Innocent As A Child Quotes & Sayings

In too many cases, the moms, the dads, the sisters and brothers of children with cancer must stand by a hospital bed and watch helplessly as this horrible disease consumes the life of an innocent child. — Michael McCaul

Children are always looking at the world as if it was for the first time in their lives. So, we should always look to the world with the eyes of a child. I am not saying be naive, I am saying be innocent in the sense of discovering things. — Paulo Coelho

While the Texas prison officials remained in the dark about what was going on, they were fortunate that William and Danny had benign motives. Imagine what havoc the two might have caused; it would have been child's play for these guys to develop a scheme for obtaining money or property from unsuspecting victims. The Internet had become their university and playground. Learning how to run scams against individuals or break in to corporate sites would have been a cinch; teenagers and preteens learn these methods every day from the hacker sites and elsewhere on the Web. And as prisoners, Danny and William had all the time in the world.

Maybe there's a lesson here: Two convicted murderers, but that didn't mean they were scum, rotten to the core. They were cheaters who hacked their way onto the Internet illegally, but that didn't mean they were willing to victimize innocent people or naively insecure companies. — Kevin D. Mitnick

Like the wide hollows of eyes marked in cathedrals of stone that left me half-perplexed as a child. A self-portrait of an innocent in this organic of ephemeral societies. Then I know I will be able to flourish viciously. That's the trouble with remembering. You begin to wish. — Abigail George

Whenever a person says to you that they are as innocent as lambs in all concerning money, look well after your own money, for they are dead certain to collar it, if they can. Whenever a person proclaims to you 'In worldly matters I'm a child,' you consider that that person is only a crying off from being held accountable, and that you have got that person's number, and it's Number One. Now, I am not a poetical man myself, except in a vocal way, when it goes round a company, but I'm a practical one, and that's my experience. So's this rule. Fast and loose in one thing, Fast and loose in everything. I never knew it fail. No more will you. Nor no one. — Charles Dickens

God ... made childhood joyous, full of life, bubbling over with laughter, playful, bright and sunny. We should put into their childhood days just as much sunshine and gladness, just as much cheerful pleasure as possible. Pour in the sunshine about them in youth. Let them be happy, encourage all innocent joy, provide pleasant games for them, romp and play with them; be a child again among them. Then God's blessing will come upon your home, and your children will grow up sunny-hearted, gentle, affectionate, joyous themselves and joy-bearers to the world. — J.R. Miller

Always seeing a child as the innocent left you open to not seeing when the child was scheming to take you down. It — Mercedes Lackey

Modern children were considerably less innocent than parents and the larger society supposed, and postmodern children are less competent than their parents and the society as a whole would like to believe ... The perception of childhood competence has shifted much of the responsibility for child protection and security from parents and society to children themselves. — David Elkind

In times that are dark and God seems far [away], I look for him in small ways - the innocent laughter of a child on an airplane, the way the rain falls down through tree branches, the aroma of honeysuckle as I ride my bike down the Natchez Trace, and through the love of friends who have carried me through the darkest times of my life. — Anne Jackson

She would become the general symbol at which the preacher and moralist might point, and in which they might vivify and embody their images of woman's frailty and sinful passion. Thus the young and pure would be taught to look at her, with the scarlet letter flaming on her breast - at her, the child of honourable parents - at her, the mother of a babe that would hereafter be a woman - at her, who had once been innocent - as the figure, the body, the reality of sin. And over her grave, the infamy that she must carry thither would be her only monument. — Nathaniel Hawthorne

She had his dark hair, his lashes, and from the glimpse he had, she bore his eyes, as well. But the shape of her face, a perfect oval, was her mother's. She had Anais's cheeks. Anais's lovely mouth and proud chin. He kissed her chin, feeling the softest of fluttering against his cheek - baby's breath. There was nothing sweeter than the feel of an innocent child's breath against one's cheek - nothing more wondrous than knowing that the baby was your own flesh and blood.
Mina stretched against him, yawning widely and throwing her arms up wide alongside her head. He laughed through his tears and reached for her little fist and brought it to his mouth, kissing her with such love he thought he would die of it. "You will consume me, little Mina, just as your mother has."
-Linsay to his infant daughter. — Charlotte Featherstone

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? — Philip Pullman

If you pay a child a dollar to read a book, as some schools have tried, you not only create an expectation that reading makes you money, you also run the risk of depriving the child for ever of the value of it. Markets are not innocent. — Michael Sandel

There is no innocent sleep so innocent as sleep shared between a woman and a child, the little breath hurrying beside the longer, as a child's foot runs. — Alice Meynell

Reading these tales is like looking at a photograph of a child whom you only knew as an adult. In her eyes you can see the woman that you came to know much later - a face, not yet fully formed, that contains the promise of something that is now a part of you: the welcomed surprise of recognition in innocent eyes. — Octavia E. Butler

Her finger-nails were painted five different colours, looking like the paints in a child's paintbox; and she was as innocent as a child. — G.K. Chesterton

But in my rebellious way I think that people have to be able to start over, just as I believed that a little girl has to be able to stay an innocent child her whole life long if she wants to, — Orhan Pamuk

When we enter the world as a child, they say we are innocent. When we leave the world as an older adult, we have each experienced a mixture of life's sorrow and joys. The years bring diverse events and mindsets, clouding up our vision, so that we no longer see things as they are, but we view now with lenses of many different shapes, sizes and influential colors depending on life's encounters. It is then, with this cleansing of your inner lens, that you figure out once again, who you are, resulting in numerous side trips, to rediscover your true self, possibly experiencing a reawakening. This sensational feeling of inner peace is unimaginable. — Wes Adamson

When people are kids their parents teach them all sorts of stuff, some of it true and useful, some of it absurd hogwash (example of former: don't crap your pants; example of latter: Columbus discovered America). This is why puberty happens. The purpose of puberty is to shoot an innocent and gullible child full of nasty glandular secretions that manifest in the mind as confusion, in the innards as horniness, upon the skin as pimples, and on the tongue as cocksure venomous disbelief in every piece of information, true or false, gleaned from one's parents since infancy. The net result is a few years of familial hell culminating in the child's exodus from the parental nest, sooner or later followed by a peace treaty and the emergence of the postpubescent as an autonomous, free-thinking human being who knows that Columbus only trespassed on an island inhabited by our lost and distant Indian relatives, but who also knows not to crap his pants. — David James Duncan

Many veterans feel guilty because they lived while others died. Some feel ashamed because they didn't bring all their men home and wonder what they could have done differently to save them. When they get home they wonder if there's something wrong with them because they find war repugnant but also thrilling. They hate it and miss it.Many of their self-judgments go to extremes. A comrade died because he stepped on an improvised explosive device and his commander feels unrelenting guilt because he didn't go down a different street. Insurgents used women and children as shields, and soldiers and Marines feel a totalistic black stain on themselves because of an innocent child's face, killed in the firefight. The self-condemnation can be crippling.
The Moral Injury, New York Times. Feb 17, 2015 — David Brooks

The soul, light as a feather, fluid as water, innocent as a child, responds to every movement of grace like a floating balloon. — Jean-Pierre De Caussade

Watch the thoughts, because in your watching them, they disappear. Then watch your emotions, sentimentalities; by your watching, they also disappear. Then your heart is as innocent as that of a child, and your head is as great a genius as Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell, Aristotle. But — Osho

Abortion sheds that innocent blood. Now, as a servant of the Lord, I dutifully warn those who advocate and practice abortion that they incur the wrath of Almighty God, who declared, "If men ... hurt a woman with child, so that her fruit depart from her ... he shall be surely punished." — Russell M. Nelson

It actually may be that the shadows of the so-called middle-class utopia always cast heavily on children, particularly in their adolescence. And this is so because the middle class is the proprietor and perpetuator of the category of childhood; living within the economic advantage of not needing children to work (or serve as marriage pawns for continued nobility) leads to a conception of childhood innocence. The child is hidden from the world behind the structural walls of family and education. Middle-class parents take on a heavy burden of seeing it as their core vocation to protect and advance their children. But this projecting and advancing appears to always come with tension as the innocent middle-class child turns into the alien middle-class adolescent.[2] — Andrew Root

I feel the greatest destroyer of peace today is 'Abortion', because it is a war against the child ... A direct killing of the innocent child, 'Murder' by the mother herself ... And if we can accept that a mother can kill even her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another? How do we persuade a woman not to have an abortion? As always, we must persuade her with love ... And we remind ourselves that love means to be willing to give until it hurts ... — Mother Teresa

Today, parental authority is in full retreat. Youngsters are increasingly excused from obeying their elders, whereas parents are blamed for anything that goes wrong in the life of their child. Mum and Dad are about as likely to be found innocent in the Freudian courtroom as were defendants in a Stalinist show trial. — Yuval Noah Harari

What she did not yet realize was that those boundaries were much looser for a child in the progressive circles of Salem and Boston, where a young girl who "poured out her whole heart" would be kindly received by adults eager to see proof of the innocent wisdom of childhood. As she grew older, Elizabeth would have to reckon with the fact that others began to find that same forthright manner disturbing in a young woman. — Megan Marshall

Good friends will allow you to be as innocent and free as a child when in private, and as wise and mature as an adult when in public. — Criss Jami

She looked at him bravely now for the first time, at his face, the face from which a child had fled, and drew breath. She rose. Her eyes filled.

She knew.

He took her in his arms and kissed her ardently. Men in their hosts, young and old, innocent and corrupt, had paid her for her favors, but she put her arms about him of her own free will as though to give him what she could in recompense for this, the last gift she guessed, of his manhood. — Glendon Swarthout

In a world in which everything bears the indelible impress of Man, it is refreshing to escape from time to time from this wall-to-wall humanisation. Hence the American enthusiasm for national parks and outdoor activities. It is seductive to see the world as though we were not there to see it. We can always dream of perceiving things as they are in themselves, without the buzz and distortion of human meaning. We can take a vacation now and then from the intolerable burden of sense-making, rather as we do when we treat human flesh as something to be mindlessly indulged. We can shuck off language and confront reality in the raw, as we imagine an innocent child might do. — Terry Eagleton

The things I've seen ... no, the things I've done." He shuddered slightly as memories flashed into his mind. "I was as innocent. I thought I understood the world, but I was little more than a child. — Conn Iggulden

The real danger has always lived in my granddad's kind voice, his soft caresses. All of it masquerading as innocent, but really just a gateway drug for girls starved for affection, desperate for someone to love them. He doesn't force us with a heavy hand. He manipulates with a gentle touch, guides us exactly where he wants us to go. So in the end, we blame only ourselves. — Amy Engel

And he was such a polite, mannerly old boy; simple and kind as a child. I used to wonder how anybody so innocent and defenceless had managed to get along at all, to keep alive for nearly seventy years in as hard a world as this. Anybody could take advantage of him. He held no grudge against any of the people who had misused him. — Willa Cather

Let us recognize that a large fraction of our suffering and that of our fellow human beings is brought about by what we do to one another. It is humankind, not God, that had invented knives, arrows, guns, bombs, and all manner of other instruments of torture used through the ages. The tragedy of the young child killed by a drunk driver, of the innocent young man dying on the battlefield, or of the young girl cut down by a stray bullet in a crime-ridden section of a modern city can hardly be blamed on God. After all, we have somehow been given free will, the ability to do as we please. We use this ability frequently to disobey the Moral Law. And when we do so, we shouldn't then blame God for the consequences. — Francis S. Collins

As a child she had believed that wrongs would always be righted, that somehow the world would not let the innocent suffer, but now she realised that this was not true. Old oppressors were replaced by new ones, from another distant place or from right next door. Old lies were replaced by new ones, backed up by old threats. — Alexander McCall Smith

He'd never forget what Naasir had said to him when Dmitri yelled that he didn't intend to bury another child and that Naasir needed to have a care for his life.
"Am I a person, Dmitri? Will you be sad if I die?"
Hardened and cruel though he'd become, the innocent question had shaken him. "Yes," he'd said, as honest in his answer as Naasir had been in his question. "You are a person. You are Naasir. I'll lose a piece of me if you die and it's a piece I'll never get back."
Naasir had stared at him for a long time before coming over to hug him. "Okay, Dmitri. I'm sorry. I didn't know I was a person before. — Nalini Singh

The screaming four-month-old child is trying to find out whether the world is a reasonably safe place or not. She is in a state of deep terror and isolation. She hasn't learned to feel comfort when no one is around. To put her on the parents' schedule instead of her own for holding and feeding is to "condemn the innocent," as Jesus said (Matt. 12:7). — Henry Cloud

Wrong' training can be a very innocent thing. Consider a father who allows his child to read good books. That child may soon cease to watch television or go to the movies, nor will he eventually read Book-of-the-Month Club selections, because they are ludicrous and dull. As a young man, then, he will effectually be excluded from all of Madison Avenue and Hollywood and most of publishing, because what moves him or what he creates is quite irrelevant to what is going on: it is too fine. His father has brought him up as a dodo. — Paul Goodman

In contrast to how a child belongs in the world, adult belonging is never as natural, innocent, or playful. Adult belonging has to be chosen, received, and renewed. It is a lifetime's work. — John O'Donohue

I was very innocent and shielded as a child, so I didn't know a lot about music or dancing. When I was in Primary Six, no one would participate in a talent show, so I decided to go on. When the audience applauded me, I felt euphoric, and I started dancing right after that! — Rain

Plunging into the depths of hell, re-opening the gates to wounds and emotions that we have long tried to keep sealed and locked within, we discover that that the devil is not the Herculean ruler of darkness that we had imagined, but only a vulnerable and devastated child. With honesty and without judgment, we must muster the courage to meet this innocent child with whom we have come to label as the devil. — Forrest Curran

Why target two and a half million innocent newborns and children?" Barbara Loe Fisher asks of the hep B vaccine. The implication behind the word innocent is that only those who are not innocent need protection from disease. All of us who grew up during the AIDS epidemic were exposed to the idea that AIDS was a punishment for homosexuality, promiscuity, and addiction. But if disease is a punishment for anything, it is only a punishment for being alive. When I was a child, I asked my father what causes cancer and he paused for a long moment before saying, "Life. Life causes cancer." I took this as an artful dodge until I read Siddhartha Mukherjee's history of cancer, in which he argues not only that life causes cancer but that cancer is us. "Down to their innate molecular core," Mukherjee writes, "cancer cells are hyperactive, survival-endowed, scrappy, fecund, inventive copies of ourselves." And this, he notes, "is not a metaphor. — Eula Biss

Life is a mystery; that means it cannot be solved. And when all efforts to solve it prove futile, the mystery dawns upon you. Then the doors are open; then you are invited. As a knower, nobody enters the divine; as a child, ignorant, not knowing at all- the mystery embraces you. With a knowing mind you are clever, not innocent. Innocence is the door. — Rajneesh

All life-forms are innocent, but man is the greatest innocent life-form that the universe has ever produced.
Man is never created bad, as some primitive "revelations" claim.
Man is both all-capable, and innocent;
Man cannot have better attributes than the ones he already has.
Once we defeat scarcity, the factor that has forced all our negative attributes into existence will be no more.
Man's nature is forged by scarcity.
Man is a child of scarcity.
Some men may currently live in abundance, even obscene abundance, but they still are the children of scarcity.
We all are. — Haroutioun Bochnakian

December finds himself again a child
Even as he undergoes his age.
Cold and early darkness now descends,
Embracing sanctuaries of delight.
More and more he stares into the night,
Becoming less and less concerned with ends,
Emblem of the innocent as sage
Restored to wonder by what he must yield. — Nick Gordon

The child watched its disappearance--he was astounded but dreamy. His stupefaction was complicated by a sense of the dark reality of existence. It seemed as if there were experience in this dawning being. Did he, perchance, already exercise judgment? Experience coming too early constructs, sometimes, in the obscure depths of a child's mind, some dangerous balance--we know not what--in which the poor little soul weighs God.

Feeling himself innocent, he yielded. There was no complaint-THE IRREPROACHABLE DOES NOT REPROACH.
(The Man Who Laughs) — Victor Hugo

But the waves kept moving, with the white wake of the ship traced in them for an instant, and then smoothed over by the water. And it was as if my own footsteps were being erased behind me, the footsteps I'd made as a child on the beaches and pathways of the land I'd left, and the footsteps I'd made on this side of the ocean, since coming here; all the traces of me, smoothed over and rubbed away as if they had never been, like polishing the black tarnish from the silver, or drawing your hand across dry sand.
On the edge of sleep I thought: It's as if I never existed, because no trace of me remains, I have left no marks. And that way I cannot be followed. It is almost the same as being innocent.
And then I slept. — Margaret Atwood

The child is naturally meditative. He is a sort of samadhi; he's coming out of the womb of existence. His life river is yset absolutely fresh, just from the source. He knows the truth, but he does not know that he knows ... His knowledge is not yet aware. It is innocent. It is simply there, as a matter of fact. And he is not separate from his knowledge; he is his knowledge. He has not mind, he has simple being. — Rajneesh

John Lewis said, You have to be taught the way of peace, the way of love, the way of nonviolence. In the religious sense, in the moral sense, you can say that in the bosom of every human being, there is a spark of the divine. So you don't have a right as a human to abuse that spark of the divine in your fellow human being. From time to time, we would discuss that, if you have someone attacking you, beating you, spitting on you, you have to think of that person. Years ago that person was an innocent child, an innocent little baby. What happened? Did something go wrong? Did someone teach that person to hate, to abuse others? You try to appeal to the goodness of every human being and you don't give up. You never give up on anyone. — Krista Tippett