Quotes About Questioning

She had an immense curiosity about life, and was constantly staring and wondering.

For men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in their readiness to doubt.

But fortunately no shadow ever broke a rock, and one can ask himself why he lives a thousand times and yet never die.

Anxiously, he touched the lump on his head again, then felt his injured leg, groaning. "The whole affair is a mystery to me," he said. "Who would want to steal anything from me?" "Perhaps a thief...?" ventured Julius.

Several times I asked myself, "Can it be that I have overlooked something, that there is something which I have failed to understand? Is it not possible that this state of despair is common to everyone?" And I searched for an answer to my questions in every area of knowledge acquired by man. For a long time I carried on my painstaking search; I did not search casually, out of mere curiosity, but painfully, persistently, day and night, like a dying man seeking salvation. I found nothing.

Without knowing what I am and why I am here, life's impossible; and that I can't know, and so I can't live," Levin said to himself.

So he lived, not knowing and not seeing any chance of knowing what he was and for what purpose he had been placed in the word.

Rostov was not listening to the soldier. He looked at the snowflakes dancing above the fire and remembered the Russian winter with a warm, bright house, a fluffy fur coat, swift sleighs, a healthy body, and all the love and care of a family. "And why did I come here?" he wondered.

My brother's death: wise, good, serious, he fell ill while still a young man, suffered for more than a year, and died painfully, not understanding why he had lived and still less why he had to die. No theories could give me, or him, any reply to these questions during his slow and painful dying.

The question was summed up for him thus: "If I do not accept the answers Christianity gives to the problems of my life, what answers do I accept?

But does it make any difference now?" he thought. "And what will be there, and what has been done here? Why was I so sorry to part with life? There was something in this life I didn't and still don't understand...

What, indeed, had I done in all my thirty years of conscious life? Not only had I failed to live my life for the sake of all, but I had not even lived it for myself. I had lived as a parasite, and once I asked myself why I had lived, the answer I received was: for nothing.

But I am alive still. Now what's to be done? what's to be done?

What am I? And where am I? And why am I here?

While I doubted, I had hope; but now there is no hope left and all the same I doubt everything.

But I am alive still. Now what's to be done? what's to be done?" he said in despair.

When I doubted, there was hope; but now there is no hope and even so I doubt everything.

Without knowing what I am and why I am here, life is impossible.

You'll die and all will end. You'll die and know all, or cease asking.

Then these moments of perplexity began to recur oftener and oftener, and always in the same form. They were always expressed by the questions: What is it for? What does it lead to?

El error consistía en que había atribuido a la vida en general una respuesta dirigida sólo a mí. Me preguntaba qué era mi vida, y recibía por respuesta que era un mal y una absurdidad. Y ciertamente, mi existencia, consagrada a la complacencia de mis deseos, era absurda y mala, y la afirmación de que la vida es mala y absurda sólo se refería a la mía propia y no a la vida en general.

The answer was: "You'll die and all will end. You'll die and know all, or cease asking.

But why do his ears stick out so oddly? Did he have his hair cut?

He looked intently and inquiringly into his friend's eyes, evidently trying in vain to find the answer to some question.