Quotes about Innocence

Through our own recovered innocence we discern the innocence of our neighbors.

The dog was created specially for children. He is the god of frolic.

What is a child? Ignorance. What is a child? Want of instruction.

You know how a gardenia's petals reveal any telltale fingermarks by turning brown," the preacher said. "Your lives are like that. Purity is like that . . . Young people, don't give anything to the world to destroy. Don't be ashamed of high ideals, dreams, and beautiful thoughts.

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

What we venerate in the Saints, beyond and above all that we know is this secret; the mystery of an innocence and of an identity perfectly hidden in God.

Songs of Innocence

Children are the hands by which we take hold of heaven.

And along the streets the blood of the children flowed simply, like the blood of children…Come and see the blood in the streets, come and see the blood in the streets.

A child. New life. Immune to evil or illness, protected from kidnap, beatings, rape, racism, insult, hurt, self-loathing, abandonment. Error-free. All goodness. Minus wrath. So they believe.

when the little boy discovered, at four, the same thing Mr. Smith had learned earlier -- that only birds and planes could fly -- he lost all interest in himself.

And how sweet that would have been: the two of them back by the milk shed, squatting by the churn, smashing cold, lumpy butter into their faces with not a care in the world.