Quotes About Questioning

But Charlie, Charlie, how can we ever really know anything? Charlie, what or who is God?

I was a Christian when I was young and didn't know any better.

I think my films are always quite self-reflexive and always question 'why am I doing this, is this the right way to do it, what is cinema for, does it have a purpose?'

I think we should all be proud that we are living in a country where we can question those we put in power because, at the end of the day, they work for every citizen.

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.

I'm used to always being different, in any context. People always want to know how I grew up, so I just say I grew up Muslim. That's the truth. Two Muslim girls can write me two extremely different letters - and they do. Some are very supportive, and some question what I do.

In so far as I have any beliefs, I suppose I'm like that old Peggy Lee song, 'Is That All There Is?' I want to believe there's something else going on, but what that something else is I don't pretend to know.

I didn't even have that many close LGBT friends or anything like that, but I suppose it was growing up and becoming aware of how you are in a cultural landscape that is blatantly homophobic... you turn around and say, 'Why did I grow up in a homophobic place? Why did I grow up in a misogynistic place?'

I have always been the kid who's asked 'Why?' In my faith, you're just supposed to have faith. But I was always like 'why?'

I'm not sure I'm adult yet.

Shrines! Shrines! Surely you don't believe in the gods. What's your argument? Where's your proof?

As children we were bombarded by competing answers. Church says one thing, school another. Now as adults it's no surprise that if we discuss the nature of it all, we generally spout some combination of the two, depending on our individual inclination and mood.

What might we learn from lines of research that are off the beaten track? They check accepted ideas, always a good thing, and there is the chance nature has prepared yet another surprise for us.

It will come as no surprise that I would count Nietzsche the perspectivist - he who questioned not only the possibility but the value of Truth - as the enemy. There will be even fewer surprises that I would reject the Dionysian Nietzsche, the celebrant of transgressive desire.

I think so many people tend to think of faith as blind adherence to a dogma or unquestioned surrender to an authority figure, and the result is losing self-respect and losing our own sense of what is true. And I don't think of faith in those terms at all.

And did you get what you wanted from this life,...?

What is he?' 'What would you have him be?

Quite often we are led to aporia, an impasse, unable to proceed a step further. Socrates is almost always there, but even he is only a supporting character. The starring role is given to the philosophical question. It is the philosophical question that is supposed to take center stage, cracking us open to an entirely new variety of experience.

One of my goals in life is to become truly rabbinical, to be able to answer closed questions with open questions, to have the internal authority to be a good gatekeeper when intruders approach, and to at least remember to ask, "Why are you asking that?

We think we tell stories, but stories often tell us, tell us to love or to hate, to see or to be blind. Often, too often, stories saddle us, ride us, whip us onward, tell us what to do, and we do it without questioning. The task of learning to be free requires learning to hear them, to question them, to pause and hear silence, to name them, and then to become the storyteller.

Alguna vez las revoluciones fueron lo que pensamos que serían?

Jewish tradition holds that some questions are more significant than their answers.

Sometimes I wonder if any of us are cut out for the lives we lead.

Der Sturm klärt den trübsten Himmel auf. Nicht allein unser Charakter und noch weniger die Welt, in die wir hineingeboren werden, sind unser Schicksal. Im Hinterfragen und nicht im Glauben an eine Fügung finden wir Selbstvergewisserung.