Quotes About Inquiry

I roamed the countryside searching for answers to things I did not understand.

Are you a good listener? Do you ask questions that help the other person become a better communicator? Do people feel comfortable around you, or do you dominate conversations?

Then why on earth had she never told anyone about these things? Matthews asked. Linda didn't miss a beat. "Because no one ever asked," she said. "You're the first that ever did.

The noble kind of curiosity is what makes a person face danger to see where a great river begins, or what's across the oceans. There's an even more noble kind of curiosity that causes us to ask Who made the river, and what's beyond the heavens.

The process of learning is a nonstop orgy of wonderment.

Do cats eat bats?… Do bats eat cats?

Collective inquiry is less prone to error than is solitary inquiry, individualism in this case being an impediment to knowledge.

What makes us human, I think, is an ability to ask questions, a consequence of our sophisticated spoken language.

We're all just bags of bones and muscle and hormones; I'll never understand what makes our minds do the things we do. It's like that statue of the monkey holding a skull. We're trying to use a thing we don't understand to understand ourselves.

Without free speech no search for truth is possible... no discovery of truth is useful.

A good scientist can understand the current state of a field, pick interesting questions where a success will actually lead to useful new knowledge, and push that field further through their work.

An experienced reader uses the poem as an agent of inquiry. This makes poetry very exciting, unstable, and interactive.

Poetry is but another form of inquiry into the nature of phenomena, using with its own unique procedures and tools.

No; we have been as usual asking the wrong question. It does not matter a hoot what the mockingbird on the chimney is singing. The real and proper question is: Why is it beautiful?

The Q I loathe and despise, the Q every single writer I know loathes and despises, is this one: 'Where,' the reader asks, 'do you get your ideas?' It's a simple question, and my usual response is a kind of helpless, 'I don't know.'

We explore our environment, more than we are compelled to utter poetry, when we're toddlers. We start doing that later. Before that happens, every child is a scientist.

I guess I could say that I pursue questions that interest me in ways that interest me on the page, but that's awfully vague.

I get a very vague idea and - perhaps because I once was a journalist, or perhaps because that's what made me want to be a journalist - I go off and explore it for a bit, rather than mapping out a plot and then filling in the research.

Skeptics question the validity of a particular claim by calling for evidence to prove or disprove it.

So for twelve miles I rode with Sherman, and we became fast friends. He asked me all manner of questions on the way, and I found that he knew my father well, and remembered his tragic death in Salt Creek Valley.

Moreover, only a strong and united scientific opinion imposing the intrinsic value of scientific progress on society at large can elicit the support of scientific inquiry by the general public.

I was 7 years old, and I challenged everything. I never accepted answers on face value.

One can't merely content oneself with identifying proximate causes; one also has to ask about ultimate causes.

If you truly want to understand something, try to change it - Kurt Lewin -