Questioning
- An answer is always a form of death.--John Fowles (The Magus)
- At home, parents utter eighteen negative statements for every positive one--usually to an inquisitive child who wants to know how something works.--Charles 'Chic' Thompson (What a Great Idea!)
- ... be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.--Rainer Maria Rilke
- A child can ask questions that a wise man cannot answer.--Unknown
- Children ask better questions than adults. "May I have a cookie?" "Why is the sky blue?" and "What does a cow say?" are far more likely to elicit a cheerful response than "Where's your manuscript?" Why haven't you called?" and "Who's your lawyer?"--Fran Lebowitz
- Clever people seem not to feel the natural pleasure of bewilderment, and are always answering questions when the chief relish of a life is to go on asking them.--Frank Moore Colby ("Simple Simon" The Colby Essays, v.1)
- Constant and frequent questioning is the first key to wisdom … For through doubting we are led to inquire, and by inquiry we perceive the truth.-~Peter Abelard
- The creative individual has the capacity to free himself from the web of social pressures in which the rest of us are caught. He is capable of questioning the assumptions that the rest of us accept.--John W. Gardner
- Every scientific fulfillment raises new questions; it asks to be surpassed and outdated.--Max Weber (Methodology of the Social Sciences)
- The first key to wisdom is this - constant and frequent questioning … for by doubting we are led to question and by questioning we arrive at the truth.-- Peter Abelard
- He who knows all the answers has not been asked all the questions.--Confucius
- I don't pretend we have all the answers. But the questions are certainly worth thinking about..--Arthur C. Clarke
- I keep six honest serving men
(They taught me all I knew);
Their names are What and Why and When
And How and Where and Who.--Rudyard Kipling ("The Elephant's Child," Just-So Stories)
- I learned, when hit by loss, to ask the right question: "What next?" instead of "Why me?" . . . Whenever I am willing to ask "What is necessary next?" I have moved ahead. Whenever I have taken no for a final answer I have stalled and gotten stuck.--Julia Cameron
- If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers.--Thomas Pynchon (Gravity’s Rainbow)
- If we would have new knowledge, we must get a whole world of new questions.--Susanne K. Langer
- If you don't ask "why this?" often enough, somebody will ask "why you?"--Tom Hirshfield
- If you don't like the question that's asked, answer some other question.--Howard Baker
- The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reasons for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries to comprehend a little of this mystery every day. Never lose a holy curiosity.--Edmund Burke
- In this universe we are given two gifts: the ability to love, and the ability to ask questions. Which are, at the same time, the fires that warm us and the fires that scorch us.--Mary Oliver (Upstream)
- It is better to know some of the questions rather than to know all the answers.-James Thurber
- It is easier to judge a person's mental capacity by his questions than by his answers.--Le Duc de Levis (Maxims)
- It is not the correct thing to scold children for asking questions: this is about as reasonable as to scold them for breathing or thinking.--Florence Howe Hall (The Correct Thing)
- The job is to ask questions--it always was--and to ask them as inexorably as I can. And to face the absence of precise answers with a certain humility.--Arthur Miller
- The man who questions opinion is wise; the man who quarrels with fact is a fool.--Frank A Garbutt
- Maybe the question of whether people can access truth on their own is the real issue at the heart of the religion/science debate. ... I’m not sure we are arguing so much about how the world came to be as about who has a right to figure things out and whose conclusions we should trust.--Lisa Randall (Knocking on Heaven's Door)
- Millions saw the apple fall, but Newton was the one who asked why.--Bernard M. Baruch
- The moment we find the reason behind an emotion … the wall is breached, and the positive memories it has kept from us return too. That's why it pays to ask those painful questions. The answers can set you free.--Gloria Steinem
- The only interesting answers are those that destroy the questions.--Susan Sontag
- The only questions that really matter are the ones you ask yourself.--Ursula K. LeGuin (The Writer)
- A Persian philosopher, being asked by what method he had acquired so much knowledge, answered, "By not being prevented by shame from asking questions where I was ignorant."--Unknown
- The power to question is the basis of all human progress.--Indira Ghandi
- A prudent question is one-half of wisdom.--Francis Bacon
- Quality questions create a quality life. Successful people ask better questions, and as a result, get better answers.--Anthony Robbins
- Question everything. Every stripe, every star, every word spoken. Everything.--Ernest J. Gaines
- Questions focus our thinking. Ask empowering questions like: What's good about this? What's not perfect about it yet? What am I going to do next time? How can I do this and have fun doing it?--Charles Connolly
- Questions show the mind's range, and answers its subtlety.--Jospeh Joubert (Pensées)
- The questions that are beyond the reach of economics--the beauty, dignity, pleasure and durability of life--may be inconvenient but they are important.--John Kenneth Galbraith (The New Industrial State)
- Questions took people on quests; occasionally, questions actually led to answers.--Arthur J. Magida (Opening the Doors of Wonder)
- The questions which one asks oneself begin, at least, to illuminate the world, and become one's key to the experience of others.--James Baldwin
- The scientist is not a person who gives the right answers, he's one who asks the right questions.--Claude Levi-Strauss
- The scientific mind does not so much provide the right answers as ask the right questions.--Claude Levi-Strauss (The Raw and the Cooked)
- So if it's a child's role to ask questions, then it is an adult's role to answer them, and to answer them well. Because first questions are crucial.--Philip Gulley ("Young Children (Curiosity)")
- Solving one problem always uncovers new problems that we could not have discovered before; answering one question inevitably leads us to new and better questions.--LLN (from The Quotable Teacher, comp. by Howe)
- Sometimes we just have to accept there are things we can’t know. Why is your sister ill? Why did my father die?…Sometimes we think we should be able to know everything. But we can’t. we have to allow ourselves to see what there is to see, and we have to imagine.--David Almond (Skellig)
- The test of a good teacher is not how many questions he can ask his pupils that they will answer readily, but how many questions he inspires them to ask him which he finds it hard to answer.--Alice Wellington Rollins
- There are no foolish questions, and no man becomes a fool until he has stopped asking questions.--Charles Proteus Steinmetz
- There are no right answers to wrong questions.--Ursula K. Le Guin, (Planet of Exile)
- There aren't any embarrassing questions--just embarrassing answers.--Carl Rowen (New Yorker Dec. 7, 1963)
- There is frequently more to be learned from the unexpected questions of a child than the discourses of men, who talk in a road, according to the notions they have borrowed and the prejudices of their education.--John Locke (Something Concerning Education)
- ‘Tis not every question that deserves an answer.--Thomas Fuller (Gnomologia)
- To question a wise man is the beginning of wisdom.--German Proverb
- Truth replies only when first hearing sincere questions, and how few it hears.--Vernon Howard
- The uncreative mind can spot wrong answers, but it takes a very creative mind to spot wrong questions.--Antony Jay
- The way a question is asked limits and disposes the way in which any answer to it - right or wrong - may be given.--Susanne K. Langer
- We are closer to God when we are asking questions than when we think we have the answers.-—Abraham Joshua Heschel
- We have to remember that what we observe is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning.--Werner Heisenberg
- We learn more by looking for the answer to a question and not finding it than we do from learning the answer itself.--Lloyd Alexander
- What we need to acknowledge, now more than ever, is that we do not know everything. We cannot know everything. Knowledge changes.... The only thing we can count on to see us through an uncertain future is our ability to ask questions.--Andrea Batista Schlesinger (the Death of "Why?")
- When a child asks you something, answer him, for goodness' sake. But don't make a production of it. Children are children, but they can spot an evasion quicker than adults, and evasion simply muddles 'em.--Harper Lee
- When we have arrived at the question, the answer is already near.--Ralph Waldo Emerson (Journal, April 1852)
- You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions.-- Naguib Mahfouz
- You don't want a million answers as much as you want a few forever questions. The questions are diamonds you hold in the light. Study a lifetime and you see different colors from the same jewel.--Richard Bach (Running from Safety)
- You have to ask the questions and attempt to find answers, because you're right in the middle of it; they've put you in charge--and during a hurricane too.--Sheila Ballantyne
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