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.

— James Baldwin

There is no aphrodisiac like innocence.

— Jean Baudrillard

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.

— Ruth Benedict

Every harlot was a virgin once.

— William Blake

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.

— Malcolm Bradbury

The innocent is the person who explains nothing.

— Albert Camus

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

One threatens the innocent who spares the guilty.

— Sir Edward Coke

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

— Anatole France

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

— Anatole France

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.

— Graham Greene

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

— Haug

All things truly wicked start from an innocence.

— Ernest Hemingway

He is armed without who is innocent within, be this thy screen, and this thy wall of brass.

— Horace

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

— Francois De La Rochefoucauld

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

— Else Lanchester

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

— Mignon McLaughlin

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

— Ouida

Now my innocence begins to weigh me down.

— Jean Racine

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.

— Friedrich Schlegel

Innocence is like polished armor; it adorns and defends.

— Bishop Robert South

If you would live innocently, seek solitude.

— Publilius Syrus

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.

— Dylan Thomas

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

— Thomas Traherne

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

— Source Unknown

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

— John Updike

Nothing looks so like innocence as an indiscretion.

— Oscar Wilde

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

— Mary Wollstonecraft

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.

— Virginia Woolf

I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.

— F. Scott Fitzgerald