Quotes about ignorance and knowledge

We are asleep — in a dream state — and mistakenly think we are awake. One of the fundamental aspects of the ontological category of ignorance is ignorance of this very ignorance; he not only does not know, he does not know that he does not know. We are in a kind of prison but do not know it.
– Philip K. Dick

If we were perverse gods or immoral despoilers, we could not invent a better method to make a group of slaves work peacefully than to make them believe, by means of collective hypnosis, that they are happy and important. We would then have perfect robots who would work untiringly, producing what we desire. In addition, these robots would make and maintain themselves.
– John Baines, The Stellar Man

Knowledge of oneself is a very big, but a very vague and distant, aim. Man in his present state is very far from self-knowledge. Therefore, strictly speaking, his aim cannot even be defined as self-knowledge. Self-study must be his big aim. It is quite enough if a man understands that he must study himself. It must be man’s aim to begin to study himself, to know himself, in the right way.
Self-study is the work or the way which leads to self-knowledge. But in order to study oneself one must first learn how to study, where to begin, what methods to use. A man must learn how to study himself, and he must study the methods of self-study. The chief method of self-study is self-observation. Without properly applied self­ observation a man will never understand the connection and the correlation between the various functions of his machine, will never understand how and why on each separate occasion everything in him ‘happens’.
– G.I. Gurdjieff, In Search of the Miraculous