Jean Giraudoux Quotes

Learning, n. The kind of ignorance distinguishing the studious.

People disparage knowing and the intellectual life, and urge doing. I am content with knowing, if only I could know.

The tree of knowledge is not the tree of life! And yet can we cast out of our spirits all the good or evil poured into them by so many learned generations? Ignorance cannot be learned.

Books give not wisdom where none was before. But where some is, there reading makes it more.

To penetrate and dissipate these clouds of darkness, the general mind must be strengthened by education.

Entire ignorance is not so terrible or extreme an evil, and is far from being the greatest of all; too much cleverness and too much learning, accompanied with ill bringing-up, are far more fatal.

It is impossible to make people understand their ignorance, for it requires knowledge to perceive it; and, therefore, he that can perceive it hath it not.

We are faced with the paradoxical fact that education has become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought.

He who learns but does not think, is lost! He who thinks but does not learn is in great danger.

Education is a crutch with which the foolish attack the wise to prove that they are not idiots.

If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them.

In formal logic, a contradiction is the signal of defeat, but in the evolution of real knowledge it marks the first step in progress toward a victory.

Why waste time learning, when ignorance is instantaneous?

Whoever does not love knowledge, then there is no good in him.

I want everybody to be smart. As smart as they can be. A world of ignorant people is too dangerous to live in.

Learning is, in too many cases, but a foil to common sense; a substitute for true knowledge.

How can people be so stupid? I marvel at that. See, I think you have to work as being ignorant - and if you're gonna work at being ignorant, why not work at being informed?

Anything that gives us new knowledge gives us an opportunity to be more rational.

Learning is the ally, not the adversary of genius... he who reads in a proper spirit, can scarcely read too much.

The more I read, the more I realise what I don't know.

I no have education. I have inspiration. If I was educated, I would be a damn fool.

My goal is to make the viewer a little bit smarter.

Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education.

Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.

The truth of things is the chief nutriment of superior intellects.