Quotes About Inquiry

Nature puts no question and answers none which we mortals ask.

For what are the classics but the noblest recorded thoughts of man? They are the only oracles which are not decayed, and there are such answers to the most modern inquiry in them as Delphi and Dodona never gave. We might as well omit to study Nature because she is old.

What are these pines & these birds about? What is this pond a-doing? I must know a little more.

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

Queequeq, my fine friend, does this sort of thing often happen?

One must verify or expel his doubts, and convert them into the certainty of Yes or NO.

I think an interview, properly considered, should be an investigation. You shouldn't know what the interview will yield. Otherwise, why do it at all?

Bernstein grew up in my building in New York. He's a very, very fine player. When he was a kid, he came by to find out what was going on in the world of jazz.

You guys ask really long questions. In the U.S., they just want to know who you're sleeping with.

People seriously ask us all the time, 'Are you guys really brothers?'

Asking questions is what brains were born to do, at least when we were young children. For young children, quite literally, seeking explanations is as deeply rooted a drive as seeking food or water.

In science, every question answered leads to 10 more. I love that science can never, ever be finished. From a young age, people think, 'Science is hard and boring.' We don't tell children, 'Yes, you have to learn these formulae and theorems, but then you go on to learn about nuclear reactions and stars.'

All the other books ask, 'What's it like?' What was World War II like for the young kid at Normandy, or what is work like for a woman having a job for the first time in her life? What's it like to be black or white?

I had no lasting physical trauma nor a psychological one. Yet, it was hard to return to the old path. I found myself asking big questions: Why was my life spared? What is my purpose here? And it led me to a life of inquiry.

'What comes next?' is the constant question I'm asked by outsiders eager to travel to the island. During the eleven years I traveled to Havana, very few Cubans I met on the island ever bothered to verbalize this question.

'Research,' for me, is a big word that encompasses a lot of different activities, all of them based around curiosity. Research is traveling to places, or studying snowflakes with a magnifying glass, or excavating one's memories. Research is walking around Hamburg with a notebook.

At the heart of the best documentaries, there is a journey of inquiry - someone who travels out into the world, comes back with a story, and who then finds meaning in it, and intrigue; someone who tells you about something you never quite knew before, or in a way you hadn't quite thought about.

The scientist should treasure the riddles he can't solve, not explain them away at the outset.

Traditionally, scientists have treated the laws of physics as simply 'given,' elegant mathematical relationships that were somehow imprinted on the universe at its birth, and fixed thereafter. Inquiry into the origin and nature of the laws was not regarded as a proper part of science.

I'm not just interested in fascinating faces or trees. I want to bore in deeper.

If you read my books, especially the Star Trek books and the Quest for Tomorrow books, you'll see in them the core theme of the basic humanistic questions that Star Trek asked.

Trial. A formal inquiry designed to prove and put upon record the blameless characters of judges, advocates and jurors.

To me, the thing that sets us apart from so many other animal species is our ability to ask questions, investigate, gather information, come to our own conclusions, and sometimes depart from the pack, sometimes move away from the tribe.

Verily, knowledge is a lock and its key is the question.