Ignored Quotes

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Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.
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Steve Jobs
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Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
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Aldous Huxley (Complete Essays, Vol. II: 1926-1929)
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First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you and want to burn you. And then they build monuments to you.
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Nicholas Klein
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War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.
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George Orwell (1984)
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Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.
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Fernando Pessoa (The Book of Disquiet)
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Whatever the cost of our libraries, the price is cheap compared to that of an ignorant nation.
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Walter Cronkite
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When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.
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Mark Twain
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It isn't possible to love and part. You will wish that it was. You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal.
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E.M. Forster (A Room with a View)
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Confidence is ignorance. If you're feeling cocky, it's because there's something you don't know.
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Eoin Colfer (Artemis Fowl (Artemis Fowl, #1))
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The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.
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Daniel J. Boorstin
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Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
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Martin Luther King Jr.
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There is only one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance.
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Socrates
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You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. No one is entitled to be ignorant.
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Harlan Ellison
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Education: the path from cocky ignorance to miserable uncertainty.
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Mark Twain
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Ignore those that make you fearful and sad, that degrade you back towards disease and death.
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Rumi (Jalal ad-Din Muhammad ar-Rumi)
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Ignorance killed the cat; curiosity was framed!
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C.J. Cherryh
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All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence; then success is sure.
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Mark Twain
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I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn't learn something from him.
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Galileo Galilei
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Learning to ignore things is one of the great paths to inner peace.
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Robert J. Sawyer (Calculating God)
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Ignoring isnโ€™t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.
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Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid's Tale)
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Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'
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Isaac Asimov
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We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.
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Plato
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How marvelous books are, crossing worlds and centuries, defeating ignorance and, finally, cruel time itself.
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Gore Vidal (Julian)
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If you hide your ignorance, no one will hit you and you'll never learn.
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Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451)
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There will come a time when all of us are dead. All of us. There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone ever existed or that our species ever did anything. There will be no one left to remember Aristotle or Cleopatra, let alone you. Everything that we did and built and wrote and thought and discovered will be forgotten and all of this will have been for naught. Maybe that time is coming soon and maybe it is millions of years away, but even if we survive the collapse of our sun, we will not survive forever. There was time before organisms experienced consciousness, and there will be time after. And if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it. God knows thatโ€™s what everyone else does.
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John Green (The Fault in Our Stars)
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Don't ignore half of me so you can fit me into a box. Don't do that.
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Taylor Jenkins Reid (The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo)
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Imagination is the golden-eyed monster that never sleeps. It must be fed; it cannot be ignored.
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Patricia A. McKillip
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When it comes to men who are romantically interested in you, itโ€™s really simple. Just ignore everything they say and only pay attention to what they do.
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Randy Pausch (The Last Lecture)
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I'd take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day.
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Douglas Adams (The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time)
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If you're texting Magnus to say 'I think u r kewl,' I'm going to kill you." "Who's Magnus?" Max inquired. "He's a warlock," said Alec. "A sexy, sexy warlock," Isabelle told Max, ignoring Alec's look of total fury. "But warlocks are bad," protested Max, looking baffled. "Exactly," said Isabelle.
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Cassandra Clare (City of Glass (The Mortal Instruments, #3))
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If anyone tells you that a certain person speaks ill of you, do not make excuses about what is said of you but answer, "He was ignorant of my other faults, else he would not have mentioned these alone.
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Epictetus
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A library is like an island in the middle of a vast sea of ignorance, particularly if the library is very tall and the surrounding area has been flooded.
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Lemony Snicket (Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid)
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We are all born ignorant, but one must work hard to remain stupid.
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Benjamin Franklin
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There will be a few times in your life when all your instincts will tell you to do something, something that defies logic, upsets your plans, and may seem crazy to others. When that happens, you do it. Listen to your instincts and ignore everything else. Ignore logic, ignore the odds, ignore the complications, and just go for it.
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Judith McNaught (Remember When (Foster Saga, #1))
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She was already learning that if you ignore the rules people will, half the time, quietly rewrite them so that they don't apply to you.
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Terry Pratchett (Equal Rites (Discworld, #3))
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It would be too easy to say that I feel invisible. Instead, I feel painfully visible, and entirely ignored.
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David Levithan (Every Day (Every Day, #1))
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There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.
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Isaac Asimov
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The only calibration that counts is how much heart people invest, how much they ignore their fears of being hurt or caught out or humiliated. And the only thing people regret is that they didn't live boldly enough, that they didn't invest enough heart, didn't love enough. Nothing else really counts at all.
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Ted Hughes (Letters of Ted Hughes)
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It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.
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C.S. Lewis (The Weight of Glory, and Other Addresses)
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No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance.
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Atwood H. Townsend
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Lawful good to lawful evil!" said Simon, pleased. "He's quoting Dungeons and Dragons," said Clary. "Ignore him.
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Cassandra Clare (City of Ashes (The Mortal Instruments, #2))
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Humans see what they want to see.
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Rick Riordan (The Lightning Thief (Percy Jackson and the Olympians, #1))
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People have a habit of inventing fictions they will believe wholeheartedly in order to ignore the truth they cannot accept.
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Libba Bray (The Sweet Far Thing (Gemma Doyle, #3))
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Every blessing ignored becomes a curse.
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Paulo Coelho (The Alchemist)
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There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action.
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Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Collected Works)
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Living is Easy with Eyes Closed.
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John Lennon
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But when a woman decides to sleep with a man, there is no wall she will not scale, no fortress she will not destroy, no moral consideration she will not ignore at its very root: there is no God worth worrying about.
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Gabriel Garcรญa Mรกrquez (Love in the Time of Cholera)
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If someone is able to show me that what I think or do is not right, I will happily change, for I seek the truth, by which no one was ever truly harmed. It is the person who continues in his self-deception and ignorance who is harmed.
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Marcus Aurelius (Meditations)
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There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn't true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.
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Sรธren Kierkegaard
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Children aren't happy with nothing to ignore, And that's what parents were created for.
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Ogden Nash
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Without education, we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.
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G.K. Chesterton
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You'd think people had better things to gossip about," said Ginny as she sat on the common room floor, leaning against Harryโ€™s legs and reading the Daily Prophet. "Three Dementor attacks in a week, and all Romilda Vane does is ask me if itโ€™s true youโ€™ve got a Hippogriff tattooed across your chest." Ron and Hermione both roared with laughter. Harry ignored them. What did you tell her?" I told her it's a Hungarian Horntail," said Ginny, turning a page of the newspaper idly. "Much more macho." Thanks," said Harry, grinning. "And what did you tell her Ronโ€™s got?" A Pygmy Puff, but I didnโ€™t say where.
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J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Harry Potter, #6))
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Sleep is like a cat: It only comes to you if you ignore it.
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Gillian Flynn (Gone Girl)
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There are no uninteresting things, only uninterested people.
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G.K. Chesterton
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I AM IGNORANT of absolute truth. But I am humble before my ignorance and therein lies my honor and my reward.
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Kahlil Gibran
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Being ignorant is not so much a shame, as being unwilling to learn.
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Benjamin Franklin
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There was a long hard time when I kept far from me the remembrance of what I had thrown away when I was quite ignorant of its worth.
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Charles Dickens (Great Expectations)
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I understand what you're saying, and your comments are valuable, but I'm gonna ignore your advice.
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Roald Dahl (Fantastic Mr. Fox)
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He thought her beautiful, believed her impeccably wise; dreamed of her, wrote poems to her, which, ignoring the subject, she corrected in red ink.
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Virginia Woolf (Mrs. Dalloway)
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The Greek word for "return" is nostos. Algos means "suffering." So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.
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Milan Kundera (Ignorance)
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Ignorance, the root and stem of every evil.
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Plato
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The most fundamental aggression to ourselves, the most fundamental harm we can do to ourselves, is to remain ignorant by not having the courage and the respect to look at ourselves honestly and gently.
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Pema Chรถdrรถn (When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times)
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To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?
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Marcus Tullius Cicero
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Instinct is a marvelous thing. It can neither be explained nor ignored.
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Agatha Christie (The Mysterious Affair at Styles (Hercule Poirot, #1))
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Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.
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Charles Darwin (The Descent of Man)
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Envy is ignorance, Imitation is Suicide.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson (Self-Reliance)
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Some things are hard to write about. After something happens to you, you go to write it down, and either you over dramatize it, or underplay it, exaggerate the wrong parts or ignore the important ones. At any rate, you never write it quite the way you want to.
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Sylvia Plath (The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath)
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The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody has decided not to see.
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Ayn Rand (The Fountainhead)
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Five percent of the people think; ten percent of the people think they think; and the other eighty-five percent would rather die than think.
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Thomas A. Edison
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The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of the infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.
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H.P. Lovecraft (The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories)
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Teach the ignorant as much as you can; society is culpable in not providing a free education for all and it must answer for the night which it produces. If the soul is left in darkness sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but he who causes the darkness.
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Victor Hugo (Les Misรฉrables)
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Anger, resentment and jealousy doesn't change the heart of others-- it only changes yours.
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Shannon L. Alder (300 Questions to Ask Your Parents Before It's Too Late)
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But you can't make people listen. They have to come round in their own time, wondering what happened and why the world blew up around them. It can't last.
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Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451)
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People are stupid. They will believe a lie because they want to believe it's true, or because they are afraid it might be true.
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Terry Goodkind (Wizard's First Rule (Sword of Truth, #1))
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There are winds of destiny that blow when we least expect them. Sometimes they gust with the fury of a hurricane, sometimes they barely fan oneโ€™s cheek. But the winds cannot be denied, bringing as they often do a future that is impossible to ignore.
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Nicholas Sparks (Message in a Bottle)
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Sometimes people hold a core belief that is very strong. When they are presented with evidence that works against that belief, the new evidence cannot be accepted. It would create a feeling that is extremely uncomfortable, called cognitive dissonance. And because it is so important to protect the core belief, they will rationalize, ignore and even deny anything that doesn't fit in with the core belief.
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Frantz Fanon (Black Skin, White Masks)
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It's an universal law-- intolerance is the first sign of an inadequate education. An ill-educated person behaves with arrogant impatience, whereas truly profound education breeds humility.
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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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There are people who are generic. They make generic responses and they expect generic answers. They live inside a box and they think people who don't fit into their box are weird. But I'll tell you what, generic people are the weird people. They are like genetically-manipulated plants growing inside a laboratory, like indistinguishable faces, like droids. Like ignorance.
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C. JoyBell C.
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It takes a very long time to become young.
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Pablo Picasso
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I think it's perfectly possible to explain how the universe came about without bringing God into it, but I don't know everything, and there may well be a God somewhere, hiding away. Actually, if he is keeping out of sight, it's because he's ashamed of his followers and all the cruelty and ignorance they're responsible for promoting in his name. If I were him, I'd want nothing to do with them.
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Philip Pullman
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Itโ€™s much easier not to know things sometimes.
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Stephen Chbosky (The Perks of Being a Wallflower)
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Try to imagine a life without timekeeping. You probably canโ€™t. You know the month, the year, the day of the week. There is a clock on your wall or the dashboard of your car. You have a schedule, a calendar, a time for dinner or a movie. Yet all around you, timekeeping is ignored. Birds are not late. A dog does not check its watch. Deer do not fret over passing birthdays. an alone measures time. Man alone chimes the hour. And, because of this, man alone suffers a paralyzing fear that no other creature endures. A fear of time running out.
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Mitch Albom (The Time Keeper)
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Sometimes a man wants to be stupid if it lets him do a thing his cleverness forbids.
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John Steinbeck (East of Eden)
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All things truly wicked start from innocence.
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Ernest Hemingway
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Give me a man or woman who has read a thousand books and you give me an interesting companion. Give me a man or woman who has read perhaps three and you give me a very dangerous enemy indeed.
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Anne Rice (The Witching Hour (Lives of the Mayfair Witches, #1))
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ุฐูˆ ุงู„ุนู‚ู„ู ูŠุดู‚ู‰ ููŠ ุงู„ู†ุนูŠู…ู ุจุนู‚ู„ู‡ู ูˆุฃุฎูˆ ุงู„ุฌู‡ุงู„ุฉู ููŠ ุงู„ุดู‚ุงูˆุฉู ูŠู†ุนู…ู
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ุฃุจูˆ ุงู„ุทูŠุจ ุงู„ู…ุชู†ุจูŠ
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He knows nothing; and he thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career.
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George Bernard Shaw (Major Barbara)
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People tend to be generous when sharing their nonsense, fear, and ignorance. And while they seem quite eager to feed you their negativity, please remember that sometimes the diet we need to be on is a spiritual and emotional one. Be cautious with what you feed your mind and soul. Fuel yourself with positivity and let that fuel propel you into positive action.
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Steve Maraboli (Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human Experience)
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I have always found it odd that people who think passive aggressively ignoring a person is making a point to them. The only point it makes to anyone is your inability to articulate your point of view because deep down you know you canโ€™t win. Itโ€™s better to assert yourself and tell the person you are moving on without them and why, rather than leave a lasting impression of cowardness on your part in a personโ€™s mind by avoiding them.
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Shannon L. Alder
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Dignity /หˆdignitฤ“/ noun 1. The moment you realize that the person you cared for has nothing intellectually or spiritually to offer you, but a headache. 2. The moment you realize God had greater plans for you that donโ€™t involve crying at night or sad Pinterest quotes. 3. The moment you stop comparing yourself to others because it undermines your worth, education and your parentโ€™s wisdom. 4. The moment you live your dreams, not because of what it will prove or get you, but because that is all you want to do. Peopleโ€™s opinions donโ€™t matter. 5. The moment you realize that no one is your enemy, except yourself. 6. The moment you realize that you can have everything you want in life. However, it takes timing, the right heart, the right actions, the right passion and a willingness to risk it all. If it is not yours, it is because you really didnโ€™t want it, need it or God prevented it. 7. The moment you realize the ghost of your ancestors stood between you and the person you loved. They really don't want you mucking up the family line with someone that acts anything less than honorable. 8. The moment you realize that happiness was never about getting a person. They are only a helpmate towards achieving your life mission. 9. The moment you believe that love is not about losing or winning. It is just a few moments in time, followed by an eternity of situations to grow from. 10. The moment you realize that you were always the right person. Only ignorant people walk away from greatness.
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Shannon L. Alder
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But that's the glory of foreign travel, as far as I am concerned. I don't want to know what people are talking about. I can't think of anything that excites a greater sense of childlike wonder than to be in a country where you are ignorant of almost everything. Suddenly you are five years old again. You can't read anything, you have only the most rudimentary sense of how things work, you can't even reliably cross a street without endangering your life. Your whole existence becomes a series of interesting guesses.
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Bill Bryson (Neither Here nor There: Travels in Europe)
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Does it break my heart, of course, every moment of every day, into more pieces than my heart was made of, I never thought of myself as quiet, much less silent, I never thought about things at all, everything changed, the distance that wedged itself between me and my happiness wasn't the world, it wasn't the bombs and burning buildings, it was me, my thinking, the cancer of never letting go, is ignorance bliss, I don't know, but it's so painful to think, and tell me, what did thinking ever do for me, to what great place did thinking ever bring me? I think and think and think, I've thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it.
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Jonathan Safran Foer
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Go placidly amid the noise and the haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence. As far as possible without surrender, be on good terms with all persons. Speak your truth quietly and clearly, and listen to others, even the dull and ignorant; they too have their story. Be yourself. Especially do not feign affection. Neither be cynical about love โ€“ for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment it is perennial as the grass. Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth. Nurture strength of spirit to shield you from misfortune. But do not distress yourself with imaginings. Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness. Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here. And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should. Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be, and whatever your labours and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life keep peace with your soul. With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world.
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Max Ehrmann (Desiderata: A Poem for a Way of Life)
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When Great Trees Fall When great trees fall, rocks on distant hills shudder, lions hunker down in tall grasses, and even elephants lumber after safety. When great trees fall in forests, small things recoil into silence, their senses eroded beyond fear. When great souls die, the air around us becomes light, rare, sterile. We breathe, briefly. Our eyes, briefly, see with a hurtful clarity. Our memory, suddenly sharpened, examines, gnaws on kind words unsaid, promised walks never taken. Great souls die and our reality, bound to them, takes leave of us. Our souls, dependent upon their nurture, now shrink, wizened. Our minds, formed and informed by their radiance, fall away. We are not so much maddened as reduced to the unutterable ignorance of dark, cold caves. And when great souls die, after a period peace blooms, slowly and always irregularly. Spaces fill with a kind of soothing electric vibration. Our senses, restored, never to be the same, whisper to us. They existed. They existed. We can be. Be and be better. For they existed.
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Maya Angelou
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There will always be someone willing to hurt you, put you down, gossip about you, belittle your accomplishments and judge your soul. It is a fact that we all must face. However, if you realize that God is a best friend that stands beside you when others cast stones you will never be afraid, never feel worthless and never feel alone.
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Shannon L. Alder
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You Chose You chose. You chose. You chose. You chose to give away your love. You chose to have a broken heart. You chose to give up. You chose to hang on. You chose to react. You chose to feel insecure. You chose to feel anger. You chose to fight back. You chose to have hope. You chose to be naรฏve. You chose to ignore your intuition. You chose to ignore advice. You chose to look the other way. You chose to not listen. You chose to be stuck in the past. You chose your perspective. You chose to blame. You chose to be right. You chose your pride. You chose your games. You chose your ego. You chose your paranoia. You chose to compete. You chose your enemies. You chose your consequences. You chose. You chose. You chose. You chose. However, you are not alone. Generations of women in your family have chosen. Women around the world have chosen. We all have chosen at one time in our lives. We stand behind you now screaming: Choose to let go. Choose dignity. Choose to forgive yourself. Choose to forgive others. Choose to see your value. Choose to show the world youโ€™re not a victim. Choose to make us proud.
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Shannon L. Alder
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I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness... The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance
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Carl Sagan (The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark)
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If you don't want a man unhappy politically, don't give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none. Let him forget there is such a thing as war. If the government is inefficient, top-heavy, and tax-mad, better it be all those than that people worry over it. Peace, Montag. Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year. Cram them full of noncombustible data, chock them so damned full of 'facts' they feel stuffed, but absolutely 'brilliant' with information. Then they'll feel they're thinking, they'll get a sense of motion without moving. And they'll be happy, because facts of that sort don't change.
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Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451)
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I'd like to repeat the advice that I gave you before, in that I think you really should make a radical change in your lifestyle and begin to boldly do things which you may previously never have thought of doing, or been too hesitant to attempt. So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man's living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun. If you want to get more out of life, Ron, you must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life that will at first appear to you to be crazy. But once you become accustomed to such a life you will see its full meaning and its incredible beauty. And so, Ron, in short, get out of Salton City and hit the Road. I guarantee you will be very glad you did. But I fear that you will ignore my advice. You think that I am stubborn, but you are even more stubborn than me. You had a wonderful chance on your drive back to see one of the greatest sights on earth, the Grand Canyon, something every American should see at least once in his life. But for some reason incomprehensible to me you wanted nothing but to bolt for home as quickly as possible, right back to the same situation which you see day after day after day. I fear you will follow this same inclination in the future and thus fail to discover all the wonderful things that God has placed around us to discover. Don't settle down and sit in one place. Move around, be nomadic, make each day a new horizon. You are still going to live a long time, Ron, and it would be a shame if you did not take the opportunity to revolutionize your life and move into an entirely new realm of experience. You are wrong if you think Joy emanates only or principally from human relationships. God has placed it all around us. It is in everything and anything we might experience. We just have to have the courage to turn against our habitual lifestyle and engage in unconventional living. My point is that you do not need me or anyone else around to bring this new kind of light in your life. It is simply waiting out there for you to grasp it, and all you have to do is reach for it. The only person you are fighting is yourself and your stubbornness to engage in new circumstances.
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Jon Krakauer (Into the Wild)
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I look at the blanked-out faces of the other passengers--hoisting their briefcases, their backpacks, shuffling to disembark--and I think of what Hobie said: beauty alters the grain of reality. And I keep thinking too of the more conventional wisdom: namely, that the pursuit of pure beauty is a trap, a fast track to bitterness and sorrow, that beauty has to be wedded to something more meaningful. Only what is that thing? Why am I made the way I am? Why do I care about all the wrong things, and nothing at all for the right ones? Or, to tip it another way: how can I see so clearly that everything I love or care about is illusion, and yet--for me, anyway--all that's worth living for lies in that charm? A great sorrow, and one that I am only beginning to understand: we don't get to choose our own hearts. We can't make ourselves want what's good for us or what's good for other people. We don't get to choose the people we are. Because--isn't it drilled into us constantly, from childhood on, an unquestioned platitude in the culture--? From William Blake to Lady Gaga, from Rousseau to Rumi to Tosca to Mister Rogers, it's a curiously uniform message, accepted from high to low: when in doubt, what to do? How do we know what's right for us? Every shrink, every career counselor, every Disney princess knows the answer: "Be yourself." "Follow your heart." Only here's what I really, really want someone to explain to me. What if one happens to be possessed of a heart that can't be trusted--? What if the heart, for its own unfathomable reasons, leads one willfully and in a cloud of unspeakable radiance away from health, domesticity, civic responsibility and strong social connections and all the blandly-held common virtues and instead straight toward a beautiful flare of ruin, self-immolation, disaster?...If your deepest self is singing and coaxing you straight toward the bonfire, is it better to turn away? Stop your ears with wax? Ignore all the perverse glory your heart is screaming at you? Set yourself on the course that will lead you dutifully towards the norm, reasonable hours and regular medical check-ups, stable relationships and steady career advancement the New York Times and brunch on Sunday, all with the promise of being somehow a better person? Or...is it better to throw yourself head first and laughing into the holy rage calling your name?
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Donna Tartt (The Goldfinch)