Quotes About Inquiry

Voltaire once wrote, "Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers." Sir

Most human beings I've met have a rather negative opinion of science. They think it is dull and abstruse, possibly even dangerous. But everyone, even on EARTH, is a scientist, really, whether he realizes it or not. Anyone who has ever watched and wondered how a bird flies, or a leaf unfurls, or concluded anything on the basis of his own observations, is a scientist. Science is a part of life.

So, you'd rather just regurgitate what these books tell you than know what really happened? Exactly. No quest for truth? Where's your spirit of exploration? You never went to college, did you?

In ancient Greece, skeptics were those who thought, not those who scoffed.

One shouldn't be too inquisitive in life Either about God's secrets or one's wife. You'll find God's plenty all you could desire; Of the remainder, better not enquire.

And Seneca says, 'Whosoever would have wisdom shall disdain no man, but he shall gladly teach what he knows, without presumption or pride, and of such things as he does not know, he shall not be ashamed to learn them, and shall inquire of lesser folk than himself.

There are those that look at things the way they are, and ask why? I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?

What we want to see is the child in pursuit of the knowledge not the knowledge in pursuit of the child.

Some men see things as they are and ask why. Others dream things that never were and ask why not.

Don't just teach your children to read… Teach them to question what they read. Teach them to question everything.

What wine goes with Captain Crunch?

scepticism, as we know, can never be thoroughly applied, else life would come to a standstill

I went into science a great deal myself at one time; but I saw it would not do. It leads to everything; you can let nothing alone.

T]he whole undertaking of philosophical inquiry requires a prior understanding of the conceptual system in which the undertaking is set. That is an empirical job for cognitive science and cognitive semantics. ... Unless this job is done, we will not know whether the answers philosophers give to their questions are a function of the conceptualization built into the questions themselves.

I always wonder when it was that I was embraced.

Any genuine philosophy leads to action and from action back again to wonder, to the enduring fact of mystery.

I am amazed; until the day I die I shall wonder how Whittaker Chambers got into my house to use my typewriter.

'Who are we?' And to me that's the essential question that's always been in science fiction. A lot of science fiction stories are - at their very best - evocations of that question. When we look up at the night sky and wonder, 'Is there anyone else out there?' we're also asking who we are we in relation to them.

You wonder about it and wonder how will I make an instrument that can handle this kind of a problem.

As neither of these two great research scientists was able to find the solution to the mystery, it is small wonder that none of their contemporaries were able to do so either.

I don't have a problem believing in God and Jesus. But in Genesis one has to wonder about these sentences that just go on and end without finishing. The thought is unfinished. Where did Adam go? What is he doing? Hello? There has to be some pages missing.

It's human nature to wonder.

Closeness to animals creates the desire to understand them, and not just a little piece of them, but the whole animal. It makes us wonder what goes on in their heads even though we fully realize that the answer can only be approximated.

I just wondered how things were put together.