Famous Quotes & Sayings

Patrick Rothfuss

Fear tends to come from ignorance. Once I knew what the problem was, it was just a problem, nothing to fear.

Patrick Rothfuss

Knowing your own ignorance is the first step to enlightenment.

Lev Grossman

We have reached the point where ignorance and neglect are the best we can hope for in a ruler.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon

But ignorance is happiness,When young Hope is to show the way

Marguerite Duras

In a thousand years time this day will have existed for a thousand years to the day. And the ignorance of the whole world about what they've said today will have a date too.

Marguerite Yourcenar

On the whole, however, it is only out of pride or gross ignorance, or cowardice, that we refuse to see in the present the lineaments of times to come.

Naomi Judd

Ignorance is my least favorite thing. I really think it's at the core of all our problems.

R. Buckminster Fuller

So long as mathematicians can impose up-and-down semantics upon students while trafficking personally in the non-up-and-down advantages of their concise statements, they can impose upon the ignorance of man a monopoly of access to accurate processing of information and can fool even themselves by thought habits governing the becoming behavior of professional specialists, by disclaiming the necessity of, or responsibility for, comprehensive adjustment of the a priori thought to total reality of universal principles.

R. Buckminster Fuller

There is no energy crisis, only a crisis of ignorance.

Publilius Syrus

Better to be ignorant of a matter than half know it.

Niccolo Machiavelli

A sign of intelligence is an awareness of one's own ignorance.

Niccolo Machiavelli

Men are always averse to enterprises in which they foresee difficulties.

Nhat Hanh

The Buddha always reminds us that our afflictions, including our fear and our desiring, are born from our ignorance. That is why in order to dissipate fear, we have to remove wrong perception.

Nhat Hanh

Fear is born from ignorance. We think that the other person is trying to take away something from us. But if we look deeply, we see that the desire of the other person is exactly our own desire - to have peace, to be able to have a chance to live.

Nhat Hanh

Human beings are not our enemy. Our enemy is not the other person. Our enemy is the violence, ignorance, and injustice in us and in the other person. When we are armed with compassion and understanding, we fight not against other people, but against the tendency to invade, to dominate, and to exploit.

Noam Chomsky

Our ignorance can be divided into problems and mysteries. When we face a problem, we may not know its solution, but we have insight, increasing knowledge, and an inkling of what we are looking for. When we face a mystery, however, we can only stare in wonder and bewilderment, not knowing what an explanation would even look like.

Jodi Picoult

Sometimes we find ourselves walking through life blindfolded, and we try to deny that we're the ones who securely tied the knot.

Oliver Goldsmith

And his best riches, ignorance of wealth.

Oliver Goldsmith

Prudery is ignorance.

Oliver Goldsmith

Paltry affectation, strained allusions, and disgusting finery are easily attained by those who choose to wear them; they are but too frequently the badges of ignorance or of stupidity, whenever it would endeavor to please.

Margaret Atwood

I was unfair to him, of course, but where would I have been without unfairness? In thrall, in harness. Young women need unfairness, it's one of their few defenses. They need their callousness, they need their ignorance. They walk in the dark, along the edges of high cliffs, humming to themselves, thinking themselves invulnerable.

Margaret Atwood

A lot of being a poet consists of willed ignorance. If you woke up from your trance and realized the nature of the life-threatening and dignity-destroying precipice you were walking along, you would switch into actuarial sciences immediately.

Margaret Atwood

Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

Through ignorance of what is good and what is bad, the life of men is greatly perplexed.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

In extraordinary events ignorance of their causes produces astonishment.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

Nor am I ashamed, as some are, to confess my ignorance of those matters with which I am unacquainted.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

Ignorance of impending evil is far better than a knowledge of its approach.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

No man should so act as to make a gain out of the ignorance of another.

P. J. O'Rourke

The idea of a news broadcast once was to find someone with information and broadcast it. The idea now is to find someone with ignorance and spread it around.

Oscar Wilde

Anybody can write a three-volume novel. It merely requires a complete ignorance of both life and literature.

Oscar Wilde

Learn to differentiate between ignorance and stupidity.

Oscar Wilde

So much had been surrendered! And to such little purpose! There had been mad wilful rejections, monstrous forms of self-torture and self-denial, whose origin was fear and whose result was a degradation infinitely more terrible than that fancied degradation from which, in their ignorance, they had sought to escape.

Oscar Wilde

There is much to be said in favor of modern journalism. By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community. By carefully chronicling the current events of contemporary life, it shows us of what very little importance such events really are. By invariably discussing the unnecessary, it makes us understand what things are requisite for culture, and what are not.