Quotes about innocence

"People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster."

Baldwin, James on innocence
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"There is no aphrodisiac like innocence."

Baudrillard, Jean on innocence   

"No man ever looks at the world with pristine eyes. He sees it edited by a definite set of customs and institutions and ways of thinking."

Benedict, Ruth on innocence   

"Every harlot was a virgin once."

Blake, William on innocence   

"Only the old are innocent. That is what the Victorians understood, and the Christians. Original sin is a property of the young. The old grow beyond corruption very quickly."

Bradbury, Malcolm on innocence   

"The innocent is the person who explains nothing."

Camus, Albert on innocence   

"The greenhorn is the ultimate victor in everything; it is he that gets the most out of life."

Chesterton, Gilbert K. on innocence   

"One threatens the innocent who spares the guilty."

Coke, Sir Edward on innocence   

"Innocence most often is a good fortune and not a virtue."

France, Anatole on innocence   

"It is well for the heart to be naive and the mind not to be."

France, Anatole on innocence   

"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."

Greene, Graham on innocence   

"Innocent as a dove you will harm no one, but wise as a serpent no one will harm you."

Haug on innocence   

"All things truly wicked start from an innocence."

Hemingway, Ernest on innocence
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"He is armed without who is innocent within, be this thy screen, and this thy wall of brass."

Horace on innocence   

"Those who are incapable of committing great crimes do not readily suspect them in others."

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De on innocence   

"She looked as though butter wouldn't melt in her mouth --or anywhere else."

Lanchester, Else on innocence   

"It's innocence when it charms us, ignorance when it doesn't."

McLaughlin, Mignon on innocence   

"To vice, innocence must always seem only a superior kind of chicanery."

Ouida on innocence   

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"Now my innocence begins to weigh me down."

Racine, Jean on innocence   

"Prudishness is pretense of innocence without innocence. Women have to remain prudish as long as men are sentimental, dense, and evil enough to demand of them eternal innocence and lack of education. For innocence is the only thing which can ennoble lack of education."

Schlegel, Friedrich on innocence   

"Innocence is like polished armor; it adorns and defends."

South, Bishop Robert on innocence   

"If you would live innocently, seek solitude."

Syrus, Publilius on innocence
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"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."

Thomas, Dylan on innocence
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"Certainly Adam in Paradise had not more sweet and curious apprehensions of the world, than I when I was a child."

Traherne, Thomas on innocence   

"The temperate person's pleasures are durable because they are regular; and all their life is calm and serene, because it is innocent."

Unknown, Source on innocence   

"The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives for ever."

Updike, John on innocence   

"Nothing looks so like innocence as an indiscretion."

Wilde, Oscar on innocence
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"Children, I grant, should be innocent; but when the epithet is applied to men, or women, it is but a civil term for weakness."

Wollstonecraft, Mary on innocence   

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"I am to be broken. I am to be derided all my life. I am to be cast up and down among these men and women, with their twitching faces, with their lying tongues, like a cork on a rough sea. Like a ribbon of weed I am flung far every time the door opens."

Woolf, Virginia on innocence
3 fans of this quote