Quotes about questioning

Walt Whitman - Song of Myself

A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full handsHow could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any morethan he.

Bryant McGill - Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life

Sex is a form of exploration it is asking questions and getting answer

Colleen Hoover - Slammed

Regret is counterproductive. It's looking back on a past that you can't change. Questioning things as they occur can prevent regret in the future.

Friedrich Nietzsche -

He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.

Lionel Suggs -

People need to stop accepting the evidence of reality, and start questioning it.

Nicholas Sparks - The Last Song

I mean talk. Never forget that God is your friend. And like all friends, He longs to hear what's been happening in your life. Good or bad, whether it's been full of sorrow or anger, and even when you're questioning why terrible things have to happen. So I talk withhim.

Rainer Maria Rilke - Letters to a Young Poet

I beg you, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

Criss Jami - Killosophy

As a writer of philosophy, it's good to ask oneself, 'Will I still believe this a week from now, or months, or even years?

Osho -

Remain in wonder if you want the mysteries to open up for you. Mysteries never open up for those who go on questioning. Questioners sooner or later end up in a library. Questioners sooner or later end up with scriptures, because scriptures are full of answers.And answers are dangerous, they kill your wonder.

Dwight D. Eisenhower -

Never question another man's motive. His wisdom, yes, but not his motives.

Gautama Buddha -

Yes, Kālāmas, it is proper that your have doubt, that you have perplexity, for a doubt has arisen in a matter which is doubtful. Now, look you Kālāmas, do not be led by reports, or traditions, or hearsay. Be not led by the authority of religious texts, not by the delight in speculative opinions, nor by seeming possibilities, not by the idea: 'this is our teacher'. But, O Kālāmas, when you know for yourself that certain things are unwholesome, and wrong, and bad, then give them up... And when you

Stephen M. Irwin - The Dead Path

I need to ask, are you afraid of spiders?"Nicholas blinked, suddenly caught off guard, "Yes, I'm afraid of spiders.""Were you always?""What are you, a psychiatrist?"Pritam took a breath. He could feel Laine's eyes on him, appraising his line of questioning."Is it possible that the trauma of losing your best friend as a child and the trauma of losing your wife as an adult and the trauma of seeing Laine's husband take his life in front of you just recently..." Pritam shrugged and raised his palms,

Shannon L. Alder -

Regardless of your faith, you can never escape uncertainty.

Criss Jami - Killosophy

Doubt is a question mark; faith is an exclamation point. The most compelling, believable, realistic stories have included them both.

Stephen Batchelor - Confession of a Buddhist Atheist

The problem with certainty is that it is static; it can do little but endlessly reassert itself. Uncertainty, by contrast, is full of unknowns, possibilities, and risks. (65)

Jennifer Niven - American Blonde

But what if hope had a threshold? What if there was a limit to it? What if each of us was only given a certain amount and mine was used up?

Anna B. Doe - Lost & Found

It’s not like you have anything to lose anymore.”My fingers stop at my thumb ring while Sienna’s words echo in my head. Do I have anything to lose? I mean, after all I did, everything I fought against. I slowly turn the ring on my thumb. This simple band has, like all of my rings, one word engraved on it. Will anything change if I go to him? After all, I did lose everything that is important.It’s funny, actually, after the months I spent pushing him away. I thought, like the silly girl I probabl

Jean-Yves Leloup - Compassion and Meditation: The Spiritual Dynamic between Buddhism and Christianity

Sometimes the best answer to a question is another question. Is it not by asking questions that we stimulate each other to reach more deeply into our own source and, thereby, approach the Source, both together and in our different ways? (7)

David Dark -

And for the sake of humility--a characteristic crucial to sacred questioning we might do well to confess that we're capable at any moment of such bad religion ourselves.

Alain de Botton - Art as Therapy

Curiosity takes ignorance seriously, and is confident enough to admit when it does not know. It is aware of not knowing, and it sets out to do something about it

Bryant McGill - Voice of Reason

One of the most important things one can do in life is to brutally question every single thing you are taught.

Josh Hanagarne - and the Power of Family

Test everything that can be tested. As soon as you think you know something, that's when you stop questioning it. Understanding kills curiosity. Understanding kills progress.

Heather Small -

To question is to grow.

Dave Logan - Tribal Leadership: Leveraging Natural Groups to Build a Thriving Organization

Alignment, to us, means bringing pieces into the same line - the same direction. The metaphor is that a magnet will make pieces of iron point toward it. Agreement is shared intellectual understanding. Tribes are clusters of people, and people are complex and nonrational at times. If a tribe is united only by agreement, as soon as times change, agreement has to be reestablished. If people learn new ideas or see a problem from a new perspective, they no longer agree, so tribes based on agreement o

Pearl Zhu - Leadership Master: Five Digital Trends to Leap Leadership Maturity

Framing the right problem is equally or even more important than solving it.

Pearl Zhu - Leadership Master: Five Digital Trends to Leap Leadership Maturity

A set of excellent questions themselves is perhaps like a poem, both philosophical and intellectual.

Pearl Zhu - Leadership Master: Five Digital Trends to Leap Leadership Maturity

The art of questioning is to ignite innovative thinking; the science of questioning is to frame system thinking, with the progressive pursuit of better solutions.

Chris Kraus - I Love Dick

Female monsters take things as personally as they really are. They study facts. Even if rejection makes them feel like the girl who's not invited to the party, they have to understand the reasons why.... Every question, once it's formulated, is a paradigm, contains its own internal truth. We have to stop diverting ourselves with false questions. And I told Warren: I aim to be a female monster too.

Theresa Dedmon - Born to Create: Stepping Into Your Supernatural Destiny

One day a young daughter was watching her mother make a roast for the family. She watched as her mother cut off the two ends of the roast and put it in the pan, along with the potatoes and vegetables. Perplexed by the procedure, the child asked why her mother cut off both ends. The mother smiled and answered, “Because that’s the way grandma always did it.” The next time the child saw her grand- ma, she asked her why she did this. Her grandma answered that she had cut off the ends of her roasts a

Criss Jami - Healology

Only the man who thinks himself a fool is as wise as he thinks.

David Dark -

What the pundits call wishy-washiness, the Bible calls repentance.

Kelli Russell Agodon - Hourglass Museum

As I go under, I wonder if there’s a reason for art?

Bert McCoy -

I teach what compels us to question our reality

Mike Klepper -

Of everything we must first ask: is it real or not?

Raheel Farooq -

The most ridiculous activity of human mind is questioning. Cognition of reality surpasses both question and answer, however ingenious.

Shannon A. Thompson - Minutes Before Sunset

I wasn’t sure what was worse: being oblivious or living within reality. (Eric)

Ka Chinery - Perceptions from the Photon Frequency: The Ascended Version

The deterioration of individual thought has resulted in a morbidly dependent society that has lost its sense of personal responsibility and accountability. Society has devolved into a state of thoughtless stagnancy, accepting the tyrannical laws and deleterious social structures without question or reason. This is the downfall of the human race, and the roadblock to Divinity.

Marty Rubin -

My teachers told me: Question everything; take nothing for granted. I question nothing, I take everything for granted.

Garth Nix - Sabriel

Does the walker choose the path, or the path the walker?

Shelley Noble - Beach Colors

Life was about loss. One minute standing on the promise of your dreams, then free-falling backward into nothingness. Is this what it meant to grow old? To gradually be stripped of all you cared about. And then what? Were you supposed to spend the rest of your life, dreaming about the past while you waited to die? Or did you start a new life, set the cycle in motion once again. Take the chance of losing that, too. And if you did, what happened to the old life? Did it die away from lack of attenti

Unarine Ramaru -

I would like to believe that logic is questioning your reasoning to reach a conclusion.

Raphael Zernoff -

Most of beliefs that are commonly known as scientific facts are based on various theories, which have never been validated. Many of them will never be. Question your beliefs. Choose what promotes love and unity.

Jess C. Scott - Bedmates

I didn’t know if I should put my faith in God or Satan. Was there really a difference at the end of the day, when we were all going to be dead souls anyway?

Kimberly D. Acquaviva - LGBTQ-Inclusive Hospice and Palliative Care: A Practical Guide to Transforming Professional Practice

If your organization is not formally committed to a policy of nondiscrimination based on sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression or gender presentation in its employment practices, you should not expect lesbian,gay, bisexual, transgender, gender-nonconforming, queer, and/or questioning patients and families to feel safe seeking out your services.

Criss Jami - Killosophy

The first ingredient to being wrong is to claim that you are right. Geniuses have a knack for raising new questions. Hence by the public they are either admired for their creativity or, even more commonly so, detested for disturbing the daily peace of mind.

Radhika Mukherjee - Our Particular Shadows

Did you know, that one night; one moonless, clear, shining night; with the shadowy silhouettes of trees crisp against the star-filled sky – I, on the high, level terrace of my flat, stretched out my hand! Against all odds and possibilities of unbelief and grief – a life of searchings, discontent, and a nagging sense of unreality… A spider-web intuition of a spread-out, intricate illusion that wilfully withheld the truth from me.

Praveen Chenna -

Questions to be answered by questions itself when you wanna ignore it in first place. It’s better to be diplomatic rather than Ignorant.

Raheel Farooq -

Good questions are to be appreciated, not answered.

A.J. Darkholme - Rise of the Morningstar

The questions we don’t ask become the puzzles we don’t solve.

J. Ross Clara - Citations: A Brief Anthology

Explanations are for cowards.

Elie Wiesel - Night

He explained to me with great insistence that every question posessed a power that did not lie in the answer.

Eraldo Banovac -

Designing well-written tests still remains a challenging task. Some complex questions may lose clarity causing difficulties in providing meaningful answers. Basically, questions should be designed in such a way that each well-prepared student can easily give a correct answer.

Eraldo Banovac -

Aiming to check a new test's difficulty, ask your assistants to solve the test prior to the actual exam. If the results are not satisfactory, reevaluate all ambiguous questions and correct them.

Cat Clarke - Undone

I can just close my eyes and let myself fall into oblivion. Maybe I'll hit the exact same rocks and my blood will mingle with his and maybe there's some kind of life after death and he's waiting for me there with his hand outstretched just like mine.But...I don't want to die.I try to twist my body backwards and pain shoots up my neck.It's too late.I chose life too late.

Shannon A. Thompson - Minutes Before Sunset

I don’t believe that," I said, and he raised his brow beneath his shaggy hair. "I never asked you to.” (Jessica)

Ta-Nehisi Coates - Between the World and Me

My mother and father were always pushing me away from secondhand answers—even the answers they themselves believed. I don’t know that I have ever found any satisfactory answers of my own. But every time I ask it, the question is refined. That is the best of what the old heads meant when they spoke of being “politically conscious”—as much a series of actions as a state of being, a constant questioning, questioning as ritual, questioning as exploration rather than the search for certainty.

Rasheed Ogunlaru -

People will ask you the question 'how is life treating you?' But my question is 'how are you treating life?' On that your happiness rests

Shelly Thacker -

Mayhap it was not wise to question God's plans; mayhap he had been meant to live, to seek this justice, to serve some purpose. The past was the past. And the future...

Rob Liano -

Don't question what you don't understand unless you're asking questions seeking to understand.

Natasha Tsakos -

It’s about running wild in a field of exclamation points chasing question marks

Nassim Nicholas Taleb - Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

A central argument is never a summary. It is more like a generator.

Thomas L. Friedman - The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century

A Nobel Prize winner was asked how he became a scientist. He said that every day after school, his mother would ask him not what he learned but whether he asked a good question today. That, he said, was how he became a scientist.

Hal B. Gregersen -

Most students have to do some work to resuscitate their childlike curiosity. The best way to do that is to start asking questions again—lots of them.

Matthew Lee Anderson -

The path between faith and understanding demands both obedience and inquiry. If Christianity is true, if it goes to the center of the universe and explains every stone and leaf the way we Christians think, then the more we search it out and explore it the more reasons we will have to be confident in that truth.

Marcus Aurelius - Meditations

As far as you can, get into the habit of asking yourself in relation to any action taken by another: "What is his point of reference here?" But begin with yourself: examine yourself first.

Tom Jubert / Jonas Kyratzes -

They say "doubt everything," but I disagree. Doubt is useful in small amounts, but too much of it leads to apathy and confusion. No, don't doubt everything. QUESTION everything. That's the real trick. Doubt is just a lack of certainty. If you doubt everything, you'll doubt evolution, science, faith, morality, even reality itself - and you'll end up with nothing, because doubt doesn't give anything back. But questions have answers, you see. If you question everything, you'll find that a lot of wh

Toba Beta - My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut

Questioning anything within doubt, will just bring mind to no certainty.

Elton Trueblood - Abraham Lincoln: Lessons in Spiritual Leadership

He was too perplexed to please the conventional and too reverent. to please the infidels.

Saurabh Gupta Earth5R -

Our lives are cluttered by complexities and that leads to problems. Genius is the one solves simple problems which seem complicated.

Dick Allen - Zen Master Poems

Question everything, even the question mark, that shepherd's crook floating in the air above that small round rockIf you - stubbornly - still wish to be unhappy,maybe you can grasp it.

Krista Tippett - Speaking of Faith

The spiritual energy of our time, as I've come to understand it, is not a rejection of the rational disciplines by which we've ordered our common life for many decades - law, politics, economics, science. It is, rather, a realization that these disciplines have a limited scope. They can't ask ultimate questions...they don't begin to tell us how to order our astonishments, what matters in life, what matters in a death, how to love, how we can be of service to each other. These are the kinds of qu

Kim Wright -

Siri, what is the meaning of life? She answers: To think about questions like this. Huh. Good one.

Bryant McGill - Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life

The starting point to freedom is to begin questioning the cultural narrative you have been sold.

Natasha Tsakos -

Running wild in a field of exclamations, chasing question marks

H.G. Wells - The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman

Her mind escaped between them, and went exploring for itself through the great gaps they had made in the simple obedient assumptions of her girlhood. That question originally put in Paradise, "Why shouldn't we?" came into her mind and stayed there. It is a question that marks a definite stage in the departure from innocence. Things that had seemed opaque and immutable appeared translucent and questionable. She began to read more and more in order to learn things and get a light upon things, and

Raymond Carver - What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

There was a time when I thought I loved my first wife more than life itself. But now I hate her guts. I do. How do you explain that? What happened to that love? What happened to it, is what I'd like to know. I wish someone could tell me.

Shannon A. Thompson - November Snow

I saw something I could never forget. I saw lifetimes of acknowledgement, fear, wisdom, questioning, and understanding in a child's eye. It was the worst thing I would ever witness.

Paul Henri Thiry d'Holbach - System of Nature

If a faithful account was rendered of man's ideas upon the Divinity, he would be obliged to acknowledge, that for the most part the word Gods has been used to express the concealed, remote, unknown causes of the effects he witnessed; that he applies this term when the spring of natural, the source of known causes ceases to be visible: as soon as he loses the thread of these causes, or as soon as his mind can no longer follow the chain, he solves the difficulty, terminates his research, by ascrib

Thomas Hardy - The Mayor of Casterbridge

And all this while the subtle-souled girl asking herself why she was born, why sitting in a room, and blinking at the candle; why things around her had taken the shape they wore in preference to every other possible shape.

John Gardner - Grendel

What do you call the Hrothgar-wrecker when Hrothgar has been wrecked?

R. N. Prasher -

Wind is on fire" - beautiful words. What causes the fire, what enhances it, and what finally extinguishes it by itself or by bringing in rainclouds, gets identified with it. Do breath and life have the same relationship with each other!

Bill Nye -

Every question leads to new answers, new discoveries, and new smarter questions.

Raphael Zernoff -

Find your freedom through questioning everything you hear and see. Be free to choose, from all possible perspectives and opinions, what builds love and harmony.

Criss Jami - Killosophy

If I love a dose of (good) theology or philosophy, I probably also love discipline, improvement, wisdom, and challenges. If I hate it, I am probably too comfortable and proud to try to question myself.

Manal Al-Sharif - Daring to Drive: A Saudi Woman’s Awakening

Gradually, I realized that the ideas I had embraced and defended blindly all my life represented a singular, and highly radical, point of view. I began to question everything.

Bertrand Russell -

In all affairs it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.

Alain de Botton -

It is not only the hostility of others that may prevent us from questioning the status quo. Our will to doubt can be just as powerfully sapped by an internal sense that societal conventions must have a sound basis, even if we are not sure exactly what this may be, because they have been adhered to by a great many people for a long time. It seems implausible that our society could be gravely mistaken in its beliefs, and at the same time, that we would be alone in noticing the fact. We stifle our

D.A. Simpson -

If you have never truly questioned what you believe, I would question whether you truly believe it.

Eugène Ionesco - Fragments of a Journal

Nothing is mightier than our why, nothing stands above it, because in the end there is a why to which no answer is possible. In fact, from why to why, from one step to the next, you get to the end of things. And it is only by travelling from one why to the next, as far as the why that is unanswerable, that man attains the level of the creative principle, facing the infinite, equal to the infinite maybe. So long as he can answer the why he gets lost, he loses his way among things. 'Why this?' I a

Werner Heisenberg -

What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.

Morris Raphael Cohen -

Liberalism is an attitude rather than a set of dogmas - an attitude that insists upon questioning all plausible and self-evident propositions, seeking not to reject them but to find out what evidence there is to support them rather than their possible alternatives.

Marty Rubin -

Always doubting and questioning everything strikes me as a very miserable way to live.

Richard Dawkins - Science in the Soul: Selected Writings of a Passionate Rationalist

The habit of questioning authority is one of the most valuable gifts that a book, or a teacher, can give a young would-be scientist.

Samantha Harvey -

What I always liked about Socrates was his insistence on questioning things for the sake of reaching some sort of clarity - even if it is only clarity about the gaps in our knowledge.

Peter Abelard -

By doubting we are led to question, by questioning we arrive at the truth.

Niall Ferguson -

As a teacher, my strategy is to encourage questioning. I'm the least authoritarian professor you'll ever meet.