The great challenge of adulthood is holding on to your idealism after you lose your innocence. — Bruce Springsteen
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
Innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm. — Graham Greene
There is something splendid about innocence; but what is bad about it, in turn, is that it cannot protect itself very well and is easily seduced. — Immanuel Kant
Being part of the natural world reminds me that innocence isn't ever lost completely; we just need to maintain our goodness to regain it. — Jewel
All things truly wicked start from an innocence. — Ernest Hemingway
I can sing very comfortably from my vantage point because a lot of the music was about a loss of innocence, there's innocence contained in you but there's also innocence in the process of being lost. — Bruce Springsteen
Crime butchers innocence to secure a throne, and innocence struggles with all its might against the attempts of crime. — Maximilien Robespierre
A library is a place where you can lose your innocence without losing your virginity. — Germaine Greer
Ralph wept for the end of innocence, the darkness of man's heart, and the fall through the air of the true, wise friend called Piggy. — William Golding
The tragedy of sexual intercourse is the perpetual virginity of the soul. — William Butler Yeats
Losing an illusion makes you wiser than finding a truth. — Ludwig Borne
I am not innocent. Innocence is a science of the sublime. And I am only at the very beginning of the apprenticeship. — Helene Cixous
Self-knowledge is like lost innocence; however unsettling you find it, it can never be 'unthought' or 'unknown'. — Michael Sandel
Innocence Quotes
The media's the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that's power. Because they control the minds of the masses. — Malcom X
I die innocent of all the crimes laid to my charge; I pardon those who have occasioned my death; and I pray to God that the blood you are going to shed may never be visited on France. — Louis XVI of France
Children are human beings to whom respect is due, superior to us by reason of their innocence and of the greater possibilities of their future. — Maria Montessori
The best way to guarantee a loss is to quit.
Whatever weakens your reason, impairs the tenderness of your conscience, obscures your sense of God, or takes off your relish of spiritual things; in short, whatever increases the strength and authority of your body over your mind; that thing is sin to you, however innocent it may be in itself. — Susanna Wesley
When a government becomes powerful it is destructive, extravagant and violent; it is an usurer which takes bread from innocent mouths and deprives honorable men of their substance, for votes with which to perpetuate itself. — Marcus Tullius Cicero
Holy Communion is the shortest and safest way to Heaven. There are others: innocence, but that is for little children; penance, but we are afraid of it; generous endurance of trials of life, but when they come we weep and ask to be. The surest, easiest, shortest way is the Eucharist. — Pope Pius X
The trust of the innocent is the liar's most useful tool. — Stephen King
If I sit next to a madman as he drives a car into a group of innocent bystanders, I can't, as a Christian, simply wait for the catastrophe, then comfort the wounded and bury the dead. I must try to wrestle the steering wheel out of the hands of the driver. — Dietrich Bonhoeffer
There are no innocent civilians, so it doesn't bother me so much to be killing innocent bystanders. — Curtis LeMay
To see a world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wildflower. — William Blake
Crimes against children are the most heinous crime. That, for me, would be a reason for capital punishment because children are innocent and need the guidance of an adult society. — Clint Eastwood
When we are children we seldom think of the future. This innocence leaves us free to enjoy ourselves as few adults can. The day we fret about the future is the day we leave our childhood behind. — Patrick Rothfuss
Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.
The sexual abuse and exploitation of children is one of the most vicious crimes conceivable, a violation of mankind's most basic duty to protect the innocent. — James T. Walsh
In the inner place where true artists create there exists a pure child. — Lawren Harris
Children are happy because they’re not self-conscious. — Naval Ravikant
Not everyone you lose is a loss.
From children and drunk people you’ll hear the truth. — Danish Proverbs
A better world begins with our children. Our boys and, crucially, our girls. — Ursula von der Leyen
I have two young children with autism. What could they have ever done to deserve that? What kind of a God allows the innocent to suffer? It's a mystery. Yet still, I believe in God. — Fred Melamed
The soul, light as a feather, fluid as water, innocent as a child, responds to every movement of grace like a floating balloon. — Jean-Pierre de Caussade
Innocence And Experience Quotes
India has known the innocence and insouciance of childhood, the passion and abandon of youth, and the ripe wisdom of maturity that comes from long experience of pain and pleasure; and over and over a gain she has renewed her childhood and youth and age — Jawaharlal Nehru
... pure and intelligent women can be deceived and misled by the baser sort, their very innocence and experience making them credulous and the helpless tools of the guilty and bold. — Catharine Beecher
When the heart is touched by direct experience, the mind may be challenged to change. Personal involvement with innocent suffering, with the injustice others suffer, is the catalyst for solidarity which then gives rise to intellectual inquiry and moral reflection. — Peter Hans Kolvenbach
It is better to risk saving a guilty person than to condemn an innocent one.
Experience had taught me that innocence seldom utters outraged shrikes. Guilt does. Innocence is a mighty shield, and the man or woman covered by it, is much more likely to answer calmly: 'My life is blameless. Look into it, if you like, for you will find nothing.' That is the tone of innocence. — Whittaker Chambers
In every cry of every man,
In every infant's cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forg'd manacles I hear. — William Blake
All great art originates from the innocent child within us expressing itself through the wisdom, experience and skill of an adult. — Richard Schmid
A failure is not a loss. Its a gain. You learn. You change. You grow.
We are prisoners of the world's demented sink.
The soft enchantments of our years of innocence
Are harvested by accredited experience
Our fondest memories soon turn to poison
And only oblivion remains in season. — John Ashbery
The Architect is just one of a series of works which examine the confrontation of innocence and experience, illustrating the complex ethics of power that exist between reader and writer, critic and artist, the human and the divine. — John Scott
When we see the face of God we shall know that we have always known it. He has been a party to, has made, sustained and moved moment by moment within, all our earthly experiences of innocent love. — C. S. Lewis
When the stars threw down their spears, and watered heaven with their tears, did he smile his work to see? Did he who made the Lamb make thee? — William Blake
Don't we all look back in longing, those of us who had happy childhoods? Because the greatest loss we ever know is not the loss of family or place or money, it is the loss of innocence. There is forever a hollow place in our hearts once we realize that darkness rings the campfire. — Carolyn Hart
Most of life is hell. It’s filed with failure and loss. People disappoint you. Dreams don’t work out. Hearts get broken. Innocent journalists die. And the best moments of life, when everything comes together, are few and fleeting. But you’ll never get to the next great moment if you don’t keep going. So that’s what I do. I keep going. — Sigourney Weaver
One person's trauma is another's loss of innocence. — Jodi Picoult
I think that's the real loss of innocence: the first time you glimpse the boundaries that will limit your potential. — Steve Toltz
Bad company is as instructive as licentiousness. One makes up for the loss of one's innocence with the loss of one's prejudices. — Denis Diderot
I would certainly say that films like Time Code and the Loss of Sexual Innocence were far more rewarding to me in terms of being able to move forward as a filmmaker. — Mike Figgis
Over the past few years, the road to confrontation has shown its consequences: loss of innocent lives, destruction and fear. Most costly, however, was the loss of hope. The most precious gift that you can present to your peoples over the coming weeks is renewed hope born out of tangible progress on the ground. — King Abdullah II
a loss of sensibility follows a loss of innocence, at once a penalty and a compensation. — Dodie Smith
No acquisitions of guilt can compensate the loss of that solid inward comfort of mind, which is the sure companion of innocence and virtue; nor can in the least balance the evil of that horror and anxiety which, in their room, guilt introduces into our bosoms. — Henry Fielding
To write books is to have a certain relation with original sin. For what is a book if not a loss of innocence, an act of aggression, a repetition of our Fall? — Emile M. Cioran
He wanted to care, and he could not care. For he had gone away and he could never go back anymore. The gates were closed, the sun was down, and there was no beauty left but the gray beauty of steel that withstands all time. Even the grief he could have borne was left behind in the country of youth, of illusion, of the richness of life, where his winter dreams had flourished. — F. Scott Fitzgerald
It was quite a European war until 1917, when the Americans joined up. They don't have the same sense of the loss of innocence and the cataclysmic loss of life. A whole generation was wiped out. — Tom Hiddleston
I think the heartbreak of September 11 - America's grief not only over the loss of life but also the loss of our own innocence - has expanded us as people because it has tenderized our hearts. On a psychological level, the American people have matured as a result of that awful day. — Marianne Williamson
I'm not sure if there is a cultural loss of innocence specifically associated with the seventies. The oil crisis? The Watergate scandal? I really don't know. There's nothing there on the scale of Hiroshima. — Quentin S. Crisp
Al-Qaida in particular remains dangerous, and there [in Iraq] is some residual militia and special group presence. There are still between 20 and 30 attacks per day, still periodic car bombs and still loss of innocent civilians. — David Petraeus
[Ending] is partly drawn from a desire to shock the audience, to brutally de-romanticize what many Americans think is happening overseas. And partly drawn from my own childhood: violence and a loss of innocence. But keep in mind that, as a writer, I'm both the criminal and the victim. I'm not trying to get out of anything easy. — Said Sayrafiezadeh
The loss of innocent life is a tragedy for anyone involved in it, but the numbers are really very low. — Paul Bremer
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. — Christopher Alexander
It will feel impossible; like you are dying inside this is your soul crying out for life. It may take everything you have; every ounce of will and strength. You will lose a part of yourself trying to save something essential and innocent. And when you have given everything, you will recover and you will be set free, and you will discover there was even more in you than you ever knew. — Bryant H. McGill
I was taught to lie at a young age. . . . I think that [A PARK IN OUR HOUSE] describes what people make out of their reality in a totalitarian system like Castro's. They take flight and move into the imagination in order to transcend their immediate reality. I had to write this play. It helped me understand my own loss of innocence. — Nilo Cruz
I think that 9/11 is a greater loss if we do not change our behavior in some way. I think that if we don't turn it into a positive change in some way, those innocent people really died for no purpose. I would like to think they had some important purpose. What I see, that I don't like, is the product of what our land of opportunity can breed. — Doug Davidson
Innocence is suffering
and the loss of that innocence
is something to fear. — Diane Wakoski
In Sherman's famous march through Georgia, his soldiers left a swath of death and destruction, destroying crops, burning homes and killing civilians. Sherman himself acknowledged that only 20% of the destruction inflicted by his invasion was inflicted on military objectives. Civilian non-combatants, essentially innocents, suffered 80% of the losses. — John Pugsley
Cuba laments and expresses its profound sadness for the loss of so many innocent lives and expresses our absolute rejection of acts of terrorism, wherever they may come from. — Felipe Perez Roque
Complete and accurate surveillance as a means of control is probably a practical impossibility. What is much more likely is a loss of privacy and constant inconvenience as the wrong people gain access to information, as one wastes time convincing the inquisitors that one is in fact innocent, or as one struggles to untangle the errors of the errant machine. — Victor C. Ferkiss
If true, the Pythagorean principles as to abstain from flesh, foster innocence; if ill-founded they at least teach us frugality, and what loss have you in losing your cruelty? It merely deprives you of the food of lions and vultures...let us ask what is best - not what is customary. Let us love temperance - let us be just - let us refrain from bloodshed. — Seneca
So the city became the material expression of a particular loss of innocence – not sexual or political innocence but somehow a shared dream of what a city might at its best prove to be – its inhabitants became, and have remained, an embittered and amnesiac race, wounded but unable to connect through memory to the moment of injury, unable to summon the face of their violator. — Thomas Pynchon
In Conclusion
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