quotations about questions
Everything in this world can volunteer some reply, what takes up time is posing the questions.
JOSÉ SARAMAGO
Baltasar and Blimunda
Never surrender a good question for a mere answer.
JANE HIRSHFIELD
"Living by Questions", Oprah
To stand in the midst of ... this whole marvelous uncertainty and rich ambiguity in existence without questioning, without trembling with the craving and the rapture of such questioning ... that is what I feel to be contemptible, and this is the feeling for which I look first in everybody. Some folly keeps persuading me that every human has this feeling just because he is human.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
attributed, The Gay Science
The answer is a mirror of the question.
BRIAN HERBERT & KEVIN J. ANDERSON
The Butlerian Jihad
No one has the answer: we are answer and question.
R. D. LAING
The Politics of Family and Other Essays
Ask me no questions, and I'll tell you no fibs.
OLIVER GOLDSMITH
She Stoops to Conquer
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
attributed, Reader's Digest, Volume 37, 1940
To really ask is to open the door to the whirlwind. The answer may annihilate the question and the questioner.
ANNE RICE
The Vampire Lestat
Charm is a way of getting the answer yes without ever having asked a clear question.
ALBERT CAMUS
The Fall
Ask not a foolish question in public.
STILPO
attributed, Day's Collacon
An able man is not ashamed to put questions both to the humble and the wise.
TSHANG
attributed, Day's Collacon
To a man full of questions make no answer at all.
PLATO
attributed, Day's Collacon
Why ... did so many people spend their lives not trying to find answers to questions -- not even thinking of questions to begin with? Was there anything more exciting in life than seeking answers?
ISAAC ASIMOV
Prelude to Foundation
Old questions are not answered--they only go out of fashion.
DONALD SCHÖN
attributed, Governing Health: The Politics of Health Policy
There are some questions that shouldn't be asked until a person is mature enough to appreciate the answers.
ANNE BISHOP
Daughter of the Blood
Whatever you eye falls on -- for it will fall on what you love -- will lead you to the questions of your life, the questions that are incumbent upon you to answer, because that is how the mind works in concert with the eye. The things of this world draw us where we need to go.
MARY ROSE O'REILLEY
The Barn at the End of the World: The Apprenticeship of A Quaker, Buddhist Shepherd
For a long time I was timid in the presence in learning, and I fancied that the insufficiency of the answers which I received was not its fault, but was owing to my own gross ignorance, but this thing was not a joke or a pastime with me, but the business of my life, and I was at last forced, willy-nilly, to the conclusion that these questions of mine were the only legitimate questions underlying all knowledge, and that it was not I that was in fault in putting them, but science in pretending to have an answer for them.
LEO TOLSTOY
A Confession
The power to question is the basis of all human progress.
INDIRA GANDHI
attributed, Misbehave: Speak Truth to Power
No question is so difficult to answer as that to which the answer is obvious.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
Our Theatres in the Nineties
Where the question is a jest, the fittest answer is a scoff.
ARCHIMEDES
attributed, Day's Collacon