Invincible ignorance

“ This process of higher understanding improves mortal mind until error disappears, and nothing is left which deserves to perish or be punished.
Ignorance, like intentional wrong, is not Science. Ignorance must be seen and corrected before we can attain harmony. Inharmonious beliefs, which rob Mind, calling it matter, and deify their own notions, imprison Ignorance. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is well to remind ourselves that ignorance was the most momentous, the most cruel condition of his life, as of our own; and that the effort to relieve himself of its pressure, either by the pursuit of knowledge, or by giving spur and bridle to the imagination that it might course round him dragging the great woof of illusion, and tent him in the ethereal dream of the soul's desire, was the constant effort and resource of his days. ”

“ 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. ”

“ What a melancholy prospect is furnished by the hostile operations of this universal enemy to human nature, Ignorance.
All men are in pursuit of the same two objects—happiness and truth; and ignorance is constantly employed to conceal them from the pursuers.
"Moral truth," says ignorance, or its advocates, priests and false philosophers, "is incomprehensible or imaginary, and happiness is unattainable in this life." They hold the language of folly and falsehood. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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? ”

“ And then this man, in learning the value of Ignorance, came perilously near believing that no man could know anything. He came dangerously near the belief that Knowledge is all a mirage toward which men journey hopelessly; a phantom to be grasped by no hand; a will-o'-the-wisp to be followed here and there but leading nowhere. He, for a little, said that Ignorance is the truest wisdom. ”

“ The problem before you is, how the general ignorance is to be dispersed, and other people enabled to discriminate between the genuine and the other sort. Find the solution, Truth; for indeed it concerns you; Falsehood must not prevail; shall Ignorance shield the base while they counterfeit the good, and you never know it? ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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! ”

“ 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. ”

“ Extreme ignorance, being neglect of one's intellectual faculties, is a kind of insanity, and so is the perversion of the moral perceptions of those who are educated to a life of crime from their childhood. ”

“ And still further, sir, I affirm, in words as true and literal as any that belong to geometry, that the man who withholds knowledge from a child not only works diabolical miracles for the destruction of good, but for the creation of evil also. He who shuts out truth, by the same act opens the door to all the error that supplies its place. Ignorance breeds monsters to fill up all the vacuities of the soul that are unoccupied by the verities of knowledge. ”

“ 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. ”

“ So let us feel two things:—Let us be thankful that we do not know, for the ignorance is the sign of the greatness; and then, let us be sure that just the very mixture of knowledge and ignorance which we have about another world is precisely the food which is most fitted to nourish imagination and hope. If we had more knowledge, supposing it could be given, of the conditions of that future life, it would lose some of its power to attract. Ignorance does not always prevent the occupation of the mind with a subject. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ IS there anything more entertaining than human ignorance and the reticence with which it seeks to conceal itself? Ignorance, wide-spread as it is, everywhere makes evasion or denial of its existence. Why should man be mortified over a universal attribute, or arrogate to himself an omniscience obviously impossible? Yet the effort to deny ignorance is directly in proportion to the extent to which it is present. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ If the new knowledge you bring him is evidently a matter of fact, if his brain rationally perceives that he was wrong about this thing, and you are right, he removes his incorrect idea and establishes the correct one, with no more disagreeable sensation than a little sense of shame:—not that, if he was wise enough to admit ignorance gracefully. ”

“ 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. ”

“ From infancy to manhood, from manhood to old age, their view is bounded by the narrow horizon which their senses have drawn around them; and they remain ignorant, not only of the nature, but even of the existence of objects beyond. ”

“ Our lives are universally shortened by our 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. ”

“ The errors of men are necessary consequences of ignorance. Their ignorance, prejudice, and credulity are necessary consequences of their inexperience, negligence, and want of reflection, in the same manner as delirium or lethargy are necessary effects of certain diseases. Truth, experience, reflection, and reason, are remedies calculated to cure ignorance, fanaticism and follies. ”

“ It is the moral effect of that generally-fulfilled apprehension which makes one salient difference between the cultivated, or spurious, rider, and the ignorant, or true rider. In this case, Ignorance is not only bliss, but usurps the place of Knowledge, as power. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But while any attempt to carry the representation of the fatal effects of ignorance over the extent of so dreary a scene is declined, let it not be forgotten that they have been an awful reality; that they have actually existed, in time, and place, and number of victims; that there actually were the men, and so many men, who exemplified, and in so many ways, the truth we are illustrating. And a truth which has its demonstration in facts ought to come with the weight of all the facts that we believe ever did demonstrate it. ”

“ It is surprising how difficult one who attempts this rule finds it at first to provide himself with subjects for thought—to think of something that he does not know. In our ignorance our horizon is very contracted: mists, clouds, and darkness hang upon it, and self fills almost the entire view around, above, and below to the utmost verge. ”

“ We attack with slender array, but unflinching purpose, the gloomy powers of ignorance that are allied to doubt and indifference. These contend under the prestige of a thousand years of possession.
Ignorance and Prejudice are twin giants that renew their life upon each other; they are as old as chaos, and are invulnerable to the weapons of ordinary warfare. ”

“ In fact, the recognition of human ignorance is not only the one highest, but the one true, knowledge; and its first-fruit, as has been said, is humility. Simple nescience is not proud; consummated science is positively humble. For this knowledge it is not, which 'puffeth up;' but its opposite, the conceit of false knowledge,—the conceit, in truth, as the apostle notices, of an ignorance of the very nature of knowledge:—
'Nam nesciens quid scire sit,
Te scire cuncta jactitas.'
"But as our knowledge stands to Ignorance, so stands it also to Doubt. ”

“ For the ignorant man, desiring the things that are worthless, transient, illusory, seeing about him false shows instead of the high things which are real, creates in himself a passion which in turn creates more and more dangerous illusions, and thus is his own victim. But when false desire dies, illusions end, and Ignorance, dispersing like the night, gives place to the Sun of Enlightenment and the world lies about such a man as it truly is. And he knows, being no more the prisoner of time and space and their brood of follies, for Ignorance, the true cause of all ill, in him is dead. ”

“ The most melancholy of the exemplifications of the effect of ignorance, as constituting an incapacity for receiving religious instruction, have been presented to those who have visited persons thus devoid of knowledge in sickness and the approach to death. Supposing them to manifest alarm and solicitude, it is deplorable to see how powerless their understandings are, for any distinct conception of what, or why, it is that they fear, or regret, or desire. ”

“ 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. ”