Quotes About Innocence

No one has yet realized the wealth of sympathy, the kindness and generosity hidden in the soul of a child. The effort of every true education should be to unlock that treasure.

Self-knowledge is like lost innocence; however unsettling you find it, it can never be 'unthought' or 'unknown'.

I want to be six years old again - just for a day. It's not that things were so much better back then. They sucked. But I was the kind of kid who knew how to laugh about it all. That's what I want. I want to laugh.

Charlotte never lied to others, so she made the classic mistake of the habitually honest—she assumed that other people did not lie to her, at least not to her face. In her world, people were innocent of deliberate deceit until proven otherwise, which was, of course, way too late. Even

All children are sweet at five. But at twelve they begin to get silly.

Pas envie de vivre... Qui se levait la première, le matin, rien que pour sentir l'air froid sur sa peau nue? Qui se couchait la dernière seulement quand elle n'en pouvait plus de fatigue, pour vivre encore un peu de la nuit? Qui pleurait déjà toute petite, en pensant qu'il y avait tant de petites bêtes, tant de brins d'herbe dans le pré et qu'on ne pouvait pas tous les prendre?

Never resist a sentence you like, in which language takes its own pleasure and in which, after having abused it for so long, you are stupefied by its innocence.

The only truly happy people are children and the creative minority.

Le monde va finir, c'est-à-dire, en réalité, «L'enfance va finir». Et, parce qu'elle va finir, elle demeurera à tout jamais inachevée.

Children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot which the poet spends his life patiently trying to untie.

At all costs the true world of childhood must prevail, must be restored; that world whose momentous, heroic, mysterious quality is fed on airy nothings, whose substance is so ill-fitted to withstand the brutal touch of adult inquisition.

It seemed marvelous to see life pump through that strange little body of feathers, wordless noises, milk eyes—much as life pumped through me.

Children have neither past nor future; they enjoy the present, which very few of us do.

Children enjoy the present because they have neither a past nor a future.

On les avait chassés ; ils étaient redevenus sauvages avec la pureté et la simplicité des bêtes.

He felt as if he had been washed from top to bottom, like a sheet scrubbed by a brush. He felt all white and full of new life. He walked the earth with a clean heart.

A young thinker, untainted by current indoctrinations. Someone who might do some real good in the world.

Whoever blushes confesses guilt, true innocence never feels shame.

Although modesty is natural to man, it is not natural to children. Modesty only begins with the knowledge of evil.

If you want to be creative, stay in part a child, with the creativity and invention that characterizes children before they are deformed by adult society.

At four years of age children accept without surprise that which is daily paraded before their eyes

Innocence has nothing to dread.

Crime like virtue has its degrees; and timid innocence was never known to blossom suddenly into extreme license.

Grâces au ciel, mes mains ne sont point criminelles. Plût aux dieux que mon cÅ"ur fût innocent comme elles!