Quotes About Inquiry

In fact, the answers that religion, as we have come to know it, provides to the question of human worth have played so dominant a role in the preceding centuries that believers often cannot conceive how non-believers can muster sufficient commitment to their own lives to get out of bed each morning, let alone the ethical wherewithal to regard others as deserving of moral regard. Once one "comes out" as an atheist, these are the inquisitions to which one is often subjected.

One of my goals in life is to become truly rabbinical, to be able to answer closed questions with open questions, to have the internal authority to be a good gatekeeper when intruders approach, and to at least remember to ask, "Why are you asking that?

By now you've noticed that Woolf says "I don't know" quite a lot.

Jewish tradition holds that some questions are more significant than their answers.

Science doesn't reduce things, or explain mysteries away; it just discovers stranger and stranger things.

The secret? If we have a cardinal strategy that forms the bedrock for all our practices, it may be this: Ask why. Ask it all the time, ask it any day, every day, and always ask it three times in a row.

Why do the men come, do you suppose? Who knows why men do anything?

You don't want a million answers as much as you want a few forever questions. The questions are diamonds you hold in the light. Study a lifetime and you see different colors from the same jewel. The same questions, asked again, bring you just the answers you need just the minute you need them.

Cevap alamaman?z?n en büyük nedeni sorular? sormam?? olman?zd?r.

I wonder what in the hell I was thinking about?' he said aloud to himself. 'I wonder if I'm losing my mind?' That was like a duck wondering why it flies south in the autumn or an old camel noticing one day that he has a hump on his back.

The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry.

If you don't understand how something works, never mind: just give up and say God did it. You don't know how the nerve impulse works? Good! You don't understand how memories are laid down in the brain? Excellent! Is photosynthesis a bafflingly complex process? Wonderful! Please don't go to work on the problem, just give up, and appeal to God.

Religion teaches you to be satisfied with nonanswers. It's a sort of crime against childhood.

Science doesn't have all the answers, but it is good at spotting the important questions when they are camouflaged against a background of common sense.

The habit of questioning authority is one of the most valuable gifts that a book, or a teacher, can give a young would-be scientist.

If you don't understand how something works, never mind: just give up and say God did it.

If you don't understand how something works, never mind: just give up and say God did it.

children should be taught not so much what to think as how to think.

One of the great virtues of science is that scientists know when they don't know the answer to something. They cheerfully admit that they don't know. Cheerfully, because not knowing the answer is an exciting challenge to try to find it.

But think about why it is impolite to ask such direct, factual questions of religious people today. It is because it is embarrassing! But it is the answer that is embarrassing, if it is yes.

uno de los efectos auténticamente perniciosos de la religión es que enseña que estar satisfecho con el desconocimiento es una virtud.

you could almost define a philosopher as someone who won't take common sense for an answer.

Don't squander precious ignorance by researching it away.

To say that something happened supernaturally is not just to say 'we don't understand it' but to say ' we will never understand it, so don't even try.