Infinite Ignorance

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Solutions Spirituality

This is a collection of quotes from a few different people on the topic sometimes referred to as 'infinite ignorance'.

References

Quotes

Let us be convinced that nothing can happen to us apart from the providence of God.

- St. Dorotheos of Gaza, Discourses and Sayings

Our only occupation should be the cure of ourselves; Empty is the discourse of that philosopher by which no human passion is attended to

- Epicurus, Kyriai Doxai (The Principal Doctrines)

Obedience is the burial of the will and the resurrection of humility.

- St. John Climacus, The Ladder of Divine Ascent

Place before your mind's eye the vast spread of time's abyss, and embrace the universe; and then compare what we call human life with infinity...

- Seneca, Letters from a Stoic

The Lord does not show Himself to a proud soul. The proud soul, no matter how many books it reads, will never know God, since by its pride it does not give place for the grace of the Holy Spirit, while God is known only by the humble soul.

- St. Silouan the Athonite, Wisdom from Mount Athos

Man had been created to rise, in his simple and uncompounded nature, in noetic contemplation of the simple and uncompounded God, To rise in love, and to unite all of creation with himself in love, raising it also to the Creator. Instead of regarding the Way, however, he chose to regard what was easier and closer at hand: his own visible self. Instead of rising with God, he fell in love with himself.

- Hieromonk Damascene (Christensen), Christ the Eternal Tao

The question is not what you look at, but what you see. It is only necessary to behold the least fact or phenomenon, however familiar, from a point a hair's breadth aside from our habitual path or routine, to be overcome, enchanted by its beauty and significance.

- Henry David Thoreau, Walden

It must come to me, not I to it

- Plotinus, The Enneads

The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing

- Socrates, Plato's Dialogues

Instead of speaking of it, I make it understood by my acts

- Socrates, unknown

The purification of the soul, its separation as far as possible from the body and its gathering itself together within itself, is the true practice of philosophy. Hence philosophy consists of a lived concrete exercise and not of a theory or conceptual edifice: The theoretical philosophical discourse is completely different from the lived exercises by which the soul purifies itself of its passions and spiritually separates itself from the body

- Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life

Watch and see the courses of the stars as if you are running alongside them, and continually dwell in your mind upon the changes of the elements into one another; for these imaginations wash away the foulness of life on the earth. When you are reasoning about mankind, look upon earthly things below as if from some vantage point above them.

- Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

I thought of Plato's words and felt them suddenly in my heart: all in all, nothing human is worth taking very seriously; nevertheless.

- Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human

Blessed is the one who has arrived at infinite ignorance.

- Evagrius Ponticus, Praktikos

We can perhaps get a better idea [of this spiritual exercise] if we understand it as an attempt to liberate ourselves from a partial, passionate point of view - linked to the senses and the body - so as to rise to the universal, normative viewpoint of thought, submitting ourselves to the demands of the Logos and the norm of the Good. Training for death is training to die to one's individuality and passions, in order to look at things from the perspective of universality and objectivity.