“Of our world of war, we are ignorant of our insignificance in the universes”

Conversations with a Lady on the Plurality of Worlds or Etretiens sur la Pluralité des Mondes (1686) as quoted by Mark Brake, Alien Life Imagined: Communicating the Science and Culture of Astrobiology (2012)

Source: Order Out of Chaos: Man's New Dialogue with Nature (1984), p. 313; Cited in: K.C. Laszlo (2001) The Evolution of Business: Learning, Innovation, and Sustainability for the 21st century. p. 10.

Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985)
Context: We no longer have a coherent conception of ourselves, and our universe, and our relation to one another and our world. We no longer know, as the Middle Ages did, where we come from, and where we are going, or why. That is, we don't know what information is relevant, and what information is irrelevant to our lives.

Variant translation: The more we learn about the world, and the deeper our learning, the more conscious, clear, and well-defined will be our knowledge of what we do not know, our knowledge of our ignorance. The main source of our ignorance lies in the fact that our knowledge can only be finite, while our ignorance must necessarily be infinite.
Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (1963)
Context: The more we learn about the world, and the deeper our learning, the more conscious, specific, and articulate will be our knowledge of what we do not know, our knowledge of our ignorance. For this, indeed, is the main source of our ignorance — the fact that our knowledge can be only finite, while our ignorance must necessarily be infinite.

Source: Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011), Chapter 19, "The illusion of understanding", page 201 (ISBN 9780141033570).

"The War Universe", taped conversation, first published in Grand Street, No. 37 (1991) http://openlibrary.org/b/OL7452886M/Grand_Street_37_(Grand_Street)
Context: This is a war universe. War all the time. That is its nature. There may be other universes based on all sorts of other principles, but ours seems to be based on war and games. All games are basically hostile. Winners and losers. We see them all around us: the winners and the losers. The losers can oftentimes become winners, and the winners can very easily become losers.

The Believer interview (2013)
Context: Yeah, our view of reality, the one we conventionally take, is one among many. It’s pretty much a fact that our entire universe is a mental construct. We don’t actually deal with reality directly. We simply compose a picture of reality from what’s going on in our retinas, in the timpani of our ears, and in our nerve endings. We perceive our own perception, and that perception is to us the entirety of the universe. I believe magic is, on one level, the willful attempt to alter those perceptions. Using your metaphor of an aperture, you would be widening that window or changing the angle consciously, and seeing what new vistas it affords you.

Book II, Ch. 12: Apology for Raimond Sebond
Essais (1595), Book II
Context: Great abuses in the world are begotten, or, to speak more boldly, all the abuses of the world are begotten, by our being taught to be afraid of professing our ignorance, and that we are bound to accept all things we are not able to refute: we speak of all things by precepts and decisions. The style at Rome was that even that which a witness deposed to having seen with his own eyes, and what a judge determined with his most certain knowledge, was couched in this form of speaking: “it seems to me.” They make me hate things that are likely, when they would impose them upon me as infallible.

Source: The Wild (1995), p. 81