There are things we know by heart.

And things we don’t.

The things we know best are the things we haven't been taught.

There are things one prefers not to think about but that doesn't mean one forgets about them.

We rarely recognize the extent in which our conscious estimates of what is worth while and what is not, are due to standards of which we are not conscious at all. But in general it may be said that the things which we take for granted without inquiry or reflection are just the things which determine our conscious thinking and decide our conclusions.

Evidence shows that we do much less thinking than we believe we do — except, of course, when we think about it.

What you think about when you don't have to think, shows what you really are.

Normally, we do not so much look at things as overlook them.

By thinking through his actual options, Ian stumbled onto a twentysomething version of what psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas calls the unthought known. Unthought knowns are those things we know about ourselves but forget somehow. These are the dreams we have lost sight of or the truths we sense but don’t say out loud. We may be afraid of acknowledging the unthought known to other people because we are afraid of what they might think. Even more often, we fear what the unthought known will then mean for ourselves and our lives. Ian pretended that not knowing what to do was the hard part when, somewhere inside, I think he knew that making a choice about something is when the real uncertainty begins. The more terrifying uncertainty is wanting something but not knowing how to get it. It is working toward something even though there is no sure thing. When we make choices, we open ourselves up to hard work and failure and heartbreak, so sometimes it feels easier not to know, not to choose, and not to do. But it isn’t.

But we don't want to think. It's exhausting enough without that. We didn't think when we did the Ginkgo Pictures, at all. Afterwards we found out all this stuff about them.

We imagined we knew everything the other thought, even when we did not necessarily want to know it, but in fact, I have come to see, we knew not the smallest fraction of what there was to know.

Why do we know what we know and why don't we know what we don't know? What should we know and what shouldn't we know? How might we know differently?

We know less when we erroneously think we know than when we recognize that we don’t.

Almost never do they realize that they, too, 'know things' they have learned in their relations with the world.

We may with advantage at times forget what we know.