Kurt Vonnegut Quotes

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

No one, however smart, however well educated … is the suppository of all wisdom.

No one is wise at all times.

Do you mean ter tell me," he growled at the Dursleys, "that this boy—this boy!—knows nothin' abou'—about ANYTHING?" Harry thought this was going a bit far. He had been to school, after all, and his marks weren't bad. I know some things," he said. "I can, you know, do math and stuff.

But I know that all the things I do know are very small compared with the things that I don't know.

Make it thy business to know thyself, which is the most difficult lesson in the world. Yet from this lesson thou will learn to avoid the frog's foolish ambition of swelling to rival the bigness of the ox.

The difference between what the most and the least learned people know is inexpressibly trivial in relation to that which is unknown.

If you think you know it all, you are missing something.

I have seldom seen much ostentation and much learning met together.

Part of the American myth is that people who are handed the skin of a dead sheep at graduating time think that it will keep their minds alive forever.

Many would be wise if they did not think themselves wise.

It takes great self-confidence to write a newspaper column. Some might say it takes arrogance. Be that as it may, my willingness to pronounce on a great many matters of which I have little or no knowledge is one of my prime qualifications for this trade.

The minute you get too big to mop a floor or wipe a counter, that's the exact minute you have life f**ked up.

The wisest among us is a fool in some things.

Understanding that rests in what it does not understand is the finest.

Norman Mailer in his writings is ultimately more concerned with success than with danger; danger is only a means to success.

If one does not reflect, one thinks oneself master of everything; but when one does reflect, one realizes that one is master of nothing.

I don't want to tell people what to think. I'm the least qualified person in the world for that. If I'd go around pretending to be the expert on everything, I'd become Dan Brown, and I don't understand that. We all do our research if we're good writers, and we all work hard to get it right, but that doesn't mean we're experts in the field. The best we can do is challenge people to learn the facts themselves.

I don't know anything and neither do you.

We cannot all be masters.

If there's anything worse than knowing too little, it's knowing too much. Education will broaden a narrow mind, but there's no known cure for a big head. The best you can hope is that it will swell up and bust.

I write for the unlearned about things in which I am unlearned myself.

I’ve seen how you can’t learn anything when you’re trying to look like the smartest person in the room.