Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes

To know anything well involves a profound sensation of ignorance.

Doubt grows with knowledge.

Indeed, the most important product of knowledge is ignorance.

I think the philosophy that we don't know as much as we think we know resonates throughout my work.

He that knew all that learning ever writ, Knew only this - that he knew nothing yet.

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

Knowledge is knowing that we cannot know.

Who knows most, doubts most.

… a progressive discovery of our own ignorance

It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.

What we know is a drop, what we don't know is an ocean.

It's like the more you know the more you know you don't know.

Our knowledge is a little island in a great ocean of nonknowledge.

The greater our knowledge increases the more our ignorance unfolds.

The more we study the more we discover our ignorance.

I'm not very wise to many things.

To know, is to know that you know nothing. That is the meaning of true knowledge.

True, a little learning is a dangerous thing, but it still beats total ignorance.

The more we know, the more we realize there is to know.

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.

In expanding the field of knowledge we but increase the horizon of ignorance.

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.

We live on an island surrounded by a sea of ignorance. As our island of knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.

There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know.

There is not anything that can so suddenly flood the mind with shame as the conviction of ignorance, yet we are all ignorant of nearly everything there is to be known.