Mind

"Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing."

"Ignorance of the Scriptures is ignorance of Christ"

"Bigotry is the disease of ignorance, of morbid minds; enthusiasm of the free and buoyant. Education & free discussion are the antidotes of both."

"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."

"Ignorance is preferable to error, and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing than he who believes what is wrong."

"The wise preach to the ignorant when the latter ask them to do so. Through this the ignorant may attain sudden enlightenment, and their mind thereby becomes illuminated. Then they are no longer different from the wise men."

"If there ever comes a day when I deliberately embrace ignorance, I’ll have lived one day too long."

"The Socratic maxim that the recognition of our ignorance is the beginning of wisdom has profound significance for our understanding of society. The first requisite for this is that we become aware of men’s necessary ignorance of much that helps him to achieve his aims."

"To each his suff’rings; all are men, Condemn’d alike to groan,— The tender for another’s pain, Th’ unfeeling for his own. Yet ah! why should they know their fate, Since sorrow never comes too late, And happiness too swiftly flies? Thought would destroy their paradise. No more; where ignorance is bliss, ’T is folly to be wise."

"And his best riches, ignorance of wealth."

"There are, however, some potentates I would kill by any and all means at my disposal. They are Ignorance, Superstition, and Bigotry — the most sinister and tyrannical rulers on earth."

"Es ist nichts schrecklicher als eine tätige Unwissenheit."

"Ignorance is the dominion of absurdity."

"It's always possible to wake someone from sleep, but no amount of noise will wake someone who is pretending to be asleep."

"Ignorance of one’s misfortunes is clear gain."

"Ignorance gives one a large range of probabilities."

"If I had to name the single most frightening and dangerous threat to the health of the oceans, the one that stands alone yet is at the base of all the others is ignorance: lack of understanding, a failure to relate our destiny to that of the sea, or to make the connection between the health of coral reefs and our own health, between the fate of the great whales and the future of humankind. There is much to learn before it is possible to intelligently create a harmonious, viable place for ourselves on the planet. The best place to begin is by recognizing the magnitude of our ignorance, and not destroy species and natural systems that we cannot re-create nor effectively restore once they are gone."

"For your ignorance is the mother of your devotion to me."

"In Western society... [t]here are no more continents... little left to discover. I am, in part, an ant biologist... and I knew that much of the world of insects remains unknown. ...How ignorant are we? The question of what we know and do not know clung to me. ...In looking into the stories of biological discovery, I... began to find... a collection of scientists, often obsessive, usually brilliant, occasionally half-mad... Those individuals very often see the same things that other scientists see, but they pay more attention... and they focus on them to the point of exhaustion, and at the risk of the ridicule of their peers. ...[W]e are, before these discoveries, always more ignorant than we imagine ourselves to be. ...[W]e are repeatedly willing to imagine we have found most of what is left to discover. Before microbes were discovered, scientists were confident that insects were the smallest organisms. Before life was discovered at the bottom of the ocean, many scientists were confident that nothing lived deeper than three hundred fathoms. Once we made a tree of life that included four kingdoms (animals, plants, fungi, and s), we were confident that there would be no more major branches to reveal. ...We are again at a stage when we believe we have found most of what might be found, but we are wrong. ...[W]hole realms of life remain to be found. ...And even before a new realm or kind of life is found, we still have to explore the realms we have already discovered. Most species on Earth are not yet named. Most named species have not yet been studied. When we lived in small communities, hunting and gathering, we knew only the animals and plants around us, particularly those... useful or dangerous. Living on the thin green surface of our small planet in a universe full of stars, we are not so different today. The wild leaps up and more often than not we do not event know its name."

"Ignorance never settles a question."

"Mr. Kremlin himself was distinguished for ignorance, for he had only one idea, and that was wrong."

"To be conscious that you are ignorant is a great step to knowledge."

"A truly refined mind will seem to be ignorant of the existence of anything that is not perfectly proper, placid, and pleasant."

"There is nothing so dangerous as an ignorant and frightened man."

"Ignorance, to a scientist, is an itch that begs to be pleasurably scratched. Ignorance, if you are a theologian, is something to be washed away by shamelessly making something up."

"That there should one Man die ignorant who had capacity for Knowledge, this I call a tragedy."

"Man is arrogant in proportion to his ignorance."

"The truest characters of ignorance Are vanity, and pride, and annoyance."

"For "ignorance is the mother of devotion," as all the world knows."

"Any time you combine ignorance and borrowed money, you can get some pretty interesting consequences."

"It’s amazing how self-perpetuating ignorance is."

"A large segment of the American public is sadly deficient in its knowledge of basic business and economic facts of life. The media, which many people say are their primary sources of their business and economic info, do not appear to be making any significant impact on this ignorance."

"It is not my place to tell you whether there is indefeasible ignorance of ultimate reality. I am ignorant of whether there is or is not. But you should think of these things because there are no things more important, though there are no questions more difficult or less answerable. But one's whole life may be changed if one changes his mind about these questions."

"Be ignorance thy choice, where knowledge leads to woe."

"Any wise enemy is better than an ignorant friend."

"Ignorance can be interesting. ∞ Also fatal."

"You have to start with the truth. The truth is the only way that we can get anywhere. Because any decision-making that is based upon lies or ignorance can't lead to a good conclusion."

"Men give way before the power of genius, they hate it and try to blow upon it because it takes without sharing the plunder, but they give way if it persists; in short, they worship it on their knees when they have failed in their efforts to bury it under the mud."

"Learning we thank, Genius we revere: That gives us pleasure, This gives us rapture; That informs, This inspires; and is itself inspired; for genius is from heaven, learning from man."

"Das Genie hat nicht mehr Licht als ein andrer, rechtschaffener Mensch—aber es sammelt dies Leicht durch eine bestimmte Art von Linse in einen Brennpunkt."

"Man könnte sagen: „Genie ist Mut im Talent."

"Genius is more often found in a cracked pot than in a whole one."

"If it really were the case, as popular opinion has tried to establish, that the genius were separated from ordinary men by a thick wall through which no sound could penetrate, then all understanding of the efforts of genius would be denied to ordinary men, and their works would fail to make any impression on them. All hopes of progress depend on this being untrue. And it is untrue. The difference between men of genius and the others is quantitative not qualitative, of degree not of kind."

"So far as one understands a man, one is that man. The man of genius takes his place in the above argument as he who understands incomparably more other beings than the average man. Goethe is said to have said of himself that there was no vice or crime of which he could not trace the tendency in himself, and that at some period of his life he could not have understood fully. The genius, therefore, is a more complicated, more richly endowed, more varied man; and a man is the closer to being a genius the more men he has in his personality, and the more really and strongly he has these others within him."

"Real genius is nothing else but the supernatural virtue of humility in the domain of thought."

"Genius is an intuitive talent for labor."

"Genius loci."

"Thousands of geniuses live and die undiscovered — either by themselves or by others. But for the Civil War, Lincoln and Grant and Sherman and Sheridan would not have been discovered, nor have risen into notice."

"Even if we accept, as the basic tenet of true democracy, that one moron is equal to one genius, is it necessary to go a further step and hold that two morons are better than one genius?"

"Genius can never despise labour."