Tao Te Ching
Ignorance
Contrary to common conception, ignorance doesn't have anything to do with intelligence. It means 'to ignore' and the most brilliant people are as capable of ignoring as the lowest IQs. As Forest Gump frequently quoted, "Stupid is as stupid does." In the Buddhist tradition, ignorance (avidyā) is described as a root cause of suffering, one of the three poisons, and one of the six root kleshas. Taoism, Confucianism, almost all the Eastern religions as well as our mystical heritage from Judaism, Christianity, and other western schools assert a basic human goodness instead of an original sin based view of a fundamental badness we’re all born with. Given this innate sacred and wholesome quality, ignorance is what covers and obscures our true selves, the enlightened experience discovered rather than attained.
Quotes (90)
“Like rain breaking through an ill-thatched house; ignorance, passion, and aggression will break through an unreflecting mind.”
“Just as varieties of objects are seen and discriminated in dreams and in visions, so ideas and statements are discriminated erroneously and error goes on multiplying.”
“Oh vain is man who glories in his joy and has no fears, while to and fro the chances of the years dance like an idiot in the wind!”
“Ignorance is a dreadful thing and has caused no end of damage to the human race.”
“It is ignorance that causes us to identify ourselves with the body, the ego, the sense”
“Ignorance and wisdom are identical, not different.”
“He who neglects to drink of the spring of experience is likely to die of thirst in the desert of ignorance.”
“From time without beginning, the tree of unknowing has been watered by the monsoon of mental habit.”
“If you do not know the measure of your own sleep,
The slumber of your ignorance will be inexhaustible.”
“Ignorance leads to fear, fear leads to hatred, and hatred leads to violence. This is the equation.”
“Renounce spiritual ignorance; return to The One – that is the religion called Islam.”
“Almost all Christians being wretchedly enslaved to blindness and ignorance, which the priests are so far from preventing or removing, blacken the darkness and promote the delusion.”
“He must be very ignorant for he answers every question he is asked.”
“Though near to reality by nature, people become estranged from it by habit—descending lower and lower by daily repetition, they fall into a state of ignorant obstinacy and do not know how to stop.”
“Reason and Ignorance, the opposites of each other, influence the great bulk of mankind. If either of these can be rendered sufficiently extensive in a country, the machinery of Government goes easily on. Reason obeys itself; and Ignorance submits to whatever is dictated to it.”
“Delusion and enlightenment produce one another… You get rid of this, then grab hold of that. Don’t you see how stupid it is!”
“Religions are the children of ignorance and do not long survive their mother... Mankind is growing out of religion as out of its childhood clothes.”
“Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.”
“Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.”
“Ignorance is the parent of fear and being so nonplussed and confounded about the stranger, I confess I was as much afraid of him as if it was the devil himself”
“It's better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than open it and remove all doubt.”
“We see but a part and ascribe much both of man's character and actions to chance, or luck, or fortune; but these are only words whereby we escape the admission of our own ignorance”
“Education: the path from cocky ignorance to miserable uncertainty.”
“They've promised that dreams can come true - but forgot to mention that nightmares are dreams, too.”
“The only religion that ought to be taught is the religion of fearlessness. It is fear that brings misery, fear that brings death, fear that breeds evil. And what causes fear? Ignorance of our own nature.”
“There is a war going on at the present moment. What does it signify? It signifies that several millions of sleeping people are trying to destroy several millions of other sleeping people. They would not do this, of course, if they were to wake up. Everything that takes place is owing to this sleep.”
“Either America will destroy ignorance or ignorance will destroy the United States.”
“What philosophy should dissipate is certainty, whether of knowledge or ignorance.”
“Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened.”
“Most people come to know only one corner of their room, one spot near the window, one narrow strip on which they keep walking back and forth.”
“When one realizes one is asleep, at that moment one is already half-awake.”
“And all the greedy gushes out through their small souls. And all the lazy leaks down over their brash bodies. How small it's all!”
“Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.”
“I believe I need to pay attention when, in fact, I need to see and know my inattention.”
“Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.”
“Man is so intelligent that he feels impelled to invent theories to account for what happens in the world. Unfortunately, he is not quite intelligent enough, in most cases, to find correct explanations. So that when he acts on his theories, he behaves very often like a lunatic.”
“Unfortunately, familiarity with traditionally hallowed writings tends to breed... a kind of reverential insensibility, a stupor of the spirit, an inward dearness to the meaning of the sacred words.”
“Racism is the product of tribalism and ignorance and both are falling victim to communications and world-around literacy.”
“Ignorance is the cause of inevitability. You look around without understanding and take appearances for reality... There is no way you can help the world more than putting an end to ignorance.”
“I write for one and only one purpose, to overcome the invincible ignorance of the traduced heart. […] I wish to speak to and for those who have had enough of the Social Lie, the Economics of Mass Murder, the Sexual Hoax, and the Domestication of Conspicuous Consumption.”
“An age is called Dark not because the light fails to shine, but because people refuse to see it.”
“any man-made environment is a conditioner that creates non-perceptive somnambulists.”
“The evil that is in the world almost always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding.”
“It is not so bad being ignorant if you are totally ignorant; the hard thing is knowing in some detail the reality of ignorance”
“Because they drive us to swim against the current, ignorance and self-love are the cause of most of our troubles.”
“Ignorance, hatred and greed are killing nature.”
“Plato described ordinary life as unthinking, lived in a dim cave of shadowy reflections, but said that it is possible to leave the cave and see things in sunlit clarity as they actually are.”
“The world is full of blind children... People in the world are completely stupid, like poor animals and dogs.”
“We collude with them and they with us in maintaining the great foundation of ignorance and lies on which our civilization rests.”
“The message of television as metaphor is not only that all the world is a stage but that the stage is located in Las Vegas… the nature of the medium is that it must suppress the content of ideas in order to accommodate the requirements of visual interest, the values of show business.”
“No one can blame the conqueror for writing history the way he sees it, and certainly not for digesting human events and discovering their patterns according to his own point of view. But it must be admitted … that conventional history supports and complements a very grave and almost pristine ignorance.”
“Every kind of ignorance in the world all results from not realizing that our perceptions are gambles. We believe what we see and then we believe our interpretation of it, we don't even know we are making an interpretation most of the time. We think this is reality.”
“When the focus of your practice becomes like the light of the sun penetrating a magnifying glass so sharply that it makes a fire, it dissolves greed, anger, and ignorance, the three great obstacles to our original heart/mind.”
“most people are drowning in their delusional ignorance without knowing that their suffering was created by themselves.”
“vajra ignorance... sweeps away all thoughts of possessiveness and self like a pile of dust.”
“We let ourselves be blinded by promises, reduce ourselves to a state of deaf and dumb, and accept without question the battlefield situation of fighting against something else.”
“You're telling all those lies about the good things that we can have if we close our eyes”
“Our fundamental awakened state has never been diminished or destroyed, only obscured by ignorance. But where did ignorance come from? It arose from that basic state itself, just like an illusion.”
“Politics and church are the same. They keep the people in ignorance.”
“How the hell can a person go to work in the morning, come home in the evening and have nothing to say?”
“Most people in the world don't really use their brains to think. And people who don't think are the ones who don't listen to others.”
“Probably the biggest discovery in human history was Siddhartha's realization that the self does not exist independently, that it is a mere label, and therefore that clinging to it is ignorance.”
“It is precisely the American economy that has dumbed so many down.”
“Those who choose not to empathize enable real monsters. For without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude with it, through our own apathy.”
“Ignorance is a fundamental inability to recognize the infinite potential, clarity, and power of our own minds… ignorance distorts the basically open experience of awareness into dualistic distinctions between inherently existing categories of ‘self’ and ‘other.’”
“The greatest scientific discovery was the discovery of ignorance. Once humans realized how little they knew about the world, they suddenly had a very good reason to seek new knowledge, which opened up the scientific road to progress.”
“Human stupidity is one of the most important forces in history, yet we often tend to discount it... The problem is that the world is far more complicated than a chessboard, and human rationality is not up to the task of really understanding it... Even if war is catastrophic for everyone, no god and no law of nature protect us from human stupidity.”
“Every leader has the power to do harm, but it's only when citizens know nothing of history that leaders find it possible to do evil on behalf of their people.”
“We exercise our intellect to manipulate concepts and think that we are actually connecting with reality. This may look like a display of intelligence, but it is actually ignorance.”
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