Ignorance quotes
2.8K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Explore further
Browse quotes that often appear alongside ignorance — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
Quote collection
Follow a thought to its author, or read the full quote page.
"Ignorance is an enemy, even to its owner. Knowledge is a friend, even to its hater. Ignorance hates knowledge because it is too pure. Knowledge fears ignorance because it is too sure."
"To know what you like is the beginning of wisdom and of old age. Youth is wholly experimental. The essence and charm of that unquiet and delightful epoch is ignorance of self as well as ignorance of life."
"If you don't let a teacher know what level you are -- by asking a question, or revealing your ignorance -- you will not learn or grow"
"My ignorance is not charming."
"Books cannot teach God, but they can destroy ignorance; their action is negative."
"Ignorance is death, Knowledge is life."
"God is by definition the holder of all possible knowledge, it would be impossible for him to have faith in anything. Faith, then, is built upon ignorance and hope."
"If God existed (a question concerning which Jubal maintained a meticulous intellectual neutrality) and if He desired to be worshiped (a proposition which Jubal found inherently improbable but conceivably possible in the dim light of his own ignorance), then (stipulating affirmatively both the above) it nevertheless seemed wildly unlikely to Jubal to the point of reductio ad absurdum that a God potent to shape galaxies would be titillated and swayed by the whoop-te-do nonsense the Fosterites offered Him as "worship."
"I dream of a world liberated of all diseases. Ignorance also upsets me a lot. How can one calmly look at the pictures from Rwanda and not instantly want to take action and try to ease the suffering?"
"Roving dogs do not indicate the civilisation or compassion of the society. They betray on the country the ignorance and lethargy of its members."
"To know how little one knows is to have genuine knowledge. Not to know how little one knows is to be deluded. Only those who know when they are deluded can free themselves from such delusion. The intelligent people are not deluded, because they know and accept their ignorance as ignorance, and thereby have genuine knowledge."
"An ignorant man ages like an ox. His flesh may increase, but not his understanding."
"The knowledge of one generation is the ignorance of the next."
"Nor am I ashamed, as some are, to confess my ignorance of those matters with which I am unacquainted."
"The thief who is in prison is not necessarily more dishonest than his fellows at large, but mostly one who, through ignorance or stupidity [or racism or poverty! - Draffan] steals in a way that is not customary. He snatches a loaf from the baker's counter and is promptly run into gaol. Another man snatches bread from the table of hundreds of widows and orphans and similar credulous souls who do not know the ways of company promoters; and, as likely as not, he is run into Parliament."
"the meeting between ignorance and knowledge, between brutality and culture - it begins in the dignity with which we treat the dead"
"Racists have often used pseudoscience to justify their socially damaging views; watch these films to see how science, by replacing ignorance with knowledge, can undo that damage."
"We don't, as a collective life on this planet, all get groovy together or all sink into ignorance together. One by one we liberate our souls, our individual souls, from the cycle by our own realizations."
"There's this Indian fellow who worked out a cycle like the idea of stone-age, bronze-age, only he did it on an Indian one. The cycle goes from nothing until now and 20th century and then on and right around the cycle until the people are really grooving and then just sinks back into ignorance until it gets back into the beginning again. So the 20th century is a fraction of that cycle, and how many of those cycles has it done yet? It's done as many as you think and all these times it's been through exactly the same things, and it'll be this again."
"The whole machinery of our intelligence, our general ideas and laws, fixed and external objects, principles, persons, and gods, are so many symbolic, algebraic expressions. They stand for experience; experience which we are incapable of retaining and surveying in its multitudinous immediacy. We should flounder hopelessly, like the animals, did we not keep ourselves afloat and direct our course by these intellectual devices. Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of fact."
