Quotes About Innocence

Die Athener haben die Unschuld des Herzens und das köstlichste Gut der Griechen, die innere Zeitlosigkeit, verloren. »Ihre einzige Weisheit ist, jeden Zustand zu überholen und fortzuschreiten«, beschimpft Aristophanes sie, Griechenlands Bernard Shaw. Damit ist das ominöse Wort gefallen für das Narkotikum, an das sich seitdem alle ziellos und ruhelos gewordenen Völker klammern: Fortschritt.

Creative play is like a spring that bubbles up from deep within a child.

Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.

I was just thinking that I started off OK," Jo said. "There wasn't anything different or wrong with me when I was born. I wasn't inherently bad or freakish.

Choices were so easy when I was a child. Good guy versus bad guy, and the good guys always won. But I'm no longer a child.

What if each child was taught from the cradle to sing the song of peace...would the cynics not call it foolish, saying that to be gentle is to be weak? But I tell you that until we are as innocent and pure as doves, our journey will be long and the way dark. Raise doves, not wolves.

the question of why America developed its particular habits of power, or why those persist; why it is so easy still for color to blind us, class to confuse us, sex and gender to trap us; why as a nation we are staggeringly cruel yet stubborn about our innocence; why love is so hard.

Let me tell you something straight off. This is a love story, but not like any you've heard. The boy and the girl are far from innocent. Dear lives are lost. And good doesn't win. In some places, there is something ultimately good about endings. In Neverland, that is not the case.

As a child, Leeda Cawley-Smith had had a natural attachment to animals, and they had had a natural attachment to her---cats and dogs were constantly following her home and even squirrels let her get close enough to feed them nuts.

Maybe that's another thing you learn, as you get older—the value of people who know your secrets, who understand not just your present-tense persona but the younger, more reckless, more innocent version of who you used to be.

Don't deceive yourself. Everyone is guilty of something, and even the innocent can be a threat. Perhaps it takes small crimes to prevent bigger ones, Colonel West, but it's up to bigger men than us to decide.

The world,' said he, pursuing this train of thought, 'ridicules a passion which it seldom feels; its scenes, and its interests, distract the mind, deprave the taste, corrupt the heart, and love cannot exist in a heart that has lost the meek dignity of innocence. Virtue and taste are nearly the same, for virtue is little more than active taste, and the most delicate affections of each combine in real love.

Yes. I was such a bumpkin then ... I was as naive a country mushroom as you could meet.

She trembled under his hand. "You don't need to manhandle me." "I mightn't need to, but I'd certainly like to," he purred and was rewarded with another beguiling blush. Jonas couldn't recall the last time he'd consorted with a woman innocent enough to blush.

I was a mimic when I was a child. I mimicked the teacher and made friends that way, actually. That was a very subversive activity, because I was a goody-goody who never got in trouble. But if I went off in the corner and mimicked the teacher, people loved it.

A nixie, poor ignorant girl child, is a sprite of the water.

Instead of turning away from them (war conditions) in instinctive horror, as people seem to expect, the child may turn towards them with primitive excitement. The real danger is not that the child, caught up all innocently in the whirlpool of war, will be shocked into illness. The danger lies in the fact that the destruction ranging in the outer world may meet the very real aggressiveness ranging in the inside of the child

Children are the only people who can see adults from inside their lives, permitted to observe every small thing, as if their forming minds are incapable of judging what they see, or as if it does not lodge there, somewhere, permanently,

History was so quickly remade, and so successfully, that it can truly be said that the easterners did not feel then, and do not feel now, that they were the same Germans as those responsible for Hitler's regime. This sleight-of-history must rank as one of the most extraordinary innocence manoeuvres of the century. In Dresden once, on a blue

But to whom can one appeal when one does not even know where to find the judge? How can one ever hope to prove one's innocence when there is no means of knowing of what one has been accused? No, there's no justice for people like us in the world: all that we can do is to suffer as bravely as possible and put our oppressors to shame.

But, my God, it's so beautiful when the boy smiles

The kid looked up, her bright blue eyes a little picture of health. So innocent and trusting, Rosie thought. The look we all had before life comes crashing in and sweeps it all away.

Have you taught her to kill, Priest? Can you teach her such a thing? She's so wise in her innocence, so innocent in her wisdom.

This year he'd been caught up in a whirlwind called Jaenelle Angelline-as impossible to deflect as she was to stop-and he had become an accomplice in all sorts of schemes that, even in their innocence, had been thrilling