Those who believe that there is a God, and that He created heaven and earth, and that He ruleth the world by His unceasing providence, cannot believe that millions of human beings, all created like ourselves in the image of God, were, in their time of ignorance, so utterly abandoned that their whole religion was falsehood, their whole worship a farce, their whole life a mockery. An honest and independent study of the religions of the world will teach us that it was not so, ... that there is no religion which does not contain some grains of truth. Nay, it will teach us more; it will teach us to see in the history of the ancient religions, more clearly than anywhere else, the _Divine education of the human race_.
Our knowledge can only be finite, while our ignorance must necessarily be infinite.
Ignorantia legis excusat neminem=--Ignorance of the law excuses nobody.
I do not believe in Belief. But this is an Age of Faith, and there are so many militant creeds that, in self defence, one has to formulate a creed of one's own. Tolerance, good temper and sympathy are no longer enough in a world where ignorance rules, and Science, which ought to have ruled, plays the pimp. Tolerance, good temper and sympathy they are what matter really, and if the human race is not to collapse they must come to the front before long.
Annat. He makes the disciple without ignorance, and the master without presumption.
Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.
Let ignorance talk as it will, learning has its value.
Envy is ignorance.
And I have written three books on the soul, Proving absurd all written hitherto, And putting us to ignorance again.
Nothing limits intelligence more than ignorance; nothing fosters ignorance more than one's own opinions; nothing strengthens opinions more than refusing to look at reality.
"Ignorance is the soil in which belief in miracles grows."
Behold our refutation of the error. It is not based on documents of faith, but on the reasons and statements of the philosophers themselves. If then anyone there be who, boastfully taking pride in his supposed wisdom, wishes to challenge what we have written, let him not do it in some corner nor before children who are powerless to decide on such difficult matters. Let him reply openly if he dare. He shall find me there confronting him, and not only my negligible self, but many another whose study is truth. We shall do battle with his errors or bring a cure to his ignorance. [St. Thomas Aquinas in response to Siger of Brabant’s attempt to base the law on faith rather than reason. Quoted in G. K. Chesterton, Saint Thomas Aquinas: The “Dumb Ox.” New York: Doubleday and Company, 1956, 94.]
Ridiculous modes, invented by ignorance and adopted by folly.
Shakespeare stands alone. His want of erudition was a most happy and productive ignorance; it forced him back upon his own resources, which were exhaustless.
To know the mighty works of God, to comprehend His wisdom and majesty and power; to appreciate, in degree, the wonderful workings of His laws, surely all this must be a pleasing and acceptable mode of worship to the Most High, to whom ignorance cannot be more grateful than knowledge.
Devotion, whatever form it takes, is not a source of amusement save to those who take smug satisfaction in their own ignorance and call it superiority," Demir replied.
A man conceals his ignorance by his silence.
_The Vanity of Knowledge._--The knowledge of external things will not console me for my ignorance of ethics in time of affliction, but the science of morals will always console me for my ignorance of external knowledge.
Where ignorance is our master, there is no possibility of real peace.
Thus if they discover no more imperfections and vices in us than we really have, it is plain they do us no wrong, since it is not they who cause them; but rather they do us a service, since they help us to deliver ourselves from an evil, the ignorance of these imperfections. We ought not to be troubled that they know our faults and despise us, since it is but just they should know us as we are, and despise us if we are despicable.
Many men would be religious if they knew where to begin; many would be more religious if they were sure where it would end. It is not indifference that keeps some men from God, but ignorance. "Good Master, what must I do to inherit Eternal Life?" is still the deepest question of the age. Natural Law, Eternal Life, p. 237.
Ignoratione rerum bonarum et malarum, maxime hominum vita vexatur=--Through ignorance of the distinction between good and bad, the life of men is greatly harassed.
Every man should study conciseness in speaking; it is a sign of ignorance not to know that long speeches, though they may please the speaker, are the torture of the hearer.
"Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity."
The whole difference between a man of genius and other men ... is that the former remains in great part a child, seeing with the large eyes of children, in perpetual wonder, not conscious of much knowledge--conscious rather of infinite ignorance, and yet infinite power.
Learning is an addition beyond / Nobility of birth; honour of blood, / Without the ornament of knowledge, is / A glorious ignorance.
Education: the path from cocky ignorance to miserable uncertainty.
Like all the really great men of literature, Goethe added some of the qualities of the man of science to those of the artist, especially the habit of careful and patient observation of Nature. The great poet was no mere book-learned speculator. His acquaintance with mineralogy, geology, botany and osteology, the fruit of long and wide studies, would have sufficed to satisfy the requirements of a professoriate in those days, if only he could have pleaded ignorance of everything else. Unfortunately for Goethe's credit with his scientific contemporaries, and, consequently, for the attention attracted by his work, he did not come forward as a man of science until the public had ranged him among the men of literature. And when the little men have thus classified a big man, they consider that the last word has been said about him; it appears to the thought hardly decent on his part if he venture to stray beyond the speciality they have assigned to him. It does not seem to occur to them that a clear intellect is an engine capable of supplying power to all sorts of mental factories; nor to admit that, as Goethe somewhere pathetically remarks, a man may have a right to live for himself as well as for the public; to follow the line of work that happens to interest him, rather than that which interests them.
For 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 is a much greater misfortune.--_Plato._
Science / Is but an exchange of ignorance for that / Which is another kind of ignorance.
Scholars are frequently to be met with who are ignorant of nothing saving their own ignorance.
The life, the fortune, and the happiness of every one of us, and, more or less, of those who are connected with us, do depend upon our knowing something of the rules of a game infinitely more difficult and complicated than chess. It is a game which has been played for untold ages, every man and woman of us being one of the two players in a game of his or her own. The chessboard is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the universe, the rules of the game are what we call the laws of Nature. The player on the other side is hidden from us. We know that his play is always fair, just and patient. But also we know, to our cost, that he never overlooks a mistake, or makes the smallest allowance for ignorance. To the man who plays well, the highest stakes are paid, with that sort of overflowing generosity with which the strong shows delight in strength. And one who plays ill is checkmated--without haste, but without remorse.
For I say this is death, and the sole death, / When a man's loss comes to him from his gain, / Darkness from light, from knowledge ignorance, / And lack of love from love made manifest.
The quintessential revolution is that of the spirit, born of an intellectual conviction of the need for change in those mental attitudes and values which shape the course of a nation's development. A revolution which aims merely at changing official policies and institutions with a view to an improvement in material conditions has little chance of genuine success. Without a revolution of the spirit, the forces which produced the iniquities of the old order would continue to be operative, posing a constant threat to the process of reform and regeneration. It is not enough merely to call for freedom, democracy and human rights. There has to be a united determination to persevere in the struggle, to make sacrifices in the name of enduring truths, to resist the corrupting influences of desire, ill will, ignorance and fear.
When you combine ignorance and leverage, you get some pretty interesting results.
To succeed in life, you need two things: ignorance and confidence.
Such rest in ignorance is a monstrous thing, and they who live in it ought to be made aware of its extravagance and stupidity, by having it revealed to them, that they may be confounded by the sight of their own folly. For this is how men reason when they choose to live ignorant of what they are and do not seek to be enlightened. "I know not," say they....
Your ignorance is the mother of your devotion to me.
His ignorance makes him vulnerable.
Sufficiency is a compound of vanity and ignorance.
One says that the sovereign good consists in virtue, another in pleasure, another in the knowledge of nature, another in truth: _Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas_, another in total ignorance, another in indolence, others in neglect of appearances, another in the lack of wonder, _nihil mirari prope res una quæ possit facere et servare beatum_, the true sceptics in their indifference, doubt and perpetual suspense, and others, more wise, think they can find a better way. And this is all we get from them!
Error, when she retraces her steps, has farther to go before she can arrive at truth than ignorance.
Metaphorically, Tom said, if you take knowledge as light, and ignorance as dark, there does sometimes seem to be a real presence to the dark -- to ignorance. Something more tactile and muscley than just lack of knowledge. A sort of will to ignorance. It would explain some politicians.
Say, O wise man, how thou hast come by such knowledge? Because I never was ashamed to confess my ignorance and ask others.
He that voluntarily continues ignorant is guilty of all the crimes which ignorance produces.
Laugh not too much: the witty man laughs least: / For wit is news only to ignorance. / Less at thine own things laugh: lest in the jest / Thy person share, and the conceit advance.
His best companions, innocence and health; And his best riches, ignorance of wealth.
There is no darkness but ignorance.
There is the old riddle always before me, why was ... taken from me? Human understanding has no answer for it, and yet I feel as certain as I can feel of anything that as it is, it is good, it is best, better than anything I can wish for. One feels one's own ignorance why what seems so right and natural should not be, and yet one knows it could not be. One hides one's head in the arms of a Higher Power, a Friend, a Father, and more than a Father. Wait, and you will know. Work, and you will be able to bear it.
Mr. Kremlin was distinguished for ignorance; for he had only one idea, and that was wrong.
Diversification is protection against ignorance. It makes little sense if you know what you are doing.
There is no Energy Shortage. There is no Energy Crisis. There is a Crisis of Ignorance.
Not louder does the tempestuous sea bellow when the north wind strikes its foaming waves between Scylla and Charybdis; nor Stromboli nor Mount Etna when the sulphurous flames, {4} shattering and bursting open the great mountain with violence, hurl stones and earth through the air with the flame it vomits; nor when the fiery caverns of Mount Etna, spitting forth the element which it cannot restrain, hurl it back to the place whence it issued, driving furiously before it any obstacle in the way of its vehement fury ... so I, urged by my great desire and longing to see the blending of strange and various shapes made by creating nature, wandered for some time among the dark rocks, and came to the entrance of a great cave, in front of which I long stood in astonishment and ignorance of such a thing. I bent my back into an arch and rested my left hand on my knee, and with my right hand shaded my downcast eyes and contracted eyebrows. I bent down first on one side and then on the other to see whether I could perceive anything, but the thick darkness rendered this impossible; and after having remained there some time, two things arose within me, fear and desire,--fear of the dark and threatening cave, desire to see whether there were anything marvellous within.
Where ignorance is bliss, / 'Tis folly to be wise.
From ignorance our comfort flows. The only wretched are the wise.
There are … some potentates I would kill by any and all means at my disposal. They are Ignorance, Superstition, and Bigotry — the most sinister and tyrannical rulers on earth.
_Answer._--Who has most reason to fear hell, the man who is in ignorance if there be a hell, and who is certain of damnation if there be; or he who is certainly convinced that there is a hell, and has a hope of being saved if there be?
Fickleness has its rise in the experience of the deceptiveness of present pleasures, and in ignorance of the vanity of absent ones.
The essence of knowledge is, having it, to apply it; not having it, to confess your ignorance.
For I say this is death and the sole death,-- When a man's loss comes to him from his gain, Darkness from light, from knowledge ignorance, And lack of love from love made manifest.
Prejudice is the child of ignorance.
The antagonism between science and religion, about which we hear so much, appears to me to be purely factitious — fabricated, on the one hand, by short-sighted religious people who confound a certain branch of science, theology, with religion; and, on the other, by equally short-sighted scientific people who forget that science takes for its province only that which is susceptible of clear intellectual comprehension; and that, outside the boundaries of that province, they must be content with imagination, with hope, and with ignorance.
Religion is a great force — the only real motive force in the world; but what you fellows don't understand is that you must get at a man through his own religion and not through yours. Instead of facing that fact, you persist in trying to convert all men to your own little sect, so that you can use it against them afterwards. You are all missionaries and proselytizers trying to uproot the native religion from your neighbor's flowerbeds and plant your own in its place. You would rather let a child perish in ignorance than have it taught by a rival sectary.
It is fortunate that each generation does not comprehend its own ignorance. We are thus enabled to call our ancestors barbarous.
If any man can convince me and bring home to me that I do not think or act aright, gladly will I change; for I search after truth, by which man never yet was harmed. But he is harmed who abideth on still in his deception and ignorance.
There are few sensations more pleasant than that of wondering. We have all experienced it in childhood, in youth, in manhood, and we may hope that even in our old age this affection of the mind will not entirely pass away. If we analyse this feeling of wonder carefully, we shall find that it consists of two elements. What we mean by wondering is not only that we are startled or stunned--that I should call the merely passive element of wonder. When we say 'I wonder' we confess that we are taken aback, but there is a secret satisfaction mixed up with our feeling of surprise, a kind of hope, nay, almost of certainty, that sooner or later the wonder will cease, that our senses or our mind will recover, will grapple with these novel expressions or experiences, grasp them, it may be, know them, and finally triumph over them. In fact we wonder at the riddles of nature, whether animate or inanimate, with a firm conviction that there is a solution to them all, even though we ourselves may not be able to find it. Wonder, no doubt, arises from ignorance, but from a peculiar kind of ignorance, from what might be called a fertile ignorance; an ignorance which, if we look back at the history of most of our sciences, will be found to have been the mother of all human knowledge.
The life, the fortune, and the happiness of every one of us, and, more or less, of those who are connected with us, do depend upon our knowing something of the rules of a game infinitely more difficult and complicated than chess. It is a game which has been played for untold ages, every man and woman of us being one of the two players in a game of his or her own. The chessboard is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the universe, the rules of the game are what we call the laws of Nature. The player on the other side is hidden from us. We know that his play is always fair, just, and patient. But also we know, to our cost, that he never overlooks a mistake, or makes the smallest allowance for ignorance.
Must helpless man, in ignorance sedate, Roll darkling down the torrent of his fate?
There’s not a war between Muslims and non-Muslims, but between extremists and moderates of all the religions. … What is important is not to live in fear. The most dangerous thing to do is to give up and lose hope. The main enemy is not terrorism or extremism, but ignorance.
Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance.
When I say that Descartes consecrated doubt, you must remember that it was that sort of doubt which Goethe has called "the active scepticism, whose whole aim is to conquer itself"; and not that other sort which is born of flippancy and ignorance, and whose aim is only to perpetuate itself, as an excuse for idleness and indifference.
Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.
For my part I believe in the forgiveness of sin and the redemption of ignorance.
The greater the ignorance the greater the dogmatism.
Wisdom tends to grow in proportion to one's awareness of one's ignorance.
Wrongly men complain of experience, which {13} with great railing they accuse of falsehood. Leave experience alone, and turn your lamentation to your ignorance, which leads you, with your vain and foolish desires, to promise yourselves those things which are not in her power to confer, and to accuse her of falsehood. Wrongly men complain of innocent experience, when they accuse her not seldom of false and lying demonstrations.
The most important of my achievements, if you want to call them that, was that I successfully introduced mystical ideas into pop culture, … I wanted to save our culture from the stupidity and the bigotry and the ignorance that threatened it.
There is a worth in honest ignorance; 'twere almost a pity to exchange for knowledge.
Men contemplate distinctions because they are stupefied with ignorance= (viz., of the substantial identity of things).
The quantity of books in a library is often a cloud of witnesses of the ignorance of the owner.
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
There is very little difference between someone who cannot read and someone who will not read. The result of either is ignorance. Those who are serious seekers of personal development must remove the self-imposed limitations they have placed on their reading skills and their reading habits.
~Discourtesy.~--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.--_La Bruyère._
It is confidently expected that the period is at hand, when man, through ignorance, shall not much longer inflict unnecessary misery on man; because the mass of mankind will become enlightened, and will clearly discern that by so acting they will inevitably create misery to themselves.
What matters it? say some, a little more knowledge for man, a little more liberty, a little more general development. Life is so short! He is a being so limited! But it is precisely because his days are few, and he cannot attain to all, that a little more culture is of importance to him. The ignorance in which God leaves man is divine; the ignorance in which man leaves himself is a crime and a shame.--_X. Doudan._
Education costs money. But then so does ignorance
The world's judgment is right, for it is in that condition of natural ignorance which is man's best wisdom. The sciences have two extremes which meet. The first is that pure natural ignorance in which every man is born. The other extreme is that reached by great minds, who having run through all that men can know, find that they know nothing, and again come round to the same ignorance from which they started; but this is a learned ignorance, conscious of itself. Those between the two, who have left their natural ignorance and not been able to reach the other, have some tincture of this vain knowledge, and assume to be wise. These trouble the world, and judge all things falsely. The people and the wise make up the world; these despise it, and are despised; they judge ill of all things, and the world rightly judges of them.
Whatever nature has in store for mankind, unpleasant as it may be, men must accept, for ignorance is never better than knowledge.
Error is always more busy than ignorance. Ignorance is a blank sheet on which we may write, but error is a scribbled one from which we must first erase.
I know nothing except the fact of my ignorance.
A modest confession of ignorance is the ripest and last attainment of philosophy.
In countries and epochs in which communication is impeded, soon all other liberties wither; discussion dies by inanition, ignorance of the opinion of others becomes rampant, imposed opinions triumph. … Intolerance is inclined to censor, and censorship promotes ignorance of the arguments of others and thus intolerance itself: a rigid, vicious circle that is hard to break.
The only good is knowledge and the only evil is ignorance.
A lot of being a poet consists of willed ignorance. If you woke up from your trance and realized the nature of the life-threatening and dignity-destroying precipice you were walking along, you would switch into actuarial sciences immediately.