Quotes About Ignorance

Ignorance is not bliss. Ignorance is brutal. The brutality of ignorance is such that it will make you dead while alive.

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.

Never get to the point where you will be ashamed to ask anybody for information. The ignorant man will always be ignorant if he fears that by asking another for information he will display ignorance. Better once display your ignorance of a certain subject than always know nothing of it.

Ignorance is the first requisite of the historian - ignorance, which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits, with a placid perfection unattainable by the highest art.

In Buddhist teaching, ignorance is considered the fundamental cause of violence - ignorance... about the separation of self and other... about the consequences of our actions.

Any formal attack on ignorance is bound to fail because the masses are always ready to defend their most precious possession - their ignorance.

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

The Socratic maxim that the recognition of our ignorance is the beginning of wisdom has profound significance for our understanding of society. Most of the advantages of social life, especially in the more advanced forms that we call "civilization" rest on the fact that the individual benefits from more knowledge than he is aware of. It might be said that civilization begins when the individual in the pursuit of his ends can make use of more knowledge than he has himself acquired and when he can transcend the boundaries of his ignorance by profiting from knowledge he does not himself possess.

There are two sorts of ignorance: we philosophize to escape ignorance; we start from the one, we repose in the other; they are the goals from which and to which we tend; and the pursuit of knowledge is but a course between two ignorances, as human life is only a traveling from grave to grave.

There is no supernatural, there is only nature. Nature alone exists and contains all. All is. There is the part of nature that we perceive, and the part of nature that we do not perceive. ... If you abandon these facts, beware; charlatans will light upon them, also the imbecile. There is no mean: science, or ignorance. If science does not want these facts, ignorance will take them up. You have refused to enlarge human intelligence, you augment human stupidity. When Laplace withdraws Cagliostro appears.

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

Ignorance, madam, pure ignorance.

The first thing the reasonable man must do is to be content with a very little knowledge and a very great deal of ignorance. The second thing he must do is to make the utmost possible use of the knowledge he has and not waste his energy crying for the moon. The third thing he must do is try and see clearly where his knowledge ends and his ignorance begins.

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?

Study and research into truth often only serves to make us see by experience our natural ignorance.

I know everything I need to know already," Rigg always said... To which Father always replied,"See how ignorant you are? You don't even know why you need to know the things you don't know yet." "So tell me," said Rigg. "I would but you're too ignorant to understand the reasons why your ignorance is a fatal disease.

I believe in the forgiveness of sin and the redemption of ignorance.

I have my ignorance to thank for the few things I know.

After you've seen behind the facade of a stage set you can't take the play seriously any more. In other words, you can't go backwards and regain your ignorance, you have to move forward.

As a poet I hold the most archaic values on earth . . . the fertility of the soil, the magic of animals, the power-vision in solitude, the terrifying initiation and rebirth, the love and ecstasy of the dance, the common work of the tribe. I try to hold both history and the wilderness in mind, that my poems may approach the true measure of things and stand against the unbalance and ignorance of our times.

There is no mountain anywhere everyman ignorance is his own mountain

The scientist who yields anything to theology, however slight, is yielding to ignorance and false pretenses, and as certainly as if he granted that a horse-hair put into a bottle of water will turn into a snake.

Peace and the survival of life on earth as we know it are threatened by human activities which lack a commitment to humanitarian values. Destruction of nature and nature's resources result from ignorance, greed and lack of respect for the earth's living things.

The fear and anxiety that infect humanity today are the results of this degradation of values, this ignorance of what is of significance and what is not, this want of faith in what the elders and sages have handed down as the wisdom of ages. People prefer what is pleasing to what is beneficial.

Dignity is a mask we wear to hide our ignorance.

Condemnation without investigation is the height of ignorance

I have to plead basic ignorance of most new jazz artists here.

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

That which causes us trials shall yield us triumph: and that which make our hearts ache shall fill us with gladness. The only true happiness is to learn, to advance, and to improve: which could not happen unless we had commenced with error, ignorance, and imperfection. We must pass through the darkness, to reach the light.

I know of no time in human history where ignorance was better than knowledge.

Ignorance, according to the Buddha, is our basic difficulty. Psychedelics and the process of aging make that clear to me all the time.

The Americans say that we are ungrateful-but I ask them for heaven's sake, what should we be grateful to them for-for murdering our fathers and mothers?-Or do they wish us to return thanks to them for chaining and handcuffing us, branding us, cramming fire down our throats, or for keeping us in slavery, and beating us nearly or quite to death to make us work in ignorance and miseries, to support them and their families. They certainly think we are a gang of fools.

Why should we, however, in economics, have to plead ignorance of the sort of facts on which, in the case of a physical theory, a scientist would certainly be expected to give precise information?

All that is necessary, as it seems to me, to convince any reasonable person that the Bible is simply and purely of human invention - of barbarian invention - is to read it. Read it as you would any other book; think of it as you would of any other; get the bandage of reverence from your eyes; drive from your heart the phantom of fear; push from the throne of your brain the cowled form of superstition - then read the Holy Bible, and you will be amazed that you ever, for one moment, supposed a being of infinite wisdom, goodness and purity, to be the author of such ignorance and of such atrocity.

To avoid pain we must know the conditions of health. For the accomplishment of this end we must rely upon investigation instead of faith, upon labor in place of prayer. Most misery is produced by ignorance. Passions sow the seeds of pain.

It's appropriate that the word 'ignorance' is an extension of the word 'ignore.' We ignore so much and so we become ignore-ant.

Playing rugby at school I once fell on a loose ball and, through ignorance and fear, held on despite a fierce pummelling. After that it took me months to convince my team-mates I was a coward.

Republicans stand for raw, unbridled evil and greed and ignorance smothered in balloons and ribbons.

America faces an enemy who believes in enforced ignorance. And all that we stand for is the open mind, the generous spirit, the ideal of tolerance, freedom, education, opportunity.

Every man must be taken to be cognizant of the law, otherwise there is no saying to what extent the excuse of ignorance may not be Law carried. It would be urged in almost every case.

So the journey is over and I am back again where I started, richer by much experience and poorer by many unexploded certainties. For convictions and certainties are too often the concomitants of ignorance. Those who like to feel they are always right and who attached a high importance to their own opinions should stay at home. When one is traveling, convictions are mislaid as easily as spectacles; but unlike spectacles, they are not easily replaced.

We cannot but be astonished at the ease with which men resign themselves to ignorance about what is most important for them to know; and we may be certain that they are determined to remain invincibly ignorant if they once come to consider it as axiomatic that there are no absolute principles.

Whenever any one informs us that he has found a man who knows all the arts, and all things else that anybody knows, and every single thing with a higher degree of accuracy than any other man - whoever tells us this, I think that we can only imagine him to be a simple creature who is likely to have been deceived by some wizard or actor whom he met, and whom he thought all-knowing, because he himself was unable to analyse the nature of knowledge and ignorance and imitation.

Mankind has the genius to bring all the world together and the ignorance to fight upon arrival.

Women have suffered too much from the Conspiracy of Silence to allow that conspiracy to last one minute longer. It has been an established and admitted rule in the medical profession to keep a wife in ignorance of the fact that she has become the victim of venereal disease.

Ignorance and bigotry, like other insanities, are incapable of self-government.

When ignorance gets started it knows no bounds.

Human ordeals thrive on ignorance. To understand a problem with clarity is already half way towards solving it.