“True ignorance approaches the infinite more nearly than any amount of knowledge can do, and, in our case, ignorance is fortified by a certain element of nineteenth-century indifference which refuses to be interested in what it cannot understand; a violent reaction from the thirteenth century which cared little to comprehend anything except the incomprehensible.”

— Henry Adams

Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904)

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Henry Adams 311

journalist, historian, academic, novelist 1838–1918

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“The great danger... not content with our real knowledge of the relation of the finite to the infinite, they slur over our vast ignorance by the help of the imagination. Myth supplies the place of true knowledge where we are ignorant of the connection between finite and infinite. Hence... most concrete systems of religion present us with a certain amount of knowledge but a great deal of myth.”

Karl Pearson (1857–1936) English mathematician and biometrician

The Ethic of Freethought (Mar 6, 1883)

“Desolate and dreary as the little town was in the world of today, it was infinitely more liveable than the same town of nearly two centuries before. There had been much progress in how to do things. It was regrettable that there was less progress in knowledge of things worth doing.”

Murray Leinster (1896–1975) Novelist, short story writer

Source: Time Tunnel (1964), Chapter 5 (p. 59).

“It is, however, only in the nineteenth century that one sees men beginning to glory in their ignorance—for to proclaim oneself an agnostic means nothing else—and claiming to forbid others any knowledge to which they themselves have no access; and this marked one stage further in the intellectual decline of the West.”

René Guénon (1886–1951) French metaphysician

Source: The Crisis of the Modern World (1927), p. 59

“Shakespeare realised the thirteenth-century woman more vividly than the thirteenth-century poets ever did; but that is no new thing to say of Shakespeare.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904)

“True ignorance is not the absence of knowledge, but the refusal to acquire it.”

Karl Popper (1902–1994) Austrian-British philosopher of science

As quoted by Mark Damazer in "In Our Time's Greatest Philosopher Vote" at In Our Time (BBC 4) http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/inourtime/greatest_philosopher_celeb.shtml

“As far as women are concerned, they seem always to have been more clean than the men, except when men painted them in colors which men liked best. Perhaps society was actually cleaner in the thirteenth century than in the sixteenth, as Saint Louis was more decent than Francis I, and as the bath was habitual in the twelfth century and exceptional in the renaissance.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904)

“The thirteenth century knew more about religion and decoration than the twentieth century will ever learn.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904)

“It is only by intuition that the infinite can be apprehended. But why is this? Why cannot the infinite be apprehended by concepts? To see this we must understand that the word "infinite," in the religious sense, has nothing at all to do with that sense of the word in which it is applied to space, time, and the number series. We may call this latter the mathematical infinite to distinguish it from the religious infinite. And it is the confusion between these two which misled us into the false trail of supposing that the infinity of God's mind refers to the amount of His knowledge and that the finitude of man's mind refers to his ignorance. The religious infinite, or in other words the infinity of God, means that than 'which there is no other. In this sense neither space nor time could be infinite, since space is an "other" to time, and time is an "other" to space.”

Walter Terence Stace (1886–1967) British civil servant, educator and philosopher.

p. 46-47.

“What makes a philosopher is the movement which leads back without ceasing from knowledge to ignorance, from ignorance to knowledge, and a kind of rest in this movement.”

Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961) French phenomenological philosopher

Source: In Praise of Philosophy (1963), p. 5
Context: Even those who have desired to work out a completely positive philosophy have been philosophers only to the extent that, at the same time, they have refused the right to install themselves in absolute knowledge. They taught not this knowledge, but its becoming in us, not the absolute but, at most, our absolute relation to it, as Kierkegaard said. What makes a philosopher is the movement which leads back without ceasing from knowledge to ignorance, from ignorance to knowledge, and a kind of rest in this movement.

“The most violent element in society is ignorance.”

Emma Goldman (1868–1940) anarchist known for her political activism, writing, and speeches

Variant: The most unpardonable sin in society is independence of thought.

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