Quotes About Inquiry

How could this have happened when everything was normal?

Carter and Helene still ask questions. I used to ask questions, and I got the answer: nothing. The answer is "nothing.

I have been looking all my life for history and have yet to find it.

What kind of magpie keeps this notebook?

People ask all the time how I'm doing, but the truth is, they don't really want to know.

He was a detective, but he didn't detect anything. It fell into his lap, already broken, every time.

We all want to know what went wrong, even when there isn't really an answer to that question.

Do they ever shut up on your planet?

Doubt is an incentive to truth, and patient inquiry leadeth the way.

Never memorize something that you can look up.

Science is wonderfully equipped to answer the question "How?" but it gets terribly confused when you ask the question "Why?"

Science is not a sacred cow. Science is a horse. Don't worship it. Feed it.

Scientific discovery and scientific knowledge have been achieved only by those who have gone in pursuit of it without any practical purpose whatsoever in view

Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.

There are many hypotheses in science which are wrong. That's perfectly all right; they're the aperture to finding out what's right. Science is a self-correcting process. To be accepted, new ideas must survive the most rigorous standards of evidence and scrutiny.

Science is what you know, philosophy is what you don't know.

Assume nothing, question everything, open your eyes, challenge the opposition, and start thinking.

He who knows that he doesn't know, knows what he needs to know.

Millions saw an apple falling but only Newton asked why; because the apple didn't fall onto his head but into his mind.

Never scold or beat a child until he starts asking you questions whose answers you are unable to give.

Science will always give answer to the first question but refuses to the last one.

They really don't care about your answers if they ask you wrong questions.

And do come as soon as you possibly can! P.S. to Gauguin. If you are not ill, do please come at once. If you are too ill, a wire and a letter, please. P.S. to Theo. Perhaps you will think the P.S. to Gauguin too curt, but let him say whether or not he is ill, and anyhow he will recover better here. Have you received my canvases???

Happy the man who could search out the causes of things.