giggling, squealing child who knows without thinking that bare skin and water go together as wings go with air, roots with earth, and the phoenix with incendiary sun. And innocence belongs to us as it did to ancient Greek athletes, who never wore clothes for their footraces or boxing matches but rather oiled themselves until their nude bodies glistened in the sunlight.
Janet Lembke