Ignorance Quotes

To conceal ignorance is to increase it. An honest confession of it, however, gives ground for the hope that it will diminish some day or the other.

Mahatma Gandhi

The spirit is smothered, as it were, by ignorance, but so soon as ignorance is destroyed, spirit shine forth, like the sun when released from clouds.

Sankara

Shall ignorance of good and ill Dare to direct the eternal will? Seek virtue, and of that possest, To Providence resign the rest.

Gay

A little learning is a dangerous thing, but a lot of ignorance is just as bad.

Bob Edwards

Even knowledge has to be in the fashion, and where it is not, it is wise to affect ignorance.

Baltasar Gracian

Ignorance is the mother of admiration.

George Chapman

There is no slavery but ignorance.

Robert Ingersoll, The Philosophy of Ingersoll (1906), "Fragments".

Ignorance, when voluntary, is criminal, and a man may be properly charged with that evil which he neglected or refused to learn how to prevent.

Johnson

Why waste time learning, when ignorance is instantaneous - Calvin.

Bill Watterson

Lawyers are the only persons in whom ignorance of the law is not punished.

Jeremy Bentham

Truth will always be truth, regardless of lack of understanding, disbelief or ignorance.

W. Clement Stone

A little learning is a dangerous thing but a lot of ignorance is just as bad.

Bob Edwards

The essence of knowledge is, having it, to apply it; not having it, to confess your ignorance.

Confucius

A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.

Saul Bellow

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

Martin Luther King Jr., Strength to Love, 1963

We fear things in proportion to our ignorance of them.

Titus Livius

His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere.

Mark Twain

The little I know, I owe to my ignorance.

Sacha Guitry

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.

Anne Besant

Ignorance of all things is an evil neither terrible nor excessive, nor yet the greatest of all; but great cleverness and much learning, if they be accompanied by a bad training, are a much greater misfortune.

Plato

I know nothing except the fact of my ignorance.

Socrates, from Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers

You may assume infinite ignorance and unlimited intelligence.

Leo Szilard, "A Random Walk in Science" compiled by R. L. Weber, edited by E. Mendoza

Envy is ignorance, imitation is suicide.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self Reliance

Nothing is as terrible to see as ignorance in action.

Johann von Goethe

Ignorance is preferable to error, and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing than he who believes what is wrong.

Thomas Jefferson, (Notes on Virginia, 1782)

He who is not aware of his ignorance will only be misled by his knowledge.

Richard Whatley

Discussion is an exchange of knowledge; argument an exchange of ignorance.

Robert Quillen

It is better to hide ignorance, but it is hard to do this when we relax over wine.

Heraclitus, On the Universe

Ignorance and inconsideration are the two great causes of the ruin of mankind.

John Tillotson

Ignorance gives one a large range of probabilities.

George Eliot

Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before. He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way.

Bokonon

Stupidity has a certain charm - Ignorance does not.

Frank Zappa

To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today.

Isaac Asimov

Ignorance is not innocence but sin.

Robert Browning

The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - It is the illusion of knowledge.

Daniel J. Boorstin

I wash my hands of those who imagine chattering to be knowledge, silence to be ignorance, and affection to be art.

Kahlil Gibran

It is only necessary to make war with five things; with the maladies of the body, the ignorances of the mind, with the passions of the body, with the seditions of the city and the discords of families.

Pythagoras