Quotes About Innocence

It is more important that innocence be protected than it is that guilt be punished, for guilt and crimes are so frequent in this world that they cannot all be punished. But if innocence itself is brought to the bar and condemned, perhaps to die, then the citizen will say, "whether I do good or whether I do evil is immaterial, for innocence itself is no protection," and if such an idea as that were to take hold in the mind of the citizen that would be the end of security whatsoever.

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.

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.

American movies and music deliver themes of freedom, innocence, and power that appeal to others - partly because America itself was put together out of a multiplicity of national traditions.

Writing itself, if not misunderstood and abused, becomes a way of empowering the writing self. It converts anger and disappointment into deliberate and durable aggression, the writer's main source of energy. It converts sorrow and self-pity into empathy, the writer's main means of relating to otherness. Similarly, his wounded innocence turns into irony, his silliness into wit, his guilt into judgment, his oddness into originality, his perverseness into his stinger.

After thee accumulation of too much history we have lost our innocence, we cannot easily believe in any explanations. We describe rather than feel, we touch rather than explore, we lust rather than adore.

Wisdom comes only with innocence.

This is a generation weaned on Watergate, and there is no presumption of innocence and no presumption of good intentions. Instead, there is a presumption that, without relentless scrutiny, the government will misbehave.

When you become a parent, or a teacher, you turn into a manager of this whole system. You become the person controlling the bubble of innocence around a child, regulating it.

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.

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

Back to my childhood where those monsters reside. They snack on innocence and dine on self esteem.

It's not your client's obligation, or your obligation, to prove your client's innocence. It is the prosecution's obligation to - to prove you're client's guilt.

Atheism is aristocratic; the idea of a great Being that watches over oppressed innocence and punishes triumphant crime is altogether popular.

What an unbearable creature he must have been in those days--and yet in those days he had been comparatively innocent. That was another mystery: it sometimes seemed to him that venial sins--impatience, an unimportant lie, pride, a neglected opportunity--cut you off from grace more completely than the worst sins of all. Then, in his innocence, he had felt no love for anyone; now in his corruption he had learnt.

The 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.

Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being.

I never had innocence.

Innocence, Once Lost, Can Never Be Regained. Darkness, Once Gazed Upon, Can Never Be Lost.

You get to relive your childhood when you have a baby and you see these toys and these books you read when you were little - the innocence that you are able to maintain because you have to find that again in order to connect with your child keeps you in a special state of mind.

I lost my innocence at age eight, so I decided to do the same to as many young girls as I could.

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...

Alas! innocence is but a poor substitute for experience.

Unlike any other business in the United States, sports must preserve an illusion of perfect innocence.

There have been many beautiful women since Marilyn Monroe. But who is there that has her total magic? Nobody has that vulnerability any more. We turn to child models in an instinctive search for that innocence and freshness, but they don’t have the deep feminine sexuality that came from Marilyn like light.

O 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.

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.

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

You lie once.. you lie for the rest of your life... and in quest of proving your innocence.. you pledge your honesty with utter lies.... !!!

If we depart form tradition, it is out of knowledge, not innocence.

You've had a whole lot of experience, but everything is also radically new at each moment, and you have to bring a kind of childlike second-level innocence to bear upon all situations, if you are going to be of use and you are going to really learn from the situation or the people.

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

There'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.

Once a child is confronted with the concept of death there's a certain innocence that goes.

Those who improve with age embrace the power of personal growth and personal achievement and begin to replace youth with wisdom, innocence with understanding, and lack of purpose with self-actualization.

But her's was the misery of innocence, which, like a cloud that passes over the fair moon, for a while hides, but cannot tarnish its brightness.

It leaned forward, elbows on its knees, all amusement vanishing from its features, leaving its chiseled visage quietly regal, dignified. "I give you my word, Gabrielle O'Callaghan," it said softly. "I will protect you." "Right. The word of the blackest fairy, the legendary liar, the great deceiver," she mocked. How dare it offer its word like it might actually mean something? A muscle leapt in its jaw. "That is not all I have been, Gabrielle. I have been, and am, many things." "Oh, of course, silly me, I left out consummate seducer and ravager of innocence.

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.

The culture will not be able to persist in light of the rigid systems of its own innocence.

I bought my first camera to photograph my brother's children. I learned a lot from that experience. The value of innocence and of not being focused on yourself, and I have to say that these things have remained with me to this day. I can immediately feel when someone is putting on a camera face.

their powerlessness, innocence, and imagination fused to enable them to turn time inside out, travel on the wind, and enter the souls of animals.

I know we're not saints or virgins or lunatics; we know all the lust and lavatory jokes, and most of the dirty people; we can catch buses and count our change and cross the roads and talk real sentences. But our innocence goes awfully deep, and our discreditable secret is that we don't know anything at all, and our horrid inner secret is that we don't care that we don't.

How often, being moved under a false cause, if the person offending makes a good defense and presents us with a just excuse, are we angry against truth and innocence itself?

Our 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.

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

Photography is Photography; And in it's purity and innocence is far too uniquely, valuable and beautiful to be spoilt by making it imitate something else.

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.

My innocence is a dying flower