Quotes About Inquiry

To choose a good book, look in an inquisitor's prohibited list.

Yes, there is happiness to be found in the mere contemplation of the deepest mysteries.

Poetry is but another form of inquiry into the nature of phenomena, using with its own unique procedures and tools.

An experienced reader uses the poem as an agent of inquiry. This makes poetry very exciting, unstable, and interactive.

Such simple questions as How many feet are in a mile? or What's the number of square feet in an acre? produce the not-so-simple answers of 5,280 and 43,560.

Every tradition forbids the asking of certain questions about what has really happened to you.

A total synthesis of all human knowledge will not result in huge libraries filled with books, in fantastic amounts of data stored on servers. There's no value any more in amount, in quantity, in explanation. For a total synthesis of human knowledge, use the interrogative.

that's the way of all good explanations. The better they are, the more questions they raise.

Joy in the universe, and keen curiosity about it all - that has been my religion.

Indeed, how can the mind by its own leading come to search out God's essence when it cannot even get to its own?

Mingled vanity and pride appear in this, that when miserable men do seek after God, instead of ascending higher than themselves as they ought to do, they measure him by their own carnal stupidity, and neglecting solid inquiry, fly off to indulge their curiosity in vain speculation.

The essence of God is rather to be adored than inquired into.

Science never gives up searching for truth, since it never claims to have achieved it.

A good question is never answered. It is not a bolt to be tightened into place but a seed to be planted and to bear more seed toward the hope of greening the landscape of idea.

A good question is never answered.

What have you taken from me, and from what have you taken me?

He looked up into Daily Alice's placid and certain face, wondering why every deepening of these daily mysteries left him less inclined to probe them. "The things that make us happy," he said, "make us wise.

Maybe every essay automatically is in some way experimental — less an outline traveling toward a foregone conclusion than an unmapped quest that has sprung from the word 'question'.

Americans don't want to think. They want to know.

Skepticism: the mark and even the pose of the educated mind.

wonder is the mother of all science.

Faith in the possibilities of continued and rigorous inquiry does not limit access to truth to any channel or scheme of things. It does not first say that truth is universal and then add there is but one road to it.

The most important factor in the training of good mental habits consists in acquiring the attitude of suspended conclusion, and in mastering the various methods of searching for new materials to corroborate or to refute the first suggestions that occur. To maintain the state of doubt and to carry on systematic and protracted inquiry ? these are the essentials of thinking.

We rarely recognize the extent in which our conscious estimates of what is worth while and what is not, are due to standards of which we are not conscious at all. But in general it may be said that the things which we take for granted without inquiry or reflection are just the things which determine our conscious thinking and decide our conclusions.