«اِلْعِلْمِ بِالشِّيءْ وَلَا الْجَهْلْ بُهْ»

The saying holds that awareness of something is always preferable to being unaware of it. Its 'X and not Y' structure implies the preference without stating 'better'. Even when knowledge is never put into practice, holding it brings no loss, so learning carries no real risk.

Ignorance, by contrast, leaves a person exposed. A day may come when that very matter must be understood, handled, or taken up as work, and someone who never learned it will be caught unprepared.

Use it to encourage learning a skill, fact, or procedure that seems irrelevant today, to justify one's own curiosity, or to answer someone asking why you bothered to learn something. It expresses a broad preference for awareness, not the claim that knowledge is power.