Keep your innocence and ignorance aside, and expose yourself to dangerous situations, and understand the deeper secrets of life.

In their innocence, very young children know themselves to be light and love. If we will allow them, they can teach us to see ourselves the same way.

And that’s what innocence is. It’s simple and trusting like a child, not judgmental and committed to one narrow point of view. If you are locked into a pattern of thinking and responding, your creativity gets blocked. You miss the freshness and magic of the moment. Learn to be innocent again, and that freshness never...

Mr. Rove, like every other citizen, is entitled to the presumption of innocence, and until somebody says that he’s done something wrong, he ought to be permitted to go about his business like anybody else.

Last night I walked for hours. It was as if I wanted to get lost down some unknown street. To get absolutely and happily lost. But there are moments when we can’t, when we don’t know how to lose our way. Even if we always go in the wrong direction. Even if we lose all...

The flowered trim on the hems [of the dress] seemed superfluous, even frivolous, but at the same time it comforted her, as though the idea that a seamstress had thought to adorn clothing so innocently implied that somewhere, innocence was safe.

We look for things or people that are incorruptible. There is nothing incorruptible, merely uncorrupted. We neglect the role we play. We value innocence, but only the kind we cannot alter. We throw mud at purity and mock it for its stain.

the cold winds of insecurity… hadn’t shredded the dreamy chrysalis of his childhood. He was still immersed in the dim, wet wonder of the folded wings that might open if someone loved him; he still hoped, probably, in a butterfly’s unthinking way, for spring and warmth. How the wings ache, folded so, waiting; that is,...

His resiliency was not the resiliency of the dumb but of a lamb who can remember hurt but cannot sustain the anger or the bitterness that brittles the heart.

So little I know in my innocence. Ideals, like pebbles in a stream wash away, wash away. Life makes no sense.

I would be guilty only if I were innocent of working to destroy racism in my country.

The presumption of innocence remains and protecting those offenders on the register from vigilantes is essential. However there must be a balance, as communities can have rights as well as individuals. Communities have the right to know who is within their midst that may be dangerous, in order to ensure the protection of our children.

Women do have an affinity for evil, for believing that no woman is to be trusted, but that some men are too innocent to protect themselves.

He asked her, ‘Why do you feel sorry for me, Old Woman?’The Old Woman stood beside him and looked out the window at the Garden, so beautiful, flowering and everywhere illuminated by the rays of the setting sun, and said, ‘I feel sorry for you, dear Youth, because I know where you are gazing and...

Ransom perceived that he had never before seen anything but half-hearted and uneasy attempts at evil. This creature was whole-hearted. The extremity of its evil had passed beyond all struggle into some state which bore a horrible similarity to innocence.

you boys can keep your virgins give me hot old women in high heels with asses that forgot to get old.

They are funny little representatives of simplicity, of awareness. No one is more aware of themselves as these children are. They have nothing, have no one but us, have seemingly no reason to be hopeful…yet they are. They choose to be happy even though the obviously easier choice would be to be frightened or sad...

You have been so sheltered, Deeta – more even than your sisters. You know nothing of life or of people, in truth I think both scare you. You have little experience of anything but Tom and I and the children. You carved out a little niche for yourself with us, somewhere you were comfortable and...

I can’t bear the thought that a man of lofty mind and heart begins with the ideal of the Madonna and ends with the ideal of Sodom.

Hello,” Life says, “Remember me?We started out together hereWhen you were just a bundleOf innocent amazement.Remember how you saw the worldWith nothing but wonder?We were such rowdy playmates then.We painted on the sky with cloudsAnd made magic out of Clothespins and peanut butter.Remember, can you, how I became stained and heavyWith trouble?Not safe now. Lots...

Listen to the child in you and follow its innocence

If the system turns away from the abuses inflicted on the guilty, then who can be next but the innocents?

The poet believed that ‘Beauty’ first entered the world not at its creation, nor with the first garden, the first sunrise, the birth of the first man and woman and their first sexual act. The poet believed that ‘Beauty’ entered the world the day the first child blushed.

Wir alle, ob schuldig oder nicht, ob alt oder jung, müssen die Vergangenheit annehmen. Wir alle sind von ihren Folgen betroffen und für sie in Haftung genommen. […] Es geht nicht darum, Vergangenheit zu bewältigen. Das kann man gar nicht. Sie läßt sich ja nicht nachträglich ändern oder ungeschehen machen. Wer aber vor der Vergangenheit...

What they, in their innocence, cannot comprehend is that a properly constituted, healthy, decent man never writes, acts, or composes.

A CHILD’S GUIDE TO INNOCENCE

The thing about learning how to fight is that— some of us are not born with that desire. They say some are born fighters; but they don’t usually point out that others just aren’t. Some of us are forced by life to take up arms and fight. Many of us are. The art lies in...

In an extroverted society, the difference between an introvert and an extrovert is that an introvert is often unconsciously deemed guilty until proven innocent.

Now my innocence begins to weigh me down.

He can feel them, reaching out for the child, groping their way to its purity…

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

The innocence of children is what makes them stand out as a shining example to the rest of Mankind.

Children have a different convention of the fearful until they have been taught the proper things to be shocked at.

Cosette, by learning that she was beautiful, lost the grace of not knowing it; an exquisite grace, for beauty heightened by artlessness is ineffable, and nothing is so adorable as dazzling innocence, going on her way, and holding in her hand, all unconsciousness, the key of a paradise.

Unschuld ist kein Schutz.

You were born a child of light’s wonderful secret— you return to the beauty you have always been.

The hopeless hope is one of the early harbingers of spring, bespeaking an innocent belief that the world might right its wrongs and reverse its curses simply because the trees are coming into leaf.

Don’t care what people sayJust follow your own wayDon’t give up and use the chanceTo return to innocence.That’s not the beginning of the endThat’s the return to yourselfThe return to innocence.

I was so happy that my mother, father, and two brothers had somehow found one another. Perhaps my mother and father have gotten back together, I thought.

…it takes strength to remember, it takes another kind of strength to forget, it takes a hero to do both. People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred...

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...

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

Dalgliesh was too experienced to assume that fear implied guilt; it was often the most innocent who were the most terrified.

Innocence ain’t all it’s cracked up to be, you know. Innocent little kids rip the wings off flies, because they don’t know any better. That’s innocence.

We try to bring up our children so that they are protected from the world’s evils, only to find we’ve raised a pack of innocents who seem to be about to stumble into them at every turn just from sheer stupidity!

And the sun on the wall of her room, the block of sun with all the tiny flying things in it. When she was little she thought they were the souls of dead insects, still buzzing in the light.

People, in general, tend to project onto others their own state of mind. Well-meaning people inevitably assume other people are well meaning. People who cheat assume everyone cheats. People who deceive assume everybody deceives.Confessions of a Whistle-Blower: Lessons Anna C. Salter. Ethics & Behavior, Volume 8, Issue 2 June 1998

We shoot our heroes and enjoy peripeteia as a spectacle akin to sport and perhaps harshly disavowing the past protects us from the disappointment of our outsized hopes–who knows, really, but shifts in taste don’t fully account for the phenomenon. At any rate, nearly everything urgent and alive becomes doo-wop down the road, at least...

I have been wrongly accused; and you, ma’am, and everybody else, will now think me wicked.””We shall think you what you prove yourself to be, my child. Continue to act as a good girl, and you will satisfy us.

I still remember my middle school locker combination. Maybe I should go back to my old locker to see if I left my innocence in there.