Questioning Quotes

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 answer, 'because that," and from one explanation to the next I reach the point where no explanation is satisfying, from one explanation to the next I reach zero, the absolute, where truth and falsehood are equivalent, become equal to one another, are identified with one another, cancel each other out in face of the absolute nothing. And so we can understand how all action, all choice, all history is justified, at the end of time, by a final cancelling-out. The why goes beyond everything. Nothing goes beyond the why, not even the nothing, because the nothing is not the explanation; when silence confronts us, the question to which there is no answer rings out in the silence. That ultimate why, that great why is like a light that blots out everything, but a blinding light; nothing more can be made out, there is nothing more to make out.

Eugène Ionesco

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.

Richard Dawkins

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

Marty Rubin

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.

Eraldo Banovac

Explanations are for cowards.

J. Ross Clara

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

A.J. Darkholme

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

Praveen Chenna

Good questions are to be appreciated, not answered.

Raheel Farooq

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

Elie Wiesel

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.

Radhika Mukherjee

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.

Kimberly D. Acquaviva

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.

Criss Jami

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.

Raphael Zernoff

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?

Jess C. Scott

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

Unarine Ramaru

Top question of the dying: "What made me sick?

Steven Magee

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.

Marcus Aurelius

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.

Matthew Lee Anderson

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.

Hal B. Gregersen

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.

Thomas L. Friedman

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

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

Natasha Tsakos

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 what we believe is untrue...but you might also discover that some things ARE true. You might discover what your own beliefs are. And then you'll question them again, and again, eliminating flaws, discovering lies, until you get as close to the truth as you can.Questioning is a lifelong process. That's precisely what makes it so unlike doubt. Questioning engages with reality, interrogating all it sees. Questioning leads to a constant assault on the intellectual status quo, where doubt is far more likely to lead to resigned acceptance. After all, when the possibility of truth is doubtful (excuse the pun), why not simply play along with the most convenient lie?Questioning is progress, but doubt is stagnation.

Tom Jubert / Jonas Kyratzes

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

Toba Beta

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

Saurabh Gupta Earth5R

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

Elton Trueblood

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

Kim Wright

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 questions religion arose to address and religions traditions are keepers of conversation across generations about them.

Krista Tippett

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.

Dick Allen

He could have killed me for the blunder— which really wasn’t my fault— but I was lucky , and he gave me another chance. The two officers who questioned him were also incredibly lucky for not having had any idea who it was they’d been questioning.

Floyd C. Forsberg

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

D.A. Simpson

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.

Manal Al-Sharif

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.

Criss Jami

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.

Raphael Zernoff

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 doubts, and follow the flock, because we cannot conceive of ourselves as pioneers of hitherto unknown difficult truths. It is for help in overcoming our meekness that we can turn to the philosopher.

Alain de Botton

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.

Bertrand Russell

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

Bill Nye

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 ascribing it to his gods; thus giving a vague definition to an unknown cause, at which either his idleness, or his limited knowledge, obliges him to stop. When, therefore, he ascribes to his gods the production of some phenomenon, the novelty or the extent of which strikes him with wonder, but of which his ignorance precludes him from unravelling the true cause, or which he believes the natural powers with which he is acquainted are inadequate to bring forth; does he, in fact, do any thing more than substitute for the darkness of his own mind, a sound to which he has been accustomed to listen with reverential awe?

Paul Henri Thiry d'Holbach

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.

Raymond Carver

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 less and less to pass the time. Ideas came to her that seemed at first strange altogether and then grotesquely justifiable and then crept to a sort of acceptance by familiarity. And a disturbing intermittent sense of a general responsibility increased and increased in her.You will understand this sense of responsibility which was growing up in Lady Harman's mind if you have felt it yourself, but if you have not then you may find it a little difficult to understand. You see it comes, when it comes at all, out of a phase of disillusionment. All children, I suppose, begin by taking for granted the rightness of things in general, the soundness of accepted standards, and many people are at least so happy that they never really grow out of this assumption. They go to the grave with an unbroken confidence that somewhere behind all the immediate injustices and disorders of life, behind the antics of politics, the rigidities of institutions, the pressure of custom and the vagaries of law, there is wisdom and purpose and adequate provision, they never lose that faith in the human household they acquired amongst the directed securities of home. But for more of us and more there comes a dissolution of these assurances; there comes illumination as the day comes into a candle-lit uncurtained room. The warm lights that once rounded off our world so completely are betrayed for what they are, smoky and guttering candles. Beyond what once seemed a casket of dutiful security is now a limitless and indifferent universe. Ours is the wisdom or there is no wisdom; ours is the decision or there is no decision. That burthen is upon each of us in the measure of our capacity. The talent has been given us and we may not bury it.

H.G.Wells

Running wild in a field of exclamations, chasing question marks

Natasha Tsakos

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

Bryant McGill

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.

Shannon A. Thompson

Misguided good men are more dangerous than honest bad men. It is because they are seen as good that, in and by good conscience, the mob will always, stubbornly back them without question.

Criss Jami

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.

Thomas Hardy

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.

Cat Clarke

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

Shannon A. Thompson

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...

Shelly Thacker

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

Rasheed Ogunlaru

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.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

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

Rob Liano

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

Alain de Botton

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

Garth Nix

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 attention?

Shelley Noble

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.

Ka Chinery

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

Shannon A. Thompson

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

Marty Rubin

I sure wasn't going to ask Aunt Sally, because if she told me once that getting your period was like a moth becoming a butterfly, she'd probably say that sexual intercourse was like a deer getting antlers or something.

Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

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

Raheel Farooq

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Questioning Quotes

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