Famous Quotes & Sayings

Marcus Aurelius

Begin each day by telling yourself: Today I shall be meeting with interference, ingratitude, insolence, disloyalty, ill-will, and selfishness – all of them due to the offenders’ ignorance of what is good or evil.

Marcus Aurelius

No one was ever injured by the truth; but he who persists in self-deception and ignorance is injured.

Simon Bolivar

When mankind was in its infancy, steeped in uncertainty, ignorance, and error, was it possible to foresee what system it would adopt for preservation.

Sidney Hook

Idealism, alas, does not protect one from ignorance, dogmatism, and foolishness.

Sheryl Sandberg

But the upside of painful knowledge is so much greater than the downside of blissful ignorance.

Sharon Salzberg

We need the compassion and the courage to change the conditions that support our suffering. Those conditions are things like ignorance, bitterness, negligence, clinging, and holding on.

Sharon Salzberg

All beings want to be happy, yet so very few know how. It is out of ignorance that any of us cause suffering, for ourselves or for others

Neil Peart

Quick to judge, quick to anger, slow to understand... prejudice, fear and ignorance walk hand-in-hand.

Joseph Conrad

She feared the unknown as we all do, and her ignorance made the unknown infinitely vast.

Joseph Conrad

One ship is very much like another and the sea is always the same. In the immutability of their surroundings the foreign shores, the foreign faces, the changing immensity of life, glide past, veiled not by a sense of mystery but by a slightly disdainful ignorance; for there is nothing mysterious to a seaman unless it be the sea itself, which is the mistress of his existence and as inscrutable as Destiny.

Joshua Ferris

It is forgivable to say nothing out of ignorance; it's inexcusable to remain silent once awareness dawns.

Laurell K. Hamilton

People are supposed to fear the unknown, but ignorance is bliss when knowledge is so damn frightening.

John Kenneth Galbraith

Money is what fueled the industrial society. But in the informational society, the fuel, the power, is knowledge. One has now come to see a new class structure divided by those who have information and those who must function out of ignorance. This new class has its power not from money, not from land, but from knowledge.

John Kenneth Galbraith

Few economic problems, if any, are difficult of solution. The difficulty, all but invariably, is in confronting them. We know what needs to be done; for reasons of inertia, pecuniary interest, passion or ignorance, we do not wish to say so.

Leon Battista Alberti

A common error of ignorance is to maintain that what one does not know does not exist.

Leo Szilard

You may assume infinite ignorance and unlimited intelligence.

Leo Tolstoy

All men's instincts, all their impulses in life, are efforts to increase their freedom. Wealth and poverty, health and disease, culture and ignorance, labor and leisure, repletion and hunger, virtue and vice, are all terms for greater or less degree of freedom.

Leo Tolstoy

The only absolute knowledge attainable by man is that life is meaningless.

Pema Chodron

At the root of all the harm we cause is ignorance.

Philip Pullman

I think it's perfectly possible to explain how the universe came about without bringing God into it, but I don't know everything, and there may well be a God somewhere, hiding away. Actually, if he is keeping out of sight, it's because he's ashamed of his followers and all the cruelty and ignorance they're responsible for promoting in his name. If I were him, I'd want nothing to do with them.

Konrad Adenauer

The good Lord set definite limits on man's wisdom, but set no limits on his stupidity.

Kofi Annan

Ignorance and prejudice are the handmaidens of propaganda. Our mission, therefore, is to confront ignorance with knowledge, bigotry with tolerance, and isolation with the outstretched hand of generosity. Racism can, will, and must be defeated.

Katy Perry

My whole thing is to agree to disagree and to have respect because nothing can really be changed and you wouldn't want to ruin their happiness - even if that happiness is ignorance.

Ramakrishna

When an unbaked pot is broken, the potter can use the mud to make a new one; but when a baked one is broken, he cannot do the same any longer. So when a person dies in a state of ignorance, he is born again; but when he becomes well baked in the fire of true knowledge and dies a perfect man, he is not born again.

Ramakrishna

Meditate upon the Knowledge and Bliss Eternal , and you will also have bliss. The Bliss indeed is eternal, only it is covered and obscured by ignorance. The less your attachment is towards the senses, the more will be your love towards God .

Ramakrishna

Wisdom leads to unity, but ignorance to separation. So long as God seems to be outside and far away, there is ignorance. But when God is realised within, that is true knowledge.

Ramana Maharshi

There is nothing new to gain. On the other hand a man must lose his ignorance. That is all.

L. Ron Hubbard

A political system seeking to function amongst ignorant, illiterate and barbaric people could have marvelous principles but could only succeed in being ignorant, illiterate and barbaric unless one addressed the people one by one and cured the ignorance, illiteracy and barbarism of each citizen.

Thomas Aquinas

Wonder [admiratio astonishment, marvel] is a kind of desire for knowledge. The situation arises when one sees an effect and does not know its cause, or when the cause of the particular effect is one that exceeds his power of understanding. Hence, wonder is a cause of pleasure insofar as there is annexed the hope of attaining understanding of that which one wants to know. ... For desire is especially aroused by the awareness of ignorance, and consequently a man takes the greatest pleasure in those things which he discovers for himself or learns from the ground up.

Thomas Aquinas

It is on account neither of God's weakness nor ignorance that evil comes into the world, but rather it is due to the order of his wisdom and the greatness of his goodness that diverse grades of goodness occur in things, many of which would be lacking if no evil were permitted. Indeed, the good of patience would not exist without the evil of persecution; nor the good of preservation of life in a lion if not for the evil of the destruction of the animals on which it lives.

Lawrence M. Krauss

The purpose of education is not to validate ignorance but to overcome it

Larry McMurtry

Backward is just not a natural direction for Americans to look - historical ignorance remains a national characteristic.

Lewis H. Lapham

The gentlemen who wrote the Constitution were as suspicious of efficient government as they were wary of democracy, a "turbulence and a folly" that was associated with the unruly ignorance of an urban mob.