Blissful Ignorance Quotes

Every place where we were together was a symbol of our youth and our blissful ignorance of the world. It was our tiny bubble of happiness. And as I looked carefully at them, memorizing their faces and everything I was able to see about them, I mentally made a toast. Here's to all the sleepless nights and to our existence. ~ Kia Amazona

Of course the 19th century remained in blissful ignorance of post-modern irony, and the dime novels were made without end. ~ Clive Sinclair

But the upside of painful knowledge is so much greater than the downside of blissful ignorance. ~ Sheryl Sandberg

There was something to be said for blissful ignorance. But would I have been happier with no idea about what threatened my world? At least this way I stood a chance of doing something about it. ~ Shanna Swendson

Finally, "industrial society," to use a genteel euphemism for capitalism, has also become an easy explanation for the environmental ills that afflict our time. But a blissful ignorance clouds the fact that several centuries ago, much of England's forest land, including Robin Hood's legendary haunts, was deforested by the crude axes of rural proletarians to produce charcoal for a technologically simple metallurgical economy and to clear land for profitable sheep runs. This occurred long before the Industrial Revolution. ~ Murray Bookchin

Humans have an evolved capacity to engage in self-deception in order to navigate through life in a delusional state of blissful ignorance. ~ Gad Saad

Sometimes blissful ignorance is awfully empowering ~ Guy Kawasaki

Our only solace as writers is in the work itself, and perhaps also in a penchant for blissful ignorance that allows us to gamble, to risk, to keep going where others would tote up the odds and stop. ~ Gayle Lynds

How can I do better?" "What am I doing that I don't know?" "What am I not doing that I don't see?" These questions can lead to so many benefits. And believe me, the truth hurts. Even when I have solicited feedback, any judgment can feel harsh. But the upside of painful knowledge is so much better than the downside of blissful ignorance. (p.83 f) ~ Sheryl Sandberg

Rancid was poor. He didn't seem to know that he was poor, however, and I never had the heart to tell him, because he was the happiest person I'd ever met. If he had known he was poor, of course, then he would have been sad and miserable all the time. As it was, Rancid was able to live out his whole life in blissful ignorance of the fact that he was poor. ~ Patrick F. McManus

I wonder why it is that when I plan a route too carefully, it goes to pieces, whereas if I blunder along in blissful ignorance aimed in a fancied direction I get through with no trouble. ~ John Steinbeck

The secrets of the universe aren't really secrets. It's just that humanity is too subjugated by their blissful ignorance to ask the right questions. When you have all of the answers, but are unable to ask any questions to them, then all you have are secrets. ~ Lionel Suggs

Read widely of others experiences in thought and action- stretch to others even though it hurts to and strains and would be more comfortable to snuggle back in the comforting cotton-wool of blissful ignorance! Hurl yourself at goals above your head and bear the lacerations that come when you slip and make a fool of yourself. Try always, as long as you have breath in your body, to take the hard way, the Spartan way- and work, work, work to build yourself into a rich, continually evolving entity! ~ Sylvia Plath

The central values by which most men have lived, in a great many lands at a great many times - these values, almost if not entirely universal, are not always harmonious with each other. Some are, some are not. Men have always craved for liberty, security, equality, happiness, justice, knowledge, and so on. But complete liberty is not compatible with complete equality - if men were wholly free, the wolves would be free to eat the sheep. Perfect equality means that human liberties must be restrained so that the ablest and the most gifted are not permitted to advance beyond those who would inevitably lose if there were competition. Security, and indeed freedoms, cannot be preserved if freedom to subvert them is permitted. Indeed, not everyone seeks security or peace, otherwise some would not have sought glory in battle or in dangerous sports.
Justice has always been a human ideal, but it is not fully compatible with mercy. Creative imagination and spontaneity, splendid in themselves, cannot be fully reconciled with the need for planning, organization, careful and responsible calculation. Knowledge, the pursuit of truth - the noblest of aims - cannot be fully reconciled with the happiness or the freedom that men desire, for even if I know that I have some incurable disease this will not make me happier or freer. I must always choose: between peace and excitement, or knowledge and blissful ignorance. And so on...
If these ultimate human values by which we live are to be ~ Isaiah Berlin

The dull pain of truth weights my soul, pulling it under. I am left hopelessly awake. ~ Libba Bray

A slave is one who sells his soul to save his life. A master is one who gives his life to save his soul. ~ Matshona Dhliwayo

Laws, it is said, are for the protection of the people. It's unfortunate that there are no statistics on the number of lives that are clobbered yearly as a result of laws: outmoded laws; laws that found their way onto the books as a result of ignorance, hysteria or political haymaking; antilife laws; biased laws; laws that pretend that reality is fixed and nature is definable; laws that deny people the right to refuse protection. A survey such as that could keep a dozen dull sociologists out of mischief for months. ~ Tom Robbins

Why does everyone have to pretend to be stupid and not know long words? ~ Martin Freeman

As science pushes forward, ignorance and superstition gallop around the flanks and bite science in the rear with big dark teeth. ~ Philip Jose Farmer

Weakness and ignorance are not barriers to survival, but arrogance is. ~ Liu Cixin

It is very difficult to bear the pain of ignorance of the person whom you love and who loves you, more than anything in the world.. ~ Vennela

His ignorance covers the world like a blanket, and there's scarcely a hole in it anywhere. ~ Mark Twain

For though men be ignorant, yet they are men ~ Baruch Spinoza

Dogs don't know what they look like. Dogs don't even know what size they are. No doubt it's our fault, for breeding them into such weird shapes and sizes. My brother's dachshund, standing tall at eight inches, would attack a Great Dane in the full conviction that she could tear it apart. When a little dog is assaulting its ankles the big dog often stands there looking confused - "Should I eat it? Will it eat me? I am bigger than it, aren't I?" But then the Great Dane will come and try to sit in your lap and mash you flat, under the impression that it is a Peke-a-poo… Cats know exactly where they begin and end. When they walk slowly out the door that you are holding open for them, and pause, leaving their tail just an inch or two inside the door, they know it. They know you have to keep holding the door open. That is why their tail is there. It is a cat's way of maintaining a relationship. Housecats know that they are small, and that it matters. When a cat meets a threatening dog and can't make either a horizontal or a vertical escape, it'll suddenly triple its size, inflating itself into a sort of weird fur blowfish, and it may work, because the dog gets confused again - "I thought that was a cat. Aren't I bigger than cats? Will it eat me?" … A lot of us humans are like dogs: we really don't know what size we are, how we're shaped, what we look like. The most extreme example of this ignorance must be the people who design the seats on airplanes. At the other extreme, the ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

GreenHollyWood, I think that you asked me why I don't get out?
- I'm kinda in hateful state, I hate to watch the fucking liars to lie in front of my face and backward to put the knife in my back.

Why I stay home?
- It's awesome place, I feel safe and out of the ignorance there is always somebody to harass for to get attention. ~ Deyth Banger

The essential is never to arrive anywhere, never to be anywhere. The essential is to go on squirming forever at the edge of the line, as long as there are waters and banks and ravening in heaven a sporting God to plague his creature, per pro his chosen shits. I've swallowed three hooks and am still hungry. Hence the howls. What a joy to know where one is, and where one will stay, without being there. Nothing to do but strech out comfortably on the rack, in the blissful knowledge you are nobody for eternity. ~ Samuel Beckett

I wish you would read a little poetry sometimes. Your ignorance cramps my conversation. ~ Anthony Hope

The charm of Ronald Reagan is not just that he kept telling us screwy things, it was that he believed them all. No wonder we trusted him, he never lied to us ... His stubbornness, even defiance, in the face of facts ('stupid things,' he once called them in a memorable slip) was nothing short of splendid ... This is the man who proved that ignorance is no handicap to the presidency. ~ Molly Ivins

Herein is the evil of ignorance, that he who is neither good nor wise is nevertheless satisfied with himself: he had no desire for that of which he feels no want. ~ Plato

Disgust is a learned behaviour that finds fertile soil in ignorance, yielding a bountiful harvest of alienation, oppression, and hate. ~ Jamie Arpin-Ricci

I think it is the height of ignorance to believe that the sexual act is an independent function necessary like sleeping or eating. Seeing, therefore, that I did not desire more children, I began to strive after self-control. There was endless difficulty in the task. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

The dark-haired girl behind Winston had begun crying out: 'Swine! Swine! Swine!', and suddenly she picked up a heavy Newspeak dictionary and flung it at the screen. ~ George Orwell

The poet Robert Browning caused considerable consternation by including the word twat in one of his poems, thinking it an innocent term. The work was Pippa Passes, written in 1841 and now remembered for the line "God's in His heaven, all's right with the world." But it also contains this disconcerting passage:
Then owls and bats
Cowls and twats
Monks and nuns in a cloister's moods,
Adjourn to the oak-stump pantry!
Browning had apparently somewhere come across the word twat
which meant precisely the same then as it does now
but pronounced it with a flat a and somehow took it to mean a piece of headgear for nuns. The verse became a source of twittering amusement for generations of schoolboys and a perennial embarrassment to their elders, but the word was never altered and Browning was allowed to live out his life in wholesome ignorance because no one could think of a suitably delicate way of explaining his mistake to him. ~ Bill Bryson

After reading the news, I go on Twitter. I don't have an account but I find it interesting - all the different voices, the squabbles, the arrogance of certainty, the ignorance, the occasional, but wonderful, compassion, and watching the evolution of language head towards a new kind of hieroglyphics. ~ Matt Haig

Believe is the beginning of blissful. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Forgetting is a very useful kind of ignorance: it wipes the bad sums off our slates. ~ Nanamoli Thera

Who was that lad they used to try to make me read at Oxford? Ship- Shop- Schopenhauer. That's the name. A grouch of the most pronounced description. ~ P.G. Wodehouse

The modern drama, operating through the double channel of dramatist and interpreter, affecting as it does both mind and heart,is the strongest force in developing social discontent, swelling the powerful tide of unrest that sweeps onward and over the dam of ignorance, prejudice, and superstition. ~ Emma Goldman

Historically, it is traditional and habitual for us to be inadequately prepared. This is the combined result of a number factors, the character of which is only indicated: democracy, which tends to make everyone believe that he knows it all; the preponderance, inherent in democracy, of people whose real interest is in their own welfare as individuals; the glorification of our own victories in war and the corresponding ignorance of our defeats - and disgraces - and of their basic causes; the inability of the average individual to understand the cause and effect not only in foreign but domestic affairs, as well as his lack of interest in such matters. Added to these elements is the manner in which our representative form of government has developed as to put a premium on mediocrity and to emphasize the defects of the electorate already mentioned ~ Ernest J. King

Sure, you can choose the safety and predictability of the cage, forfeiting the adventure God has destined for you. But you won't be the only one missing out or losing out. When you lack the courage to chase the Wild Goose, the opportunity costs are staggering. Who might not hear about the love of God if you don't seize the opportunity to tell them? Who might be stuck in poverty, stuck in ignorance, stuck in pain if you're not there to help free them? Where might the advance of God's kingdom in the world stall out because you weren't there on the front lines? ~ Mark Batterson

British generals often gave away in stupidity what they had gained in ignorance. ~ Scott Anderson

I have lots of things to teach you now, in case we ever meet, concerning the message that was transmitted to me under a pine tree in North Carolina on a cold winter moonlit night. It said that Nothing Ever Happened, so don't worry. It's all like a dream. Everything is ecstasy, inside. We just don't know it because of our thinking-minds. But in our true blissful essence of mind is known that everything is alright forever and forever and forever. Close your eyes, let your hands and nerve-ends drop, stop breathing for 3 seconds, listen to the silence inside the illusion of the world, and you will remember the lesson you forgot, which was taught in immense milky way soft cloud innumerable worlds long ago and not even at all. It is all one vast awakened thing. I call it the golden eternity. It is perfect. We were never really born, we will never really die. It has nothing to do with the imaginary idea of a personal self, other selves, many selves everywhere: Self is only an idea, a mortal idea. That which passes into everything is one thing. It's a dream already ended. There's nothing to be afraid of and nothing to be glad about. I know this from staring at mountains months on end. They never show any expression, they are like empty space. Do you think the emptiness of space will ever crumble away? Mountains will crumble, but the emptiness of space, which is the one universal essence of mind, the vast awakenerhood, empty and awake, will never crumble away because it was never born ~ Jack Kerouac

Just as there is a moment when the artist must stop, when the sculpture must be left as it is, the painting untouched - just as a determination not to know serves the maker more than all the resources of clairvoyance - so there must be a minimum of ignorance in order to perfect a life in happiness. Those who lack such a thing must set about acquiring it: unintelligence must be earned. ~ Albert Camus

I seek wisdom to justify my ignorance ~ Neal Parks

The future vibrated with uncertainty. I had failed. I had ignorance. I had hope. ~ Sean Ferrell

a town with more drinking joints than reading joints has a problem reading can solve ~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

There is a particularly unattractive and discouragingly common affliction called tunnel vision, which for all the misery it causes, ought to top the job list at the World Health Organization. Tunnel vision is a disease in which perception is restricted by ignorance and distorted by vested interest. Tunnel vision is caused by an optic fungus that multiplies when the brain is less energetic than the ego. It is complicated by exposure to politics. When a good dea is run through the filters and compressors of ordinary tunnel vision, it not only comps out reduced in scale and value but in its new dogmatic configuration produces effects the opposite of those for which it originally was intended. ~ Tom Robbins

Only priests and politicians benefit from a people's ignorance. ~ Ki Longfellow

People are generally opposed to things they know nothing about. ~ Kate Langley Bosher

Her least favorite thing: VOLUNTARY IGNORANCE ~ Whoopi Goldberg