ignorance Quotes

“Is that how we lived, then? But we lived as usual. Everyone does, most of the time. Whatever is going on is as usual. Even this is as usual, now. We lived, as usual, by ignoring. Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it. ”

“I had discerned the ways in which we had been sculpted by a tradition given to us by others, a tradition of which we were either willfully or accidentally ignorant. I had begun to understand that we had lent our voices to a discourse whose sole purpose was to dehumanize and brutalize others—because nurturing that discourse was easier, because retaining power always feels like the way forward.”

“They are Man’s . . . And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased.”

Ignorance is the parent of fear.

Ignorance is the parent of fear.

“From a caprice of nature, not from the ignorance of man. Not a mistake has been made in the working. But we cannot prevent equilibrium from producing its effects. We may brave human laws, but we cannot resist natural ones.”

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.

“One can’t judge till one’s forty; before that we’re too eager, too hard, too cruel, and in addition much too ignorant.”

“I do not approve of anything that tampers with natural ignorance. Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone.”

“Where my culture I’m told holds no significance I’ll wither and die in ignorance But my inner eye can c a race who reigned as kings in another place”

“I have learned that with creatures one loves, suffering is not the only thing for which one may pity them. A rabbit who does not know when a gift has made him safe is poorer than a slug, even though he may think otherwise himself.”

″“Do you like it?” asked Strawberry. Hazel puzzled over the stones. They were all the same size, and pushed at regular intervals into the soil. He could make nothing of them. “What are they for?” he asked again.”

″“Hazel,” he said quickly, “that’s a piece of flat wood—like that piece that closed the gap by the Green Loose above the warren—you remember? It must have drifted down the river. So it floats. We could put Fiver and Pipkin on it and make it float again. It might go across the river. Can you understand?” Hazel had no idea what he meant. Blackberry’s flood of apparent nonsense only seemed to draw tighter the mesh of danger and bewilderment.”

“The thoughtless, the ignorant, and indolent, seeing only the apparent effects of things and not the things themselves, talk of law, of fortune, and chance. Seeing a man grow rich, they say, “How lucky he is!” Observing another become intellectual they exclaim, “How highly favored he is!” And noting the saintly character and wide influence of another, they remark, “How chance aids him at every turn!” They don’t see the trials and failures and the struggles which these men have voluntarily encountered in order to gain their experience; have no knowledge of the sacrifices they have made, of the undaunted efforts they have put forth, of the faith they have exercised, that they might overcome the apparently insurmountable, and realize the vision of their heart. They do not know the darkness and the heart aches; they only see the light and the Joy, and they call it “luck”; do not see the longing arduous journey, but only behold the pleasant goal, and call it “good fortune”; do not understand the process, but only perceive the result, and call it “chance”.”

Always it was to be called a rod. If someone called it a pole, my father looked at him as a sergeant in the United States Marines would look at a recruit who had just called a rifle a gun.

″The most fundamental aggression to ourselves, the most fundamental harm we can do to ourselves, is to remain ignorant by not having the courage and the respect to look at ourselves honestly and gently.″

“My father wanted us to be inspired by our great hero, but in a manner fit for our times - with pens, not swords. Just as Khattak had wanted the Pashtuns to unite against a foreign enemy, so we needed to unite against ignorance.”

“The Rabbit could not claim to be a model of anything, for he didn’t know that real rabbits existed; he thought they were all stuffed with sawdust like himself, and he understood that sawdust was quite out-of-date and should never be mentioned in modern circles.”

Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them.

“People want to ignore what they can’t understand. They’re looking for logic at any cost.”

“You’ve always been a tourist here, you just didn’t know it.”

“Sitting there watching the laundry go around in the dryer, I thought about the round world and hygiene. We’ve made a lot of progress, you know. We used to think that disease was an act of God. Then we figured out it was a product of human ignorance, so we’ve been cleaning up our act-literally-ever since. We’ve been getting the excrement off our hands and clothes and bodies and food and houses”

“He said, ‘Ignorance and power and pride are a deadly mixture, you know’ ‘Sure are,’ I said. ‘Like matches in the hand of a three-year-old. Or automobiles in the hands of a sixteen-year-old. Or faith in God in the mind of a saint or a maniac. Or a nuclear arsenal in the hands of a movie character. Or even jumper cables and batteries in the hands of fools.‘”

“Unfortunately, the sort of individual who is programmed to […] keep pushing for the top is frequently programmed to disregard signs of grave and imminent danger as well.”

“The Devon faculty had never before experienced a student who combined a calm ignorance of the rules with a winning urge to be good, who seemed to love the school truly and deeply, and never more than when he was breaking the regulations […]. The faculty threw up its hands over Phineas, and so loosened its grip on all of us.”

“They who have received some portion of God’s gift, these, if judged by their deeds, have from death’s bond won their release; for they embrace in their own mind, all things, things on the earth, things in the heaven, and things above the heaven - if there be aught. They who do not understand, because they possess the aid of reason only and not mind, are ignorant wherefore they have come into being and whereby, like irrational creatures, their makeup is in their feelings and their impulses, they fail in all appreciation of things which really are worth contemplation. These center all their thought upon the pleasures of the body and its appetites.”

To say that the Force works in mysterious ways is to admit one’s ignorance, for any mystery can be solved through the application of knowledge and unrelenting effort.

“She had taught me to disdain the blend of ignorance and arrogance that too often characterized Americans abroad.”

“I am not a Polack. People from Poland are Poles, not Polacks. But what I am is a one hundred percent American, born and raised in the greatest country on earth and proud as hell of it, so don’t ever call me a Polack.”

“Becoming free from the clutches of ignorance is not as simple as learning about its cause. Even if you are honest and truly believe in the philosophy of yoga and mystical spirituality, all of your mental efforts to negate the ignorance will fail in the beginning.”

“Some towns … want to talk about what happened, about the past. Other towns, discussion of the past is discouraged. We went to a place once where the children didn’t know the world had ever been different, although you’d think all the rusted-out automobiles and telephones wires would give them a clue.”

“The most merciful thing in the world, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.”

“We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.”

“Sometimes people never even ask my name, like it’s not important or something. It is. My name is Melody.”

“The atmosphere of the home is prolonged in the school, where the students soon discover that (as in the home) in order to achieve some satisfaction they must adapt to the precepts which have been set from above. One of these precepts is not to think”.

“But who is more ignorant? The man who cannot define lightning, or the man who does not respect its awesome power?”

“What shall we do if we take ignorance to be knowledge?”

“For in the end, [Huxley] was trying to tell us what afflicted the people in ‘Brave New World’ was not that they were laughing instead of thinking, but that they did not know what they were laughing about and why they had stopped thinking.”

“I can tell you that ‘Just cheer up’ is almost universally looked at as the most unhelpful depression cure ever. It’s pretty much the equivalent of telling someone who just had their legs amputated to ‘just walk it off.’ ”

“In her month and a half of turbulent motherhood, Bebe did not once seek help from a psychologist or a doctor... she had no idea where to turn... She did not know how to find the social workers who might have helped her... she did not know how to file for welfare.”

“I was born a slave; but I never knew it till six years of happy childhood had passed away.”

“She was ‘nervous,’ she suffered ‘little spells’—such were the sheltering expressions used by those close to her. Not that the truth concerning ‘poor Bonnie’s afflictions’ was in the least a secret; everyone knew she had been an on-and-off psychiatric patient the last half-dozen years.”

“She may be an ignorant creature, degraded by the system that has brutalized her from her childhood; but she has a mother’s instincts, and is capable of a mother’s agonies.”

“You think we’ve got the handle on reality, just ’cause we can record bits of it. More to it than that, pal. More to it than that.”

“Every bad man is ignorant what he ought to do and what to leave undone, and by reason of such error men become unjust and wholly evil.”

“You see, I haven’t really thought very much. I was always afraid of what I might think—so it seemed safer not to think at all. But now I know. A thought is like a child inside our body. It has to be born. If it dies inside you, part of you dies too!”

“The freedom now desired by many is not freedom to do and dare but freedom from care and worry.”

“Deceitfulness, and arrogance, and pride, Quickness to anger, harsh and evil speech, And ignorance, to its own darkness blind,-- These be the signs, My Prince! of him whose birth Is fated for the regions of the vile.”

“Ignorance, begot Of Darkness, blinding mortal men, binds down Their souls to stupor, sloth, and drowsiness.”

“People worry about kids playing with guns, and teenagers watching violent videos; we are scared that some sort of culture or violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands - literally thousands - of songs about broken hearts and rejection and pain and misery and loss. ”

“After leaving their bodies, they who have killed the Self go to the worlds of the Asuras, covered with blinding ignorance.”

“They enter into blind darkness who worship Avidya (ignorance and delusion); they fall, as it were, into greater darkness who worship Vidya (knowledge).”

“Fools dwelling in ignorance, yet imagining themselves wise and learned, go round and round in crooked ways, like the blind led by the blind.”

“Children (the ignorant) pursue external pleasures; (thus) they fall into the wide-spread snare of death. But the wise, knowing the nature of immortality, do not seek the permanent among fleeting things.”

“It’s clear to me now that I have been moving toward you and you toward me for a long time. Though neither of us was aware of the other before we met, there was a kind of mindless certainty bumming blithely along beneath our ignorance that ensured we would come together.”

“So she had passed her childhood, like a half-wild cat.”

“It would create a feeling that is extremely uncomfortable, called cognitive dissonance. And because it is so important to protect the core belief, they will rationalize, ignore and even deny anything that doesn’t fit in with the core belief.”

“if only we were crazy enough to be willing to ignore our mechanical and static perceptions we’d know that a half-filled coffee cup holds more secrets than, say, the Grand Canyon.”

“He’d always thought they’d go home one day and everything would be like it was before they came . . . he didn’t understand that there was no going back, that what had happened was forever.”

“If you didn’t grow up like I did then you don’t know, and if you don’t know it’s probably better you don’t judge.”

“For this is certain, no secure civilization can be built in the South with the Negro as an ignorant, turbulent proletariat.”

“The significance of our lives and our fragile planet is then determined only by our own wisdom and courage. We are the custodians of life’s meaning. We long for a Parent to care for us, to forgive us our errors, to save us from our childish mistakes. But knowledge is preferable to ignorance. Better by far to embrace the hard truth than a reassuring fable.”

“Commentators who today talk of ‘The Dark Ages’ when faith instead of reason was said to ruthlessly rule, have for their animadversions only the excuse of perfect ignorance. Both Aquinas’ intellectual gifts and his religious nature were of a kind that is no longer commonly seen in the Western world.”

“And a man who is puzzled and wonders thinks himself ignorant.”

“If you and I spend our seasons together we would find that our dreams and fantasies of happily-ever-after-love have holes in them through which the wind of karma blows: our yellow flag shakes. And I would like you to look ahead and see what I know: the wind will replace our pretty ideas with something brighter: life.”

“But the man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out. He will be wiser but less cocksure, happier but less self-satisfied, humbler in acknowledging his ignorance yet better equipped to understand the relationship of words to things, of systematic reasoning to the unfathomable Mystery which it tries, forever vainly, to comprehend.”

“It would be too easy to say that I feel invisible. Instead, I feel painfully visible, and entirely ignored.”

“Whether in a suit or in a loincloth, people are ignorant, little thorns, cutting into one another.”

“Whether in a suit or in a loincloth people are ignorant little thorns cutting into one another. They seem incapable of advancing beyond the violent tendencies which at one time were necessary for survival.”

“I felt a touch sorry for him because it might be his last day of being the baby of the family and his coddling days could be done. He was too small and knowledgeless to know it, though, so I guessed the loss couldn’t hurt him.”

“Yes. Lyra has a part to play in all this, and a major one. The irony is that she must do it all without realizing what she’s doing. She can be helped, though, and if my plan with the Tokay had succeeded, she would have been safe for a little longer.”

″‘A fine woman. A cultured woman,’ they said, but were glad it was their children and not they who had to spend each day in the classroom. The Ferretti voice rang out across the empty town, like a tocsin bell announcing the outbreak of battle: Senhora Ferretti’s battle against Ignorance.”

“For a moment David was tempted to think that perhaps there were no good people at all outside concentration camps, but then he reminded himself of the sailor and Angelo and the English people who might have been ignorant but were certainly not bad.”

“We had defended ourselves since memory against everything and everybody, considered all speech a code to be broken by us, and all gestures subject to careful analysis; we had become headstrong, devious, and arrogant. Nobody paid us any attention, so we paid very good attention to ourselves. Our limitations were not known to us—not then.”

“People tend to be generous when sharing their nonsense, fear, and ignorance. And while they seem quite eager to feed you their negativity, please remember that sometimes the diet we need to be on is a spiritual and emotional one. Be cautious with what you feed your mind and soul. Fuel yourself with positivity and let that fuel propel you into positive action.”

“I don’t want to be another one of those people who just pretend like they don’t know about the suffering, like they don’t see it every single day, like they don’t walk past it on their way to school or work.”

″...with a shiver of foreboding he saw his marriage becoming what most of the other marriages about him were: a dull association of material and social interests held together by ignorance on the one side and hypocrisy on the other.”

“We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again- to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.”

“There is no darkness but ignorance.”

“To permit ignorance is to empower it.”

“You can know a thing to death and be for all purposes completely ignorant of it.”

“Really, if people weren’t so intent on keeping young women completely ignorant of the realities of marriage, scenes like this could be avoided.”

″‘Ain’t you got no feelings for yore trade?’ asked Smith earnestly. ‘Don’t you want it to prosper with more readers?’ ‘You’re a wicked little thief!’ said the bookseller, now jerking to the left. ‘Only because I’m ignorant!‘”

“When they looked at the flowers, Giglio was utterly unacquainted with botany, and had never heard of Linnaeus. When the butterflies passed, Giglio knew nothing about them, being as ignorant of entomology as I am of Algebra.”

“When a man wishes to make his way in the world, be it in what country it will, be ought to be provided beforehand with a tolerable share of knowledge; but this was what Robinson never thought of.”

‘Are you willing, Wilhelmina, to share my ignorance? Here is the book. Take it and keep it, read it if you will, but never let me know; unless, indeed, some solemn duty should come upon me to go back to the bitter hours, asleep or awake, sane or mad, recorded here.’

Poor Marilla was only preserved from complete collapse by remembering that it was not irreverence, but simply spiritual ignorance on the part of Anne that was responsible for this extraordinary petition.

But, indeed, he was blind and foolish, as he ever and always is.

“Dantès, even in his dying moments, swore by his crucified Redeemer, that he was utterly ignorant of the cause of his detention.”

“We were too ignorant—that was the trouble. We didn’t stand any chance. If I’d known what I know now we’d have won out.”

not merely the cost of keeping millions of men in idleness, of arming and equipping them for battle and parade, but the drain upon the vital energies of society by the war attitude and the war terror, the brutality and ignorance, the drunkenness, prostitution, and crime it entails, the industrial impotence and the moral deadness? Do you think that it would be too much to say that two hours of the working time of every efficient member of a community goes to feed the red fiend of war?”

How strange! I thought, though everybody hated and despised each other, they could not avoid loving me.

“As we shall now have no influence over his destiny, good or bad, you must say nothing of where he is gone to my daughter: she cannot associate with him hereafter, and it is better for her to remain in ignorance of his proximity; lest she should be restless, and anxious to visit the Heights. Merely tell her his father sent for him suddenly, and he has been obliged to leave us.”

I know what he suffers now, for instance, exactly: it is merely a beginning of what he shall suffer, though. And he’ll never be able to emerge from his bathos of coarseness and ignorance.

“If they know nothing of victory, they are at least spared the knowledge of defeat.”

“Better he should be bruised from head to foot by me who love him than that he should come to harm through ignorance,”

And he stole, too, then, without knowing it himself, for ‘How can it be stealing, if one picks it up?’