There has to be evil so that good can prove its purity above it.

If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.

Once a child is confronted with the concept of death there's a certain innocence that goes.

I have always said that innocence is much more powerful than experience.

Over time, naturally, you lose your innocence from gaining knowledge. You can't be innocent forever, but there's something in innocence you need to regain to be creative.

'The Museum of Innocence' is not about politics; it's a love story, but I think it's political in the sense that it wants to capture how a man suppresses a woman.

As children, our imaginations are vibrant, and our hearts are open. We believe that the bad guy always loses and that the tooth fairy sneaks into our rooms at night to put money under our pillow. Everything amazes us, and we think anything is possible. We continuously experience life with a sense of newness and unbridled curiosity.

The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives.

I've never had anyone define purity. You probably can't define purity. Purity is to live according to original design.

And I don't believe that children are innocent. In fact, no one seriously believes that. Just go to a playground and watch the kids playing in the sandbox! The romantic notion of the sweet child is simply the parents projecting their own wishes.

From the first opening of our eyes, it is the light that attracts us. We clutch aimlessly with our baby fingers at the gossamer-motes in the sunbeam, and we die reaching out after an ineffable blending of earthly and heavenly beauty which we shall never fully comprehend.

Sweet mercy is nobility's true badge.

Children are the keys of paradise.

Christ hath instituted Baptism as a bath, to wash away the anger, and hath put into us the Noble Stone, viz. the water of eternal life, for an earnest-penny, so that instantly in our childhood we might be able to escape the wrath.

Integrity reveals beauty.

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.

Youth is the spirit of adventure and awakening. It is a time of physical emerging when the body attains the vigor and good health that may ignore the caution of temperance. Youth is a period of timelessness when the horizons of age seem too distant to be noticed.

Goodness, armed with power, is corrupted; and pure love without power is destroyed.

But the Wisdom of God, which is His only-begotten Son, being in all respects incapable of change or alteration, and every good quality in Him being essential, and such as cannot be changed and converted, His glory is therefore declared to be pure and sincere.

Rare is the union of beauty and purity.

We are children of the eternity: But this world is an out-birth out of the eternal; and its palpability taketh its original in the anger; the eternal nature is its root.

A lovely nook of forest scenery, or a grand rock, like a beautiful woman, depends for much of its attractiveness upon the attendance sense of freedom from whatever is low; upon a sense of purity and of romance.

After many years of great mercy, after tasting of the powers of the world to come, we still are so weak, so foolish; but, oh! when we get away from self to God, there all is truth and purity and holiness, and our heart finds peace, wisdom, completeness, delight, joy, victory.

A good youth ought to have a fear of God, to be subject to his parents, to give honor to his elders, to preserve his purity; he ought not to despise humility, but should love forbearance and modesty. All these are an ornament to youthful years.

As for reputation, though it be a glorious instrument of advancing our Master's service, yet there is a better than that: a clean heart, a single eye, and a soul full of God. A fair exchange if, by the loss of reputation, we can purchase the lowest degree of purity of heart.

True love is eternal, infinite, and always like itself. It is equal and pure, without violent demonstrations: it is seen with white hairs and is always young in the heart.

Innocence can be more powerful than experience.

A beautiful woman delights the eye; a wise woman, the understanding; a pure one, the soul.

Those of us who were brought up as Christians and have lost our faith have retained the sense of sin without the saving belief in redemption. This poisons our thought and so paralyses us in action.

A young bride is like a plucked flower; but a guilty wife is like a flower that had been walked over.

Purity is the feminine, truth the masculine of honor.

Purity and simplicity are the two wings with which man soars above the earth and all temporary nature.

By their innocence and goodness, by their boundless capacity for forgiveness, and by the sheer power of their faith and hope, children redeem their parents, bringing out their best selves.

The way to preserve the peace of the church is to preserve its purity.

Pure love is a willingness to give without a thought of receiving anything in return.

Purity is not imposed upon us as though it were a kind of punishment, it is one of those mysterious but obvious conditions of that supernatural knowledge of ourselves in the Divine, which we speak of as faith. Impurity does not destroy this knowledge, it slays our need for it.

Purity of personal life is the one indispensable condition for building up a sound education.

Pure, holy simplicity confounds all the wisdom of this world and the wisdom of the flesh.

We've let the blade of our innocence dull over time, and it's only in innocence that you find any kind of magic, any kind of courage.

The moment someone chooses to trust in Jesus Christ, his sins are wiped away, and he is adopted into God's family. That individual is set apart as a child of God, with a sacred purpose.

The knowledge that makes us cherish innocence makes innocence unattainable.

A graceful and honorable old age is the childhood of immortality.

It is astonishing what force, purity, and wisdom it requires for a human being to keep clear of falsehoods.

O Lord, help me to be pure, but not yet.

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.

Children begin by loving their parents; after a time they judge them; rarely, if ever, do they forgive them.

If Edith Wharton lived in the Age of Innocence, surely we now live in the Age of Deception.

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?

A more secret, sweet, and overpowering beauty appears to man when his heart and mind open to the sentiment of virtue.

Perfection is the child of time.

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.

An all-white space has a purity that is refreshing and serene.

A babe in the house is a well-spring of pleasure, a messenger of peace and love, a resting place for innocence on earth, a link between angels and men.

Simplicity, clarity, singleness: These are the attributes that give our lives power and vividness and joy as they are also the marks of great art. They seem to be the purpose of God for his whole creation.