Quotes & Sayings About Questions Without Answers

The point of asking questions is to find true answers; the point of measuring is to measure accurately; the point of making maps is to find your way to your destination ... In short, the goal of truth goes without saying, in every human culture. — Daniel Dennett

For the courage of her heart, which I saw face down the greatest horrors I know without breaking. For the high and hungry intelligence of her mind, which never stops asking questions, nor thinking about the answers. For the spark of her spirit, which could teach bonfires how to burn. That's three. Enough for going on with. All this is set beside me, and you ask me instead if I want dirt? I do not understand farmers — Lois McMaster Bujold

It is not without fear and trembling that a historian of religion approaches the problem of myth. This is not only because of that preliminary embarrassing question: what is intended by myth? It is also because the answers given depend for the most part on the documents selected. — Mircea Eliade

Man will not live without answers to his questions. — Hans Morgenthau

In raising problems without solutions, in posing questions without answers, in retreating to the hermetic, cavernous abode of complaint, pessimism is guilty of that most inexcusable of Occidental crimes - the crime of not pretending it's for real. Pessimism fails to live up to the most basic tenet of philosophy - the "as if." Think as if it will be helpful, act as if it will make a difference, speak as if there is something to say, live as if you are not, in fact, being lived by some murmuring non-entity both shadowy and muddied. — Eugene Thacker

People who face a difficult question often answer an easier one instead, without realizing it. — Daniel Kahneman

She will try to find the nice way to exercise intelligence. But intelligence is not ladylike. Intelligence is full of excesses. Rigorous intelligene abhors sentimentality, and women must be sentimental to value the dreadful silliness of the men around them. Morbid intelligence abhors the cheery sunlight of positive thinking and eternal sweetness; and women must be sunlight and cheery and sweet, or the woman could not bribe her way with smiles through a day. Wild intelligence abhors any narrow world; and the world of women must stay narrow, or the woman is an outlaw. No woman could be Nietzsche or Rimbaud without ending up in a whorehouse or lobotomized. Any vital intelligence has passionate questions, aggressive answers; but women cannot be explorers; there can be no Lewis or Clark of the female mind. — Andrea Dworkin

Cynics know the answers without having penetrated deeply enough to know the questions. When challenged by mysterious truths, they marshall 'facts. — Marilyn Ferguson

As human beings, don't we need questions without answers as well as questions with answers, questions that we might someday answer and questions that we can never answer? — Alan Lightman

Better that I find you, God, and leave the questions unanswered, than to find the answers without finding you. — Saint Augustine

I can evade questions without help; what I need is answers — John F. Kennedy

So let me just say this. There are ways. You already know that because, in your life, there have been High Kindness periods and Low Kindness periods, and you know what inclined you toward the former and away from the latter. Education is good; immersing ourselves in a work of art: good; prayer is good; meditation's good; a frank talk with a dear friend; establishing ourselves in some kind of spiritual tradition - recognizing that there have been countless really smart people before us who have asked these same questions and left behind answers for us. It would be strange and self-defeating to fail to seek out these wise voices from the past
as self-defeating as it would be to attempt to rediscover the principles of physics from scratch or invent a new method of brain surgery without having learned the ones that already exist. — George Saunders

How do I know what I love the most? By looking at my life outside of Sunday morning. What do I enjoy the most? What do I spend the most time doing? Where does my mind drift to when I don't have anything to do? What am I passionate about? What do I spend my money on? What makes me angry when I don't get it? What do I feel depressed without? What do I fear losing the most? Our answers to those questions will lead us straight to the God or gods we love and worship. — Bob Kauflin

I'm a pretty solid Christian. But even as an altar boy, I was always asking the bigger questions
you know: if God is, in fact, good, what is all this death I see? And if God is gentle, what is all this suffering I see? I've found some of the answers in Eastern religion. It explained my Christianity to me. Good and evil are the same thing. You can't have one without the other. It's the balance, it's the temperance of things. — Tim Allen

The world of the known and the not yet known is bridged by wonderment. But wonderment happens largely in a situation where the child's world is separate from the adult world, where children must seek entry, through their questions, into the adult world. As media merge the two worlds, as the tension created by secrets to be unraveled is diminished, the calculus of wonderment changes. Curiosity is replaced by cynicism or, even worse, arrogance. We are left with children who rely not on authoritative adults but on news from nowhere. We are left with children who are given answers to questions they never asked. We are left, in short, without children. — Neil Postman

Ask courageous questions.
Do not be satisfied with superficial answers.
Be open to wonder and at the same time subject all claims to knowledge, without exception, to intense skeptical scrutiny.
Be aware of human fallibility.
Cherish your species and your planet. — Carl Sagan

Very few beings really seek knowledge in this world. Mortal or immortal, few really ask. On the contrary, they try to wring from the unknown the answers they have already shaped in their own minds
justifications, confirmations, forms of consolation without which they can't go on. To really ask is to open the door to the whirlwind. The answer may annihilate the question and the questioner. — Anne Rice

(1) I have told you more than I know about osteoporosis. (2) What I have told you is subject to change without notice. (3) I hope I raised more questions than I have given answers. (4) In any case, as usual, a lot more work is necessary. — Fuller Albright

A copy of Thoreau's Walden ... which Chris has never heard and which can be read a hundred times without exhaustion. I try always to pick a book far over his head and read it as a basis for questions and answers, rather than without interruption. I read a sentence or two, wait for him to come up with his usual barrage of questions, answer them, then read another sentence or two. Classics read well this way. They must be written this way. Sometimes we have spent a whole evening reading and talking and discovered we have only covered two or three pages. It's a form of reading done a century ago ... when Chautauquas were popular. Unless you've tried it you can't imagine how pleasant it is to do it this way. I — Robert M. Pirsig

I understand. There is the journey you make through the world - the one that aches and sings. We come together with others to make our way and survive its trials," she said. "But we are, all of us, also wayfarers on a greater journey, this one without end, each of us searching for the answers to the unspoken questions of our hearts. Take comfort, as I have, in knowing that, while we must travel it alone, this journey rewards goodness, and will prove that the things which are denied to us in life will never create a cage for our souls." Nicholas — Alexandra Bracken

Be patient with all that is unresolved in your heart, And try to love the questions themselves. Do not seek for the answers that cannot be given, For you would not be able to live them, And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now, And perhaps, without knowing it, You will live along some distant day Into the answers. Rainer Rilke — Paul J. Donoghue

You are so young, you have not even begun, and I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything that is unsolved in your heart and to try to cherish the questions themselves, like closed rooms and like books written in a very strange tongue. Do not search now for the answers which cannot be given you because you could not live them. It is a matter of living everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, one distant day live right into the answer. — Rainer Maria Rilke

The Work is merely four questions; it's not even a thing. It has no motive, no strings. It's nothing without your answers. These four questions will join any program you've got ad enhance it. Any religion you have-they'll enhance it. If you have no religion, they will bring you joy. And they'll burn up anything that isn't true for you. They'll burn through to the reality that has always been waiting. — Byron Katie

The value of philosophy is, in fact, to be sought largely in its very uncertainty. The man who has no tincture of philosophy goes through life imprisoned in the prejudices derived from common sense, from the habitual beliefs of his age or his nation, and from convictions which have grown up in his mind without the co-operation or consent of his deliberate reason. To such a man the world tends to become definite, finite, obvious; common objects rouse no questions, and unfamiliar possibilities are contemptuously rejected. As soon as we begin to philosophize, on the contrary, we find, as we saw in our opening chapters, that even the most everyday things lead to problems to which only very incomplete answers can be given. . . .

--From The Problems of Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1912). — Bertrand Russell

As gardeners-without-borders we must ask ourselves bigger questions like: Where did these materials arise and at what cost to the place that begot them? Of course the synthetic fertilizer loses on every score; it's not even in the running. It gives us no answers; it ignores the questions. — Will Bonsall

I would like to beg of you, dear friend, as well as I can, to have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Faith without works is dead"If you were guaranteed success, what would you do with your life?" Another way to frame it is, "If you already had all the fame, fortune, and power you could ever want, what would you do with your life?" The answers to these questions hold the keys to the purpose of your life. Action, finally, is the true religion. By taking this bold step, regardless of outcome, you're sending yourself a message that your dream is real. You're cutting a new groove in consciousness that says you will no longer be held back by fear or perceived limitation. You're setting the law of freedom in motion, allowing it to gain momentum, until you won't be able to prevent your progress even if you tried! — Derek Rydall

And then what?" she asked, though this time the words were quieter, smaller; they were heavy with things unspoken: questions without answers and promises without assurances.
Owen wanted to say this: "And the we'll be together forever."
Or this: "And then we'll live happily ever after."
But he could't. Instead, he fixed his eyes on the empty sky, feeling his once heavy heart go floating off like a balloon.
"And then we'll have to go home," he said eventually, because it was the truth, and after everything they'd been through, it was the only thing he could give her. — Jennifer E. Smith

Long exasperated by questions without answers, by answers without consequences, by truths which change nothing, we learn to become intoxicated by the mood of mystery itself, by the odor of the unknown. We are entranced by the subtle scents and wavering reflections of the unimaginable. — Thomas Ligotti

He discovered that the science he'd once thought of as the whole world of knowledge is only a branch of philosophy, which is far broader and far more general. The questions he had asked about infinite hypotheses hadn't been of interest to science because they weren't scientific questions. Science cannot study scientific method without getting into a bootstrap problem that destroys the validity of its answers. The questions he'd asked were at a higher level than science goes. And so Phaedrus found in philosophy a natural continuation of the question that brought him to science in the first place, What does it all mean? What's the purpose of all this? At — Robert M. Pirsig

I'm a lot more observational than personal in my writing. My writing is mostly a lot of questions without answers. — Laura Marling

Call your personal board now and discuss the important questions. You cannot invent, re-invent or show creative brilliance without asking pertinent questions. You must demand answers from your life, from your present circumstances or from any challenge you may face. Why can't you change? What does it take to get different results? What else can you do or try? — Archibald Marwizi

My brothers' faces haunt me. I hear their children, my nieces and nephews, asking me why I came home without their daddies. I think of their wives, imagine their questions. Our parents, forever seeing the faces of their lost sons when they look at me. They will want answers, demand to know how I survived. And what do I tell them? That I huddled like a baby inside my tent while their killer beckoned me forth for one last stand? — Kevin Wallis

Be patient with all that is unsolved in your life. Learn to love the questions themselves, until some distant day, without your knowing, you will have lived into the answers. — Rainer Maria Rilke

You reach a certain age when reality grabs you by the scruff of the neck and shouts in your face:"Hey, look, this is what life is." And you have to open your eyes and look at it, listen to it, smell it: people who don't like you, things you don't want to do, things that hurt, things that scare you, questions without answers, feelings you don't understand, feelings you don't want but have no control over.
Reality.
When you gradually come to realise that all that stuff in books, films, television, magazines, newspapers, comics - it's all rubbish. It's got nothing to do with anything. It's all made up. It doesn't happen like that. It's not real. It means nothing. Reality is what you see when you look out of the window of a bus: dour faces, sad and temporary lives, millions of cars, metal, bricks, glass, rain, cruel laughter, ugliness, dirt, bad teeth, crippled pigeons, little kids in pushchairs who've already forgotten how to smile ... — Kevin Brooks

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer. — Rainer Maria Rilke

I am left without answers. There are only questions I must answer for myself. What is the balance between home and the road? Hearth and horizon? Between what is and what could be? — Gloria Steinem

Lead with questions, not answers." "Engage in dialogue and debate, not coercion." "Conduct autopsies, without blame." "Build 'red flag' mechanisms." In other words, make it easy for employees and customers to speak up when they identify a problem. — Daniel H. Pink

There was something growing in me. Something far more than the festering hate that had begun too many years ago. This girl that sits obediently in the bath, awaiting her master's return was just an image, a picture in a book with no accompanying explanation. She sits in silence, she answers his questions and she succumbs his touches without complaint. But in the dark recesses of her mind something continues to thrive. Like a switch flipped it had changed her from the pathetic, frightened girl into a soulless demon playing a sickening game. Dragging him in with her acquiesce until she could chew him up and spit him out. — Roxanne Lee

With faith, there are no questions; without faith, there are no answers. — Yisroel Meir Ha-Cohen

Live your questions now, and perhaps even without knowing it, you will live along some distant day into your answers. — Rainer Maria Rilke

To assert that the universe has a purpose implies the universe has intent. And intent implies a desired outcome. But who would do the desiring? And what would a desired outcome be? That carbon-based life is inevitable? Or that sentient primates are life's neurological pinnacle? Are answers to these questions even possible without expressing a profound bias of human sentiment? Of course humans were not around to ask these questions for 99.9999% of cosmic history. So if the purpose of the universe was to create humans then the cosmos was embarrassingly inefficient about it. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

'Apocalypse Now' poses questions without any attempt to provide definitive answers, and the film's profound ambiguities are integral to its enduring magic. — James Gray

For those without faith there are no answers, for those with faith there are no questions. — Immanuel Jakobovits, Baron Jakobovits

Ever find yourself working on something without knowing exactly why? Someone just told you to do it. It's pretty common, actually. That's why it's important to ask why you're working on _. What is this for? Who benefits? What's the motivation behind it? Knowing the answers to these questions will help you better understand the work itself. — Jason Fried

You like or dislike people long before you know much about them; you trust or distrust strangers without knowing why; you feel that an enterprise is bound to succeed without analyzing it. Whether you state them or not, you often have answers to questions that you do not completely understand, relying on evidence that you can neither explain nor defend. — Daniel Kahneman

I would like to beg you dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
Letter to a Young Poet, 1903 — Rainer Maria Rilke

I told them we're tired of the culture wars, tired of Christianity getting entangled with party politics and power. Millennials want to be known by what we're for, I said, not just what we're against. We don't want to choose between science and religion or between our intellectual integrity and our faith. Instead, we long for our churches to be safe places to doubt, to ask questions, and to tell the truth, even when it's uncomfortable. We want to talk about the tough stuff - biblical interpretation, religious pluralism, sexuality, racial reconciliation, and social justice - but without predetermined conclusions or simplistic answers. We want to bring our whole selves through the church doors, without leaving our hearts and minds behind, without wearing a mask. — Rachel Held Evans

Love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer. — Krista Tippett

To sustain moral behavior, people need more than simply a list of rules. They need to be people who have a comprehensive view of the universe - a religion, or an ideology that functions like a religion - that stands behind those rules. Only such a comprehensive view can explain the rules (supplying answers to the crucial "ethical content questions" mentioned above), organize the rules (so we know how to handle difficult ethical judgments), justify the rules (making them seem plausible, and therefore worthy of obedience), and sacralize the rules (making them sacred and truly moral, rather than merely prudent advice). Without a comprehensive view of the universe, no body of ethical rules remains coherent for long. — Greg Forster

In ancient Greece, some people did that for a living. They would just sit on a tree branch or a stone bench and ponder, sometimes aloud. Some got answers and some got headaches. And now, in this new age of jet planes and pistachio ice-cream, we pondered over the same questions without getting the answers and maybe in five thousand years, some other kids will be sitting on roofs pondering the same all over again. Not far from the Shepherd's star, there was a discreet star, one who didn't shine too brightly. I had it named "Goddessa". It was mine. — Patric Juillet

Most people believe that great leaders are distinguished by their ability to give compelling answers. This profound book shatters that assumption, showing that the more vital skill is asking the right questions ... . Berger poses many fascinating questions, including this one: What if companies had mission questions rather than mission statements? This is a book everyone ought to read - without question. — Adam Grant

She thought men were saviors ...
... And she looked for more in them than what they were ...
Only to rescue herself from those she wished would rescue her ...
And isn't that the most tragic lie ...
The lie where we tell what we wished were true and believe it ... ?
She had an artificial memory, a prosthesis to a past that never was ...
She was like a party that no one ever went to ...
Like a cure ... without a disease ...
And isn't that the greatest fear of all ... to be ready with the answers
to questions that no one asks anymore? — Merrit Malloy

A picture can be an answer as well as a question but if you can't answer your question try to question your question ... There can be questions without answers but no answers without questions. — Ernst Haas

I might never have realized who I really was or have gotten answers to the relentless questions that had driven me to the Cove without those quiet hours spent with Fairlight in the mountains. I do not know why it is that an intimate contact with wildlife and a personal observation of nature helps so much in this self-discovery. But that it is so, I have seen in other people's lives as well as my own ... even a few bricks and macadam are a shield between us and the wisdom that nature has to give. — Catherine Marshall

My child, it will be better for you if you accept my decisions without complaint. Do not ask me to defend my actions or to explain why one person is favored and another seems slighted. The answers to these questions go far beyond your comprehension. — Thomas A Kempis

When there's a dead body in the room, you never, ever answer cops' questions without your lawyer present. Which is to say, your lawyer answers the questions by saying, We have nothing to say at this time. — Paul Levine