Quotes about Innocence

The television, iPod, and Internet have trespassed upon the innocence of America's children, while preoccupied mothers and dispassionate fathers stare aghast wondering what went wrong. They don't stop to think of their own contributions to the persuasions influencing their children. After all, where do kids as young as elementary age get money to rent rock videos and the latest rap DVDs?

To injure, ignore, disrespect, and violate the innocence of a child are among the greatest evils known to man.

Truth is easier for a child to handle than evasiveness.

Is that too innocence, when the fountain of milk is flowing in rich abundance, not to endure one to share it, though in extremest need, and whose very life as yet depends thereon? We bear gently with all this, not as being no or slight evils, but because they will disappear as years increase; for, though tolerated now, the very same tempers are utterly intolerable when found in riper years.

Clearly we must not be attached to anything, no matter how innocent, because it will slip from our grasp when least expected; nothing but the eternal can content us.

Man lowers his head and lunges into civilization, forgetting the days of his infancy when he sought truth in a snowflake or a stick. Man forgets the wisdom of the child.

God never meant that people were to wear clothes. He meant we were to be nude. But we were in a state of innocence. Then sin came into the human race and became a blood poisoning.

If we maintain the open-mindedness of children, we challenge fixed ideas and established structures, including our own.

Jesus makes it clear that the way to God is the same as the way to a new childhood. The innocence that is reached through conscious choices. The Beatitudes offer me the simplest route for the journey home, back into the house of my Father. And along this route I will discover the joys of the second childhood: comfort, mercy, and an ever clearer vision of God. It's a place where I can live in freedom without obsessions and compulsions.

But when I forget that voice of the first unconditional love, then these innocent suggestions can easily start dominating my life and pull me into the "distant country."

Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature herself.

Poetry and imagination begin life. A child will fall on its knees on the gravel walk at the sight of a pink hawthorn in full flower, when it is by itself, to praise God for it.