Quotes About Inquiry

There is a kind of courtesy in skepticism. It would be an offense against polite conventions to press our doubts too far.

An almost indispensable skill for any creative person is the ability to pose the right questions. Creative people identify promising, exciting, and, most important, accessible routes to progress - and eventually formulate the questions correctly.

People love science and all it offers, but they also feel a calling in themselves to the sense of what's deeper.

I do love science. My father is a scientist.

Curiosity kills itself; and love is only curiosity, as is proved by its end.

I love it when people ask who my influences are... or what my favorite part of my last book was... or the last great book I read.

I would love to study cultures and people.

I never have, but I would love to pick R. Kelly's brain.

To limit one's field of inquiry to the function of an institution in a given social system, with no alternatives considered, provides an infinite number of rationalizations for all the inequalities and inequities of that system.

For human suffering there is a reason; perhaps the reason has not been found because the right questions have not been asked, or pressed far enough.

My, Juanita, you're getting to be a big girl. How old are you? I can't keep track.

Eventually he made it to Buckingham Palace, where the king famously startled Lindbergh by asking him how he had peed during the flight. Lindbergh explained, a touch awkwardly, that he had brought along a pail for the purpose.

It is fairly amazing to reflect that at the beginning of the twentieth century, and for some years beyond, the best scientific minds in the world couldn't actually tell you, in any meaningful way, where babies came from.

In short, there is just a great deal we don't know.

it occurred to me with a certain uncomfortable forcefulness that I didn't know the first thing about the only planet I was ever going to live on.

in the words of Carl Sagan.

Was Hamlet a Man or a Woman?" and others of similarly inventive cast.

have any thoughts here?" She looks surprised that I'm asking. "You want to know what I'd do?" "Yes, Liz. You went to one of those

Doubt is the only appropriate response for human beings.

Hello Dad! It is now three in the morning. Do you know where I am?

The more you think about things, the weirder they seem. Take this milk. Why do we drink COW milk?? Who was the guy who first looked at a cow and said, 'I think I'll drink whatever comes out of these things when I squeeze 'em!'?

As a writer, I believe in going where the evidence takes me rather than coming in with a preconceived notion and forcing the evidence to fit that belief.

We desire truth and find within ourselves only uncertainty.

For the chief malady of man is restless curiosity about things which he cannot understand; and it is not so bad for him to be in error as to be curious to no purpose.