concept

innocence Quotes

55 of the best book quotes about innocence
01
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“They became acquainted with sorrow and loved sorrow; they thirsted for suffering, and said that truth could only be attained through suffering. Then science appeared. As they became wicked they began talking of brotherhood and humanitarianism, and understood those ideas. As they became criminal, they invented justice and drew up whole legal codes in order to observe it, and to ensure their being kept, set up a guillotine. They hardly remembered what they had lost, in fact refused to believe that they had ever been happy and innocent.”
Fyodor Dostoevsky
author
The Dream of a Ridiculous Man
book
happiness
innocence
suffering
science
justice
concepts
02
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“’You see,’ said Candide to Martin, ‘that crime is sometimes punished. This rogue of a Dutch skipper has met with the fate he deserved.’ ‘Yes,’ said Martin; ‘but why should the passengers be doomed also to destruction? God has punished the knave, and the devil has drowned the rest.’”
Voltaire
author
Candide
Martin
characters
03
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“We were as twinn’d lambs that did frisk i’ the sun, And bleat the one at the other: what we changed Was innocence for innocence;”
04
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“Mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy . . . but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.”
05
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“None of them imagined that a horrible ordeal was drawing nigh. Nobody suspected that by the end of that long day, every minute would matter.”
06
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“Four hundred vertical feet above, where the summit was still washed in bright sunlight under an immaculate cobalt sky, my compadres dallied to memorialize their arrival at the apex of the planet, unfurling flags and snapping photos, using up precious ticks of the clock.”
07
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“It wasn’t my fault. He hurt me. It wasn’t my fault. And I’m not going to let it kill me. I can grow.”
08
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“Sibyl? Oh, she was so shy and so gentle. There is something of a child about her. Her eyes opened wide in exquisite wonder when I told her what I thought of her performance, and she seemed quite unconscious of her power.”
09
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″‘You fool,’ said Lupin softly. ‘Is a schoolboy grudge worth putting an innocent man back inside Azkaban?‘”
10
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“I want you to know, Stanley, that I respect you,” Mr. Pendanski said. “I understand you’ve made some bad mistakes in your life. Otherwise you wouldn’t be here. But everyone makes mistakes. You may have done some bad things, but that doesn’t mean you’re a bad kid.” Stanley nodded. It seemed pointless to try and tell his counselor that he was innocent. He figured that everyone probably said that.
11
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“I will love you as misfortune loves orphans, as fire loves innocence, and as justice loves to sit and watch while everything goes wrong.”
12
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“Arthur was happy. Like the man in Eden before the fall, he was enjoying his innocence and fortune.”
13
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″...but it seems, in tragedy, that innocence is not enough.”
14
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“They had never been there in the dark. But there was enough moon for them to find their way into the castle, and he could tell her about his day in Washington. And apologize. It had been so dumb of him not to ask if Leslie could go, too.”
15
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“When you’re living in the reality of the forgiveness you been extended, you just don’t get angry with others easily. I suspect our sense of entitlement to anger is directly proportional to our perception of our own relative innocence.”
16
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“It would have been impossible to carry a bad name with a greater sweetness of innocence, and by the time I had got back to Bly with him I remained merely bewildered—so far, that is, as I was not outraged—by the sense of the horrible letter locked up in my room, in a drawer. As soon as I could compass a private word with Mrs. Grose I declared to her that it was grotesque. She promptly understood me. ‘You mean the cruel charge—?’ ‘It doesn’t live an instant. My dear woman, LOOK at him!‘”
17
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“Suddenly, in these circumstances, I became aware that, on the other side of the Sea of Azof, we had an interested spectator... My heart had stood still for an instant with the wonder and terror of the question whether she too would see; and I held my breath while I waited for what a cry from her, what some sudden innocent sign either of interest or of alarm, would tell me. I waited, but nothing came...”
18
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“To gaze into the depths of blue of the child’s eyes and pronounce their loveliness a trick of premature cunning was to be guilty of a cynicism in preference to which I naturally preferred to abjure my judgment and, so far as might be, my agitation. I couldn’t abjure for merely wanting to, but I could repeat to Mrs. Grose—as I did there, over and over, in the small hours—that with their voices in the air, their pressure on one’s heart, and their fragrant faces against one’s cheek, everything fell to the ground but their incapacity and their beauty.”
19
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“I meant no harm. I most truly did not. But I had to grow bigger. So bigger I got.”
20
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“As you perceive, the only person responsible for the couple’s offense escaped; and not only escaped but became the executioner of the innocent.”
21
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“I didn’t know what to do or say. In a matter of seconds it seemed, I had gone from being angered by her strength, to being amazed by her innocence, and then frightened by her vulnerability. And now I felt numb, strangely weak, as if someone had unplugged me and the current running through me had stopped.”
22
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″‘Then you must teach my daughter this same lesson. How to lose your innocence but not your hope. How to laugh forever.‘”
23
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“When a child first catches adults out—when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not have divine intelligence, that their judgments are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just—his world falls into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety gone. ”
24
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“To see a wretched criminal squirming in the dock, suffering the tortures of the damned… was to me an exquisite pleasure. Mind you, I took no pleasure in seeing an innocent man there.”
25
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“Suddenly those stares made sense. My intentions didn’t matter. They didn’t know I didn’t want this. In their eyes, I was a threat. And I could see they wanted me gone.”
26
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“To tell you the truth, boss, I don’t know much of anything.”
27
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“I don’t want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.”
28
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“You are innocent until you understand.”
29
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“I am convinced that most people do not grow up. We find parking spaces and honor our credit cards. We marry and dare to have children and call that growing up. I think what we do is mostly grow old. We carry accumulation of years in our bodies, and on our faces, but generally our real selves, the children inside, are innocent and shy as magnolias.”
30
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“He wore his innocence like a comfortable old coat.”
31
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“STEVE I thought you you’re supposed to be innocent until you’re proven guilty? O’BRIEN That’s true, but in reality it depends on how the jury sees the case.”
32
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“None of my ten friends, even today, ascribes moral evil to Hitler, although most of them think (after the fact) that he made fatal strategical mistakes which even they themselves might have made at the time. His worst mistake was his selection of advisers—a backhand tribute to the Leader’s virtues of trustfulness and loyalty, to his very innocence of the knowledge of evil, fully familiar to those who have heard partisans of F. D. R. or Ike explain how things went wrong.”
33
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“I fooled myself. I had to. Everybody has to. If the good had been twice as good and the bad only half as bad, I still ought to have seen it, all through as I did in the beginning, because I am, as you say, sensitive. But I didn’t want to see it, because I would have then had to think about the consequences of seeing it, what followed from seeing it, what I must do to be decent. I wanted my home and family, my job, my career, a place in the community.”
34
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“Shoot all the blue jays you want, if you can hit ‘em, but remember it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.”
35
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“There’s a lot of ugly things in this world, son. I wish I could keep ‘em all away from you. That’s never possible.”
36
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“So it took an eight-year-old child to bring ‘em to their senses...That proves something - that a gang of wild animals can be stopped, simply because they’re still human. Hmp, maybe we need a police force of children.”
37
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“Ralph wept for the end of innocence, the darkness of man’s heart, and the fall through the air of a true, wise friend called Piggy.”
38
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“The other nine, decent, hard-working, ordinarily intelligent and honest men, did not know before 1933 that Nazism was evil. They did not know between 1933 and 1945 that it was evil. And they do not know it now. None of them ever knew, or now knows, Nazism as we knew and know it; and they lived under it, served it, and, indeed, made it.”
39
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“The fact is, I think, that my friends really didn’t know. They didn’t know because they didn’t want to know; but they didn’t know. They could have found out, at the time, only if they had wanted to very badly.”
40
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“It is, I suppose, the common grief of children at having to protect their parents from reality. It is bitter for the young to see what awful innocence adults grow into, that terrible vulnerability that must be sheltered from the rodent mire of childhood.”
41
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“I get glimpses of the horror of normalcy. Each of these innocents on the street is engulfed by a terror of their own ordinariness. They would do anything to be unique.”
42
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“There is likewise another great advantage in my scheme, that it will prevent those abortions, and that horrid practice of women murdering their bastard children, alas, too frequent among us, sacrificing the poor innocent babes, I doubt, more to avoid the expense than the shame.”
43
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“She had immense eyes that always seemed in danger of capsizing in their own innocence.”
44
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“Of what is great one must either be silent or speak with greatness. With greatness--that means cynically and with innocence.”
45
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Being a children’s book, I thought I would love it for the innocence in the writing and the illustrations. But heck, no (again!) I enjoyed it for what it is. Full of adventure, full of Robinson Crusoe vibes.
46
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“But when, at the Assize Court, he brought in the key to the whole case, he did not tell the whole truth. He only allowed so much of it to appear as sufficed to ensure the acquittal of an innocent man.”
47
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“When people throw themselves into the arms of justice with the proofs of complicity on them, you can be sure they are not accomplices.”
48
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“I don’t think your brother did it – and I’m going to try to prove it.”
49
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“Boys scattered around the hills never would play with Ben. They said it was because he was so little and nervous. But M.C. had played with Ben from the time he was a child and didn’t know better. When he was older, he had been told. Now he guessed Ben was like a bad habit he couldn’t break and had to keep secret.”
50
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“With each gleaning I commit, with each life taken for the good of humanity, I mourn for the boy I once was, whose name I sometimes struggle to remember. And I long for a place beyond immortality where I can, in some small measure, resurrect the wonder, and be that boy again.”
51
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“Grandfather looked at us. Then he said, ‘We are Christians. Bear in mind that the Jews crucified our Lord.’ Here Father interjected, ‘But not the Schneiders!‘”
52
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“And she said I was no gentleman, and refused to tell me. So as she wouldn’t confess, of course I arrested her, and to be on the safe side I also arrested everybody else in the shop, and the Baby into the bargain.”
53
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“What could he and she really know of each other, since it was his duty, as a “decent” fellow, to conceal his past from her, and hers, as a marriageable girl, to have no past to conceal?”
54
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″...He asked himself if May’s face was doomed to thicken into the same middle-aged image of invincible innocence. Ah, no, he did not want May to have that kind of innocence, the innocence that seals the mind against imagination and the heart against experience!”
55
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“Then the telephone rang like a spoiled brat. I shoved it down the Insinkerator. I must state here and now I have nothing whatever against the Insinkerator; it was an innocent bystander. I feel sorry for it now, a practical device indeed, which never said a word, purred like a sleepy lion most of the time, and digested our leftovers. I’ll have it restored.”

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