A Quote by Seneca the Younger
Our posterity will wonder about our ignorance of things so plain.
Related Quotes
Though the familiar use of things about us take off our wonder, yet it cures not our ignorance.
As parents, we can have no joy, knowing that this government is not sufficiently lasting to ensure any thing which we may bequeath to posterity: And by a plain method of argument, as we are running the next generation into debt, we ought to do the work of it, otherwise we use them meanly and pitifully. In order to discover the line of our duty rightly, we should take our children in our hand, and fix our station a few years farther into life; that eminence will present a prospect, which a few present fears and prejudices conceal from our sight.
("I love you," someone says, and instantly we begin to wonder - "Well, how much?" - and when the answer comes - "With my whole heart" - we then wonder about the wholeness of a fickle heart.) Our lovers, our husbands, our wives, our fathers, our gods - they are all beyond us.
We have heard of a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. It is said that knowledge is power, and the like. Methinks there is equal need of a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Ignorance, what we will call Beautiful Knowledge, a knowledge useful in a higher sense: for what is most of our boasted so-called knowledge but a conceit that we know something, which robs us of the advantage of our actual ignorance? What we call knowledge is often our positive ignorance; ignorance our negative knowledge.
Christmas renews our youth by stirring our wonder. The capacity for wonder has been called our most pregnant human faculty, for in it are born our art, our science, our religion.
Men of genius are not to be analysed by commonplace rules. The rest of us who have been or are leaders, more commonplace in our quality, will do well to remember two things. One is never to forget posterity when devising a policy. The other is never to think of posterity when making a speech.
In spite of all the talk and study about our next years, all the silent ponderings about what lies within them...it seems plain to us that many things are wrong in the present ones that can be, must be, changed. Our texture of belief has great holes in it. Our pattern lacks pieces.
The distance we feel from our actions is proportionate to our ignorance of them; our ignorance, in turn, is largely a measure of the length of the chain of intermediaries between ourselves and our acts.
There is a certain virtue in every good man, which night and day stirs up the mind with the stimulus of glory, and reminds it that all mention of our name will not cease at the same time with our lives, but that our fame will endure to all posterity.
The more we learn about the world, and the deeper our learning, the more conscious, specific, and articulate will be our knowledge of what we do not know, our knowledge of our ignorance
If one looks at all closely at the middle of our own century, the events that occupy us, our customs, our achievements and even our topics of conversation, it is difficult not to see that a very remarkable change in several respects has come into our ideas; a change which, by its rapidity, seems to us to foreshadow another still greater. Time alone will tell the aim, the nature and limits of this revolution, whose inconveniences and advantages our posterity will recognize better than we can.
Material possessions and honors of the world do not endure. But your union as wife, husband, and family can. No sacrifice is too great to have the blessings of an eternal marriage. By making and keeping sacred temple covenants, we evidence our love for God, for our companion, and our real regard for our posterity-even those yet unborn. Our family is the focus of our greatest work and joy in this life; so will it be throughout all eternity.
Science is being daily more and more personified and anthromorphized into a god. By and by they will say that science took our nature upon him, and sent down his only begotten son, Charles Darwin, or Huxley, into the world so that those who believe in him, &c.; and they will burn people for saying that science, after all, is only an expression for our ignorance of our own ignorance.
If we abide by the principles taught in the Bible, our country will go on prospering and to prosper; but if we and our posterity neglect its instructions and authority, no man can tell how sudden a catastrophe may overwhelm us and bury all our glory in profound obscurity.
Just as full sunlight completely dispels all darkness but even a few rays provide a measure of light, so, if we complete the practice of training the mind, we will totally dispel the darkness of our ignorance, but if we engage in only some parts of the practice, this will still help to reduce our ignorance and self-cherishing .
The poverty of our imagination is no measure of say the world's resources. Our posterity will no doubt get fuel in ways that we are unable to devise for them.
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