“The ignorant man always adores what he cannot understand.”

“Without self knowledge, without understanding the working and functions of his machine, man cannot be free, he cannot govern himself and he will always remain a slave.”

G. I. Gurdjieff (1866–1949) influential spiritual teacher, Armenian philosopher, composer and writer

“You cannot always tell what a man is by looking at him. What he appears to be and what he really is may be radically different. The appearance of a man today does not always reveal what he will be tomorrow.”

Kirby Page (1890–1957) American clergyman

“Ignorance, which is contented and clumsy, will produce what is imperfect, but not offensive. But ignorance discontented and dexterous, learning what it cannot understand, and imitating what it cannot enjoy, produces the most loathsome forms of manufacture that can disgrace or mislead humanity.”

John Ruskin (1819–1900) English writer and art critic

“I often think that men don't understand what is noble and what is ignorant, though they always talk about it.”

Leo Tolstoy book Anna Karenina

“The wise man has always treated religions with respect, not adoration nor blind following alone. He's more logical rather than emotional.”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

“Misunderstanding of the present is the inevitable consequence of ignorance of the past. But a man may wear himself out just as fruitlessly in seeking to understand the past, if he is totally ignorant of the present…This faculty of understanding the living is, in very truth, the master quality of the historian.”

Marc Bloch (1886–1944) French historian, medievalist, and historiographer

“Why, what can a man do when he takes to adoring one of you mermaids? He only neglects his work and runs up bills.”

George Eliot book Middlemarch

“Praise ignorance, for what man has not encountered he has not destroyed.”

Wendell Berry (1934) author

“What good are laws that cannot be read or understood, or a tongue that spews only hatred or ignorance? What good is the written word to an illiterate man?”

Delores Phillips (1950–2014) American writer