QUESTION QUOTES
quotations about questions
Questions give us no rest. We know not why our curse makes us seek we know not what, ever and ever. But we cannot resist it. It whispers to us that there are great things on this earth of ours, and that we must know them.
AYN RAND
Anthem
Everyone's sleeping through life
Afraid that their questions
Just might have answers
LINKIN PARK
"Walking in Circles"
The best answer to a question is putting the foot into the stirrup.
ANTAR
attributed, Day's Collacon
A question is a trap, and an answer your foot in it.
JOHN STEINBECK
Travels with Charley: In Search of America
Every question possessed a power that did not lie in the answer.
ELIE WIESEL
Night
Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.
RAINER MARIA RILKE
Letters to a Young Poet
Unanswered questions aren't threats; they're challenges and catalysts.
COLIN WRIGHT
attributed, Pinterest
Wisdom is understanding when to ask questions.
BRIAN HERBERT & KEVIN J. ANDERSON
Dune: House Harkonnen
Pose your questions to people and you will get countless useless answers.
DEJAN STOJANOVIC
The Sun Watches the Sun
If the present Congress errs in too much talking, how can it be otherwise in a body to which the people send one hundred and fifty lawyers, whose trade it is to question everything, yield nothing, and talk by the hour?
THOMAS JEFFERSON
Memoirs of Thomas Jefferson
Freedom is the right to question and change the established way of doing things.
RONALD REAGAN
speech at Moscow State University, May 31, 1988
If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers.
THOMAS PYNCHON
Gravity's Rainbow
Where were answers to the truly deep questions? Religion promised those, though always in vague terms, while retreating from one line in the sand to the next. Don't look past this boundary, they told Galileo, then Hutton, Darwin, Von Neumann, and Crick, always retreating with great dignity before the latest scientific advance, then drawing the next holy perimeter at the shadowy rim of knowledge.
DAVID BRIN
Kiln People
It is really quite impossible to be affirmative about anything which one refuses to question; one is doomed to remain inarticulate about anything which one hasn't, by an act of the imagination, made one's own.
JAMES BALDWIN
Notes of a Native Son
Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable. How many hours are there in a mile? Is yellow square or round? Probably half the questions we ask -- half our great theological and metaphysical problems -- are like that.
C. S. LEWIS
A Grief Observed
He who asks a question remains a fool for five minutes. He who does not ask remains a fool forever.
CHINESE PROVERB
A question is not just there to be answered. It is also there to answer.
ANONYMOUS
Your questions are false if you already know the answer.
JOSÉ SARAMAGO
The Stone Raft
Questioning the ostensibly unquestionable premises of our way of life is arguably the most urgent of services we owe our fellow humans and ourselves.
ZYGMUNT BAUMAN
Globalization: The Human Consequences
Philosophy is to be studied, not for the sake of any definite answers to its questions, since no definite answers can, as a rule, be known to be true, but rather for the sake of the questions themselves; because these questions enlarge our conception of what is possible, enrich our intellectual imagination and diminish the dogmatic assurance which closes the mind against speculation; but above all because, through the greatness of the universe which philosophy contemplates, the mind is also rendered great, and becomes capable of that union with the universe which constitutes its highest good.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
The Problems of Philosophy