Ignorance

“ My son, these are silly, old world, notions that are only the outcome of superstition and ignorance; an ignorance that was the bane and the curse of past generations; an ignorance that wise people have rooted out thousands of years ago; an ignorance that must never again be tolerated, as all such superstitions are but an insult to intellectual refinement and knowledge. ”

“ Be ignorance thy choice, where knowledge leads to woe. ”

“ Is it not true that ignorance is the cause of nearly all the discontent in the world? If you scatter the clouds of ignorance, with them the darkness of nearly all our woes will fly, and you will stand at the head of a new race, educated, refined, and capable of understanding and securing their rights ten-fold more surely and more intelligently than now. ”

“ I wonder if you would be content to remain in ignorance? I must admit that before I met you, I did many things that you would condemn, but I would rather that you remained in ignorance of them. Knowledge can do no good. ”

“ It is impossible to think of the object of our ignorance, how then realize the ignorance whose very centre is a blank, a negation! When a man knows, then first he gets a glimpse of his ignorance as it vanishes. ”

“ That which I am, thou art, and that also is this world, with its gods and heroes and mankind. Men contemplate distinctions, because they are stupefied with ignorance." "The words I and mine constitute ignorance. ”

“ Methinks there is equal need of a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Ignorance, what we will call Beautiful Knowledge, a knowledge useful in a higher sense: for what is most of our boasted so-called knowledge but a conceit that we know something, which robs us of the advantage of our actual ignorance? What we call knowledge is often our positive ignorance; ignorance our negative knowledge. ”

“ Now if such were the state of their intelligence, how would this friend of truth and the people find, how would he have expected to find, their piety, their morals, and their happiness affected by such destitution of knowledge? Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? We are supposing them to be in ignorance of four parts out of five, or perhaps of nine parts out of ten, of what the Supreme Wisdom was maintaining an extraordinary dispensation to declare to them. ”

“ Its place is not to be sought without or beyond knowledge or ignorance, but between them. But is opinion to be sought without and beyond either of them, in a greater clearness than knowledge, or in a greater darkness than ignorance? ”

“ So you see that you never know where ignorance lurks. The hydra-headed upas tree and bete noir of self-acting progress is such ignorance as that, lurking in the very shadow of magnificent educational institutions and hard words of great cast. ”

“ And of these orders, none, be it observed, has railed against knowledge. By no rule, in any one of them, has ignorance been made a virtue and science a sin. All have admired the beauty of knowledge--the fire on her brow--her forward countenance--her boundless domain. ”

“ For I knew that ignorance was at the bottom of many of these sad tragedies—the criminal reticence of the people who know, too mock-modest to discuss openly a fact of life which, beyond all other facts of life, should be spoken of bluntly, honestly, therefore decently and cleanly. ”

“ only ignorance! how can you talk about only ignorance? Don't you know that it is the worst thing in the world, next to wickedness?—and which does the most mischief heaven only knows. If people can say, 'Oh! I did not know, I did not mean any harm,' they think it is all right. ”

“ I love those words which mollify and moderate the temerity of our propositions, 'Peradventure, in some sort, 'tis said, I think,' and the like.... There is a sort of ignorance, strong and generous, that yields nothing in honor and courage to knowledge; an ignorance which to conceive requires no less knowledge than knowledge itself. ”

“ Its quantity has distracted their attention from its quality. "Heu, quantum est quod nescimus!" exclaim they pathetically. "What an immensity of ignorance is ours!" True; but these whinings will never teach us what ignorance is, what its law is, and what its object is: and this alone is what we, as searchers after truth, are interested in finding out. To tell us how much a thing is, will never teach us what it is, as our psychologists, moralising on the boundlessness of human ignorance, seem to suppose. ”

“ The dark shadow of ignorance, the nest of all iniquities, is the resting place where "the pearl of ages" is very anxious to hide himself and his subjects, in spite of the enlightenment of this century. ”

“ The mind is another name for ignorance, and an unreality appearing as a real entity. Here ignorance takes the name of the mind, and unreality passes under the title of reality. Ignorance is the want of true knowledge, as knowledge is the privation of ignorance.
19. Ignorance or false knowledge, is driven by our knowledge of truth; as the error of water in the desert, is dispelled by the knowledge of mirage. ”

“ The indifference which has made that ignorance possible, and has in its turn been fed by the ignorance, is in some respects a more shocking phenomenon than the vicious life which it has allowed to rot and to reek unheeded. ”

“ And is it possible to avoid the conclusion that ignorance is regarded as culpable, when those who know are in contact with those who do not know, and when they do nothing definite, determined, and immediate, to remove that ignorance? ”

“ The great pleasure of ignorance is, after all, the pleasure of asking questions. The man who has lost this pleasure or exchanged it for the pleasure of dogma, which is the pleasure of answering, is already beginning to stiffen. ”

“ How far we may be the cause of the ignorance we call involuntary, it is impossible to determine. A wrong act, an improper thought, belonging to years ago and even repented of since, may project its dark shadow into the present, and pervert the judgment. We are fearfully made. ”

“ The only method of abating this power of Ignorance, is by increasing that of Knowledge. As the sun goes up the sky, the darkness disappears; and the owl, the bat, and the beasts of prey, slink out of sight. Give the people knowledge,—give them better education,—and thus, crime will be abated,—drunkenness, improvidence, lawlessness, and all the powers of evil, will, to a certain extent, disappear. ”

“ Does He interpose in our lives, or are we rushed along by the great moral and physical laws, which govern the universe; and if by chance we fail to harmonize with them, be crushed for our ignorance—our ignorance which is not of our own making? ”

“ for where knowledge is a duty, ignorance is a crime. ”

“ We must endeavor to convince ourselves that all these things are the offspring of ignorance; that they have no foundation in reason, philosophy, or religion; and that they are exceedingly pernicious in their consequences. ”

“ It is necessary that you should know that without this form of ignorance life itself would be impossible, that it is merely?, vital condition under which, alone, a living organism can preserve itself and prosper: a great solid belt of ignorance must stand about you. ”

“ It must be ignorance with regard to some particular circumstance connected with the special action which he is committing — ignorance of the person with whom, or the instrument with which, or the subject matter in regard to which he is dealing. ”

“ The more we study, we the more discover
Our ignorance. ”

“ Ignorantia animæ.—I know no disease of the soul but ignorance, not of the arts and sciences, but of itself; yet relating to those it is a pernicious evil, the darkener of man’s life, the disturber of his reason, and common confounder of truth, with which a man goes groping in the dark, no otherwise than if he were blind. ”

“ If we are ignorant at all (and who will question our ignorance?) we must be ignorant of something; and this something is not nothing, nor is it the contradictory. That is admitted on all hands. But every attempt to fix the object of our ignorance as anything but object + subject must have the effect of fixing it either as nothing, or as the contradictory. ”

“ Any reference to that dreadful spectacle, as an example of the consequences of the ignorance and wickedness of a people, might have been heard with unconcern, and lightly passed over as foreign to the matters requiring their attention: it was all over with the people dead, and the people alive had their own concerns to mind. ”

“ In a lengthened digression the author aims at simplifying the question, and endeavours to show, by a logical process, that ignorance is the head source from which concupiscence and passion take their rise. ”

“ And seeing ignorance is the curse of God,
Knowledge the wing wherewith we fly to heaven,
Unless you be possess'd with devilish spirits,
You cannot but forbear to murder me:
This tongue hath parley'd unto foreign kings
For your behoof,--
CADE Tut, when struck'st thou one blow in the field? ”

“ Because they have put on clothes.
They imitate each other in the follies of their ignorance ;
And all is falsity. They mould all to a false pattern.
The blind correcting the blind.
The more ignorant compelling the less ignorant. ”

“ But I have acquired one great piece of knowledge, which, had I not received a regular training, might have seemed to me as the arrogance of ignorance, and that is the fact that profound knowledge hurts the imagination. ”

“ Whosoever perversely resolves to adhere to plans or opinions, be they right or be they wrong, because they have adopted them, raises an impassable bar to information. The wiser we are the more we are aware of the extent of our ignorance. ”

“ In the present age, whatever flatters the mind in its ignorance of its ignorance, tends to aggravate that ignorance, and, I apprehend, does on the whole do more harm than good. Have you read the debate on the Address? What a melancholy picture of the intellectual feebleness of the country! ”

“ Knowledge and human power are synonymous, since the ignorance of the cause frustrates the effect. ”

“ Knowledge and truth may be in us without judgment, and judgment also without them; but the confession of ignorance is one of the finest and surest testimonies of judgment that I know. ”

“ PROPOSITION I.
WHAT IGNORANCE IS.
Ignorance is an intellectual defect, imperfection, privation, or shortcoming.
DEMONSTRATION.
The deprivation of anything whose possession is consistent with the nature of the Being which wants it, is a defect. But ignorance is a deprivation of something which is consistent with the nature of intelligence: it is a deprivation of knowledge. Therefore ignorance is an intellectual defect, imperfection, privation, or shortcoming. ”

“ Let us not be suspected of having lost sight of the fact, that vice and misery have, in our nature, a deeper source than ignorance; or of being so absurd as to imagine that if the inestimable truths unknown to the heathen world had been, on the contrary, in all men's knowledge, but a slight portion of the depravity and wretchedness we have described could then have had an existence. ”

“ With regard to the understanding, we must be on our guard against two faults, which very commonly impair its action.
Ignorance is the first of these; it darkens the understanding, and obstructs the entrance of truth—its proper object. ”

“ and that he knew nothing except just the fact of his ignorance. ”

“ But though this conclusion concerning human ignorance be the result of the strictest scrutiny of this subject, men still entertain a strong propensity to believe, that they penetrate further into the province of nature, and perceive something like a necessary connexion between cause and effect. ”

“ Ignorance breeds monsters to fill up all the vacuities of the soul that are unoccupied by the verities of knowledge. ”