Quotes About Ignorance

The word 'chance' then expresses only our ignorance of the causes of the phenomena that we observe to occur and to succeed one another in no apparent order. Probability is relative in part to this ignorance, and in part to our knowledge.

Beware of ignorance when in motion; look out for inexperience when in action, and beware of the majority when mentally poisoned with misinformation, for collective ignorance does not become wisdom.

Monks, when ignorance is abandoned, and knowledge arises in the monk, with the ending of ignorance and the arising of knowledge he clings neither to sense-pleasures, nor does he cling to views, nor to precepts and vows, nor to a Self-doctrine. Not clinking, he is not disturbed; not disturbed, he attains individually nibbana.

There is simple ignorance, not knowing, and willful ignorance that refuses to know, that covers the light of knowledge with the dark blanket of bias.

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."

Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don't know because we don't want to know.

Ignorance is in relationship to content; it is not just a spirit of ignorance. In verse 21 it speaks of "the truth in Jesus." Truth is content, truth has something to do with reason. Truth has something to do with the rational creature that God has made us. The dilemma here in the internal world is not just some sort of grey fog, it is in relationship to content.

It is an essential part of the scientific enterprise to admit ignorance, even to exult in ignorance as a challenge to future conquests.

People always fear change. People feared electricity when it was invented, didn't they? People feared coal, they feared gas-powered engines... There will always be ignorance, and ignorance leads to fear. But with time, people will come to accept their silicon masters.

It is a common sentence that knowledge is power; but who hath duly considered or set forth the power of ignorance? Knowledge slowly builds up what ignorance in an hour pulls down.

Unfortunately, we live at a moment in which ignorance appears to be one of the defining features of American political and cultural life. Ignorance has become a form of weaponized refusal to acknowledge the violence of the past, and revels in a culture of media spectacles in which public concerns are translated into private obsessions, consumerism and fatuous entertainment.

Ignorance is the source of hatred, and the way to get rid of ignorance is realization.

You must form your own fashions in a way which demonstrates that you flout the standards from knowledge, not from ignorance. . . But I may flout the standards? . . . Of course. What do you think standards are for?

We cannot be saved until we have risen above all our enemies, not the least of which is ignorance.

In Buddhism, ignorance as the root cause of suffering refers to a fundamental misperception of the true nature of the self and all phenomena.

No man has a right to be idle. Where is it that in such a world as this, that health, and leisure, and affluence may not find some ignorance to instruct, some wrong to redress, some want to supply, some misery to alleviate?

A burning itch to know is higher than a solemn vow to pursue truth. To feel the burning itch of curiosity requires both that you be ignorant, and that you desire to relinquish your ignorance.

There is no mountain anywhere everyman ignorance is his own mountain

If we're able to identify our own ignorance, we can identify someone else's expertise. We learn how to listen to each other. And that is the foundation of human understanding.

I feel closer to my country than ever. There is no longer a feeling of lonesome isolation. Instead-peace. I return without fearing prejudice that once bothered me . . . for I know that people practice cruel bigotry in their ignorance, not maliciously

Ignorance is always ready to admire itself. Procure yourself critical friends.

Self-hate is a form of mental slavery that results in poverty, ignorance, and crime.

Knowledge that takes you, not beyond yourself is far worse than ignorance.

If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.

Education, introspection, self-love and excellence are the only ways to overcome the wrath of ignorance

To rail and rant against tyranny is to manifest inferiority, for there is no tyranny but ignorance; to be conscious of one's powers is to lose consciousness of tyranny. Self government is not a remote aim. It is an intimate and inescapable fact. To govern oneself is a natural imperative, and all tyranny is the miscarriage of self government. The first requisite of freedom is to accept responsibility for the lack of it.

But what sin is to the moralist and crime to the jurist so to the scientific man is ignorance.

Rather than bring the full force of our creativity and rationality to bear on the problems of ethics, social cohesion, and even spiritual experience, moderates merely ask that we relax our standard of adherence to ancient superstitions and taboos, while otherwise maintaining a belief system that was passed down to us from men and women whose lives were simply ravaged by their basic ignorance about the world.

But the upside of painful knowledge is so much greater than the downside of blissful ignorance.

Every man should study conciseness in speaking; it is a sign of ignorance not to know that long speeches, though they may please the speaker, are the torture of the hearer.

Ignorance may be bliss, but it certainly is not freedom, except in the minds of those who prefer darkness to light and chains to liberty. The more true information we can acquire, the better for our enfranchisement.

True freedom, which is full joy, is the complete recognition of law and adaptation to it. Bondage comes from ignorance of law or opposition to it.

Any fool can see the limits of seeing, but not even the wisest know the limits of knowing. Thus is ignorance rendered invisible, and are all Men made fools.

We need only view a Dissection of that large Mass, the Brain, to have ground to bewail our Ignorance...We admire...the Fibres of every Muscle, and ought still more to admire their disposition in the Brain, where an infinite number of them contained in a very small Space, do each execute their particular Offices without confusion or disorder.

Henry's universe was modeled on the highball. It was a mixture in which half a pint of the fizziest philosophical and scientific ideas all but drowned a small jigger of immediate experience, most of it strictly sexual. Broken reeds are seldom good mixers. They're far too busy with their ideas, their sensuality and their psychosomatic complaints to be able to take an interest in other people - even their own wives and children. They live in a state of the most profound voluntary ignorance, not knowing anything about anybody, but abounding in preconceived opinions about everything.

If ignorance goes to forty dollars a barrel, I want drilling rights to George Bush's head.

Reason obeys itself; and ignorance submits to whatever is dictated to it.

This is something I consider Enlightenment to be - and that is to give intellectual or spiritual understanding and to be free of ignorance, false beliefs or prejudice. Able to honor each person as they walk their own path and not infringe our own personal beliefs onto them but to accept what ever form that carries truth for them

We are more pained by ignorance than delighted by instruction.

Dogmatism is by far the best fall-back defense, the most impregnable castle, that ignorance can find. It's also a dead give-away that the person doesn't know why he believes what he believes.

If novels and stories are bulletins from the progressive states of ignorance a writer passes through over the years, observations and opinions about horses are all the more so, since horses are more mysterious than life and harder to understand.

Bigotry is the disease of ignorance, of morbid minds; enthusiasm of the free and buoyant. Education and free discussion are the antidotes of both.

Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.

Mankind's journey into space, like every great voyage of discovery, will become part of our unending journey of liberation. In the limitless reaches of space, we will find liberation from tyranny, from scarcity, from ignorance and from war. We will find the means to protect this Earth and to nurture every human life, and to explore the universe. . . .This is our mission, this is our destiny.

[Comics is] one of the last havens for honesty when it comes to a reader's genuine response to art. Most of us, if we don't find any sympathy or pleasure, for example, in a modern painting, are likely to blame our own ignorance of the history and theory of painting. But nobody pretends to like a bad comic strip. Such harshness is necessary for any real truth to surface, I think, and for art to really contribute anything to life. Though I don't know. I could be wrong.

If you had made the acquiring of ignorance the study of your life, you could not have graduated with higher honor than you could to-day.

I had a desire to see something besides my own shores, if only to be content to return to them someday. If I wish to live in my native land and love her, it should not be out of ignorance.

Many books have been written to show that Christianity has emasculated the world, that it shoved aside the enlightenment and wisdom of Hellas for a doctrine of superstition and ignorance.