an ignorance conducive to one's aim, The Mechanics of Virtue, aphorism 320

320 

There is an ignorance conducive to one's aim, but one will never know exactly what it is. It is the consequence of one's aim ... the nonessential filtered out by the requirements of the aim. It is that body of knowledge the learning of which would have one lose sight of one's aim. Consequently it is hazardous to set up the broad aim of eliminating ignorance, for then one pursues knowledge indiscriminately. And because there are limits of time and resource, one will always have a fair degree of ignorance in any event, only now one has not the filter with which to receive only the most valuable knowledge and to the utmost of one's capacity. It follows then that if one has the broad and necessarily indistinct aim of wisdom, one had better find another aim ... a complementary and specific task whose requirements filter out nonessential knowledge.

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