Ignorant quotes
698 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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"One can't understand everything at once, we can't begin with perfection all at once! In order to reach perfection one must begin by being ignorant of a great deal. And if we understand things too quickly, perhaps we shan't understand them thoroughly."
"Well, Ben Rogers, if I was as ignorant as you I wouldn't let on."
"The ignorant are afraid to betray surprise or admiration...they think it ill manners."
"...one should be gentle with the ignorant, for they are the chosen of God."
"We never knew an ignorant person yet but was prejudiced."
"...ignorant as the unborne babe! ignorant as unborn twins!"
"There is an ancient script that says, 'He that wishes to be ignorant, let him be ignorant.' But I took off the last word and it now reads for me like this: He that wishes to be ignorant, let him be!"
"The body can't distinguish between cleansing and punishing for the body is ignorant, and mute besides."
"When you are young, you think that the old lament the deterioration of life because this makes it easier for them to die without regret. When you are old, you become impatient with the way in which the young applaud the most insignificant improvements … while remaining heedless of the world’s barbarism. I don’t say things have got worse; I merely say the young wouldn’t notice if they had. The old times were good because then we were young, and ignorant of how ignorant the young can be."
"Most people who travel look only at what they are directed to look at. Great is the power of the guidebook maker, however ignorant."
"The poor yield to the rich, the common people to the upper ten, the servants to their masters, the ignorant to the scholars; but there is nobody who does not imagine that he is really better than others."
"People feel guilty. And guilt is stymieing. Guilt immobilizes. Guilt closes the air ducts and the veins, and makes people ignorant."
"What am I to choose? "Choose what you please, as long as you choose." There you have a foolish answer, which seems to be the outcome, however, of all Dogmatism, which will not allow us to be ignorant of that which we are ignorant."
"If to take up books were to take them in, and if to see them were to consider them, and to run through them were to grasp them, I should be wrong to make myself out quite as ignorant as I say I am."
"Whoever is ignorant is vulgar."
"If youth were not ignorant and timid, civilization would be impossible."
"Truths, no matter how momentous or enduring, are nothing to the individual until he appreciates them, and feels their force, and acknowledges their sovereignty. He cannot bow to their majesty until he sees their power. All the blind then, and all the ignorant--that is, all the children--must be educated up to the point of perceiving and admitting the truth, and acting according to its mandates."
"But let a man know that there are things to be known, of which he is ignorant, and it is so much carved out of his domain of universal knowledge."
