"ignorance"タグの名言

Most often, what I don’t know will have a vastly greater bearing on my life that what I do know.

Ignorance, when voluntary, is criminal, and a man may be properly charged with that evil which he neglected or refused to learn how to prevent.

Later times have laid all the blame upon the Goths and Vandals, but, however unwilling the partizans of the Christian system may be to believe or to acknowledge it, it is nevertheless true, that the age of ignorance commenced with the Christian system.There was more knowledge in the world before that period, than for many centuries afterwards; and as to religious knowledge, the Christian system, as already said, was only another species of mythology; and the mythology to which it succeeded, was a corruption of an ancient system of theism. It is owing to this long interregnum of science, and to no other cause, that we have now to look back through a vast chasm of many hundred years to the respectable characters we call the Ancients. Had the progression of knowledge gone on proportionably with the stock that before existed, that chasm would have been filled up with characters rising superior in knowledge to each other; and those Ancients we now so much admire would have appeared respectably in the background of the scene. But the christian system laid all waste; and if we take our stand about the beginning of the sixteenth century, we look back through that long chasm, to the times of the Ancients, as over a vast sandy desert, in which not a shrub appears to intercept the vision to the fertile hills beyond.

Information is what you put in empty heads to keep them empty.

Certainty is the most vivid condition of ignorance and the most necessary condition for knowledge.

We ought to read mainly, not to know more, but to remind ourselves that we do not know much.

Ignorance often makes a complicated thing seem simple, or vice versa.

A single person cannot know even a billionth of what is known, which is not even a trillionth of what there is to know.

We readily rebel against our knowledge than our ignorance.

As the area of our knowledge grows, so too does the perimeter of our ignorance.

What you don’t know has power over you; knowing it brings it under your control, and makes it subject to your choice. Ignorance makes real choice impossible.

Gnosticism, a highly intellectual second-century movement (the word ‘gnostic’ comes from the Greek word for ‘knowledge’) that was later declared heretical, didn’t help. Heretics were intellectual therefore intellectuals were, if not heretical, then certainly suspect. So ran the syllogism. Intellectual simplicity or, to put a less flattering name on it, ignorance was widely celebrated. The biography of St Antony records with approval that he ‘refused to learn to read and write or to join in the silly games of the other little children’. Education and silly games are here bracketed together, and both are put in opposition to holiness. Instead of this, we learn, Antony ‘burned with the desire for God’. That this wasn’t quite true – Antony’s letters reveal a much more careful thinker than this implies – didn’t much matter: it appealed to a powerful ideal. No need to read: give up both books and bread and you will win God’s favour. Even intellectuals were susceptible to this pretty picture: it was hearing about how the simple, unlettered Antony had inspired so many to turn to Christ that led Augustine to start striking himself on the head, tearing his hair and asking, ‘What is wrong with us?’ Ignorance was power.

The philosophy they had lived for starts to die itself. Some strands of ancient philosophy live on, preserved by the hands of some Christian philosophers – but it is not the same. Works that have to agree with the pre-ordained doctrines of a church are theology, not philosophy. Free philosophy has gone. The great destruction of classical texts gathers pace. The writings of the Greeks ‘have all perished and are obliterated’: that was what John Chrysostom had said. He hadn’t been quite right, then: but time would bring greater truth to his boast. Undefended by pagan philosophers or institutions, and disliked by many of the monks who were copying them out, these texts start to disappear. Monasteries start to erase the works of Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca and Archimedes. ‘Heretical’ – and brilliant – ideas crumble into dust. Pliny is scraped from the page. Cicero and Seneca are overwritten. Archimedes is covered over. Every single work of Democritus and his heretical ‘atomism’ vanishes. Ninety per cent of all classical literature fades away. Centuries later, an Arab traveller would visit a town on the edge of Europe and reflect on what had happened in the Roman Empire. ‘During the early days of the empire of the Rum,’ he wrote – meaning the Roman and Byzantine Empire – ‘the sciences were honoured and enjoyed universal respect. From an already solid and grandiose foundation, they were raised to greater heights every day, until the Christian religion made its appearance among the Rum; this was a fatal blow to the edifice of learning; its traces disappeared and its pathways were effaced.

People, nearly all of them, don’t know how to worry about others without being presumptuous, with finesse, with modesty. They think they know. My sister thought she knew. Knew the human race. . . . Knowledge doesn’t know. But that’s something few understand.

Self-knowledge, which comes from within, gradually change our beliefs and drops those beliefs which are false and stupid. After being cleared off all the dirt acquired by us in the form of second-hand knowledge in our early age, we can directly see the reality, through our own eyes, through our own heart and mind, as our mind gets unconditioned. It is this mind that is rightly compared to God, as such a consciousness is pure, having been cured of all ignorance and darkness and we come close to our true self—Atman or soul.

A person who does not read and never seeks to increase personal knowledge will always remain imprisoned by ignorance and unable to escape a cellblock of drudgery and despair.

The light of knowledge is fully capable of destroying the darkness of ignorance. This also help us in overcoming all the difficulties and in achieving success in all our endeavors.

There is nothing wrong in not knowing, but that ignorance must never be covered with the illusion of knowledge. Only when you know that you don't know, you can learn and grow.

Spirituality lies in acts of compassion and conscience, not in supernatural nonsense. One may babble ceaselessly about positive frequencies, healing vibrations, nourishing stones and crystals, but all these are not indicative of a spiritual existence, if anything, they are only signs of stupidity and ignorance masquerading as higher knowledge.

Peace without knowledge of the cause of that peace is still ignorance.