98 Quotes On Ignorance And Wisdom

In a world overflowing with information, the delicate balance between ignorance and wisdom is ever more pronounced. Ignorance, often seen as a lack of knowledge, can stem from apathy or circumstance, while wisdom reflects a deep understanding gained through experience and reflection. Both concepts have sparked the curiosity and reflections of thinkers throughout history. In this curated collection of the top 98 quotes on ignorance and wisdom, we delve into the insights of philosophers, authors, and leaders who have pondered these timeless themes. Whether you seek to enlighten yourself or gain a new perspective, these quotes offer a rich tapestry of thought on the intricate dance between not knowing and understanding.

1. “A learned blockhead is a greater blockhead than an ignorant one.” - Benjamin Franklin

2. “Occasionally he stumbled over the truth, but hastily picked himself up and hurried on as if nothing had happened.” - Winston Churchill

3. “You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. No one is entitled to be ignorant.” - Harlan Ellison

4. “Admiration is the daughter of ignorance.” - Thomas Fuller

5. “Our ignorance can be divided into problems and mysteries. When we face a problem, we may not know its solution, but we have insight, increasing knowledge, and an inkling of what we are looking for. When we face a mystery, however, we can only stare in wonder and bewilderment, not knowing what an explanation would even look like.” - Noam Chomsky

6. “Living is Easy with Eyes Closed.” - John Lennon

7. “Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.” - Charles Darwin

8. “It takes a very long time to become young.” - Pablo Picasso

9. “He knows nothing; and he thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career.” - George Bernard Shaw

10. “Being ignorant is not so much a shame, as being unwilling to learn.” - Benjamin Franklin

11. “To know that you do not know is the best.To think you know when you do not is a disease.Recognizing this disease as a disease is to be free of it.” - Lao Tzu

12. “Our wretched species is so made that those who walk on the well-trodden path always throw stones at those who are showing a new road.” - Voltaire

13. “It is an infantile superstition of the human spirit that virginity would be thought a virtue and not the barrier that separates ignorance from knowledge.” - Voltaire

14. “That which we manifest is before us; we are the creators of our own destiny. Be it through intention or ignorance, our successes and our failures have been brought on by none other than ourselves.” - Garth Stein

15. “A learned fool is more a fool than an ignorant fool.” - Molière

16. “If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.” - Robert Orben

17. “His progress through life was hampered by his tremendous sense of his own ignorance, a disability which affects all too few.” - Terry Pratchett

18. “When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.” - Mark Twain

19. “Beware the man of a single book.” - St. Thomas Aquinas

20. “The ever more sophisticated weapons piling up in the arsenals of the wealthiest and the mightiest can kill the illiterate, the ill, the poor and the hungry, but they cannot kill ignorance, illness, poverty or hunger.” - Fidel Castro

21. “Point me out the happy man and I will point you out either extreme egotism, selfishness, evil -- or else an absolute ignorance.” - Graham Greene

22. “I believe in the forgiveness of sin and the redemption of ignorance.” - Adlai E. Stevenson II

23. “The greatest of all the accomplishments of 20th century science has been the discovery of human ignorance” - Lewis Thomas

24. “No one infers a god from the simple, from the known, from what is understood, but from the complex, from the unknown, and incomprehensible. Our ignorance is God; what we know is science.” - Robert G. Ingersoll

25. “It’s ever been the way of the man of science or philosophy. Most folks stay in the dark and then complain they can’t see nothing.” – Snipes (185)” - Ron Rash

26. “Whatever the cost of our libraries, the price is cheap compared to that of an ignorant nation.” - Walter Cronkite

27. “Science replaces private prejudice with public, verifiable evidence.” - Richard Dawkins

28. “I'd tried to straighten him out, but there's only so much you can do for a person who thinks Auschwitz is a brand of beer.” - David Sedaris

29. “Timendi causa est nescire - Ignorance is the cause of fear.” - Lucius Annaeus Seneca

30. “Ignorance is an evil weed, which dictators may cultivate among their dupes, but which no democracy can afford among its citizens.” - William Beveridge

31. “How could I have been so ignorant? she thinks. So stupid, so unseeing, so given over to carelessness. But without such ignorance, such carelessness, how could we live? If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen next—if you knew in advance the consequences of your own actions—you'd be doomed. You'd be as ruined as God. You'd be a stone. You'd never eat or drink or laugh or get out of bed in the morning. You'd never love anyone, ever again. You'd never dare to.” - Margaret Atwood

32. “Ignorance breeds monsters to fill up the vacancies of the soul that are unoccupied by the verities of knowledge.” - Horace Mann

33. “The acquisition of knowledge always involves the revelation of ignorance - almost is the revelation of ignorance. Our knowledge of the world instructs us first of all that the world is greater than our knowledge of it. To those who rejoice in the abundance and intricacy in Creation, this is a source of joy, as it is to those who rejoice in freedom...To those would-be solvers of "the human problem," who hope for knowledge equal to (capable of controlling) the world, it is a source of unremitting defeat and bewilderment. The evidence is overwhelming that knowledge does not solve "the human problem." Indeed, the evidence overwhelmingly suggests - with Genesis - that knowledge is the problem. Or perhaps we should say instead that all our problems tend to gather under two questions about knowledge: Having the ability and desire to know, how and what should we learn? And, having learned, how and for what should we use what we know? (pg. 183, People, Land, and Community)” - Wendell Berry

34. “What struck me whenever I visited a farm was how much more sophisticated was the life the animals were capable of living than was assumed by those exploiting them. The more we are willing to see about their lives, the more we will see. Humans seem to take perverse pleasure in attributing stupidity to animals when it is almost always entirely a question of human ignorance.” - Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson

35. “We kill all the caterpillars, then complain there are no butterflies.” - John Marsden

36. “It's an universal law-- intolerance is the first sign of an inadequate education. An ill-educated person behaves with arrogant impatience, whereas truly profound education breeds humility.” - Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

37. “Those at too great a distance may, I am well are, mistake ignorance for perspective.” - Carl Sagan

38. “Whoever said ignorance is bliss must have died a horrible death with a really surprised look on his face.” - Lisa Shearin

39. “To some perhaps it may appear a little strained to place this last-mentioned form of attachment on a level of importance with the others, and such persons may be inclined to deny to the homogenic [...] or homosexual love that intense, that penetrating, and at times overmastering character which would entitle it to rank as a great human passion. But in truth this view, when entertained, arises from a want of acquaintance with the actual facts.” - Edward Carpenter

40. “Do you mean ter tell me," he growled at the Dursleys, "that this boy—this boy!—knows nothin' abou'—about ANYTHING?"Harry thought this was going a bit far. He had been to school, after all, and his marks weren't bad."I know some things," he said. "I can, you know, do math and stuff.” - J.K. Rowling

41. “There were long stretches of DNA in between genes that didn't seem to be doing very much; some even referred to these as "junk DNA," though a certain amount of hubris was required for anyone to call any part of the genome "junk," given our level of ignorance.” - Francis S. Collins

42. “He must be very ignorant for he answers every question he is asked.” - Voltaire

43. “Fear and realisation of ignorance, strong medicines against stupid pride.” - Garth Nix

44. “Bhutan does seem a bit unreal at times. Hardly anybody in the U.S. knows where it is. I have friends who still think the entire country is a figment of my imagination. When I was getting ready to move there, and I told people I was going to work in Bhutan, they'd inevitably ask, "Where's Butane?"It is near Africa," I'd answer, to throw them off the trail. "It's where all the disposable lighters come from."They'd nod in understanding.” - Linda Leaming

45. “Religion, n. A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable.” - Ambrose Bierce

46. “Eating is an agricultural act,' as Wendell Berry famously said. It is also an ecological act, and a political act, too. Though much has been done to obscure this simple fact, how and what we eat determines to a great extent the use we make of the world - and what is to become of it. To eat with a fuller consciousness of all that is at stake might sound like a burden, but in practice few things in life can afford quite as much satisfaction. By comparison, the pleasures of eating industrially, which is to say eating in ignorance, are fleeting. Many people today seem erfectly content eating at the end of an industrial food chain, without a thought in the world; this book is probably not for them.” - Michael Pollan

47. “Even the humblest Party member is expected to be competent, industrious, and even intelligent within narrow limits, but it is also necessary that he should be a credulous and ignorant fanatic whose prevailing moods are fear, hatred, adulation, and orgiastic triumph. In other words it is necessary that he should have the mentality appropriate to a state of war. It does not matter whether the war is actually happening, and, since no decisive victory is possible, it does not matter whether the war is going well or badly. All that is needed is that a state of war should exist.” - George Orwell

48. “If he were allowed contact with foreigners he would discover that they are creatures similar to himself and that most of what he has been told about them is lies. The sealed world in which he lives would be broken, and the fear, hatred, and self-righteousness on which his morale depends might evaporate. It is therefore realized on all sides that however ofter Persia, or Egypt, or Java, or Ceylon may change hands, the main frontiers must never be crossed by anything except bombs.” - George Orwell

49. “Where ignorance is our master, there is no possibility of real peace.” - Dalai Lama XIV

50. “Yes, please leave us, the mere presence of beings like yourselves is intensely painful to us.” - Gene L. Coon

51. “She turned to examine Dr. Breed, looking at him with helpless reproach. She hated people who thought too much. At that moment, she struck me as an appropriate representative for almost all mankind.” - Kurt Vonnegut

52. “Harshaw had the arrogant humility of the man who has learned so much that he is aware of his own ignorance and he saw no point in 'measurements' when he did not know what he was measuring.” - Robert A. Heinlein

53. “Yes, now you know. Now you know! That's what it was to be alive. To move about in a cloud of ignorance; to go up and down trampling on the feelings of those...of those about you. To spend and waste time as though you had a million years. To be always at the mercy of one self-centered passion, or another. Now you know — that's the happy existence you wanted to go back to. Ignorance and blindness.” - Thornton Wilder

54. “But to live in ignorance on such a point was impossible.” - Jane Austen

55. “[American exceptionalism] is a reaction to the inability of people to understand global complexity or important issues like American energy dependency. Therefore, they search for simplistic sources of comfort and clarity. And the people that they are now selecting to be, so to speak, the spokespersons of their anxieties are, in most cases, stunningly ignorant.” - Zbigniew Brzezinski

56. “We have a large public that is very ignorant about public affairs and very susceptible to simplistic slogans by candidates who appear out of nowhere, have no track record, but mouth appealing slogans” - Zbigniew Brzezinski

57. “Ignorance is hardly unusual, Miss Davar. The longer I live, the more I come to realize that it is the natural state of the human mind. There are many who will strive to defend its sanctity and then expect you to be impressed with their efforts.” - Brandon Sanderson

58. “The truth is like salt. Men want to taste a little, but too much makes everyone sick.” - Joe Abercrombie

59. “The truth. Men will blind themselves with hot irons, rather than face it.” - David Gemmell

60. “The greater ignorance towards a country is not ignoring what its politicians have to say, it is ignoring what the inmates in its prisons have to say.” - Criss Jami

61. “I have always regarded as a stroke of good fortune that I was not born or brought up in a small American town; they may be the backbone of the nation, but they are also the backbone of ignorance, bigotry, and boredom, all in vast quantities.” - Gore Vidal

62. “Strange are the pictures of the future that mankind can thus draw with this brush of faith and these many-coloured pigments of the imagination! Strange, too, that no one of them tallies with another!” - H. Rider Haggard

63. “There are people who are generic. They make generic responses and they expect generic answers. They live inside a box and they think people who don't fit into their box are weird. But I'll tell you what, generic people are the weird people. They are like genetically-manipulated plants growing inside a laboratory, like indistinguishable faces, like droids. Like ignorance.” - C. JoyBell C.

64. “Martha said, "Do you have any idea of the kind of surprise your brothers are in for sooner or later? Or are you doing it on purpose?" Cord put his hat on and pulled it low, hiding his eyes. "Grown man walks around with his eyes shut tight, he shouldn't be surprised if he bumps into something he didn't see. You aren't trying to convince anybody of anything they don't want to believe." Martha laughed. "You win. I just hope I'm there when the blind men hit the wall.” - Ellen O'Connell

65. “And in that moment, I felt my own ignorance spread suddenly out behind me like a pair of wings, and every single thing I didn’t know was a feather on those wings. I could feel them tugging at the air, restless to be airborne.” - Frank Cottrell Boyce

66. “A fool can easily be known(identified) by what proceeds from his or her mouth.” - Adedayo kingjerry

67. “He stared at his feet. “I’m still very ignorant,” he said, “but at least I’m ignorant about really important things.” - Terry Pratchett

68. “Inexperience can be overcome, ignorance can be enlightened, but prejudice will destroy you.” - Mercedes Lackey

69. “originality and a feeling of one's own dignity are achieved only through work and struggle.” - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

70. “There is no such uncertainty as a sure thing.” - Robert Burns

71. “in times like the present, men should utter nothing for which they would not willingly be responsible through time and eternity.” - Abraham Lincoln

72. “The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking or writing, there would be no truth about anything. There would only be what is.” - Susan Sontag

73. “mystery is not founded in ignorance, mystery is founded in imagination” - S. Spencer Baker

74. “...not everyone is willing to defend a position of 'not knowing.' There is no virtue in ignorance for its own sake.” - B.F. Skinner

75. “Ignorance is not linear, it's exponential.” - Spuds Crawford

76. “Dans 1984, les livres sont plus ou moins interdits. Aujourd'hui le problème est réglé, pas la peine de les interdire: les gens n'ont plus vraiment envie de lire, de toute façon, ils savent de moins en moins lire, même le journal. ("La violence des casseroles", http://www.lapresse.ca/debats/chroniq...)” - Pierre Foglia

77. “Evolution is a part of nature. The world has strayed away from God, and now interprets its conception for the benefit of blissful ignorance.” - Lionel Suggs

78. “I didn't know that there was a thin line between ignorance and arrogance.” - Faraaz Kazi

79. “I don’t care how smart you are. You’ll never understand how little you really know until you’ve had a woman.” - Andrew Levkoff

80. “I will not dumb myself down to make someone else more comfortable with their ignorance.” - Kelli Jae Baeli

81. “I am very poor - for a know nothing, understand nothing. It is not a calamitous condition until it is realized.” - Rafael Sabatini, Scaramouche

82. “To worship a sacred mystery was just to worship your own ignorance.” - Eliezer Yudkowsky

83. “No herd is more herd than the mass of ignorant people!” - Mehmet Murat ildan

84. “I look around and see that many — not all, but many — problems we've got could be solved if our culture simply fostered the habit of reading. Reading books of science, philosophy, history. Reading literature of quality, the sort that touches us because of a more profound reason, such as, for instance, because it's got something to say beyond all the futilities and trifles of life, even while depicting the ordinary in life, at the same time that it says it with style, in a unique, admirable manner. An original one. We are not a county of readers, notwithstanding. We are the country of football turned into a cult, of guile being ranked high as a cardinal virtue, of Carnival made for exportation. A country where there are more letters in political party acronyms than in all many of our politicians have written in a lifetime. A country where ethics has become a joke theme. Where democracy is but a ridiculous puppet theatre.Yes, I look around and see that many problems could be solved if we had the habit of reading. But I am not even sure whether there is someone reading these words.” - Camilo Gomes Jr

85. “The reason God exists is because ignorance is bliss, and God is true bliss.” - Lionel Suggs

86. “There is, after all, no moral difference between the bigot and the tolerator. They are from case to case positive or negative. One man is bigoted because he was given the sword of truth, another because he is angered in thoughtlessness; then, one man is tolerant because he was given the flag of peace, another because he is cowardly and wishes to hide all guilt.” - Criss Jami

87. “The devil lives in our mistakes, the lord lives in our rights. Who lives in our ignorance, and who wins after all?” - Maya Angelou Kwabena kodom Nicholas Sparks Rosa Parks

88. “نحن نلتقي بالناس و لا ندري ان وجوههم مثل لحاء شجر قديم حفر الزمن عليه القصص الكثيرة , ونحن؟ نقرأ القصه الوحيده التي نراها امامنا في الوجه..بغداد مالبورو” - نجم والي

89. “We are all ignorant once and only when someone or something that knows more than us, comes in.” - Emmanuel Aghado

90. “I'll show you how," Peter said. "Stop hiding behind your ignorance.” - Diana Wynne Jones

91. “And where," Socrates smiled, "is the universe?""The universe is well, there are theories about how it's shaped...""That's not what I asked. Where is it?""I don't know - how can I answer that?""That is the point. You cannot answer it, and you never will. There is no knowing about it. You are ignorant of where the universe is, and thus, where you are. In fact, you have no knowledge of where anything is or of What anything is or how is came to be. Life is a mystery."My ignorance is based on this understanding. Your understanding is based on ignorance. This is why I am a humorous fool, and you are a serious jackass.” - Dan Millman

92. “Ignore ignorance? You might as well withhold medicine from a very sick patient. Not only will the patient get worse, the disease will spread.” - Stifyn Emrys

93. “And, in fine, of false sciences I thought I knew the worth sufficiently to escape being deceived by the professions of an alchemist, the predictions of an astrologer, the impostures of a magician, or by the artifices and boasting of any of those who profess to know things of which they are ignorant.” - René Descartes

94. “I've demonstrated an impressive resilience in the face of valuable life lessons, and the main thing I seem to have learned from this one is that I am capable of learning nothing from almost any experience, no matter how profound.” - Tim Kreider

95. “The dark-haired girl behind Winston had begun crying out: 'Swine! Swine! Swine!', and suddenly she picked up a heavy Newspeak dictionary and flung it at the screen.” - George Orwell

96. “Without love everything can be nothing. Does that make me want to love? No. For me, Ignorance is still better than martyrdom.” - Ira N. Barin

97. “It seems sometimes that people take a deliberately myopic and fill their eyes with things seen microscopically in order not to see macrosopically.” - Marilyn Frye

98. “Place a weapon in the hands ofGreed, hatred, especially of ignoranceYou've created innocent deathsThat wasn't neccasary” - R.K. Cowles