Quotes About Innocence

God does not make us holy in the sense of character; He makes us holy in the sense of innocence, and we have to turn that innocence into holy character by a series of moral choices.

For I see that then I was still all in a state of innocence, but that innocence, once lost, is lost forever.

The quality of artistry is the capacity to assume innocence at will, the quality of experiencing innocence as if for the first time.

We must face the fact that we are on the brink of times when man may be able to magnify his intellectual and inventive capability, just as in the nineteenth century he used machines to magnify his physical capacity. Again, as then, our innocence is lost. And again, of course, the innocence, once lost, cannot be regained. The loss demands attention, not denial.

I read Norman Lock’s The Boy in His Winter with delight and amazement. Styled in the vernacular of a rapidly changing America, it stays true to the themes of Mark Twain’s original: class relations, race and slavery, childhood innocence, moral hypocrisy—and, of course, the stark beauty and unforgiving nature of America’s greatest river. I finished this absolutely elegant narrative feeling that Huck Finn has never been more alive.

I want your innocence. I want your blind, unquestioning devotion to your father, your acceptance of who and what he is. I want you to look at me the way you look at him, knowing the worst. I want you to trust me, even when your brain tells you you shouldn't, I want you to ignore common sense and your lifelong need to protect yourself. I want you to give yourself to me, body and soul.

Life is a mystery; that means it cannot be solved. And when all efforts to solve it prove futile, the mystery dawns upon you. Then the doors are open; then you are invited. As a knower, nobody enters the divine; as a child, ignorant, not knowing at all- the mystery embraces you. With a knowing mind you are clever, not innocent. Innocence is the door.

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.

The bourgeoisie is very fond of so-called practical types and novels with happy endings, since they soothe it with the idea that one can both accumulate capital and preserve innocence, be a beast and at the same time be happy...

The courage of children and beasts is a function of innocence.

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.

Nothing looks so like innocence as an indiscretion.

Art is the fatal net which catches these strange moments on the wing like mysterious butterflies, fleeing the innocence and distraction of common men.

Maybe I don't really want to know what's going on. Maybe I'd rather not know. Maybe I couldn't bear to know. The Fall was a fall from innocence to knowledge.

... to be "literary" appeared to my deluded innocence as an unending romance.

I started writing books for children because I could illustrate them myself and because, in my innocence, I thought they'd be easier.

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

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.

If women understand by emancipation the adoption of the masculine role then we are lost indeed. If women can supply no counterbalance to the blindness of male drive the aggressive society will run to its lunatic extremes at ever-escalating speed. Who will safeguard the despised animal faculties of compassion, empathy, innocence and sensuality?

In her lived an innocence of soul of which she seemed unaware.

The way to innocence, to the uncreated and to God leads on, not back, not back to the wolf or to the child, but ever further into sin, ever deeper into human life.

Remorse is virtue's root; its fair increase is fruits of innocence and blessedness.

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

Those who judge children in their innocence, prove themselves the lesser of character and the greater of ignorance.

The innocence of virgins is like milk which turns when exposed to a clap of thunder, to a tart smell, to a hot day, to the merest nothing.

I believe I am entitled like any other person to have the presumption of innocence.

I don't think the law exists to arrive at the truth. If it did, we wouldn't have exclusionary rules, we wouldn't have presumptions of innocence, we wouldn't have proof beyond reasonable doubt. There's an enormous difference between the role of truth in law and the role of truth in science. In law, truth is one among many goals.

I feel I lost my innocence to cancer.

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

I did gardening and cooking and drawing and reading to try take the pressure off the music - just being eclectic and putting the fun back in and bringing more innocence in again is really important.

It wasn't the intention to do something important, or to even relate about social issues. The ground is so fertile in the justice world, dealing with the death penalty and the Innocence Project, for characters that have a moral ambiguity, which we were both attracted to. It's the idea that everybody has their reasons. Whatever their actions are, whether you agree with them or not, you can understand why they're feeling that way, in terms of racism or even the death penalty.

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.

Wisdom is the recovery of innocence at the far end of experience.

Christ is the very epitome of innocence, and without the blood of Christ, shed on Calvary, God's plan of salvation would not have been fulfilled.

Prayer is innocence's friend; and willingly flieth incessant 'twist the earth and the sky, the carrier-pigeon of heaven.

I categorically declare first my absolute innocence, second my lack of criminal intent, and third my effusive apologies.

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.

Maybe innocence is a skin you must shed to build layers more resistant to the caustic truths of the world.

Innocence dwells with Wisdom, but never with ignorance.

Maybe 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.

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

The 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?

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

My innocence didn't always help me, but it did preserve something in me that maybe others don't have anymore. I'm inside my bubble, you could say, and thankfully so, because I don't think daily life is always great. It protects me.

People are entitled to the presumption of innocence.

A lot of children grow up in poverty with flawed parents, but their inner world is still as inherently filled with wonder and innocence as children who are kept away from the city's underbelly.

When you see Liana [Liberato], who at the time was 14, there is an inexperience and innocence that you can't act and you can't fake.