All things truly wicked start from an innocence.
Certainly Adam in Paradise had not more sweet and curious apprehensions of the world, than I when I was a child.
Children, I grant, should be innocent; but when the epithet is applied to men, or women, it is but a civil term for weakness.
Every harlot was a virgin once.
He is armed without who is innocent within, be this thy screen, and this thy wall of brass.
I am to be broken. I am to be derided all my life. I am to be cast up and down among these men and women, with their twitching faces, with their lying tongues, like a cork on a rough sea. Like a ribbon of weed I am flung far every time the door opens.
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 at all, and our horrid inner secret is that we don't care that we don't.
If you would live innocently, seek solitude.
Innocence always calls mutely for protection when we would be so much wiser to guard ourselves against it: innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.
Innocence is like polished armor; it adorns and defends.
Innocence most often is a good fortune and not a virtue.
Innocent as a dove you will harm no one, but wise as a serpent no one will harm you.
It is well for the heart to be naive and the mind not to be.
It's innocence when it charms us, ignorance when it doesn't.
No man ever looks at the world with pristine eyes. He sees it edited by a definite set of customs and institutions and ways of thinking.
Nothing looks so like innocence as an indiscretion.
Now my innocence begins to weigh me down.
One threatens the innocent who spares the guilty.
Only the old are innocent. That is what the Victorians understood, and the Christians. Original sin is a property of the young. The old grow beyond corruption very quickly.
People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.