Clarice Lispector Quotes

If you understand everything, you must be misinformed.

Whoever believes he knows why everything is as it is has hold of nothing.

Understanding that rests in what it does not understand is the finest.

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

I know nothing, because I know too much, and understand not nearly enough and never will.

We cannot understand. The best is perhaps what we understand least.

Just because you don't understand it doesn't mean it isn't so.

Ignorance is preferable to error, and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing than he who believes what is wrong.

The greater our knowledge increases the more our ignorance unfolds.

In order to have wisdom we must have ignorance.

In expanding the field of knowledge we but increase the horizon of ignorance.

We can be absolutely certain only about things we do not understand.

The one recurring theme in my writing, and in my life in general, is confusion. The fact that anytime you think you really know something, you're going to find out you're wrong - that is the rule. The moments where you think you have something figured out, those are the exceptions.

Knowledge is knowing that we cannot know.

Just because we don't understand doesn't mean that the explanation doesn't exist.

I'll never know everything. My life would be a lot worse if there was nothing I knew the answers about - and if there was nothing I didn't know the answers about.

It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.

The more you learn, the more you learn you don't know.

There's stuff in this world, everybody pretends they understand. But we don't understand. It's important to listen.

Well isn’t that one thing you’re all the more wise for? Age has taught you something. It seems to me that you know the big secret. That nobody knows what’s going on

But I know that all the things I do know are very small compared with the things that I don't know.

One truth that I know for sure, for me anyway, is that the more you know, the more you realize that you don't know.

The vain presumption of understanding everything can have no other basis than never having understood anything. For anyone who had ever experienced just once the perfect understanding of one single thing, and had truly tasted how knowledge is accomplished, would recognize that of the infinity of other truths he understands nothing.

The goal is to know how not-to-know.

I am not omniscient, but I know a lot.