Quotes About Innocence

Good children's literature appeals not only to the child in the adult, but to the adult in the child.

Happiness is ... usually attributed by adults to children, and by children to adults.

Stone walls do not a prison make, Nor iron bars a cage, Minds innocent and quiet take That for an hermitage.

Occasionally we sigh for an earlier day when we could just look at the stars without worrying whether they were theirs or ours.

It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.

Repentance is for little children.

Individualism is rather like innocence; there must be something unconscious about it.

Cuteness in children is totally an adult perspective. The children themselves are unaware that the quality exists, let alone its desirability, until the reactions of grown-ups inform them.

If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children, I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchant-ments of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things that are artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength.

She slept the sleep of the just.

Sorrow makes us all children again.

A grandfather was walking through his yard when he heard his granddaughter repeating the alphabet in a tone of voice that sounded like a prayer. He asked her what she was doing. The little girl explained: "I'm praying, but I can't think of exactly the right words, so I'm just saying all the letters, and God will put them together for me, because He knows what I'm thinking."

I stopped believing in Santa Claus when I was six. Mother took me to see him in a department store and he asked for my autograph.

Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength.

Anybody can be good in the country. There are no temptations there.

What one loves in childhood stays in the heart forever.

Children have neither a past nor a future. Thus they enjoy the present, which seldom happens to us.

Make-believe colors the past with innocent distortion, and it swirls ahead of us in a thousand ways-in science, in politics, in every bold intention. It is part of our collective lives, entwining our past and our future ... a particularly rewarding aspect of life itself.

Be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves.

The deepest definition of youth is life as yet untouched by tragedy.

Only the young die good.

The interests of childhood and youth are the interests of mankind.

Ah! happy years! once more who would not be a boy!

Our innocence had been replaced by fear and we had become monsters. There was nothing we could do about it.