Irving Howe Quotes

Once you start asking questions, innocence is gone.

One's ignorance is one's chief asset.

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.

I said I 'liked' being half-educated; you were so much more 'surprised' at everything when you were ignorant.

I never had innocence.

For I see that then I was still all in a state of innocence, but that innocence, once lost, is lost forever.

I'm not a believer in 'what you don't know won't hurt you,' unless it's innocent.

One of the great things about being ignorant is that I often think my ideas are original. It's a wonderful feeling. That's why I try to avoid any knowledge that would spoil the sensation. Sometimes it isn't easy. People keep hurling knowledge at me, and I can't always duck.

What is experience? A poor little hut constructed from the ruins of the palace of gold and marble called our illusions.

Ignorance is not innocence.

Philosophy is an elegant thing, if anyone modestly meddles with it; but if they are conversant with it more than is becoming, it corrupts them.

Ignorance is learned; innocence is forgotten.

It was terribly beautiful to Tess today, for since her eyes last fell upon it she had learnt that the serpent hisses where the sweet birds sing.

People who get nostalgic about childhood were obviously never children.

I have always been of opinion that a man who desires to get married should know either everything or nothing.

I didn't trust adults because I thought they were all kind of corrupted. I thought children were pure and innocent, and that was inherently better. I guess I was a philosophical child.

Understanding that rests in what it does not understand is the finest.

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.

And at the instant he knew, he ceased to know.

The more I see, the less I know.

My innocence is a dying flower

An optimist is the person who has never had any experience at all.

We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces.

We were innocent once. How could it have gone so bad?