When virtue is pictured as innocence and innocence equated with childlikeness, the implication is obviously that knowledge and experience are no longer media of goodness, but have become in themselves contaminating. This is a very despairing outlook, in its way as black as Augustine's original sin, for it supposes that original goodness will in all likelihood be defiled…It surrenders the attempt to represent virtue in a mature phase.
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Joan of Arc (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1983) p. 262.Marina Warner
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The highest point a man can obtain is not Knowledge, or Virtue, or Goodness, or Victory, but something even greater, more heroic and more despairing: Sacred Awe!
Nikos Kazantzakis
In the past we believed both sexes were born with original sin. Today, we have come to unconsciously believe in the original sin of boys, but the original innocence of girls.
Warren Farrell
Prudishness is pretense of innocence without innocence. Women have to remain prudish as long as men are sentimental, dense, and evil enough to demand of them eternal innocence and lack of education. For innocence is the only thing which can ennoble lack of education.
Friedrich Schlegel
Never such innocence,
Never before or since,
As changed itself to past
Without a word — the men
Leaving the gardens tidy,
The thousands of marriages,
Lasting a little while longer:
Never such innocence again.Philip Larkin
The innocence which is simply ignorance is not virtue.
John Lancaster Spalding
Warner, Marina
Warner, William
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