Jules Verne Quotes

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.

The full area of ignorance is not mapped. We are at present only exploring the fringes.

All our knowledge - past, present, and future - is nothing compared to what we will never know.

All that we know is still infinitely less than all that still remains unknown.

What an author doesn't know could fill a book.

Too much traffic with a quotation book begets a conviction of ignorance in a sensitive reader. Not only is there a mass of quotable stuff he never quotes, but an even vaster realm of which he has never heard.

I want to find something else, unknowable, some place that's not on the map. A real adventure.

We [psychonauts] are all going to go into the books as pioneers, because it's too early for us to be anything else. There's no map, no finished database, just anecdotes of the crazy, crazy stuff that goes on. That's why it's so important to try and share [our stories].

Ultimately, the number of books always exceeds the space they are granted.

How ignorant we are! How ignorant everyone is! We can cut across only a small area of the appallingly expanding fields of knowledge. No human being can know more than a tiny fraction of the whole. It must have been satisfactory in ancient times when one's own land seemed to be the universe; when research studies, pamphlets, books did not issue in endless flow; when laboratories and scientists were not so rapidly pushing back frontiers of knowledge that the process of unlearning the old left you gasping for breath.

Books, in the plural lose their solidity of substance and become a gas, filling all available space.

Most of the book deals with things we already know yet never learn.

Only two kinds of people can attain self-knowledge: those who are not encumbered at all with learning, that is to say, whose minds are not over-crowded with thoughts borrowed from others; and those who, after studying all the scriptures and sciences, have come to realise that they know nothing.

I have a very basic notion of the structure the book might have - that's mostly it. The rest is luck and happenstance.

Of books in our time the variety is so voluminous, and they follow so fast from the press, that one must be a swift reader to acquaint himself even with their titles, and wise to discern what are worth reading.

So much paperwork to read! So much paperwork to push away! So much paperwork to pretend he hadn't received and that might have been eaten by gargoyles.

Uncertainty that comes from knowledge (knowing what you don't know) is different from uncertainty coming from ignorance.

It was amazing how many books one could fit into a room, assuming one didn't want to move around very much.

Breezy, sophisticated, hilarious, rude and aching with sweetness: LOVE, NINA might be the most charming book I've ever read.

There is so much more information about the scientific world than there was a generation ago that we have all increased our opportunities for ignorance. There are more things not to know. ... The machinery that we deal with is so much more complex that it is possible to become dysfunctional at a much higher level of performance.

If you start from a belief that the most knowledgeable person on earth does not have even one percent of the total knowledge on earth, that shoots down social engineering, economic central planning, judicial activism, and innumerable other ambitious notions favored by the political left.

We have an unknown distance yet to run, an unknown river to explore.

I always wonder: the images that hit your brain when you're young are so significant, because there's not that much information in your brain. As you get older, things just bounce off. I can remember these minute details of stupid TV shows from the '70s, and I can't remember a book I read yesterday.

We are not here to do what has already been done.

Go to the bookstore and look at how many bookshelves are filled with books trying to explain how to work the devices. We don't see shelves of books on how to use television sets, telephones, refrigerators or washing machines. Why should we for computer-based applications?