The recipe for perpetual ignorance is: Be satisfied with your opinions and content with your knowledge.

If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.

All that mankind has done, thought or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books.

If you desire many things, many things will seem few.

If you must tell me your opinions, tell me what you believe in. I have plenty of doubts of my own.

In some sort of crude sense, which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.

Ultimately, education in its real sense is the pursuit of truth. It is an endless journey through knowledge and enlightenment.

Who is rich? He that is content. Who is that? Nobody.

Convictions, in the end, they can be dangerous, but a world without them is just kind of an awful kind of gray, amorphous mass.

If this were all to go away tomorrow, all the big success, I would still be very happy going from bar to bar playing music for people.

Those who have knowledge, don’t predict. Those who predict, don’t have knowledge.

By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, journalism keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community.

Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting.

Men blaspheme what they do not know.

I am not ashamed to confess that I am ignorant of what I do not know.

Take care to get what you like or you will be forced to like what you get.

Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before.

Of those beings who live in ignorance, shut up and confined, as it were, in an egg, I have first broken the eggshell of ignorance and alone in the universe obtained the most exalted, universal Buddhahood.

Admiration is the daughter of ignorance.

A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.

I have often wondered how it is that every man loves himself more than all the rest of men, but yet sets less value on his own opinions of himself than on the opinions of others.

I know that there are millions of Americans who are content with their health care coverage – they like their plan and, most importantly, they value their relationship with their doctor.

Wisdom allows nothing to be good that will not be so forever; no man to be happy but he that needs no other happiness than what he has within himself; no man to be great or powerful that is not master of himself.

A happy life is one which is in accordance with its own nature.

Let’s not burn the universities yet. After all, the damage they do might be worse.

What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books.

The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one.

We hear only those questions for which we are in a position to find answers.

Wealth is well known to be a great comforter.

Folks don’t like to have somebody around knowing more than they do.

I am not young enough to know everything.

The three most powerful and most apparent means used by Rome to retain her power over the minds of her votaries are Ignorance, Superstition, and Persecution.

The man never feels the want of what it never occurs to him to ask for.

We have to abandon the idea that schooling is something restricted to youth. How can it be, in a world where half the things a man knows at 20 are no longer true at 40 – and half the things he knows at 40 hadn’t been discovered when he was 20?

The gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge.

People like to talk about war.

The only real security that a man can have in this world is a reserve of knowledge, experience and ability.

God grant that not only the love of liberty but a thorough knowledge of the rights of man may pervade all the nations of the earth, so that a philosopher may set his foot anywhere on its surface and say: ‚This is my country.‘

Genius without education is like silver in the mine.

Where an excess of power prevails, property of no sort is duly respected. No man is safe in his opinions, his person, his faculties, or his possessions.

Our pleasures were simple – they included survival.

The desire of excessive power caused the angels to fall; the desire of knowledge caused men to fall.

The truth is found when men are free to pursue it.

Truth is by nature self-evident. As soon as you remove the cobwebs of ignorance that surround it, it shines clear.

Truth is so obscure in these times, and falsehood so established, that, unless we love the truth, we cannot know it.

We dance round in a ring and suppose, but the secret sits in the middle and knows.

Memory is the treasury and guardian of all things.

When I walk outside, people have something to say about it.

Who has fully realized that history is not contained in thick books but lives in our very blood?

Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.

To understand a name you must be acquainted with the particular of which it is a name.

It’s easier to aim to please and say what others want to hear than to form an opinion and fight for it, even if it means taking a risk or losing your job.

Few of us can stand prosperity. Another man’s, I mean.

It isn’t what you have, or who you are, or where you are, or what you are doing that makes you happy or unhappy. It is what you think about.

He is richest who is content with the least, for content is the wealth of nature.

The ignorance of one voter in a democracy impairs the security of all.

If the Great Way perishes there will morality and duty. When cleverness and knowledge arise great lies will flourish. When relatives fall out with one another there will be filial duty and love. When states are in confusion there will be faithful servants.

The person you consider ignorant and insignificant is the one who came from God, that he might learn bliss from grief and knowledge from gloom.

If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.

I have opinions of my own, strong opinions, but I don’t always agree with them.

There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating – people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing.