Arresting Questions Quotes

When we feel the cards are stacked against us, and we have to confront the arresting questions of our walks of life, we may happen to face up to an "apocalypse." When we meet head-on a disclosure of a "new" truth and come to terms with the destruction of our "old" reality, the disparity might be very challenging, but conceivably liberating as well. ("Looking for the unexpected" ) ~ Erik Pevernagie

Designing well-written tests still remains a challenging task. Some complex questions may lose clarity causing difficulties in providing meaningful answers. Basically, questions should be designed in such a way that each well-prepared student can easily give a correct answer. ~ Eraldo Banovac

It is very interesting how the human mind works. We have the need to justify everything, to explain and understand everything, in order to feel safe. We have millions of questions that need answers because there are so many things that the reasoning mind cannot explain. It is not important if the answer is correct; just the answer itself makes us feel safe. This is why we make assumptions ... We make all sorts of assumptions because we don't have the courage to ask questions ... We have agreed that it is not safe to ask questions; we have agreed that if people love us, they should know what we want or how we feel. When we believe something, we assume we are right about it to the point that we will destroy relationships in order to defend our position. ~ Miguel Ruiz

I brought my first fall/winter line to New York, and it was confiscated by U.S. Customs. They asked, 'What is the value of this?' I said, 'I'm not so good with existential questions.' ~ John Malkovich

It can be dangerous to ask a question when you already know the answer. ~ Alice Feeney

To truly live without regrets, pay attention. Ask yourself hard questions and see where they lead. Do I really want this job? Is this relationship right for me? If I could do anything, would it be what I'm doing today ... or something different? ~ Chris Guillebeau

Vampires let us play with death and the issue of mortality. They let us ponder what it would mean to be truly long lived. Would the long view allow us to see the world differently, imagine social structures differently? Would it increase or decrease our reverence for the planet? Vampires allow us to ask questions we usually bury. ~ Margot Adler

There is no area of the world that should not be investigated by scientists. There will always remain some questions that have not been answered. In general, these are the questions that have not yet been posed. ~ Linus Pauling

If you let other people do some of the work that we ask ourselves to do, if you allow for the fact that we are ourselves dependent on and distributed over and in a way made up out of the world and processes around us then we can explain certain questions that we otherwise cannot explain and moreover we discover that we are not aliens in a strange world. ~ Alva Noe

No one questions the validity, the urgency, the essentiality of the Voting Rights Act. ~ Anthony Kennedy

When I meet God, I am going to ask him two questions: Why relativity ? And why turbulence ? I really believe he will have an answer for the first. ~ Werner Heisenberg

As the emergency personnel and squad cars descended on Pier Three that bitter afternoon, the same questions bounced from radio to radio.

"What is Superman doing here?"

"Why had the Man of Steel taken time to recover the body of a fifty-year-old Costa Rican Newspaper Man who never had been or done anything important?"

Because not a single one of us is background noise. Because when one of us disappears… Someone should notice.

Every person is a star. A Life. A Heart. A Voice. And when a voice is silenced by darkness another must rise to see that justice is done.

Valentin Reyes, survived by his daughter, Maribella, was buried last Saturday at a small service, attended by three. ~ Joe Kelly

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

Every book can be, for the right reader, an oracle, responding on occasion even to questions unasked.. ~ Alberto Manguel

When is a crisis reached? When questions arise that can't be answered. ~ Ryszard Kapuscinski

I was once doing a question and answer period with the novelist Jane Smiley in a bookstore and someone asked us what our processes were and Jane said hers and then I said mine and Jane said, "Well, if I had a student like that I'd force him never to write like that again because you could never write a novel in the way that you write poetry." ~ Edward Hirsch

The book depicts thoughts, unveils imaginings, answers unspoken questions, clarifies doubts, resolves arguments, and finally reveals the very atoms of the most curiosity-driven desire. ~ Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra

Your mind will answer most questions if you learn to relax and wait for the answer. ~ William S. Burroughs

What does it mean to be truly educated?

I think I can do no better about answering the question of what it means to be truly educated than to go back to some of the classic views on the subject. For example the views expressed by the founder of the modern higher education system, Wilhelm von Humboldt, leading humanist, a figure of the enlightenment who wrote extensively on education and human development and argued, I think, kind of very plausibly, that the core principle and requirement of a fulfilled human being is the ability to inquire and create constructively independently without external controls.

To move to a modern counterpart, a leading physicist who talked right here [at MIT], used to tell his classes it's not important what we cover in the class, it's important what you discover.

To be truly educated from this point of view means to be in a position to inquire and to create on the basis of the resources available to you which you've come to appreciate and comprehend. To know where to look, to know how to formulate serious questions, to question a standard doctrine if that's appropriate, to find your own way, to shape the questions that are worth pursuing, and to develop the path to pursue them. That means knowing, understanding many things but also, much more important than what you have stored in your mind, to know where to look, how to look, how to question, how to challenge, how to proceed independently, to deal with the chal ~ Noam Chomsky

The intellectual equipment needed for the job of the future is an ability to define problems, quickly assimilate relevant data, conceptualize and reorganize the information, make deductive and inductive leaps with it, ask hard questions about it, discuss findings with colleagues, work collaboratively to find solutions and then convince others. ~ Robert Reich

When I was ambushed by global warming advocates recently-no, they haven't given up-they asked me the same questions they always ask: "What if you're wrong?" and "If you're wrong will you apologize to future generations?" I always answer, "What if you're wrong? Will you apologize to my twenty kids and grandkids for the largest tax increase in American history?" They usually don't have anything to say after that. ~ James Inhofe

People are taught to fear god. They are taught to fear everything. It has become such a natural state that no one questions it. ~ Frederick Lenz

Beautiful. Jules once thought he'd understood what the word meant. He now believed it overused. Some word needed to be kept in reserve for the rare, the arresting, the surprising ... the magical. Or a new one invented. ~ Julie Anne Long

The kind of problem that literature raises is not the kind that you ever 'solve'. Whether my answers are any good or not, they represent a fair amount of thinking about the questions. ~ Northrop Frye

Questions asked out of agenda threaten
Questions asked out of authentic, loving inquiry unlock and liberate
Choose. ~ Dave Rudbarg

Ever see something in a store that you gotta have? How about those rainbow suspenders you wore only once? Prevent the "wish-I-hadn't"s by asking yourself these questions:

*Will I use it or wear it often?
*Will I use it or wear it a couple months from now?
*If I get it, will I have enough money for what I'm saving for?

If the answer to any of these questions is no, you might want to think twice. If you still aren't sure, try waiting a week to see if it has the same appeal. ~ Ingrid Roper

If you are to shape your world in following Christ, you are called, prayerfully, to discern where in your discipline the human project is showing signs of exile and humbly and boldly to act symbolically in ways that declare that the powers have been defeated, that the kingdom has come in Jesus the Jewish Messiah, that the new way of being human has been unveiled, and to be prepared to tell the story that explains what these symbols are all about. And in all this you are to declare, in symbol and practice, in story and articulate answers to questions, that Jesus is Lord and Caesar is not; that Jesus is Lord and Marx, Freud and Caesar is not; that Jesus is Lord and neither modernity nor postmodernity is. When Paul spoke of the gospel, he was not talking primarily about a system of salvation but about the announcement, in symbol and word, that Jesus is the true Lord of the world, the true light of the world. ~ N. T. Wright

Why were there some people who seemed so sure of themselves that it made him feel small and ignorant by comparison, as if they had a script to life with all the answers on it? He felt he didn't even know the questions. ~ Marcus Sedgwick

Gentlemen, I am tormented by questions; answer them for me. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

If you show people how much you care and ask questions in a non threatening way, you'll be amazed by how much they'll tell you. ~ John C. Maxwell

When the child asks: "Why have the leaves turned red?" or "Why does it snow?" we launch into explanations which have no obvious connection with the question. Leaves are red because it is cold, we say. What has cold to do with colour? How is the child to know that we are talking of abstract connections between atmospheric conditions and leaf chemistry? And why should he care? The child has asked 'why,' not 'how,' and certainly not 'how much.' And why should he care the molecular structure of water is believed to be such that at low temperatures it forms rigid bonds which make it appear as ice or snow? None of these abstractions says anything about what the child experiences: the redness of leaves and the cool, tickling envelopment by snow. The living response would be quite different.

'Why are the leaves red Dad?"
"Because it is so beautiful, child. Don't you see how beautiful it is, all these autumn colours?"

There is no truer answer. That is how the leaves are red. An answer which does not invoke questions, which does not lead the child into an endless series of questions, to which each answer is a threshold. The child will hear later on that a chemical reaction occurs in those leaves. It is bad enough, then; let us not make the world uninhabitable for the child too soon. ~ Neil Evernden

The scientific issues that engage people most are the truly fundamental ones: is the universe infinite? Is life just a sideshow in the cosmos? What happened before the Big Bang? Everyone is flummoxed by such questions, so there is, in a sense, no gulf between experts and the rest. ~ Martin Rees

He was large enough and round enough to join the solar system with no questions asked. The cigar that protruded from the right side of his mouth would have been a full day's work for the best torcedor in Havana, and if he was worried about the stadium being a smoke-free location, he gave no sign of it. Gave no sign, in fact, of ever being worried about much of anything. ~ Stephen Spencer

trenchant questions she'd asked. 'Pretty? ~ Stav Sherez

Does God exist? That depends on which God you have in mind. The cosmic mystery or the worldly lawgiver? Sometimes when people talk about God, they talk about a grand and awesome enigma, about which we know absolutely nothing. We invoke this mysterious God to explain the deepest riddles of the cosmos. Why is there something rather than nothing? What shaped the fundamental laws of physics? What is consciousness, and where does it come from? We do not know the answers to these questions, and we give our ignorance the grand name of God. The most fundamental characteristic of this mysterious God is that we cannot say anything concrete about Him. This is the God of the philosophers; the God we talk about when we sit around a campfire late at night, and wonder what life is all about. ~ Yuval Noah Harari