Lawrence Block Quotes

There's nothing wrong with not understanding yourself.

I really think that living is the process of going from complete certainty to complete ignorance.

Writing reminds you of how much there is in your life that stands outside your explanations. In that way, it's almost a journey into faith and doubt at once.

As you get older, you don't really have any excuse to be stupid anymore, to be in the dark.

You just realize that you don't know everything there is to know. The older I get, the less I know, and that's a good thing. When I was young, I knew everything, and everything wasn't necessarily good.

One of the uncertain pleasures of adulthood, for me, has really been about confronting how little I know about the world and how much completely baffles me about the world and human behavior.

Only a blind man can easily define what light is. When you do not know, you are bold. Ignorance is always bold; knowledge hesitates. And the more you know, the more you feel that the ground underneath is dissolving. The more you know, the more you feel how ignorant you are.

I'm much more introspective than I was, say, thirty years ago.

As I get older, the things I'm sure of become fewer.

Sometimes you think you know things, know things very deeply, only to realize you don't know a damn thing.

In fact, looking back, it seems to me that I was clueless until I was about 50-years-old.

I do not know is a phrase which becomes us.

The more we chase away the false mysteries - those things we think we know about ourselves and others - the more mysterious our existence becomes.

In an active life is sown the seed of wisdom; but he who reflects not, never reaps; has no harvest from it, but carries the burden of age without the wages of experience; nor knows himself old, but from his infirmities, the parish register, and the contempt of mankind. And age, if it has not esteem, has nothing.

We need wisdom the most when we believe in it the least.

It's good to slowly come to the realization that you understand nothing.

I've spent my life cultivating knowledge of myself. But the more I know myself, the more utterly mysterious I become.

but if I've learned anything, it's that we don't know half of what we think we do. And we know ourselves least of all.

The first step towards knowing is to see that you do not know.

I did no know everything there was to know about myself, and knew that I did not know it.

The first thing you learn in life is you're a fool. The last thing you learn in life is you're the same fool.

I know nothing except the fact of my ignorance.

I got a few marriage proposals in my 20s. I just wasn't ready. I just knew if I committed, I would've wound up doing something wrong, messing it up. I still felt like I had some living to do.

The awareness of the ambiguity of one's highest achievements (as well as one's deepest failures) is a definite symptom of maturity.

I lived a very isolated life. When you start at 20, you have a lot of nonsense to work out of your system.