Famous Quotes & Sayings

William Shakespeare

I have heard of your paintings too, well enough; God has given you one face, and you make yourselves another: you jig, you amble, and you lisp, and nick-name God's creatures, and make your wantonness your ignorance. Go to, I'll no more on't; it hath made me mad.

Adam Smith

This is one of those cases in which the imagination is baffled by the facts.

Adam Smith

He is led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention

Adam Pascal

Ignorance is bliss. I wish I still had some.

Abraham Maslow

The sacred is in the ordinary...it is to be found in one's daily life, in one's neighbors, friends, and family, in one's own backyard...travel may be a flight from confronting the scared--this lesson can be easily lost. To be looking elsewhere for miracles is to me a sure sign of ignorance that everything is miraculous.

Alberto Manguel

Through ignorance, through faith, through intelligence, through trickery and cunning, through illumination, the reader rewrites the text with the same words of the original but under another heading, re-creating it, as it were, in the very act of bringing it into being.

Albert Einstein

Man, surrounded by facts, permitting himself no surprise, no intuitive flash, no great hypothesis, no risk, is in a locked cell. Ignorance cannot seal the mind and imagination more securely.

Albert Einstein

Never underestimate your own ignorance.

Albert Einstein

Condemnation before investigation is the highest form of ignorance.

Alfred North Whitehead

Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance, is the death of knowledge.

Alfred Marshall

The hope that poverty and ignorance may gradually be extinguished derives indeed much support from the steady progress of the working classes during the 19th century.

Aldous Huxley

Reality cannot be ignored except at a price; and the longer the ignorance is persisted in, the higher and more terrible becomes the price that must be paid.

Aldous Huxley

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

Aldous Huxley

Most ignorances are vincible, and in the greater number of cases stupidity is what the Buddha pronounced it to be, a sin. For, consciously, or subconsciously, it is with deliberation that we do not know or fail to understand-because incomprehension allows us, with a good conscience, to evade unpleasant obligations and responsibilities, because ignorance is the best excuse for going on doing what one likes, but ought not, to do.

Aldous Huxley

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.

Aldous Huxley

The pleasures of ignorance are as great, in their way, as the pleasures of knowledge.

Abigail Adams

Let your observations and comparisons produce in your mind an abhorrence of domination and power, the parent of slavery, ignorance, and barbarism, which places man upon a level with his fellow tenants of the woods.

A. E. Housman

Three minutes thought would suffice to find this out; but thought is irksome and three minutes is a long time.

Adrienne Rich

Not biology, but ignorance of ourselves, has been the key to our powerlessness

Marshall McLuhan

ONLY THE SMALL SECRETS NEED TO BE PROTECTED.THE BIG ONES ARE KEPT SECRET BY PUBLIC INCREDULITY.

One should always strive for knowledge so that ignorance never touches him.

Vandana Shiva

The people who see the population explosion in the Malthusian way - as a geometric progression - forget that population growth is not a biological issue. People are not increasing in numbers out of stupidity and ignorance. Population growth is an ecological phenomenon linked very intimately to other issues, such as the usurpation of the resources which allow people to live.

Jane Austen

Facts or opinions which are to pass through the hands of so many, to be misconceived by folly in one, and ignorance in another, can hardly have much truth left.

Jane Austen

But to live in ignorance on such a point was impossible.

Jane Austen

She was heartily ashamed of her ignorance - a misplaced shame. Where people wish to attach, they should always be ignorant. To come with a well−informed mind is to come with an inability of administering to the vanity of others, which a sensible person would always wish to avoid. A woman especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can.

Jared Diamond

The past was still a Golden Age, of ignorance, while the present is an Iron Age of willful bliss.

Jane Yolen

Fish are not the best authority on water.

Jane Smiley

Ignorance is a self-generating state of mind; one of its characteristics is that it doesn't recognize itself as ignorance.

Benjamin Disraeli

Ignorance never settles a question.

Calvin Coolidge

Those who want their rights respected under the Constitution and the law ought to set the example themselves of observing the Constitution and the law. While there may be those of high intelligence who violate the law at times, the barbarian and the defective always violate it. Those who disregard the rules of society are not exhibiting a superior intelligence, are not promoting freedom and independence, are not following the path of civilization, but are displaying the traits of ignorance, of servitude, of savagery, and treading the way that leads back to the jungle.

Catherine McCormack

I happen to have worked with male directors who don't understand women at all. Not at all. I'm flabbergasted by their ignorance.

Carla Bley

I don't think you can ever regain your ignorance.

Alain Badiou

These latter institutions [the civil service, trade unions, media of all kinds], notably of course television, but more subtly the written press, are quite spectacular powers of unreason and ignorance.