Georgi Valentinovich Plekhanov Quotes

An ignorant person is one who doesn't know what you have just found out.

History is a race between education and catastrophe.

If the ideas of any particular man are determined by his environment, then the ideas of humanity, in their historical development, are determined by the development of the social environment, by the history of social relationships.

All that makes earlier times seem simpler is our ignorance of their complexities.

I maintain that there is no common language or medium of understanding between people of education and without it - between those who judge of things from books or from their senses. Ignorance has so far the advantage over learning; for it can make an appeal to you from what you know; but you cannot re-act upon it through that which it is a perfect stranger to. Ignorance is, therefore, power.

Once you realize something, then you can't pretend you don't know it any more.

The past is the place we view the present from as much as the other way around.

Of the Logos which is as I describe it men always prove to be uncomprehending, both before they have heard it and when once they have heard it. For although all things happen according to this Logos, they [men] are like people of no experience, even when they experience such words and deeds as I explain, when I distinguish each thing according to its constitution and declare how it is; but the rest of men fail to notice what they do after they wake up just as they forget what they do when asleep.

Ignorance cannot always be inferred from inaccuracy; knowledge is not always present.

The majority of people have no understanding of the things with which they daily meet, nor, when instructed, do they have any right knowledge of them, although to themselves they seem to have.

In theory we understand people, but in practice we can't put up with them, I thought, deal with them for the most part reluctantly and always treat them from our point of view. We should observe and treat people not from our point of view but from all angles, I thought, associate with them in such a way that we can say we associate with them so to speak in a completely unbiased way, which however isn't possible, since we actually are always biased against everybody.

There are no variations except for those who know a norm, and no subtleties for those who have not grasped the obvious.

Seeing is believing and believing is knowing and knowing beats unknowing and the unknown.

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

Knowledge, idea, belief stands in the way of wisdom.

I've had moments where I've met people who were complete, like, idiots, who could not understand visual culture to save their lives.

Knowledge gropes but meets not Wisdom's face.

Nothing convinces persons of a weak understanding so effectually, as what they do not comprehend.

Miracles arise from our ignorance of nature, not from nature itself.

The very essence of truth is plainness and brightness; the darkness and crookedness is our own. The wisdom of God created understanding, fit and proportionable to truth, the object and end of it, as the eye to the thing visible. If our understanding have a film of ignorance over it, or be blear with gazing on other false glitterings, what is that to truth?

I have walked with people whose eyes are full of light but who see nothing in sea or sky, nothing in city streets, nothing in books. It were far better to sail forever in the night of blindness with sense, and feeling, and mind, than to be content with the mere act of seeing. The only lightless dark is the night of darkness in ignorance and insensibility.

To the ignorant, even the words of wise seem foolishness.

All the preaching in the world cannot make a man see the truth so long as his eyes are blinded.