Questioning Quotes

“As far as you can, get into the habit of asking yourself in relation to any action taken by another: "What is his point of reference here?" But begin with yourself: examine yourself first.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“People will ask you the question 'how is life treating you?' But my question is 'how are you treating life?' On that your happiness rests”
― Rasheed Ogunlaru

“One of the most important things one can do in life is to brutally question every single thing you are taught.”
― Bryant McGill, Voice of Reason

“Nothing is mightier than our why, nothing stands above it, because in the end there is a why to which no answer is possible. In fact, from why to why, from one step to the next, you get to the end of things. And it is only by travelling from one why to the next, as far as the why that is unanswerable, that man attains the level of the creative principle, facing the infinite, equal to the infinite maybe. So long as he can answer the why he gets lost, he loses his way among things. 'Why this?' I answer, 'because that," and from one explanation to the next I reach the point where no explanation is satisfying, from one explanation to the next I reach zero, the absolute, where truth and falsehood are equivalent, become equal to one another, are identified with one another, cancel each other out in face of the absolute nothing. And so we can understand how all action, all choice, all history is justified, at the end of time, by a final cancelling-out. The why goes beyond everything. Nothing goes beyond the why, not even the nothing, because the nothing is not the explanation; when silence confronts us, the question to which there is no answer rings out in the silence. That ultimate why, that great why is like a light that blots out everything, but a blinding light; nothing more can be made out, there is nothing more to make out.”
― Eugène Ionesco, Fragments of a Journal

“Fundamentalist religion is hell-bent on ruining the scientific education of countless thousands of innocent, well-meaning, eager young minds. Non-fundamentalist, "sensible" religion may not be doing that. But it is making the world safe for fundamentalism by teaching children, from their earliest years, that unquestioning faith is a virtue.”
― Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion: A Study of Religious Belief and Skepticism

“I saw something I could never forget. I saw lifetimes of acknowledgement, fear, wisdom, questioning, and understanding in a child's eye. It was the worst thing I would ever witness.”
― Shannon A. Thompson, November Snow

“But nobody else understands about the fire. If someone threw you a rope when you were drowning. If a doctor said take this because if you don't take you'll die - you would, wouldn't you?”
― William Golding, Lord of the Flies

“Why do you dwell on things that don’t matter when there are so many things that do?”
― Dennis Sharpe, Destroyer of Worlds

“Test everything that can be tested. As soon as you think you know something, that's when you stop questioning it. Understanding kills curiosity. Understanding kills progress.”
― Josh Hanagarne, The World's Strongest Librarian: A Memoir of Tourette's, Faith, Strength, and the Power of Family

“The spiritual energy of our time, as I've come to understand it, is not a rejection of the rational disciplines by which we've ordered our common life for many decades - law, politics, economics, science. It is, rather, a realization that these disciplines have a limited scope. They can't ask ultimate questions...they don't begin to tell us how to order our astonishments, what matters in life, what matters in a death, how to love, how we can be of service to each other. These are the kinds of questions religion arose to address and religions traditions are keepers of conversation across generations about them.”
― Krista Tippett, Speaking of Faith

“Questioning ourselves and our country is healthy and essential.”
― Bryant McGill, Voice of Reason

“A priest's life is spent between question and answer-- or between a question and the attempt to answer it. The question is the summary of the spiritual life.”
― Naguib Mahfouz, Naguib Mahfouz: Three Novels of Ancient Egypt

“If we could only see internal beauty, what would people look like? Who would the supermodels be?”
― Katie Kacvinsky

“I wasn’t sure what was worse: being oblivious or living within reality. (Eric)”
― Shannon A. Thompson, Minutes Before Sunset

“Explanations are for cowards.”
― J. Ross Clara, Citations: A Brief Anthology

“If a faithful account was rendered of man's ideas upon the Divinity, he would be obliged to acknowledge, that for the most part the word Gods has been used to express the concealed, remote, unknown causes of the effects he witnessed; that he applies this term when the spring of natural, the source of known causes ceases to be visible: as soon as he loses the thread of these causes, or as soon as his mind can no longer follow the chain, he solves the difficulty, terminates his research, by ascribing it to his gods; thus giving a vague definition to an unknown cause, at which either his idleness, or his limited knowledge, obliges him to stop. When, therefore, he ascribes to his gods the production of some phenomenon, the novelty or the extent of which strikes him with wonder, but of which his ignorance precludes him from unravelling the true cause, or which he believes the natural powers with which he is acquainted are inadequate to bring forth; does he, in fact, do any thing more than substitute for the darkness of his own mind, a sound to which he has been accustomed to listen with reverential awe?”
― Paul Henri Thiry d'Holbach, System of Nature

“People often ask themselves the right questions. Where they fail is in answering the questions they ask themselves, and even there they do not fail by much. A single avenue of reasoning followed to its logical conclusion would bring them straight home to the truth. But they stop just short of it, over and over again. When they have only to reach out and grasp the idea that would explain everything, they decide that the search is hopeless. The search is never hopeless. There is no haystack so large that the needle in it cannot be found. But it takes time, it takes humility and a serious reason for searching.”
― William Maxwell, Time Will Darken It

“(...)the question of the Jews has come to the fore, but like other questions which lend themselves to prejudice, efforts will be made to hush it up as impolitic for open discussion. If, however, experience has taught us anything it is that questions thus suppressed will sooner or later break out in undesirable and unprofitable forms.”
― Henry Ford, The International Jew - The World’s Foremost Problem

“Through my questions, you will learn to teach yourselves.”
― John Jay Osborn Jr., The Paper Chase

“Did you know, that one night; one moonless, clear, shining night; with the shadowy silhouettes of trees crisp against the star-filled sky – I, on the high, level terrace of my flat, stretched out my hand! Against all odds and possibilities of unbelief and grief – a life of searchings, discontent, and a nagging sense of unreality… A spider-web intuition of a spread-out, intricate illusion that wilfully withheld the truth from me.”
― Radhika Mukherjee, Our Particular Shadows

“If I love a dose of (good) theology or philosophy, I probably also love discipline, improvement, wisdom, and challenges. If I hate it, I am probably too comfortable and proud to try to question myself.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“Tada sam počeo postavljati pitanja o tome što je volja, gdje je duša, čime se hrani misao i je li i ona, misao, također imenica iz skupine mislenih imenica, mogu li glagoli napadati, a ako mogu, jesu li predmet njihova napada moje misli ili moji organi..., i na koncu, ako mogu zamisliti svoje unutarnje organe, jesu li tada po postanku organi ispred misli ili je misao ta koja proizvodi moje tijelo?”
― Jasna Horvat, Auron

“I don’t believe that," I said, and he raised his brow beneath his shaggy hair.
"I never asked you to.”
(Jessica)”
― Shannon A. Thompson, Minutes Before Sunset

“The path between faith and understanding demands both obedience and inquiry. If Christianity is true, if it goes to the center of the universe and explains every stone and leaf the way we Christians think, then the more we search it out and explore it the more reasons we will have to be confident in that truth.”
― Matthew Lee Anderson

“They question me everyday. There’s always bright lights and they give me medicine that’s supposed to make me tell the truth, but it doesn’t work on me. Or maybe it only works when I start talking, but I never do.”
― Maya Bode, Tess Embers

“Just because you were born into something doesn't mean that it's right and it doesn't mean that it's true. The world's greatest men and women have always been those who questioned everything that ever was presented to them as truth.”
― Dan Pearce, Single Dad Laughing: The Best of Year One

“Leo wondered what unknown sin they must have committed in some previous life to deserve this. The answer came the same way their feet later shocked to life in the warming hut after being so numb for hours- you think you'll never feel your toes again, and then all of a sudden life, damaged, stiffened, clammy, but life, dog-eat-dog life! We have not done a single thing to deserve this.”
― Peter Orner, Love and Shame and Love

“The most ridiculous activity of human mind is questioning. Cognition of reality surpasses both question and answer, however ingenious.”
― Raheel Farooq

“He was too perplexed to please the conventional and too reverent. to please the infidels.”
― Elton Trueblood, Abraham Lincoln: Lessons in Spiritual Leadership

“If you have never truly questioned what you believe, I would question whether you truly believe it.”
― D.A. Simpson