89 Quotes Tagged: innocence

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 of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare.

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

Just as she was unaware of the hidden currents of politics running below the surface of College affairs, so the Scholars, for their part, would have been unable to see the rich seething stew of alliances and enmities and feuds and treaties which was a child’s life in Oxford. Children playing together: how pleasant to see! What could be more innocent and charming?

I never, even for a moment, doubted what they’d told me. This is why it is that adults and even parents can, unwittingly, be cruel: they cannot imagine doubt’s complete absence. They have forgotten.

There are innumerable ways to murder a person, but the most subtle and pernicious of these is to mutilate the soul of the innocent by denying or downgrading their uniqueness and their beauty.

Innocence is thought charming because it offers delightful possibilities for exploitation.

Youth is like having a big plate of candy. Sentimentalists think they want to be in the pure, simple state they were in before they ate the candy. They don't. They just want the fun of eating it all over again. The matron doesn't want to repeat her girlhood, she wants to repeat her honeymoon. I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.

Voll Blüten steht der Pfirsichbaum
nicht jede wächst zur Frucht
sie schimmern hell wie Rosenschaum
durch Blau und Wolkenflucht.

Wie Blüten geh'n Gedanken auf
hundert an jedem Tag — lass' blühen, lass' dem Ding den Lauf
frag' nicht nach dem Ertrag!

Es muss auch Spiel und Unschuld sein
und Blütenüberfluss
sonst wär' die Welt uns viel zu klein
und Leben kein Genuss.

Do you remember what it was like, to be young? You do. Was there any innocence there? No. Things were exactly what they looked like. If anyone tries for innocence, it's the adult, moving forward, forgetting. If innocence is ignorance of the capacity for evil, then it's what adults have, when they forget what it's like to be a child. When they look at a child and think of innocence they are thinking of how they can't remember what that feels like.

Grown-ups have developed an unpleasant habit of comforting themselves for their degradation by pretending that children are childish.

"My innocence is not lost — it has been converted into wisdom. The sensation we call "breaking" is the pain that comes from resisting the truth. Life broke parts of me that needed to fall away for me to live an open and truthful life."

Innocence is a splendid thing, only it has the misfortune not to keep very well and to be easily misled.

For children are innocent and love justice, while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy.

In an age of iPhones and Playstations, it's great to see that somebody's still rocking the bus-on-a-string.

It takes a very long time to become young.