This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
A cheerful temper, joined with innocence, will make beauty attractive, knowledge delightful, and wit good natured. It will lighten sickness, poverty and affliction; convert ignorance into an amiable simplicity, and render deformity itself agreeable.
Affliction | Beauty | Good | Ignorance | Innocence | Knowledge | Poverty | Simplicity | Temper | Will | Wit | Beauty |
In the house of Ignorance there is no mirror in which to view your soul.
Karl Popper, fully Sir Karl Raimund Popper
Our knowledge can only be finite, while our ignorance must necessarily be infinite.
Why were we able to put hundreds of thousands of troops and support personnel in Saudi Arabia within a few months to fight Saddam Hussein when we are unable to mobilize hundreds of teachers or doctors and nurses and social workers for desperately underserved inner cities and rural areas to fight the tyranny of poverty and ignorance and child neglect and abuse?
Mortimer J. Adler, fully Mortimer Jerome Adler
Ultimately, there can be no disagreement between history, science, philosophy, and theology. Where there is disagreement, there is either ignorance or error.
Disagreement | Error | History | Ignorance | Philosophy | Science | Theology |
Paltry affectation, strained allusions, and disgusting finery are easily attained by those who choose to wear them; they are but too frequently the badges of ignorance or of stupidity, whenever it would endeavor to please.
Affectation | Ignorance | Stupidity |
For ignorance of all things is an evil neither terrible nor excessive, nor yet the greatest of all; but great cleverness and much learning, if they be accompanied by a bad training, are a much greater misfortune.
Evil | Ignorance | Learning | Misfortune | Training |
Plutarch, named Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus after becoming Roman citizen NULL
Medicine, to produce health, has to examine disease, and music, to create harmony, must investigate discord; and the supreme arts of temperance, of justice, and of wisdom, as they are acts of judgment and selection, exercised not on good and just and expedient only, but also on wicked, unjust, and inexpedient objects, do not give their commendations to the mere innocence whose boast is its inexperience of evil, and whose utter name is, by their award, simpleness and ignorance of what all men who live aright should know.
Disease | Evil | Good | Harmony | Health | Ignorance | Innocence | Judgment | Justice | Men | Music | Wisdom |
Better be unborn than untaught, for ignorance is the root of misfortune.
Better | Ignorance | Misfortune |
Robert Ingersoll, fully Robert Green "Bob" Ingersoll
Justice is the only worship. Love is the only priest. Ignorance is the only slavery. Happiness is the only good. The time to be happy is now, the place to be happy is here, the way to be happy is to make others so.
Good | Happy | Ignorance | Justice | Love | Slavery | Time | Worship | Happiness |
Robert Quillen, fully Verni Robert Quillen
The tragedy of ignorance is its complacency.
Complacency | Ignorance | Tragedy |
Adi Shankara, aka Śaṅkara Bhagavatpādācārya and Ādi Śaṅkarācārya
It is ignorance that causes us to identify ourselves with the body, the ego, the senses, or anything that is not the Atman. He is a wise man who overcomes this ignorance by devotion to the Atman.
Simeon ben Lakish, or Shimon ben Lakish or Reish Lakish
Where ignorance thrives, there can be no liberty, nor can it live very long even when there is enlightenment without the help of virtue.
Enlightenment | Ignorance | Liberty | Virtue | Virtue |
Shunryu Suzuki, also Daisetsu Teitaro or D.T. Suzuki or Suzuki-Roshi
The ultimate standpoint of Zen, therefore, is that we have been led astray through ignorance to find a split in our being, that there was from the very beginning no need for a struggle between the finite and the infinite, that the peace we are seeking so eagerly after has been there all the time.
Beginning | Ignorance | Need | Peace | Struggle | Time | Zen |