On Ignorance

‘Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.’
— Henry Brooks Adams

‘True wisdom is less presuming than folly. The wise man doubts often, and changes his mind; the fool is obstinate, and doubts not; he knows all things but his own ignorance.’
— Akhenaton

‘It is better to know nothing than to know what ain’t so.’
— Josh Billings

‘The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance—it is the illusion of knowledge.’
— Daniel J. Boorstin

‘I am not ashamed to confess that I am ignorant of what I do not know.’
— Marcus Tullius Cicero

‘Education is a progressive discovery of ignorance.’
— William Durant

‘We do not know one millionth of one percent about anything.’
— Thomas Alva Edison

‘A keen observer once said of Einstein that part of his genius was his inability to understand the obvious.’
— Henry Eyring

‘Maybe that is why young people make success. They don’t know enough.’
— Richard P. Feynman

‘Nothing is worse than active ignorance.’
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

‘I’m looking for a lot of men who have an infinite capacity to not know what can’t be done.’
— Henry Ford

‘Ignorance is preferable to error, and he is less remote from the truth who believes what is wrong.’
— Thomas Jefferson
‘Prejudice is the child of ignorance.’
— William Hazlitt

‘And some men are as ignorant of what they do when awake as they are forgetful of what they do when asleep.’
— Heraclitus

‘Dogs, also, bark at what they do not know.’
— Heraclitus

‘Art hath an enemy called ignorance.’
— Samuel Johnson

‘The greater our knowledge increases, the greater our ignorance unfolds.’
— John Fitzgerald Kennedy

‘A man must have a certain amount of intelligent ignorance to get anywhere.’
— Charles F. Kettering

‘Some of the world’s greatest feats were accomplished by people not smart enough to know they were impossible.’
— Doug Larson

‘We fear things in proportion to our ignorance of them.’
— Titus Livius

‘Nothing is so firmly believed as that which we least know.’
— Michel de Montaigne

‘Ignorance is the curse of God, Knowledge the wing wherewith we fly to heaven.’
— William Shakespeare

‘The trouble with most of us is that we know too much that ain’t so.’
— Mark Twain

‘To know that you do not know is the best. To pretend to know when you do not know is a disease.’
— Lao Tzu

‘He who knows does not speak. He who speaks does not know.’
— Lao Tzu