The Innocent archetype is an optimist who can only see the good in people (and in life in general). They enjoy the simple things, are pure at heart, free of corruption, and seek harmony in the world.
100 Inspirational Quotes for Innocents
We’ve collected the best quotes about innocents for you to read through.
This selection of quotations are based solely on my personal taste and are in no particular order. You are welcome to browse the entire collection and look for your own favourite quotes.
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Checkout this list of innocent quotes:
1. Mary Wollstonecraft
Children, I grant, should be innocent; but when the epithet is applied to men, or women, it is but a civil term for weakness.
2. Federico Fellini
If you see with innocent eyes, everything is divine.
3. William Blackstone
It is better that ten guilty escape than one innocent suffer.
4. Ralph Waldo Emerson
A man is a god in ruins. When men are innocent, life shall be longer, and shall pass into the immortal, as gently as we awake from dreams.
5. Graham Greene, The Quiet American
Innocence is a kind of insanity.
6. Flora Jessop, Church of Lies
To those who abuse: the sin is yours, the crime is yours, and the shame is yours. To those who protect the perpetrators: blaming the victims only masks the evil within, making you as guilty as those who abuse. Stand up for the innocent or go down with the rest.
7. J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
Always the innocent are the first victims, so it has been for ages past, so it is now.
8. Terry Pratchett, Snuff
Cheery was aware that Commander Vimes didn’t like the phrase ‘The innocent have nothing to fear’, believing the innocent had everything to fear, mostly from the guilty but in the longer term even more from those who say things like ‘The innocent have nothing to fear’.
9. Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room
Marvelous are the innocent.
10. Graham Greene, The End of the Affair
Why do we have this desire to tease the innocent? Is it envy?
11. E.A. Bucchianeri, Brushstrokes of a Gadfly,
It is unfortunate that in most cases when the sins of the father fall on the son it is because unlike God, people refuse to forgive and forget and heap past wrongs upon innocent generations.
12. Amy Engel, The Book of Ivy
How do you measure the life of one person against the greater good? Can it ever be the right thing to sacrifice an innocent person? And how do you know what the greater good really is?
13. Saurabh Sharma
I respect all the innocent souls because they are kind enough to forgive the selfish people around them.
14. Mehmet Murat Ildan
No matter how weak they may seem, the innocent have the power to defeat even the most cruel hearts!
15. Karen Hawkins, The Abduction of Julia
Innocent and virtuous, she represented the exact type of female he avoided… God, she was a taking thing, even for an avaricious reformer.
16. Rachel Hartman, Tess of the Road
The hated innocent becomes hateful. Goodness withers when it is continuously ground underfoot.
17. Anurag Shrivastava, The Web of Karma
Jealousy is one of the blackest emotions that humans possess: it stems out of weakness and ultimately bears the bitter fruits of wickedness, which quite often end up poisoning the innocent victims, who have never done any harm to the possessor.
18. Mwanandeke Kindembo
To me justice doesn’t mean looking for the criminals. It means looking for the innocent.
19. Mokokoma Mokhonoana
A court case is usually a competition to prove the innocence of the innocent … or the guilty.
20. Madeline Miller, Circe
There was a sort of innocence to him, I thought. I do not mean this as the poets mean it: a virtue to be broken by the story’s end, or else upheld at greatest cost. Nor do I mean that he was foolish or guileless. I mean that he was made only of himself, without the dregs that clog the rest of us.
21. Clive Barker, The Forbidden
They will say your doubts shed innocent blood. But I say – what’s blood for, if not for shedding?
22. Md. Ziaul Haque
How many more Jesuses will be crucified? How many more Socrateses will be killed?
23. Grace Curley, The Light that Binds Us
The thought would not leave him. How God, if there were such a dictator, could allow the cruel to inherit the earth and poison the cups of the innocents, was lost on him.
24. Mehmet Murat Ildan
Anybody can be a flower! Yes, you can be a flower too! Just be gentle and innocent; give no harm to anyone! And now you are a flower!
25. Kapil Dhingra
Being Naughty is never bad,
Nor being innocent at each moment is good!!
26. Jessica Valenti, The Purity Myth: How America’s Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women
If being premenstrual is “innocence,” does that make those of us with periods guilty? And this really gets to the heart of the matter: These concerns aren’t about lost innocence; they’re about lost girlhood. The virginity movement doesn’t want women to be adults.
Despite the movement’s protestations about how this focus on innocence or preserving virginity is just a way of protecting girls, the truth is, it isn’t a way to desexualize them. It simply positions their sexuality as “good”— worth talking about, protecting, and valuing—and women’s sexuality, adult sexuality, as bad and wrong. The (perhaps) unintended consequences of this focus is that girl’s sexuality is sexualized and fetishized even further.
27. Mehmet Murat Ildan
When we see an innocent child, this is an ordinary thing; but when we see an innocent adult, this is an extraordinary thing!
28. Paul Bamikole
All men are innocent until darkness comes.
29. Anthony Liccione
We are all innocent, until we die.
30. Ehsan Sehgal
The innocent and the guiltless may not ask the apologies since one has not, even the clue of it.
31. Santosh Adbhut Kumar
An adult can only preach you but, an innocent kid can teach you lesson of the life. Just try it for once, you will stop listening to the world!!!
32. Tana French, The Secret Place
It does that to you, being a detective. You look at blank space and see gears turning, motives and cunning; nothing looks innocent any more. Most times when you prove away the gears, the blank space looks lovely, peaceful. But that arm: innocent, it looked just as dangerous.
33. Scott Hawkins, The Library at Mount Char
Carolyn – I need you to go back into America. We need an innocent heart. We will offer it to Nobununga when he arrives. Do you think you can handle that?”
“An innocent heart? In America?” She hesitated.
34. Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
Let us also acknowledge that the hearts which suffer the most from our wars are those of mothers. Their vital voices have been left out of the political equation for too long. An Iraqi or American mother cries the same as an Israeli or Afghan mother. The eyes of a mother who has suffered the loss of a child can destroy the soul of anyone who gazes upon them. More souls become casualties of war than physical bodies. War is a soul-shattering experience for the innocent.
35. Sanober Khan
I am a baby, I am a child, I am the innocent wonder in my eyes
I am a glimpse, I am a sign, of someone I can be, someone I might
I am not one, I am not two, but I am a million things entwined
I am a piece, I am a slice, strung together by the yarns of time.
36. Jaime Tenorio Valenzuela
Abuse the innocent and create a monster.
37. Christopher Bollen, Orient
Was there anything as innocent as willful self-destruction?
38. Jay Woodman
Innocent and joyful
I take your hand
for I know you judge not,
you simply understand.
You are my companion
on this voyage of discovery,
singing sweet soft music
to the universe inside of me.
39. Dan Groat, An Enigmatic Escape: A Trilogy
It’s as close to true freedom as I have come. Not freedom of, but freedom from; freedom from the debris of life that piles up and forces us to dig and dig for our original self, who we were once upon a time, innocent and wonderfully naïve, as authentically pure as a human can be.
40. Billy Graham, Billy Graham in Quotes
The influence of sin touches the innocent as well as the guilty
41. Jasper Fforde, Shades of Grey
Believe me, you’re going to have to do much worse than this–in the pursuit of freedom, the innocents will suffer–and at your hands.
42. Umut Kisa
We are all the same and need to think that we are innocent. However, we do blame others just to be innocent. We simply believe blaming will wash out ourselves. More we search innocence more we blame others. What we need to understand our purity instead of trying to prove that we are blameless.
43. Gena Showalter, The One You Want
This woman might have a daughter, but she was as innocent and pure as newly fallen snow.
44. Christina Engela
People claiming to be Christians and advocating the murder of innocent people – just aren’t Christians at all.
45. Selena Kitt, Confession
Innocence could be lost more than once after all.
46. Amit Kalantri
To your parents you are still that innocent baby, and sometimes even you will need your father’s hand and your mother’s lap.
47. Emily Thorne
When everything you love has been stolen from you, sometimes all you have left is revenge. Sometimes, the innocent get hurt. But one by one, the guilty will pay. Nothing ever goes exactly as you expect. And mistakes are life and death. Collateral damage is inescapable.
48. Robert G. Ingersoll, Some Mistakes of Moses
Is it true that man was once perfectly pure and innocent, and that he became degenerate by disobedience? No. The real truth is, and the history of man shows, that he has advanced. Events, like the pendulum of a clock have swung forward and backward, but after all, man, like the hands, has gone steadily on. Man is growing grander. He is not degenerating. Nations and individuals fail and die, and make room for higher forms. The intellectual horizon of the world widens as the centuries pass. Ideals grow grander and purer; the difference between justice and mercy becomes less and less; liberty enlarges, and love intensifies as the years sweep on. The ages of force and fear, of cruelty and wrong, are behind us and the real Eden is beyond. It is said that a desire for knowledge lost us the Eden of the past; but whether that is true or not, it will certainly give us the Eden of the future.
49. Amit Kalantri
Smile on the face or innocence on the face is as attractive as beauty on the face.
50. M.F. Moonzajer
Half of my life passed searching for the evil that makes me to do wrong things, until I found innocent evils trapped in me.
51. M.F. Moonzajer
How she can be innocent even if she has no intention of harming me; her sweetness and loveliness is the main source of all my pains and sufferings.
52. Ellen J. Barrier
When you take a stand against injustice inflicted upon innocent people, there will be those who will hate you for it.
53. M.F. Moonzajer
We cannot make peace with people who are not peaceful with innocent creatures.
54. Callie Hunter, Disenchanted
It didn’t matter what he’d said or done in life, in death he was innocent.
55. Amit Kalantri
When I see an evil person, I cannot believe that once he was an innocent and sweet baby.
56. M.F. Moonzajer
I worshiped God with innocent heart when I was a little kid; and now I worship you with little heart while I am innocent man.
57. Glen Duncan, By Blood We Live
The truth doesn’t care what anyone wants. The truth is innocent. You can’t blame the truth.
58. Pepper Phillips, The Devil Has Dimples
So, there is a God protecting the innocent. Too bad, he didn’t act sooner.
59. Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for me to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What’s there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed or enforced nor objectively interpreted – and you create a nation of law-breakers – and then you cash in on guilt.
60. Kate Perry, Perfect for You
But it’s the innocent looking ones who’re the most diabolical.
61. Andrew Levkoff, A Mixture of Madness
Why must there always be a price to pay for every indulgence, and why must it so often be withdrawn from the bankrupt accounts of the innocent?
62. Maya Angelou
I believe we are still so innocent. The species are still so innocent that a person who is apt to be murdered believes that the murderer, just before he puts the final wrench on his throat, will have enough compassion to give him one sweet cup of water.
63. Ronald Reagan
We cannot play innocents abroad in a world that is not innocent.
64. Voltaire
It is better to risk saving a guilty man than to condemn an innocent one.
65. Mahatma Gandhi
A man who was completely innocent, offered himself as a sacrifice for the good of others, including his enemies, and became the ransom of the world. It was a perfect act.
66. Barack Obama
For more than four decades, the Libyan people have been ruled by a tyrant – Moammar Gaddafi. He has denied his people freedom, exploited their wealth, murdered opponents at home and abroad, and terrorized innocent people around the world – including Americans who were killed by Libyan agents.
67. Malcolm X
The media’s the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that’s power. Because they control the minds of the masses.
68. Albert Camus
No cause justifies the deaths of innocent people.
69. Albert Camus
No matter what cause one defends, it will suffer permanent disgrace if one resorts to blind attacks on crowds of innocent people.
70. Albert Camus
To cut short the question of the law of retaliation, we must note that even in its primitive form it can operate only between two individuals of whom one is absolutely innocent, and the other absolutely guilty. The victim, to be sure, is innocent. But can the society that is supposed to represent the victim lay claim to innocence?
71. Marcus Tullius Cicero
Rather leave the crime of the guilty unpunished than condemn the innocent.
72. George Orwell
Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent.
73. Nelson Mandela
In countries where innocent people are dying, the leaders are following their blood rather than their brains.
74. Madeleine Albright
I think that we all know what evil is. We have a sense of what’s evil, and certainly killing innocent people is evil. We’re less sure about what is good. There’s sort of good, good enough, could be better – but absolute good is a little harder to define.
75. William Butler Yeats
The innocent and the beautiful have no enemy but time.
76. Richard Nixon
You must pursue this investigation of Watergate even if it leads to the president. I’m innocent. You’ve got to believe I’m innocent. If you don’t, take my job.
77. Cesar Chavez
Without a union, the people are always cheated, and they are so innocent.
78. Janet Jackson
People do see me as sweet and innocent. Not to say that I am not those things. But I have other sides to me.
79. Clint Eastwood
Crimes against children are the most heinous crime. That, for me, would be a reason for capital punishment because children are innocent and need the guidance of an adult society.
80. Clint Eastwood
I grew up with J. Edgar Hoover. He was the G-man, a hero to everybody, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation was the big, feared organization. He was ahead of his time as far as building up forensic evidence and fingerprinting. But he took down a lot of innocent people, too.
81. D.H. Lawrence
Oh the innocent girl in her maiden teens knows perfectly well what everything means.
82. Anais Nin
I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naive or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.
83. Sonia Sotomayor
My job as a prosecutor is to do justice. And justice is served when a guilty man is convicted and an innocent man is not.
84. Noam Chomsky
Some may remember, if you have good memories, that there used to be a concept in Anglo-American law called a presumption of innocence, innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Now that’s so deep in history that there’s no point even bringing it up, but it did once exist.
85. George W Bush
Any government that supports, protects or harbours terrorists is complicit in the murder of the innocent and equally guilty of terrorist crimes.
86. Francois de La Rochefoucauld
There are crimes which become innocent and even glorious through their splendor, number and excess.
87. Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The first step towards vice is to shroud innocent actions in mystery, and whoever likes to conceal something sooner or later has reason to conceal it.
88. Honore de Balzac
If those who are the enemies of innocent amusements had the direction of the world, they would take away the spring, and youth, the former from the year, the latter from human life.
89. Elizabeth I
A clear and innocent conscience fears nothing.
90. Nathanial Hawthorne
Words – so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.
91. Stephen King
The trust of the innocent is the liar’s most useful tool.
92. Horace
He is armed without who is innocent within, be this thy screen, and this thy wall of brass.
93. W.H. Auden
No human being is innocent, but there is a class of innocent human actions called Games.
94. Jonathan Swift
Power is no blessing in itself, except when it is used to protect the innocent.
95. Marianne Williamson
Spiritually, I understand that Trump is an innocent child of God. And before he was a Presidential candidate, I found him to be a kind of entertaining American character. But he is not entertaining anymore; he is frightening. He has been elected to the Presidency of the United States and yet he acts like he is mocking the job.
96. Phyllis George
There’s a fine line between being sweet and innocent and being a tough broad.
97. Pubilius Syrus
Pain forces even the innocent to lie.
98. Chris Rock
Gun control? We need bullet control! I think every bullet should cost 5,000 dollars. Because if a bullet cost five thousand dollars, we wouldn’t have any innocent bystanders.
99. Rollo May
Creativity is not merely the innocent spontaneity of our youth and childhood; it must also be married to the passion of the adult human being, which is a passion to live beyond one’s death.
100. Jimmy Carter
What has happened at Guantanamo Bay… does not represent the will of the American people. I’m embarrassed about it, I think its wrong. I think it does give terrorists an unwarranted excuse to use the despicable means to hurt innocent people.
