Quotes About Ignorance

The man who knows not, but knows not that he knows not, is a fool . Shun him. The man who knows not, and knows that he knows not, is a student . Teach him. - Persian proverb

Yet ignorance seemed the greatness weakness of conformity. A select few made all the decisions, and everyone else followed, regardless that those decisions could be wrong.

people fear what they do not understand.

His mantra was simple. Do what was necessary, then force a smile onto your face and take another crack at whatever. Buddha said it best. There is no wealth like knowledge, and no poverty like ignorance. But Einstein added a great caveat. Information is not knowledge. Absolutely true since the most successful person was the one with the best knowledge

There are two kinds of ignorance: blindness and self-deception. Blindness is ignorance of the basic realities of existence: impermanence, dukha, and selflessness. … Self-deception is our belief that we can know intellectually what things are. 'Oh! That's water,' we say. 'Hydrogen and oxygen.' And then we dismiss the actual experience of the moment. ([I]f you really want to know what water is, just take a drink, or go for a walk in the rain, or take a swim.)

We're like the comic strip character Hagar the Horrible who, when asked which he'd choose, power, gold, or true happiness, chose power: "With power, I could get the gold, and then I'd be happy." We find Hagar's idea humorous because we know better. Yet most of the time we ignore this very knowledge, and act (or at least think) much like Hagar.

Consciousness divides Reality. It conceptualises it, packages it, and explains it to itself. Then in our ignorance, we think it's taking readings on things 'out there.

Ignorance is not the inability to see, but the act of ignoring what is really going on in favour of what we imagine.

We engage in conceptualising to clarify, to understand, to find certitude. (…) [W]e go nowhere with this process[.] … [W]e teach uncertainty, doubt, and meaninglessness to our children, all in the name of 'truth' … [I]t just goes on, generation after generation, the continuation of greed, anger, and ignorance.

Those who are aware," he said, "do not die. Those who are ignorant are as if dead already.

Ignorance is like a black hole that sucks everything into it, even illumination. Thus we can't see it, at least not directly.

The problem is our ignorance. We have to own up to it. We're the species that, in the New Mexican desert in 1945, wondered if our new experiment might ignite the atmosphere and incinerate the Earth. We discussed it and thought it unlikely, but we could not be certain. Yet we went ahead and exploded the first atomic bomb anyway.

In America, we know to ignore artists if they're serious in any way.

We are blind to our blindness.

just because you're great at something doesn't mean you're good at everything. Unfortunately, this fact is routinely ignored by those who engage in—take a deep breath—ultracrepidarianism, or "the habit of giving opinions and advice on matters outside of one's knowledge or competence.

An opponent who feels his argument is ignored isn't likely to engage with you at all.

Unfortunately, this fact is routinely ignored by those who engage in—take a deep breath—ultracrepidarianism, or "the habit of giving opinions and advice on matters outside of one's knowledge or competence.

Daniel Kahneman has written: "[W]e can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness.

It isn't only that we know less than we pretend about the outside world; we don't even know ourselves all that well.

given sufficient ignorance, one can doubt evolution....

An absence of information is not the same as information about an absence." We're blind to our blindness.

The standard explanation of the madness of crowds is ignorance: a mediocre education system has left the populace scientifically illiterate, at the mercy of their cognitive biases, and thus defenseless against airhead celebrities, cable-news gladiators, and other corruptions from popular culture.

Our greatest enemies are ultimately not our political adversaries but entropy, evolution (in the form of pestilence and the flaws in human nature), and most of all ignorance—a shortfall of knowledge of how best to solve our problems.

But probabilities are not about the world; they're about our ignorance of the world. New information reduces our ignorance and changes the probability.