Ulysses S. Grant Quotes

There are some things I wish I never knew, but I am grateful for things that I have learned, too.

To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child.

I learn lessons with every interview I give.

I think you accidentally learn things in high school that turn out to be life lessons when you are able to step back a bit and study them in more depth.

Judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.

A college education shows a man how little other people know.

Until you understand a writer's ignorance, presume yourself ignorant of his understanding.

I have never found, in a long experience in politics, that criticism is ever inhibited by ignorance.

It's hubris to think that the way we see things is everything there is.

When you're 20, you think you know a lot more than you do.

The more you think you know, the more closed-minded you'll be.

Ignorance is always ready to admire itself. Procure yourself critical friends.

The one of the great sadnesses of any life is knowing what you know now and then remembering what you did not know then.

There are many things we only see clearly in retrospect.

The most fertile source of insight is hindsight.

You know, many a man realizes late in life that if when he was a boy he had known what he knows now, instead of being what he is he might be what he won't; but how few boys stop to think that if they knew what they don't know instead of being what they will be, they wouldn't be?

Again, if you only know what you know, you don't know if something's good or bad. You don't have perspective.

The lessons of experience are always learned too late.

The longer I live, the more uninformed I feel. Only the young have an explanation for everything.

If I’d a knowed more, I would a loved more.

We are often prophets to others only because we are our own historians.

So easy it is to see the errors of past ages, so difficult to acknowledge our own!

Belief is in ignorance. If you know, you know. And it is good that if you don’t know, know that you don’t know — the belief can deceive you. The belief can create an atmosphere in your mind, where, without knowing, you start thinking that you know. Belief is not trust, and the more strongly you say that you believe totally, the more you are afraid of the doubt within you.

The way to eliminate ignorance is through steady, focused discrimination between the observer and the world.

We do but learn to-day what our better advanced judgements will unteach us tomorrow.