Famous Quotes & Sayings

Alain de Botton

Curiosity takes ignorance seriously - and is confident enough to admit when it's in the dark. It is aware of not knowing. And then it sets out to do something about it.

Charles R. Swindoll

Someone has said,"Education is going from an unconscious to conscious awareness of one's ignorance."..No one has a corner on wisdom. All the name-dropping in the world does not heighten the significance of our character. If anything, it reduces it. Our acute need is to cultivate a willingness to learn and to remain teachable.

Charles James Fox

Persecution always says, 'I know the consequences of your opinion better than you know them yourselves.' But the language of toleration was always amicable, liberal, and just: it confessed its doubts, and acknowledged its ignorance ... Persecution had always reasoned from cause to effect, from opinion to action, [that such an opinion would invariably lead to but one action], which proved generally erroneous; while toleration led us invariably to form just conclusions, by judging from actions and not from opinions.

Charles Kettering

A man must have a certain amount of intelligent ignorance to get anywhere.

Charles Kettering

Education is man's going forward from cocksure ignorance to thoughtful uncertainty.Where there is an open mind there will always be a frontier.

Charles Darwin

Nevertheless so profound is our ignorance, and so high our presumption, that we marvel when we hear of the extinction of an organic being; and as we do not see the cause, we invoke cataclysms to desolate the world, or invent laws on the duration of the forms of life!

Charles Darwin

The more one thinks, the more one feels the hopeless immensity of man's ignorance.

Charles Darwin

It is so easy to hide our ignorance under such expressions as the plan of creation or unity of design, etc., and to think that we give an explanation when we only restate a fact.

Charles Babbage

If we define a miracle as an effect of which the cause is unknown to us, then we make our ignorance the source of miracles! and the universe itself would be a standing miracle. A miracle might be perhaps defined more exactly as an effect which is not the consequence or effect of any known laws of nature.

Barack Obama

When ignorant folks want to advertise their ignorance, you don't really have to do anything, you just let them talk.

Arthur Schopenhauer

Ignorance is degrading only when found in company with great riches.

Aristophanes

Ignorance can be cured, but stupidity is forever

Elias Hicks

People talk about revelation, and say it has ceased; but what ignorance it bespeaks, when man knows not the least thing on earth without revelation.

Elif Safak

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

Eliezer Yudkowsky

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.

Eliezer Yudkowsky

To worship a sacred mystery was just to worship your own ignorance.

Anne Lamott

Love is so much bigger than our ignorance.

Annie Besant

Knowledge is essential to conquest; only according to our ignorance are we helpless. Thought creates character. Character can dominate conditions. Will creates circumstances and environment.

Daniel J. Boorstin

Throught human history, illusions of knowledge, not ignorance, have proven to be the principal obstacles to discovery

Daniel J. Boorstin

The history of Western science confirms the aphorism that the great menace to progress is not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge.

Daniel Kahneman

Unfortunately, skill in evaluating the business prospects of a firm is not sufficient for successful stock trading, where the key question is whether the information about the firm is already incorporated in the price of the stock. Traders apparently lackthe skill to answer this crucial question, but they appear to be ignorant of their ignorance.

Daniel Kahneman

Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.

Crystal Eastman

The average man has a carefully cultivated ignorance about household matters - from what to do with the crumbs to the grocer's telephone number - a sort of cheerful inefficiency which protects him.

Clarence Darrow

The time will come when all people will view with horror light way in which society and its courts of law now take human life; and when that time comes, the way will be clear to device some better method of dealing with poverty and ignorance and their frequent byproducts, which we call crime.

Daniel Dennett

Religions have depended on the relative isolation and ignorance of their flocks, forever and this is all breaking down.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

We are so proud of our guarantees of freedom in thought and speech and worship, that, unconsciously, we are guilty of one of the greatest errors that ignorance can make - we assume our standard of values is shared by all other humans in the world.

Donald Kagan

All comparisons between America's current place in the world and anything legitimately called an empire in the past reveal ignorance and confusion about any reasonable meaning of the concept empire, especially the comparison with the Roman Empire.

Dale Carnegie

Our trouble is not ignorance, but inaction.

Cotton Mather

Ah! destructive Ignorance, what shall be done to chase thee out of the World!

Cotton Mather

That there is a Devil is a thing doubted by none but such as are under the influence of the Devil. For any to deny the being of a Devil must be from ignorance or profaneness worse than diabolical.

e. e. cummings

All ignorance toboggans into know and trudges up to ignorance again.

e. e. cummings

The intellectuals' chief cause of anguish are one another's works. Jacques Barzun, 1959 all ignorance toboggans into know and trudges up to ignorance again.

Ann Plato

To remove ignorance is an important branch of benevolence.