“The history of the Victorian Age will never be written: we know too much about it. For ignorance is the first requisite of the historian – ignorance, which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits, with a placid perfection unattainable by the highest art.”

Source: Meditations in Wall Street (1940), p. 92

Source: Barsk: The Elephants' Graveyard (2015), Chapter 17, “Dead Voices” (p. 170)

Antonine Maillet, Acadian author quoted by Isabel Vincent in the Toronto Globe and Mail, June 24, 1989. Source: Dictionary of Canadian Quotations by Robert Columbo. (Toronto: Stoddart, 1991) p. 3

Source: Quantum Reality - Beyond The New Physics, Chapter 10, Quantum Realities: Four More, p. 197

St Andrew's Day (November 30, 2007)

As quoted in "Stray Questions for: David Eagleman" by Blake Wilson in The New York Times (10 July 2009) http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/10/stray-questions-for-david-eagleman/
Context: Our ignorance of the cosmos is too vast to commit to atheism, and yet we know too much to commit to a particular religion. A third position, agnosticism, is often an uninteresting stance in which a person simply questions whether his traditional religious story (say, a man with a beard on a cloud) is true or not true. But with Possibilianism I’m hoping to define a new position — one that emphasizes the exploration of new, unconsidered possibilities. Possibilianism is comfortable holding multiple ideas in mind; it is not interested in committing to any particular story.

Variant: We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of the infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.
Source: The Call of Cthulhu

George Kubler summarizing the view of Meyer Schapiro (with whom he disagrees), quoted by Alpers in Lang, Berel (ed.), The Concept of Style, 1987, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, ISBN 0801494397