Quotes About Questions

In a way, math isn't the art of answering mathematical questions, it is the art of asking the right questions, the questions that give you insight, the ones that lead you in interesting directions, the ones that connect with lots of other interesting questions -the ones with beautiful answers.

Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable. How many hours are in a mile? Is yellow square or round? Probably half the questions we ask - half our great theological and metaphysical problems - are like that.

I wrote the song "Show Me" as a prayer to God asking simple, honest questions about life and death and why there is so much suffering in the world. As I grew with the song I realized I shouldn't limit these questions solely to God; I should ask those questions of others and of myself.

Many of the questions we ask God can't be answered directly, not because God doesn't know the answers but because our questions don't make sense. As C.S. Lewis once pointed out, many of our questions are, from God's point of view, rather like someone asking, "Is yellow square or round?" or "How many hours are there is a mile?

I believe that good questions are more important than answers, and the best children's books ask questions, and make the readers ask questions. And every new question is going to disturb someone's universe.

Science is very good at answering the 'how' questions. 'How did the universe evolve to the form that we see?' But it is woefully inadequate in addressing the 'why' questions. 'Why is there a universe at all?' These are the meaning questions, which many people think religion is particularly good at dealing with.

There can be only two questions that are asked with regard to human relationships: Where am I going? Who is going with me? Do not invert the order of the questions. Do not - under any circumstances - invert the order of the questions. Is that clear?

Philosophical questions are not by their nature insoluble. They are, indeed, radically different from scientific questions, because they concern the implications and other interrelations of ideas, not the order of physical events; their answers are interpretations instead of factual reports, and their function is to increase not our knowledge of nature, but our understanding of what we know.

I do interview senior candidates at the home office or many of our hotel or restaurant General Manager candidates. My two favorite questions are "Tell me about a failure in your career, what you learned from it, and how you've leveraged this lesson" and "All of us are misperceived at one time or another. What's the most common way you're misperceived in the workplace and why?" Both of these questions require a certain amount of self-awareness and a willingness to not give pat, normal answers that we offer experience in interviews.

America cannot be America in the new century until it deals with these new questions of gender, including the trans issues, and the questions around faith and Islam.

I'm a big believer in pose some questions and then answer a few of them before you move onto the next set of questions.

I used to love to come to the ballpark. Now I hate it. Every day becomes a little tougher because of all this. Writers, tape recorders, microphones, cameras, questions and more questions. Roger Maris lost his hair the season he hit sixty-one. I still have all my hair, but when it's over, I'm going home to Mobile and fish for a long time.

Science goes from question to question; big questions, and little, tentative answers. The questions as they age grow ever broader, the answers are seen to be more limited.

I know that big people don't like questions from children. They can ask all the questions they like, How's school? Are you a good boy? Did you say your prayers? but if you ask them did they say their prayers you might be hit on the head.

The mainstream press was not aggressive enough after 9/11, was not aggressive enough in asking questions about a decision to go to war in Iraq, was not aggresive enough in asking the hard questions about the War on Terror. I accept that for the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times.

You're not a Black man. You're a human being in God's eyes. So when you sit down to talk to someone and you talk to them in really intelligent terms, you ask difficult questions, there's a militancy that's assigned to you without you asking for it, because you are simply judged by what you look like. If you're a white person asking the same questions, you'd be one of these CNN guys and say how brilliant he is. That doesn't work for you, because this is the world we live in.

Having an answer is a comfort. It's when you start asking questions and those questions pull threads in the larger fabric, you're forced to wonder what you're left with. And for people of any age, it's scary to think the fabric of the universe - or the universe as you've always believed it existed - can just unwind, you know?

People have been educated to expect answers, even before the questions come along. It's the TV principle. You offer three possible answers before the questions come to relax and calm the audience.

The real questions refuse to be placated. They are the questions asked most frequently and answered most inadequately, the ones that reveal their true natures slowly, reluctantly, most often against your will.

I consider it my patriotic duty as an ordinary citizen - not as Secretary of State - to ask questions. I think we have to ask ourselves the tough questions.

It's okay to ask questions, but get the answers. So, where are the answers? Since the questions came from within you, guess where the answers are? Within you.

The two critical questions to ask are: "Who is my customer?" and "What value am I adding?" Unfortunately, many workers cannot answer these questions. They tend to blindly do things, and develop bad habits of doing things over and over for no good reasons.

We used to have lots of questions to which there were no answers. Now, with the computer, there are lots of answers to which we haven't thought up questions.

Let's never stop asking questions. Questions give us a harbor to remember where we once lived mentally. They remind us of the possibilities that can be born out of thoughts and musings, and they link together pattern that define our lives.

It's the stupid questions that have some of the most surprising and interesting answers. Most people never think to ask the stupid questions.

Corporations must answer questions about why they should be in the blogosphere. Small Businesses need to answer questions about why they shouldn't.

Does man Progress? A thousand questions answered yesterday create a thousand questions today.

Right now, I see a lot of alarming trends inside Russia, especially in Siberia, which I represent in the parliament. People start to ask questions: If we mine all the natural resources - if we have all the oil, all the gas, all the coal, all the gold, all the diamonds - why the hell do we need central Russia? They are just eating at our resources. Without Moscow having a response for this, it would face very nasty questions such as one that was asked during my recent reelection campaign - it actually became a slogan of my campaign - "Stop feeding Moscow."

I never think that a film should answer questions for you. I think it should make you ask a lot of questions.

I try to take large, general questions that are difficult to resolve and break them down into small, very specific questions that have clear answers.

There are two questions a man must ask himself: The first is 'Where am I going?' and the second is 'Who will go with me?' If you ever get these questions in the wrong order you are in trouble.

Stop asking yourself questions that have no meaning. Or if they have, you'll find out when you need to -- find out both the questions and the answers.

I have always been really picky about the films that I make, because I think that there's such an incredible opportunity to bring up questions when you're making movies, and some of my favorite films bring up big questions. They are movies that, when you walk away from it, it hits you as something deeper, and it's a great, fun way to be able to bounce around some of these harder concepts in our heads.

Everything we know has its origins in questions. Questions, we might say, are the principal intellectual instruments available to human beings.

The child had indeed shut up but all the questions that had accumulated on his tongue circulated in his mouth, moved through the passages of his nose and climbed up from there to tickle into his teardrop ducts, so in his moss green pupils, curious, insistent, accusing sparks of questions continued to light up and fade away like fireflies flitting about on summer nights.

The United States are such a large place. And there are some states and some cities where the questions of gender or sexuality would not be asked, or where scholars or academics are working in small little corners of the universities trying to raise these questions and being told that either that they're strange or not appropriate or being actively opposed. There are other places where there is very active scholarship going on. Certainly on gender.

In each age there is a series of pressing questions which must be asked and answered. On the correctness of the questions depends the survival of those who ask; on the quality of the answers depends the quality of the life those survivors will lead.

but you can't spend your whole life hoping people will ask you the right questions. you must learn to love and answer the questions they already ask.

I am as non-accepting of medical quackery and unscientific approaches as anybody else. I've grown up as a card-carrying scientist, and I know the power of science to answer questions, and for many questions I don't know of anything better than scientific approaches to answer them.

In the final analysis, the questions of why bad things happen to good people transmutes itself into some very different questions, no longer asking why something happened, but asking how we will respond, what we intend to do now that it happened.

If you do not wish to be lied to, do not ask questions! The only real defence civilized man has against anybody who bothers him is to lie. There would be no lies if there were no questions.

Whatever your eye falls on. For it will fall on what you love - will lead you to the questions of your life, the questions that are incumbent upon you to answer, because that is how the mind works in concert with the eye. The things of this world draw us where we need to go.

Most people ask questions because they want to know the answer; lawyers are trained never to ask questions unless they already know the answer.

I was lucky. I had some really good people that were just here there and wherever who would come into my life that I felt would answer questions. I mean, I had some very powerful questions myself for what this earth was all about.

Recently it was pointed out to me - in a kind of hurtful way, to be honest - that people in Los Angeles are aurally challenged. That is, at social events, we simply do not listen to others. We do not ask them questions about themselves, we do not nod attentively when they speak; really, if we were to examine ourselves, we would realize that we simply have no interest in others at all.

The university is a vast public utility which turns out future workers in today's vineyard, the military-industrial complex. They've got to be processed in the most efficient way to see to it that they have the fewest dissenting opinions, that they have just those characteristics which are wholly incompatible with being an intellectual. This is a real internal psychological contradiction. People have to suppress the very questions which reading books raises.

Our jobs determine to a large extent what our lives are like. Is what you do for a living making you ill? Does it keep you from becoming a more fully realized person? Do you feel ashamed of what you have to do at work? All too often, the answer to such questions is yes. Yet it does not have to be like that. Work can be one of the most joyful, most fulfilling aspects of life. Whether it will be or not depends on the actions we collectively take.

I can't make wine simple. But I can make it fun and beautiful, instead of esoteric and intimidating. The minute you realize it's OK to stumble along like the rest of us, asking questions and paying attention to your own reactions, then you'll begin what I hope will be a lifelong love affair with wine.