Quotes & Sayings About Questioning Everything

You remember having friends who used to lampoon the world so effortlessly, crouching at the verge of every joke and waiting to pounce on it, and you remember how they changed as they grew older and the joy of questioning everything slowly became transformed into the pain of questioning everything, like a star consuming its own core. — Kevin Brockmeier

I think in that context, when a generation of kids is that ignorant of their recent history, it does a good job of showing what the Pistols were standing for. It's current and it's in the air, partly because I think nothing contemporary is as extreme or as strongly stated as what The Sex Pistols were able to do in their time, in the '70s. I think the reason to [make the film] is that their ideas are still alive: the defense of the right to be an individual, and questioning everything you read, and questioning all the information that's bombarded increasingly at you. — Julien Temple

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

Many of us have bought into the idea that science, though practiced by humans, has managed to rid itself of human flaws. But if we intend to question everything, perhaps we should begin by questioning whether the human testing of human ideas can be so simple, considering how complicated humans are. — Douglas Axe

We don't have to have all the answers and know everything. Life is about acknowledging the unknown and just living. — Raneem Kayyali

Being a feminist in principle is easy compared to being a feminist in practice. For men and women, living each day in practical defiance of thousands of years of gender-based streaming is so much harder than walking in marches, running workshops, and writing blog posts. It means questioning everything you do, moment by moment, day by day. It means thinking differently and making dozens of conscious decisions every day that you might have made on auto-pilot before. It's hard. It's taxing. It's tiring. — Terry Fallis

The making of adaptable, curious, open, questioning people has nothing to do with vocational training and everything to do with humanistic and scientific studies. — Neil Postman

Always doubting and questioning everything strikes me as a very miserable way to live. — Marty Rubin

When you feel perpetually unmotivated, you start questioning your existence in an unhealthy way; everything becomes a pseudo intellectual question you have no interest in responding whatsoever. This whole process becomes your very skin and it does not merely affect you; it actually defines you. So, you see yourself as a shadowy figure unworthy of developing interest, unworthy of wondering about the world - profoundly unworthy in every sense and deeply absent in your very presence. — Ingmar Bergman

Everything that comes to us is a blessing or a test. That's all you need to know in this life ... just the certainty that God's got His eye on you, that He knows what you are made of, what you need to grow on. Why,questioning's a sin, it's pointless. He will show you your path in His own good time. And long as I remember that, I'm fine. — Dorothy Allison

O, what a world of unseen visions and heard silences, this insubstantial country of the mind! What ineffable essences, these touchless rememberings and unshowable reveries! And the privacy of it all! A secret theater of speechless monologue and prevenient counsel, an invisible mansion of all moods, musings, and mysteries, an infinite resort of disappointments and discoveries. A whole kingdom where each of us reigns reclusively alone, questioning what we will, commanding what we can. A hidden hermitage where we may study out the troubled book of what we have done and yet may do. An introcosm that is more myself than anything I can find in a mirror. This consciousness that is myself of selves, that is everything, and yet is nothing at all - what is it?
And where did it come from?
And why? — Julian Jaynes

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

I think when I started doing stand-up, that's when I really tried to question everything in my belief system which is - I think a pretty important part of being a comedian is really questioning things. — Jim Gaffigan

I had a good time working with Russell Crowe, Ron Howard and Ed Harris. It was a great cast and Russell worked really hard, doing tons of research and questioning everything. — Jennifer Connelly

When distinction of any kind, even intellectual distinction, is somehow resented as a betrayal of the American spirit of equal opportunity for all, the result must be just this terror of individualistic impulses setting us apart, either above or below our neighbours; just this determination to obey without questioning and to subscribe with passion to the conventions and traditions. The dilemma becomes a very real one: How can this sense of democratic equality be made compatible with respect for exceptional personalities or great minds? How can democracy, as we understand it today, with its iron repression of the free spirit, its monotonous standardisation of everything, learn to cherish an intellectual aristocracy without which any nation runs the risk of becoming a civilisation of the commonplace and the second-rate? — Harold Edmund Stearns

The path to holiness lies through questioning everything. — M. Scott Peck

[T]he essence of belief is doubt, the essence of reality is questioning. The essence of Time is Flow, not Fix. The essence of faith is the knowledge that all flows and that everything must change. The growing man is Man Alive, and his "philosophy" must grow, must flow, with him ... the man too fixed today, unfixed tomorrow - and his body of beliefs is nothing but a series of fixations. — Thomas Wolfe

Everything we knew condemned us, and our questioning condemned us most of all. Knowledge was the way of our people, and knowledge was dangerous. It was the first thing that freed you and the thing that put you in peril. It was the key to the ten gates. I saw them clearly now, each and every one, the gates that were there for me. Ashes, Bones, Grass, Heart, Stone, Love, Sorrow, Blood, Earth, Sky. — Alice Hoffman

You see, we are so afraid to fail, to make mistakes, not only in examinations but in life. To make a mistake is considered terrible because we will be criticized for it, somebody will scold us. But, after all, why should you not make a mistake? Are not all the people in the world making mistakes? And would the world cease to be in this horrible mess if you were never to make a mistake? If you are afraid of making mistakes you will never learn. The older people are making mistakes all the time, but they don't want you to make mistakes, and thereby they smother your initiative. Why? Because they are afraid that by observing and questioning everything, by experimenting and making mistakes you may find out something for yourself and break away from the authority of your parents, of society, of tradition. That is why the ideal of success is held up for you to follow; and success, you will notice, is always in terms of respectability. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

Questioning anything and everything, to me, is punk rock. — Henry Rollins

That is the way of it among heretics. They start questioning one doctrine and end up questioning everything. No wonder they used to burn them. — Michael Flynn

A mind that questions everything, unless strong enough to bear the weight of its ignorance, risks questioning itself and being engulfed in doubt. — Emile Durkheim

"Spirituality comes from questioning everything but at the same time accepting everything. You can even be spiritual watching TV. When the ad comes on and says, "Don't hate me because I am beautiful," question that." — K.d. Lang

Prometi hesitated, leaning back into his seat, seeming surprised at the round of questioning from Keene. He answered in a solemn tone. "I don't see the contradiction sir."
Keene forged a smile. "Of course you can. It's everything there is in the beginning. Fact existed in the beginning, did it not?"
Prometi squinted. "It ought to have."
Keene nodded. "Indeed I agree. Fact has to exist or nothing can be. Can something be and not be Fact?"
Prometi shook his head. "Nothing can be and not be fact indeed sir."
"But nothing is fact until revealed."
"Indeed Sir."
Prometi raised his voice lightly. "Such fact existed in the beginning without revelation. Can we not have a contradiction? Did fact reveal itself or is fact revelation? — Dew Platt

I'd asked Tink about good fae when I got home. He'd been busy on my computer, creating If Daryl Dies We Riot memes. He'd genuinely appeared confused by my line of questioning. According to my pint-sized roommate, all fae were bad. There was no such thing as a good fae. Something had occurred to me while I'd watched him concentrate, the white glare from my computer lighting up his face. "Do you ever leave this house, Tink? Go anywhere?" He'd frowned up at me like I'd asked him why I should watch The Walking Dead. "Why would I leave? This place has everything I need, and if it doesn't, I can order it from Amazon." He'd paused. "Though, on second thought, we could use a live-in chef, because you can't cook for shit. — Jennifer L. Armentrout

I think that's just part of how it is with making art. Sometimes you're just flooded with ideas, and then other times you're questioning all the ideas you ever had before, and everything is just ... lame. — Dana Schutz

Forgetting your Self is the greatest injury; all the calamities flow from it. Take care of the most important, the lesser will take care of itself. You do not tidy up a dark room. You open the windows first. Letting in the light makes everything easy. So, let us wait with improving others until we see ourselves as we are/ and have changed. There is no need to turn round and round in endless questioning; find yourself and everything will fall into its proper place. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

My favorite scene was my dying scene, when I had to stand up and suddenly in that moment recall my wife and everything I stood for, and I say "My queen, my wife, my love" and I think of all my movies, that is the most powerful moment I ever had. In preparation for each take, I would scream at the ground, clench my fists, and scrape the ground, and cut all my knuckles and rip my nails... I would scream, and scrape, and scratch, and then I would stand and go "GO."
And they would film.
And it felt so visceral, and so powerful, and the next day, that was my last day of filming, the next day I was leaving Montreal and I went through US IMMIGRATION and the officer asked "what happened to your hands" and I said "I was just scratching the ground" and she took me for secondary questioning, and I missed my flight, and had to stay another day.
So the next day I wore gloves. — Gerard Butler

The biblical teaching is clear. It always contests political power . It incites to "counterpower," to "positive" criticism , to an irreducible dialogue (like that between king and prophet in Israel ), to antistatism, to a decentralizing of the relation, to an extreme relativizing of everything political, to an anti-ideology, to a questioning of all that claims either power or dominion (in other words, of all things political), and finally, if we may use a modern term, to a kind of " anarchism " (so long as we do not relate the term to the anarchist teaching of the nineteenth century). — Jacques Ellul

Comedians are sociologists. We're pointing out stuff that the general public doesn't even stop to think about, looking at life in slow-motion and questioning everything we see. — Steven Wright

Narian scrutinised both me and the Queen, with eyes so deeply blue I could not break away from them. I was glad he was no longer questioning me, for those eyes made me want to tell him everything. At the same time, those eyes revealed something to me. Was he in love with Alera? — Cayla Kluver

lair Hansen had always heard that near-death experiences made people reevaluate their lives. She'd spent nearly thirty years sure about what she wanted in life, but all it had taken for her to start questioning everything was some severe turbulence on a 747. She picked up her whiskey and took — Denise Grover Swank

Our conscience is our salvation. Our questioning of everything, of right and wrong, of action and consequence, is what defines our purpose. — R.A. Salvatore

We too often forget that faith is a matter of questioning and struggle before it becomes one of certitude and peace. You have to doubt and reject everything else in order to believe firmly in Christ, and after you have begun to believe, your faith itself must be tested and purified. Christianity is not merely a set of forgone conclusions. Faith tends to be defeated by the burning presence of God in mystery, and seeks refuge from him, flying to comfortable social forms and safe convictions in which purification is no longer an inner battle but a matter of outward gesture. — Thomas Merton

If we define the word Theos as that on which everything else depends but which itself depends on nothing else - a reasonable definition - then none of these scientific theories is theologically neutral. All of them rest on fundamental assumptions which can be questioned. But the questioning, if it is to be rational, has to rely on other fundamental assumptions which can in turn be questioned. It follows (and this is Polanyi's point) that there can be no knowing without personal commitment. We must believe in order to know. — Lesslie Newbigin

I wrote my book 'The Amorous Busboy Of Decatur Avenue' completely like a writer does, writing it down, re-writing everything. But in my stand-up, I improvise initially, never questioning it too closely. — Robert Klein

Question everything, even the question mark, that shepherd's crook floating in the air above that small round rock

If you - stubbornly - still wish to be unhappy,
maybe you can grasp it. — Dick Allen

I learned everything I ever need to know about questioning artful dodgers by covering the most artful of them all, Ronald Reagan. For Reagan, performance was as much a part of governing as understanding the details of the federal budget. — Andrea Mitchell

Somewhere, sometime, somebody taught her to question everything - though it might have been a good thing if he'd also taught her to question the act of questioning. — Wallace Stegner

Eroticism is the brink of the abyss. I'm leaning out over deranged horror (at this point my eyes roll back in my head). The abyss is the foundation of the possible. We're brought to the edge of the same abyss by uncontrolled laughter or ecstasy. From this comes a "questioning" of everything possible. This is the stage of rupture, of letting go of things, of looking forward to death. — Georges Bataille

Find your freedom through questioning everything you hear and see. Be free to choose, from all possible perspectives and opinions, what builds love and harmony. — Raphael Zernoff

Question everything that is popular, and seek answers in what is not. — Suzy Kassem

I've considered everything you said earlier. I've made a decision. But first I'd like to explain that it has nothing to do with your personal endowments, which are quite considerable. It's just that - "
"My personal endowments?"
"Yes. Your intelligence. Your attractiveness."
"Oh."
Wondering why his voice sounded odd, Amelia darted a questioning glance at him. The amber eyes were bright with laughter. What had she said to amuse him? "Are you paying attention?"
"Believe me, when my personal endowments are being discussed, I always pay attention. Go on. — Lisa Kleypas

And then you grew up, went to school, and began to 'philosophize,' didn't you? We all go through the same thing. It seems that during adolescence a person's inner life is suddenly weakened, stripped of its natural courage. In his thinking he no longer dares stand face to face with reality or mystery; he begins to see them through the opinions of 'grown-ups,' through books and courses and professors. Still, a voice remains which is not completely muffled and which cries out every so often - every time its gag is loosened by an unexpected jolt in the routine. The voice cries out its great questioning of everything, but we stifle it again right away. — Rene Daumal

Believe what you like, but don't believe everything you read without questioning it. — Pauline Baynes

Socrates was famously executed for his philosophical and political beliefs. I wondered what would happen if you had a similar character, who was so relentlessly questioning of everything? In a modern society, would we be any more or any less tolerant of that kind of character? — Samantha Harvey

The dread, I learned, builds slowly. It eats away at you a little bit over time until you start questioning everything you do and feel. — Jeanie Dyer

The most important training, though, is to experience life as a writer, questioning everything, inventing multiple explanations for everything. If you do that, all the other things will come; if you don't, there's no hope for you. — Orson Scott Card

You know what I'd love to read? A Dialogue between Bron and Shevek and Socrates. Socrates would love it too. I bet he wanted people who argued. You can tell he did, you can tell that's what he loved really, at least in The Symposium. — Jo Walton

Without the journey and crucial moment of understanding, I would still be questioning everything before me. I know now that I must trust what comes next, for there is a plan greater than the one I can see at work. — Brynn Myers

19. Everything is here for a purpose, from horses to vine shoots. What's surprising about that? Even the sun will tell you, "I have a purpose," and the other gods as well. And why were you born? For pleasure? See if that answer will stand up to questioning. — Marcus Aurelius

It [motherhood] has changed absolutely everything. I mean, it's changed my life. I think I've changed as a human being more since I've had Kai than in any other period in my life ... It's such an incredible catalyst for growth. I found myself questioning absolutely everything: how I spend my time, how I speak, what kind of projects I work on, how I look at the world. — Jennifer Connelly

Unfortunately, religions have become a part of the problem instead of part of the solution. We have fought our wars in the name of God, questioning whose God is the best God and whose exploration of this deeper reality is the best explanation. That defies everything that this deeper reality teaches. — Edgar Mitchell

Then August knew. Thomas didn't dwell on things. Thomas was strong, and he didn't know what it was to be afraid. He knew he could get what he wanted, never questioning his identity or who he would be the next day.
He was everything August wasn't, and that's why August hated him. — Kris Noel

I like that you challenge me. That's new. I like that you don't go easy on me. I like that you question everything. I want you to keep questioning everything. I like how you smell. I like seeing the fight in your eyes. I like seeing anger color your cheeks. I like hearing your breathing stop when I'm close to you and I like feeling your heart pick up its speed in your chest when were close like this. I like that a lot, actually, the sound of your heart beating. So alive, a frantic mess of beats. I like the feeling of you in my arms, the way our bodies align. I like watching your eyes close and knowing I'm the reason, the reason you're feeling this." -Everett — Whitney Barbetti