Popular quotes about Innocence! Wisdom and inspiration are here!
Slave 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 CamusI 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. CrispIn former days, everyone found the assumption of innocence so easy; today we find fatally easy the assumption of guilt.
Carolyn HeilbrunThe 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.
Emma DonoghueMere anarchy is loosed upon the world, the blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned.
William Butler YeatsAn interlude of false innocence has passed. Today, as we enter the post-photographic era, we must face once again the ineradicable fragility of our ontological distinctions between the imaginary and the real, and the tragic elusiveness of the Cartesian dream. We have indeed learnt to fix the shadows, but not to secure their meanings or to stabilize their truth values; they still flicker on the walls of Plato's cave.
William J. MitchellInnocence of heart and violence of feeling are necessary in any kind of superior achievement: The arts cannot exist without them.
Louise BoganThere is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored. The reader of today looks for this motion, and rightly so, but what he has forgotten is the cost of it. His sense of evil is diluted or lacking altogether, and so he has forgotten the price of restoration. When he reads a novel, he wants either his sense tormented or his spirits raised. He wants to be transported, instantly, either to mock damnation or a mock innocence.
Flannery O'ConnorAn innocent man is a sin before God. Inhuman and therefore untrustworthy. No man should live without absorbing the sins of his kind, the foul air of his innocence, even if it did wilt rows of angel trumpets and cause them to fall from their vines.
Toni MorrisonI'm just glad I was able to return to some of that innocence and beauty I had as a child when I started my own family, and my children brought me back some of that spirit.
Angelina JolieYou still owe me a million dollars." I'd presented him with a bill for proving his innocence and getting him freed from prison. He had yet to pay. Couldn't imagine why. "Yeah, I was hoping we could work that out." "The interest alone is going to kill you." "What do you charge?" "Three hundred eighty-seven percent." "Is that ethical?" "It's as ethical as my dating the son of Satan.
Darynda JonesNor turned I ween Adam from his fair spouse, nor Eve the rites Mysterious of connubial love refused: Whatever hypocrites austerely talk Of purity and place and innocence, Defaming as impure what God declares Pure, and commands to some, leaves free to all.
John MiltonThe 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 OatesIt 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 JohnsonEvery time we focus on someone else's darkness, we are blocking our own view of the light. We think the person we are involved with has attacked us or has withheld love from us, when they really haven't. We focus on their guilt instead of their innocence. Frequently people are just being themselves and we start projecting our own childhood dramas onto them, pushing away the very love we want so much.
Marianne WilliamsonThere 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 NietzscheIf 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 CampbellHow beautiful is sorrow when it is dressed by virgin innocence! it makes felicity in others seem deformed.
William DavenantNot even the brightest future can make up for the fact that no roads lead back to what came before - to the innocence of childhood or the first time we fell in love.
Jo NesboChildhood has been idealised as a lost garden paradise to which we can never return. We are excluded from this world of carelessness, innocence and unity. But the imaginary kingdom is nothing more than a projection of adult ideas and concerns onto the image, an expression of our own yearnings. By photographing children alone, divorced from any social setting, I allow them to exist on their own...I am exploring the equivocal connection between self and world.
Loretta LuxThe deeds of love are less questionable than any action of an individual can be, for, it being founded on the rarest mutual respect, the parties incessantly stimulate each other to a loftier and purer life, and the act in which they are associated must be pure and noble indeed, for innocence and purity can have no equal. In this relation we deal with one whom we respect more religiously even than we respect our better selves, and we shall necessarily conduct as in the presence of God. What presence can be more awful to the lover than the presence of his beloved?
Henry David ThoreauI 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 MarlingThe writer cannot abandon himself simply to inspiration, and feign innocence vis a vis language, because language is never innocent.
Juan GoytisoloI think that freshness and that innocence is something that is missing from a lot of female singers. I'm certainly not denying that I'm young, but I'm not fluff.
Jessica SimpsonLove isn't as simple as you wish it would be. On the other hand, it's nowhere near as complicated as you fear it is. My advice to you is to extinguish any itch you might have to compel love to serve any agenda whatsoever. Instead, bow down before it with all the innocence you can muster, and declare yourself ready to be its humble student and servant. Celebrate through surrender.
Rob BrezsnyHis eyes were dimmed with tears and, looking humbly up to heaven, he wept for the innocence he had lost.
James JoyceLouis 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.
Brooke ShieldsRosemary 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.
F. Scott FitzgeraldIt's the first villain that I've played in a movie that has absolutely no vulnerability and no innocence, nothing whatsoever that is likeable about her other than she's so bad.
Daryl HannahI think what you have inside reflects very much in your face, in your expression. If you can find a kind of equilibrium in life, you never really get old, because you have that kind of ingenuity and innocence inside that gives you that brightness and that glint in your eye that generally, getting older, you lose.
Sophia LorenPoetry is unfallen speech. Paradise knew no other, for no other would suffice to answer the need of those ecstatic days of innocence.
Abraham ColesIn their innocence, very young children know themselves to be light and love. If we will allow them, they can teach us to see ourselves the same way.
Michael JacksonVirtue is not to be considered in the light of mere innocence, or abstaining from harm; but as the exertion of our faculties in doing good.
Joseph ButlerWe will never know the extent of the damage movies are doing to us, but movie art, it appears, thrives on moral chaos. When the country is paralyzed, the popular culture may tell us why. After innocence, winners become losers. Movies are probably inuring us to corruption; the sellout is the hero-survivor for our times.
Pauline Kael