Top 100 Not To Know Quotes
#1. Not to know the past is to be in bondage to it, while to remember, to know, is to be set free.
Sigmund Freud
#2. Who of English speech, bred to the traditions of his race, does not recognize Hamlet in his 'inky cloak' at a glance? Not to know him would argue one's self untaught in the chief glories of his language.
George Edward Woodberry
#3. To learn and not to do is really not to learn. To know and not to do is really not to know.
Stephen R. Covey
#4. Love?" Heeb asked, playfully pretending not to know the concept.
"Yeah. The real thing. The conviction that if you had this one woman, all other women would become irrelevant. You'd never again be unhappy. And you'd give up anything to have her and keep her." *Evan*
Zack Love
#5. Not to be able to bear poverty is a shameful thing, but not to know how to chase it away by work is a more shameful thing yet.
Pericles
#6. It is for little souls, that truckle under the weight of affairs, not to know how clearly to disengage themselves, and not to know how to lay them aside and take them up again.
Michel De Montaigne
#7. It is dangerous to know, but it is more dangerous not to know.
Rollo May
#8. Not to know what the world is is to be ignorant of where you are. Not to know why it's here is to be ignorant of who you are. And what it is. Not to know any of this is to be ignorant of why you're here.
Marcus Aurelius
#10. The great Roman statesman Cicero observed that, 'Not to know what happened before one was born is to be always a child.' In our ignorance of the values that form part of our history and heritage, we Americans have become perpetual children.
Ilana Mercer
#11. My former bullies pay extra to come backstage and meet me after shows, and I pretend not to know them in front of their friends. It is the most divine pleasure to exact the revenge of the brutalized child that resides within.
Margaret Cho
#12. It can be of no practical use to know that Pi is irrational, but if we can know, it surely would be intolerable not to know.
Edward Charles Titchmarsh
#13. You'd have to live in a cave not to know about the Carrier Dome. It put Syracuse on the map.
Dick Vitale
#14. Sometimes it's nice for people not to know anything about me.
Amanda Lindhout
#15. Faith means I chose not to know, which is different than ignorance which refuses to know.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
#16. Not to know what has been transacted in former times is to be always a child. If no use is made of the labors of past ages, the world must remain always in the infancy of knowledge. - Marcus Tullius Cicero
Tom Standage
#17. Yet he knew things he would have preferred not to know. Things about men and the evil they do. Things so terrible as to make anyone's confidence waver, and contaminate anyone's heart forever. He looked at the people around him, people who lived without that burden of knowledge, and envied them.
Donato Carrisi
#18. Moderation is necessary even in our desire for knowledge so as not to know things badly.
Baltasar Gracian
#20. Perhaps a wiser eye than hers would be able to read tomorrow in tonight's stars, but where was the fun in that? It was better not to know. Better to be alive in the Here and the Now
in this bright, laughing moment
and let the Hours to come take care of themselves.
Clive Barker
#21. That's not the way it is, Callahan." I grabbed her hands and rolled her closer to me, until our knees touched. "The thing is, we're all fragile. It's just that most of our friends are lucky enough not to know it yet.
Sarina Bowen
#22. Not to know of what things one should demand demonstration, and of what one should not, argues want of education.
Aristotle.
#23. In certain situations it was best not to know or at least best not to leave any way of proving that you knew what you knew.
Jonas Jonasson
#24. To learn something but not to do is really not to learn. To know something but not to do is really not to know.
Stephen Covey
#25. There was a smart, sunny girl out there right now somewhere, a Ray on a trajectory that would cross his path, a girl who made sense with him. I was just as glad not to know her this very minute, but she existed, and he would run into her, and with time I would accept it.
Elizabeth Fama
#26. He tells me that the best man I will ever find will be attracted to other women. I hear this as another fact I am too old not to know. More proof of how unprepared I am to love anyone.
Melissa Bank
#27. The Roman politician and philosopher Cicero once said: 'Not to know what has been transacted in former times is to be always a child. If no use is made of the labours of past ages, the world must remain always in the infancy of knowledge.
Ha-Joon Chang
#28. There's no better cure for the fear of taking after one's father, than not to know who he is.
Andre Gide
#29. You lose a certain type of innocence when you experience this type of kindness. You lose your right to be a jaded cynic. You can no longer go back through the looking glass and pretend not to know what you know about kindness.
Rob Sheffield
#31. She leads you on and baffles you," said Beatrice. "She wants you to know and not to know. She took care to write down that the box was there. And she buried it.
A.S. Byatt
#32. One pretended not to know that the body of a hostess was at the disposal of all comers, provided that her visiting list showed no gaps.
Marcel Proust
#33. To write brashly about some things, it is almost necessary not to know much about them.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#34. The minute you or anybody else knows what you are you are not it, you are what you or anybody else knows you are and as everything in living is made up of finding out what you are it is extraordinarily difficult really not to know what you are and yet to be that thing.
Gertrude Stein
#35. Not to know that no space of regret can make amends for one life's misused oppurtunities!
Charles Dickens
#36. Not to know. Not to remember.
With this one hope:
That beyond the River Lethe, there is memory, healed.
Czeslaw Milosz
#37. It is an unpleasant thing to go to bed without supper, it is a still less pleasant thing not to sup and not to know where one is to sleep.
Victor Hugo
#38. Fool, not to know that love endures no tie,
And Jove but laughs at lovers' perjury.
John Dryden
#39. Television was suppressing their freedom not to know.
Rick Perlstein
#40. When nothing is for sure, we remain alert, perennially on our toes. It is more exciting not to know which bush the rabbit is hiding behind than to behave as though we knew everything.
Carlos Castaneda
#41. There are trees of a thousand sorts, and all have their several fruits; and I feel the most unhappy man in the world not to know them, for I am well assured that they are all valuable. I bring home specimens of them, and also of the land.
Christopher Columbus
#42. You lose a certain kind of innocence when you experience this type of kindness. You lose your right to be a jaded cynic. You can no longer go back through the looking glass and pretend not to know what you know about kindness. It's a defeat, in a way.
Rob Sheffield
#43. Not to know what things in life require remedying is a crime ... It leaves you at the mercy of events - it lets life manipulate you - instead of training you to manipulate life.
Inez Milholland
#44. This crowd did not diminish through the whole of that cold, wet day; they seemed not to know what was to by their fate since their great benefactor was dead, and though strong and brave men wept when I met them.
Gideon Welles
#45. Hands-on experience at the critical time, not systematic knowledge, is what counts in the making of a naturalist. Better to be an untutored savage for a while, not to know the names or anatomical detail. Better to spend stretches of time just searching and dreaming.
E. O. Wilson
#46. It would be better not to know so many things than to know so many things that are not so.
Felix Okoye
#48. Japanese staff who claim not to know a word of English beyond "awesome" and "sucks", which for a vast range of human endeavour, actually, is more than enough ...
Thomas Pynchon
#50. It is a less evil to be unable to live than not to know how to live.
Publilius Syrus
#51. We are born to Exist, not to know, to be, not to assert ourselves.
Emil Cioran
#52. Mrs Forrester ... sat in state, pretending not to know what cakes were sent up, though she knew, and we knew, and she knew that we knew, and we knew that she knew that we knew, she had been busy all the morning making tea-bread and sponge-cakes.
Elizabeth Gaskell
#53. Leo's smile widened into a toothy grin. "We shall see," he said, "come. You have persuaded me into giving you a trial." We should have turned and ran away then, and saved ourselves a world of pain and grief. But we were not to know the future, or that Felix's fate-stones had lied to him.
David Pilling
#54. Evil is moral at it heart. The selection of vice over virtue; you can pretend not to know, you can rationalize, but you know it in your conscience.
Gregory Maguire
#55. Academics lack perspective. In a debate on whether the world is round, they would argue, 'No,' because it's an oblate spheroid. They suffer from 'the curse of knowledge': the inability to imagine what it's like not to know something that they know.
Steven Pinker
#56. It is enough to know that not to know is enough.
It is enough not to know.
Marcus Sedgwick
#57. It is not, then, in the content or substance of folly that its difference from truth lies, but in where it comes from. It comes not from 'the wise man's mouth' but from the mouth of the subject assumed not to know and speak the truth.
J.M. Coetzee
#58. The disciple is not hankering for knowledge; he wants to see, not to know. He wants to be. He is no longer interested in having more knowledge; he wants to have more being.
Rajneesh
#59. We're extremely fortunate not to know precisely the kind of world we live in. One would have to live a long, long time, unquestionably longer than the world itself.
Wislawa Szymborska
#60. Everyone has a purpose. There are those who are unfortunate enough not to know what that purpose is, and there are those that are bound by it, thrive in it, know nothing else.
Kelsey Sutton
#61. I don't know what sex appeal is. I don't think you can have sex appeal knowingly. The people who seduce me personally are the people who seem not to know they're seductive, and not to know they have sex appeal.
Omar Sharif
#62. Bewilderment is the true comprehension. Not to know where you are going is the true knowledge.
Martin Luther
#63. Thus I am not able to exist either with you or without you; and I seem not to know my own wishes.
Ovid
#64. It may be bliss not to know a tornado is coming because you have no need to worry or take action. But while your head is in the sand your bum is in the air, the tornado is still coming.
David Icke
#65. Seek not to know who said this or that, but take note of what has been said.
Thomas A Kempis
#66. Not to know me argues yourselves unknown.
John Milton
#67. Once and for all, there are many things I choose not to know.
Wisdom sets limits even to knowledge.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#68. Even if I seemed to remember, I could not know. For just to remember something is not to know if it really happened. That is a primary fact of the inner life, the most difficult fact with which we must live.
Joyce Carol Oates
#69. It's a tiresome matter to go to bed without supper; it is still less agreeable to have no supper and not to know where to find a bed.
Victor Hugo
#70. To cultivate the memory we should confide to it only what we understand and love: the rest is a useless burden; for simply to know by rote is not to know at all.
John Lancaster Spalding
#71. Watch out for people who think it's embarrassing not to know.
Ray Dalio
#72. Read day and night, devour books - these sleeping pills - not to know but to forget! Through books you can retrace your way back to the origins of spleen, discarding history and its illusions.
Emil Cioran
#73. You are right; you know men better than I do, and what you say may possibly be the case, I confess; but if such persons are among my acquaintances I prefer not to know it, because then I should be forced to hate them
Alexandre Dumas
#74. It's better not to know authors personally, because the real person never corresponds to the image you form of him from reading his books.
Italo Calvino
#75. [T]hey somehow conveyed to me that they were all toadies and humbugs, but that each of them pretended not to know that the others were toadies and humbugs: because the admission that he or she did know it, would have made him or her out to be a toady and humbug.
Charles Dickens
#76. wanted to know." "It's better not to know. It's better never to know. Better to leave things as they are. Not push and pry and poke." "You want beauty," said Hercule Poirot. "Beauty at any price. For me, it is truth I want. Always truth." Michael
Agatha Christie
#77. Confucius, who had said it was better not to know about ghosts and gods, but rather to focus on the world we lived in.
Yangsze Choo
#78. What a gloomy thing, not to know the address of one's soul.
Victor Hugo
#79. Once we know something, we find it hard to imagine what it was like not to know it.
Chip Heath
#80. I like not to know, unless it's something that I need to know, specifically, for how I color a performance.
Matt Bomer
#81. Better not to remember. Better not to know. You can't mourn what you never had.
Rick Yancey
#82. To know yet to think that one does not know is best; Not to know yet to think that one knows will lead to difficulty.
Lao-Tzu
#83. I don't want to be married anymore. I was trying so hard not to know this, but the truth kept insisting itself to me.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#84. Sometimes it's more painful to know the truth than not to know it.
-Han Solo
James Luceno
#85. If pretending to know was childish and pretending not to know was adult, then Punpun thought that he was still probably just a child.
Inio Asano
#86. We acknowledge that we should not talk of our wives; but we seem not to know that we should talk still less of ourselves.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld
#87. The key is to assume that your readers are as intelligent and sophisticated as you are, but that they happen not to know something you know.
Steven Pinker
#88. To know means to know all. Not to know all means not to know. In order to know all, it is only necessary to know a little. But, in order to know this little, it is first necessary to know pretty much.
G.I. Gurdjieff
#89. These men seem not to know that poetry has its particular rules and precepts; and that history is governed by others directly opposite.
Lucian Of Samosata
#90. Not to know at large of things remote
From use, obscure and subtle, but to know
That which before us lies in daily life,
Is the prime wisdom.
John Milton
#91. Some will call this self-indulgence
(They are lucky not to know its truth)
Some will know the simple fact of pain
This is becoming my normality
Sarah Kane
#93. B. You're pop-culturally illiterate not to know that this number is a song.
Kresley Cole
#94. I can live in a bubble, I like not to know anything about financials.
Alice Temperley
#95. You're playing with Pandora's box. Sometimes it's better not to open it. Sometimes, it's better not to know.
Tatiana De Rosnay
#96. There's only the writing, which I admit to knowing very little about. But then it's probably best not to know. It allows one to work without expectation. Best to let the poem do the thinking while we concern ourselves with what's called the personal life.
Russell Edson
#97. Never to get lost is not to live, not to know how to get lost brings you to destruction.
Rebecca Solnit
#98. What matters is not to know the world but to change it.
Frantz Fanon
#99. Be okay about the things you do not understand. In fact, embrace the uncertainty, but do not allow it to bring you down. It is okay not to know how a situation will turn out. You may not have control over it. But you do have control over your attitude with it.
Mike C. Adams
#100. Had laws not been, we never had been blam'd; For not to know we sinn'd is innocence.
William Davenant
