Marina Warner Quotes

Only the old are innocent. That is what the Victorians understood, and the Christians. Original sin is a property of the young. The old grow beyond corruption very quickly.

I am not young enough to know everything.

Knowledge becomes evil if the aim be not virtuous.

Although modesty is natural to man, it is not natural to children. Modesty only begins with the knowledge of evil.

The knowledge that makes us cherish innocence makes innocence unattainable.

When people are old enough to know better they are old enough to do worse.

In youth and beauty, wisdom is but rare!

I think certainly if I'd started getting published when I was in my early twenties, I was quite sheltered then and didn't know anything much about the world. I hadn't had any direct experience of how the world works.

Is the babe young? When I behold it, it seems more venerable than the oldest man.

The youth of an art is, like the youth of anything else, its most interesting period. When it has come to the knowledge of good and evil it is stronger, but we care less about it.

If youth be a defect, it is one that we outgrow only too soon.

I am not young enough to know everything.

I felt deep within me that the highest point a man can attain is not Knowledge or Virtue or Goodness or Victory but something even greater, more heroic and more despairing: Sacred Awe!

Back when I was an idealistic 18-year-old on my way to Chicago, I might have believed that being on the side of virtue would guarantee a good outcome. These many years later, I know better.

One learns one’s mystery at the price of one’s innocence.

Well, every little boy thinks he invented sin. Virtue we think we learn, because we are told about it. But sin is our own designing.

He wasn't evil as much as magnificently innocent of any kind of morality.

All innocent mechanisms are muddied up with experience. Children become less and less translucent. Layers of guile and suspicion grow. It's the law of paternal disenchantments.

Alas! innocence is but a poor substitute for experience.

Once innocence--an all too-brief state of being, if such a one exists--encounters experience, it is transformed. If that transformation is understood, it becomes knowledge. And if that knowledge is employed, then it becomes wisdom.

A library is a place where you can lose your innocence without losing your virginity.

Wisdom comes with winters

Goodness thinks no ill Where no ill seems.

If you're older, you're smarter. I just believe that. If you're in an argument with someone older than you, you should listen to 'em ... even if they're wrong, their wrongness is rooted in more information than you have.

Goodness is, so to speak, itself; badness is only spoiled goodness. And there must be something good first before it can be spoiled.