Quotes About Inquiry

You force people to stop asking questions, and before you know it they have auctioned off the question mark, or sold it for scrap. No boldness. No good ideas for fixing what's broken in the land. Because if you happen to mention it's broken, you are automatically disqualified.

People ask without wanting to know.

As long as we won't commit to knowing everything, the presumption is we know nothing.

when you look into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you.

bring our own worlds to bear in foreign landscapes in order to clarify them for ourselves. It is hard to imagine that we could do otherwise. The risk we take is of finding our final authority in the metaphors rather than in the land. To inquire into the intricacies of a distant landscape, then, is to provoke thoughts about one's own interior landscape, and the familiar landscapes of memory. The land urges us to come around to an understanding of ourselves.

ONCE EINSTEIN SAW the needle of a compass at the age of four, he always understood that there had to be "something behind things, something deeply hidden.

But there's something about sitting at someone else's desk that makes you feel like looking in the drawers. I resisted the impulse briefly. Then I decided what the hell. I was a private investigator. Poking my nose in where it didn't belong came with the territory.

how many shots were left in the clip.

what's gotten into you?

The quality of our motivational skill is directly related to the quality of our questions.

We cannot. . .begin any real inquiry into Truth, with any assumption or belief whatsoever. We must be willing to see things as they are, rather than as we hope, wish, or expect them to be.

Real Buddhism is not really an "ism." It's a process, an awareness, an openness, a spirit of inquiry—not a belief system, or even (as we normally understand it) a religion. It is more accurate to call it "the teaching of the awakened," or the buddha-dharma. Since the

It's much better to ask small questions than big ones.

The impulse to investigate can only be set free if you stop pretending to know answers that you don't. Because the incentives to pretend are so strong, this may require some bravery on your part.

The next time you run into a question that you can only pretend to answer, go ahead and say "I don't know"—and then follow up, certainly, with "but maybe I can find out." And work as hard as you can to do that.

Particular gift is the ability to ask such questions. For instance: If drug dealers make so much money, why do they still live with their mothers? Which is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool? What really caused crime rates to plunge during the past decade? Do real-estate agents have their clients' best interests at heart? Why do black parents give their children names that may hurt their career prospects? Do schoolteachers cheat to meet high-stakes testing.

If it takes a lot of courage to admit you don't know all the answers, just imagine how hard it is to admit you don't even know the right question. But if you ask the wrong question, you are almost guaranteed to get the wrong answer.

A good set of data can go a long way toward describing human behavior as long as the proper questions are asked of it. Our job in this book is to come up with such questions.

Believe those who are seeking the truth; doubt those who find it. —André Gide

Economics] is all about observing the world with genuine curiosity and admitting that it is full of mysteries

To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit." "We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special." -Steven Hawking

la economía es una ciencia que cuenta con herramientas excelentes para la obtención de respuestas, pero que sufre una seria escasez de preguntas interesantes.

Enlightenment's motto, he proclaimed, is "Dare to understand!" and its foundational demand is freedom of thought and speech.

A dream is the mind's way of answering a question it hasn't yet figured out how to ask.