Best 147 quotes in «inquiry quotes» category

Rather than swallowing our pride and simply asking what we do not know, we choose to fill in the blanks ourselves and later become humbled. Wisdom was often, in its youth, proven foolish, and ones humiliated were meant to become wise.

There was yet another disadvantage attaching to the whole of Newton’s physical inquiries, ... the want of an appropriate notation for expressing the conditions of a dynamical problem, and the general principles by which its solution must be obtained. By the labours of LaGrange, the motions of a disturbed planet are reduced with all their complication and variety to a purely mathematical question. It then ceases to be a physical problem; the disturbed and disturbing planet are alike vanished: the ideas of time and force are at an end; the very elements of the orbit have disappeared, or only exist as arbitrary characters in a mathematical formula.

The practice of deep listening is the practice of open inquiry, without assumption or judgement.

Religion, by its very nature as an untestable belief in undetectable beings and an unknowable afterlife, disables our reality checks. It ends the conversation. It cuts off inquiry: not only factual inquiry, but moral inquiry. Because God's law trumps human law, people who think they're obeying God can easily get cut off from their own moral instincts. And these moral contortions don't always lie in the realm of theological game-playing. They can have real-world consequences: from genocide to infanticide, from honor killings to abandoned gay children, from burned witches to battered wives to blown-up buildings.

The merits and services of Christianity have been industriously extolled by its hired advocates. Every Sunday its praises are sounded from myriads of pulpits. It enjoys the prestige of an ancient establishment and the comprehensive support of the State. It has the ear of rulers and the control of education. Every generation is suborned in its favor. Those who dissent from it are losers, those who oppose it are ostracised; while in the past, for century after century, it has replied to criticism with imprisonment, and to scepticism with the dungeon and the stake. By such means it has induced a general tendency to allow its pretensions without inquiry and its beneficence without proof.

...[T]hese people... are my dangerous accusers; because those who hear them suppose that anyone who inquires into such matters... theories about the heavens... and everything below the earth... must be an atheist.

Who am I? The great inquiry indeed.

Those, then, who want to find themselves at the starting point of a truly free philosophy, have to depart even from God. Here the motto is: whoever wants to preserve it will lose it, and whoever abandons it will find it. Only those have reached the ground in themselves and have become aware of the depths of life, who have at one time abandoned everything and have themselves been abandoned by everything, for whom everything has been lost, and who have found themselves alone, face-to-face with the infinite: a decisive step which Plato compared with death. That which Dante saw written on the door of the inferno must be written in a different sense also at the entrance to philosophy: ‘Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.’ Those who look for true philosophy must be bereft of all hope, all desire, all longing. They must not wish anything, not know anything, must feel completely bare and impoverished, must give everything away in order to gain everything. It is a grim step to take, it is grim to have to depart from the final shore.

Truths are as much a matter of questions as answers.

Unless the inquiry has been so exhaustive as to explore every possibility, the lack of evidence should never be used to ground a statement of fact. Unlikelihood certainly, but no more. A prematurely assumed fact blocks further inquiry.

You go on living life, as if, everything is real, as everything is going into your mind, but you will never hold on for a moment, to notice, how everything filled into your mind? You were born with it, or is it acquired?

[...] you soon become lonely if you want to use your own brain to find answers.

Actually, I can't take credit for any of my decisions. I noticed one day that all my decisions were making themselves, and always at the right time. I haven't had to make one decision since then. They are always made for me, and they come from the wisdom that is in us all. I trust that wisdom completely. That trust itself was a decision made for me as inquiry cleared my mind. No decision, no fear.

Writing seems to free them (students) of the idea that math is a collection of right answers own by the teacher – a body of knowledge that she will dispense in chunks and that they have to swallow and digest.

Additional problems are the offspring of poor decisions. When inquiry and advocacy are combined, the goal is no longer 'to win the argument', but to find the best argument.

After you've been doing inquiry for a while, if you have the thought "She doesn't love me," you just get the immediate turnaround with a smile: "Oh, I'm not loving myself in this moment.

A kiss is an inquiry on the second floor as to what's going on on the first floor.

Anacalypsis: An Attempt to Draw Aside the Veil of the Saitic or an Inquiry into the Origin of Languages, Nations and Religions.

Asking the questions - that's what changes lives. Every cell in your body is awake with inquiry. And you cannot believe the old thoughts again.

As one may bring himself to believe almost anything he is inclined to believe, it makes all the difference whether we begin or end with the inquiry, 'What is truth?'

As unbalanced parties of every description can never tolerate a free inquiry of any kind, when employed against themselves, the license, and even the most temperate freedom of the press, soon excite resentment and revenge.

You asked me questions nobody ever asked me before. You knew that I was a murderer two times over, but you treated me like a man...

Any honest inquiry into the reality of nature also yields insights about ourselves.

At root what is needed for scientific inquiry is just receptivity to data, skill in reasoning, and yearning for truth. Admittedly, ingenuity can help too.

Because answers are inert things that stop inquiry. They make you think you have finished looking. But you are never finished. There are always discoveries that will turn everything you think you know on its head and that will make you ask all over again: Who are we?

Called an inquiry into the laws which determine the division of the produce.

College campuses have become fascist colonies of anti-American hate speech, hypersensitivity, speech codes, banded words and prohibited scientific inquiry.

Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry. When we consider a book, we mustn't ask ourselves what it says but what it means.

Difference of opinion leads to inquiry, and inquiry to the truth.

By the help of microscopes, there is nothing so small, as to escape our inquiry; hence there is a new visible world discovered to the understanding.

Doubt is often better than overconfidence, for it leads to inquiry, and inquiry leads to invention.

Doubt is the incentive to truth and inquiry leads the way.

Every step in the progress of this study has tended to obliterate the technical barriers by which logicians have sought to separate the inquiries relating to the several parts of man's nature.

Faith in the possibilities of continued and rigorous inquiry does not limit access to truth to any channel or scheme of things. It does not first say that truth is universal and then add there is but one road to it.

Every man's condition is a solution in hieroglyph to those inquiries he would put. He acts it as life before he apprehends it as truth.

David Corbett's The Art of Character offers a deep inquiry into the creation of character for the novice writer, with valuable nuggets of wisdom for the seasoned storyteller. If you are a writer, it should be on your desk.

Finding the courage to go to the places that scare us cannot happen without compassionate inquiry into the workings of ego... Openness doesn't come from resisting our fears but from getting to know them well.

Freedom of inquiry, freedom of discussion, and freedom of teaching - without these a university cannot exist.

I always assumed scientists were free to ask any question, pursue any line of inquiry without fear or reprisal.

For we can affirm with a good conscience that we have, after reading the Holy Scripture, applied ourselves and yet daily apply ourselves to the extent that the grace of the Lord permits to inquiry into and investigation of the consensus of the true and purer antiquity.

for we are inquiring not in order to know what virtue is, but in order to become good, since otherwise our inquiry would have been of no use

For what are the classics but the noblest thoughts of man? They are the only oracles which are not decayed, and there are such answers to the most modern inquiry in them as Delphi and Dodona never gave. We might as well omit to study Nature because she is old.

If western culture is shown to be rich it is because, even before the Enlightenment, it has tried to "dissolve" harmful simplifications through inquiry and the critical mind.

How do we get out of our small mind? When we enquire into the core of our existence. What is life? Who am I? This spirit of self-inquiry can awaken something inside you.

How did we let an ideological resistance to inquiry become such a prominent part of our society?

If you are melancholy for the first time, you will find, upon a little inquiry, that others have been melancholy many times, and yet are cheerful now.

I never will, by any word or act, bow to the shrine of intolerance or admit a right of inquiry into the religious opinions of others.

I know of no inquiry which the impulses of man suggests that is forbidden to the resolution of man to pursue.

I had rather take my chance that some traitors will escape detection than spread abroad a spirit of general suspicion and distrust, which accepts rumor and gossip in place of undismayed and unintimidated inquiry.

I'm just trying to look at something without blinking, to see what it is like, or it could have been like, and how that had something to do with the way we live now. Novels are always inquiries for me.