Ignorance Quotes

Ignorance gives one a large range of probabilities.

George Eliot

Seize the moment of excited curiosity on any subject to solve your doubts; for if you let it pass, the desire may never return, and you may remain in ignorance.

William Wirt

A man is wise with the wisdom of his time only, and ignorant with its ignorance. Observe how the greatest minds yield in some degree to the superstitions of their age.

Henry David Thoreau

You may assume infinite ignorance and unlimited intelligence.

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

Blinding ignorance does mislead us. O! Wretched mortals, open your eyes!

Leonardo Da Vinci

It is an infantile superstition of the human spirit that virginity would be thought a virtue and not the barrier that separates ignorance from knowledge.

Voltaire

Discourtesy does not spring merely from one bad quality, but from several - - From foolish vanity, from ignorance of what is due to others, from indolence, from stupidity, from distraction of thought, from contempt of others, from jealousy.

Jean de la Bruyere

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

Bill Watterson

All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence - - And then success is sure.

Mark Twain

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

Saul Bellow

I have never found in a long experience of politics that criticism is ever inhibited by ignorance.

Harold Macmillan, British prime minister (1957 - 1963)

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

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr., retort to a heckler asking him to state his beliefs, Time, November 1, 1963

When you make a mistake or get ridiculed or rejected, look at mistakes as learning experiences, and ridicule as ignorance.... Look at rejection as part of one performance, not as a turn down of the performer.

Denis Watley

There are few earthly things more beautiful than a university... a place where those who hate ignorance may strive to know, where those who perceive truth may strive to make others see.

John Masefield

The history of the Victorian Age will never be written: we know too much about it. For 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.

Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians (1918)

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.

Charles Darwin

It is impossible to make people understand their ignorance; for it requires knowledge to perceive it and therefore he that can perceive it hath it not.

Jeremy Taylo

Envy is ignorance, imitation is suicide.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self Reliance

Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone.

Oscar Wilde

The barb in the arrow of childhood suffering is this its intense loneliness, its intense ignorance.

Akhenaton

He said that there was one only good, namely, knowledge and one only evil, namely, ignorance.

Laertius Diogenes

Ignorance is king, many would not prosper by its abdication.

"A Canticle for Leibowitz".

All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence then success is sure.

Mark Twain

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

Kahlil Gibran

Prejudice is ignorance.

Michael Jackson

The history of the Victorian Age will never be written we know too much about it. For 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.

Lytton Strachey

If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.

Derek Curtis Bok

Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times.

Gustave Flaubert

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

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

Baltasar Gracian

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

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.

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

We fear things in proportion to our ignorance of them.

Titus Livius

Your ignorance, cramps my conversation.

Sir Anthony Hawkins

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

True friendship can afford true knowledge. It does not depend on darkness and ignorance.

Henry David Thoreau