Philip Roth Quotes

He who knows nothing is closer to the truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors.

Humans believe so many lies because we aren't aware. We ignore the truth or we just don't see the truth. When we are educated, we accumulate a lot of knowledge, and all that knowledge is just like a wall of fog that doesn't allow us to perceive the truth, what really is.

Ignorance breeds fear.

You'd better not know so much, than to know so many things that ain't so.

Most of what we know or assume to know is wrong one way or another.

Seeing is believing and believing is knowing and knowing beats unknowing and the unknown.

It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.

Not creating delusions is enlightenment.

Ignorance is preferable to error, and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing than he who believes what is wrong.

Getting rid of a delusion makes us wiser than getting hold of a truth.

An age is called Dark not because the light fails to shine, but because people refuse to see it.

A deception that elevates us is dearer than a host of low truths.

Sometimes the ignorant are among the most educated.

It is better to know nothing than to know what ain't so.

Knowledge rests not upon truth alone, but upon error also.

Three-fourths of the mistakes a man makes are made because he does not really know what he thinks he knows.

Our knowledge is a receding mirage in an expanding desert of ignorance.

Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance.

The learning and knowledge that we have, is, at the most, but little compared with that of which we are ignorant.

To know that we know what we know, and to know that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge.

No one who lives in error is free.

What difference is there, do you think, between those in Plato's cave who can only marvel at the shadows and images of various objects, provided they are content and don't know what they miss, and the philosopher who has emerged from the cave and sees the real things?

While some of us may know than others about certain things, it is the thinnest slice of all that is, or could be known. In that sense, we are all profoundly ignorant.

If you understand everything, you must be misinformed.

It is better to be ignorant than to half know something.