Great Questions Quotes

Lewis is a rare example of someone who liked to think about life's great questions because they were forced on him by his own experience. ~ Alister E. McGrath

Great questions make great reporting. ~ Diane Sawyer

All great questions must be raised by great voices, and the greatest voice is the voice of the people - speaking out - in prose, or painting or poetry or music; speaking out - in homes and halls, streets and farms, courts and cafes - let that voice speak and the stillness you hear will be the gratitude of mankind. ~ Robert Kennedy

I read once, which I loved so much, that this great physicist who won a Nobel Prize said that every day when he got home, his dad asked him not what he learned in school but his dad said, 'Did you ask any great questions today?' And I always thought, what a beautiful way to educate kids that we're excited by their questions, not by our answers and whether they can repeat our answers. ~ Diane Sawyer

Society during the last hundred years has been alternately perplexed and encouraged respecting the two great questions: how shall the criminal and pauper be disposed of in order to reduce crime and reform the criminal on the one hand and, on the other, to diminish pauperism and restore the pauper to useful citizenship? ~ Dorothea Dix

Great drama is great questions or it is nothing but technique. I could not imagine a theater worth my time that did not want to change the world. ~ Arthur Miller

Good leaders ask great questions that inspire others to dream more, think more, learn more, do more, and become more. ~ John C. Maxwell

it depends whether the accommodation of social institutions to the altered state of human society, shall be the work of wise foresight, or of a conflict of opposite prejudices. The future of mankind will be gravely imperilled, if great questions are left to be fought over between ignorant change and ignorant opposition to change. ~ John Stuart Mill

My curiosity, alas, is not the kind that can be satisfied by objective knowledge. Plato said that opinion is worthless and that only knowledge counts, which is a neat formulation. But melancholy [men] from the northern mists understand that opinion is all there is. The great questions transcend fact, and discourse is a process of personality. Knowledge cannot respond to knowledge. And wisdom? Is it not opinion refined, opinion killed and resuscitated upward? Maybe Plato would have agreed with this. ~ Hayden Carruth

The great questions are those an intelligent child asks and, getting no answers, stops asking. ~ George Wald

But when we face the great questions about gravitation Does it require time? Is it polar to the 'outside of the universe' or to anything? Has it any reference to electricity? or does it stand on the very foundation of matter-mass or inertia? then we feel the need of tests, whether they be comets or nebulae or laboratory experiments or bold questions as to the truth of received opinions. ~ James Clerk Maxwell

History shows that great economic and social forces flow like a tide over communities only half conscious of that which is befalling them. Wise statesmen foresee what time is thus bringing, and try to shape institutions and mold men's thoughts and purposes in accordance with the change that is silently coming on. The unwise are those who bring nothing constructive to the process, and who greatly imperil the future of mankind by leaving great questions to be fought out between ignorant change on one hand and ignorant opposition to change on the other. ~ John Stuart Mill

Great Question Are:
Quintessential
Unforgettable
Expressive
Stimulating
Thought Provoking
Impactful
Open Ended
Neutral
Significant ~ Farshad Asl

The great questions of the day will not be settled by means of speeches and majority decisions but by iron and blood ~ Otto Von Bismarck

Good questions inform, great questions transform ~ Ken Coleman

Our old religious and moral traditions," writes Cupitt in The Great Questions of Life (2005), "have faded away, and nothing can resuscitate them. That is why a tiny handful of us are not liberal, but radical, theologians. We say that the new culture is so different from anything that existed in the past that religion has to be completely reinvented. Unfortunately, the new style of religious thinking that we are trying to introduce is so queer and so new that most people have great difficulty in recognizing it as religion at all. ~ Stephen Batchelor

While our men seem thoroughly abreast of the times on almost every other subject, when they strike the woman question they drop back into sixteenth century logic. They leave nothing to be desired generally in regard to gallantry and chivalry, but they actually do not seem sometimes to have outgrown that old contemporary of chivalry
the idea that women may stand on pedestals or live in doll houses, ... but they must not furrow their brows with thought or attempt to help men tug at the great questions of the world. ~ Anna Julia Cooper

Upon the great questions of origin, of destiny, of immortality, of ... other worlds, every honest man must say, 'I do not know.' Upon these questions, this is the creed of intelligence. ~ Robert Green Ingersoll

Voltaire once wrote, "Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers." Sir Francis Bacon added, "A prudent question is one-half of wisdom." Indira Gandhi concluded that "the power to question is the basis of all human progress." Great questions are clearly the quickest path to great answers. ~ Gary Keller

Every time you do something, make something, it's final in a way, but it's not. It immediately raises a great set of questions. And if you become a question addict, which I am, you immediately have something you need to pursue. ~ Robert Irwin

Old bureaucrat, my companion here present, no man ever opened an escape route for you, and you are not to blame. You built peace for yourself by blocking up every chink of light, as termites do. You rolled yourself into your ball of bourgeois security, your routines, the stifling rituals of your provincial existence, you built your humble rampart against winds and tides and stars. You have no wish to ponder great questions, you had enough trouble suppressing awareness of your human condition. You do not dwell on a wandering planet, you ask yourself no unanswerable questions ~ Antoine De Saint Exupery

When you really want to find the answers to the great questions of your life, you need to look for them deep in yourself. ~ Frank M. Wanderer

I was always a big fan of Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner's '2000-Year-Old Man' sketch. I think it's one of the biggest influences on the podcast, definitely. You'd never say Carl Reiner was the funniest dude on there, because he's just teeing it up, but he knows what questions to ask to lead to great improv. ~ Scott Aukerman

I don't like such "great questions" - my view is that life consists of a million little questions and that it is always only the totality of those that really matters. ~ Sandor Marai

I took a 19th-century Russian novel class in college and have been smitten with Russian literature ever since. Writers like Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Grossman, and Solzhenitsyn tackle the great questions of morality, politics, love, and death. ~ Anthony Marra

I suppose that the great questions of "Fate, Freewill, Foreknowledge Absolute," which used to be discussed at Concord, are still unsettled. ~ Henry David Thoreau

PRIOR: Why does everyone here play cards?
...
RABBI CHEMELWITZ: Cards is strategy but mostly a game of chance. In Heaven, everything is known. To the Great Questions are lying about here like yesterday's newspaper all the answers. So from what comes the pleasures of Paradise? Indeterminacy! Because mister, with the Angels, may their names be always worshipped and adored, it's all gloom and doom and give up already. But still is there Accident, in this pack of playing cards, still is there the Unknown, the Future. You understand me? It ain't all so much mechanical as they think. ~ Tony Kushner

Nobody ever launched an attack without having misgivings beforehand, You ought to have misgivings before; but when the moment of action is come, the hour of misgivings is passed. It is often not possible to go backward from a course which has been adopted in war. A man must answer "Aye" or "No" to the great questions which are put, and by that decision he must be bound. ~ Winston Churchill

A good Coach asks great questions to help you remove the obstacles in your mind and to get you back on track in life ~ Farshad Asl

But does he see everything, or only what he wants to be seeing? This is always one of the great questions of love. ~ David Levithan

One of the great questions of philosophy is, do we innately have morality, or do we get it from celestial dictation? A study of the Ten Commandments is a very good way of getting into and resolving that issue. ~ Christopher Hitchens

Here are the three great questions which in life we have over and over again to answer: Is it right or wrong? Is it true or false? Is it beautiful or ugly? Our education ought to help us to answer these questions. ~ John Lubbock

Groups give us power when we are enthusiastic, speak up, make bold assertions, and express an interest in others. Our capacity to influence rises when we practice kindness, express appreciation, cooperate, and dignify what others say and do. We are more likely to make a difference in the world when we are focused, articulate clear purposes and courses of action, and keep others on task. We rise in power when we provide calm and remind people of broader perspectives during times of stress, tell stories that calm during times of tension, and practice kind speech. Our opportunity for influence increases when we are open and ask great questions, listen to others with receptive minds, and offer playful ideas and novel perspectives. The ~ Dacher Keltner

Someone with a fresh mind, one not conditioned by upbringing and environment, would doubtless look at science and the powerful reductionism that it inspires as overwhelmingly the better mode of understanding the world, and would doubtless scorn religion as sentimental wishful thinking. Would not that same uncluttered mind also see the attempts to reconcile science and religion by disparaging the reduction of the complex to the simple as attempts guided by muddle-headed sentiment and intellectually dishonest emotion?

...Religion closes off the central questions of existence by attempting to dissuade us from further enquiry by asserting that we cannot ever hope to comprehend. We are, religion asserts, simply too puny. Through fear of being shown to be vacuous, religion denies the awesome power of human comprehension. It seeks to thwart, by encouraging awe in things unseen, the disclosure of the emptiness of faith. Religion, in contrast to science, deploys the repugnant view that the world is too big for our understanding. Science, in contrast to religion, opens up the great questions of being to rational discussion, to discussion with the prospect of resolution and elucidation. Science, above all, respects the power of the human intellect. Science is the apotheosis of the intellect and the consummation of the Renaissance. Science respects more deeply the potential of humanity than religion ever can. ~ Peter Atkins

If anything, if you can get somebody interested in something and get them excited, that's great. You should be praised for having opened the debate and having asked the right questions. ~ Oliver Stone

To turn away from the great questions and dilemmas of life is a tragedy, for the quest for meaning and truth makes life worth living. ~ Charles Colson

I would say that for the sake of human progress, the best thing we could possibly do would be to diminish, to the point of eliminating, religious faiths. But certainly not eliminating the natural yearnings of our species or the asking of these great questions. ~ E. O. Wilson

No great question will ever be settled in dollars and cents. Great questions must be settled on moral grounds and the tests of what makes free men. ~ Herbert Hoover

Read less and think more. Read about great things and think about great questions and issues. ~ Wallace D. Wattles

Great sci-fi has never shied from tackling the Big Questions, though really great sci-fi never forgets to entertain us along the way. Shock and awe applies to art, as well. ~ Rick Yancey

Immersing myself in Shakespeare's plays, reading them closely under the guidance of a brilliant, plain-spoken professor changed my life: It opened up the great questions; it put my petty problems into perspective. It got me out of bed in the mornings and kept me in the library late into the night. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

Ireland is a little country which raises all the great questions. ~ Gustave De Beaumont

Having confronted the world with little except a battered typewriter and a certain resilience, he can now take posthumous credit for having got the three great questions of the 20th century essentially 'right.' Orwell was an early and consistent foe of European imperialism, and foresaw the end of colonial rule. He was one of the first to volunteer to bear arms against fascism and Nazism in Spain. And, while he was soldiering in Catalonia, he saw through the biggest and most seductive lie of them all - the false promise of a radiant future offered by the intellectual underlings of Stalinism. ~ Christopher Hitchens

People have always wanted answers to the big questions. Where did we come from? How did the universe begin? What is the meaning and design behind it all? Is there anyone out there? The creation accounts of the past now seem less relevant and credible. They have been replaced by a variety of what can only be called superstitions, ranging from New Age to Star Trek. But real science can be far stranger than science fiction, and much more satisfying.
I am a scientist. And a scientist with a deep fascination with physics, cosmology, the universe and the future of humanity. I was brought up by my parents to have an unwavering curiosity and, like my father, to research and try to answer the many questions that science asks us. I have spent my life travelling across the universe, inside my mind. Through theoretical physics, I have sought to answer some of the great questions. At one point, I thought I would see the end of physics as we know it, but now I think the wonder of discovery will continue long after I am gone. We are close to some of these answers, but we are not there yet. ~ Stephen Hawking

Coming to the balcony, they both rested their elbows on the railing and looked down into the main room, which was filled wall-to-wall with patrons. Evie saw the antique-gold gleam of Sebastian's hair as he half sat on the desk in the corner, relaxed and smiling as he conversed with the crowd of men around him. His actions of ten days ago in saving Evie's life had excited a great deal of public admiration and sympathy, especially after an article in the Times had portrayed him in a heroic light. That, and the perception that his friendship with the powerful Westcliff had renewed, were all it had taken for Sebastian to gain immediate and profound popularity. Piles of invitations arrived at the club daily, requesting the attendance of Lord and Lady St. Vincent at balls, soirees, and other social events, which they declined for reasons of mourning.
There were letters as well, heavily perfumed and written by feminine hands. Evie had not ventured to open any of them, nor had she asked about the senders. The letters had accumulated in a pile in the office, remaining sealed and untouched, until Evie had finally been moved to say something to him earlier that morning. "You have a large pile of unread correspondence," she had told him, as they had taken breakfast together in his room. "It's occupying half the space in the office. What shall we do with all the letters?" An impish smile rose to her lips as she added. "Shall I read them to you while you rest?"
His eyes narrowe ~ Lisa Kleypas

Eli's coming with us." I hadn't known until I said it. Silence. "You're crazy," Vick says. "There's no way that kid will last until then." "I know," I tell Vick. He's right. It's only a matter of time before Eli goes down. He's small. He's impulsive. He asks too many questions. Then again, it's only a matter of time for all of us. "So why keep him around? Why bring him along?" "There's a girl I know back in Oria," I say. "He reminds me of her brother." "That's not reason enough." "It is for me," I say. Silence stretches between us. "You're getting weak," Vick says finally. "And that might kill you. Might mean you never see her again." "If I don't look out for him," I tell Vick, "I'd be someone she didn't know, even if she did see me again. ~ Ally Condie

We have conferred a mystic popularity upon officials whose only virtue is their timidity; while our scorn of rebels and reformers is so great that we have ceased to persecute them. The capitals and governments of the world are in the hands of caution; and change comes over them only in the night, unseen. ~ Will Durant

If you have food in your jaws you have solved all questions for the time being. ~ Franz Kafka

Poshlust," or in a better transliteration poshlost, has many nuances, and evidently I have not described them clearly enough in my little book on Gogol, if you think one can ask anybody if he is tempted by poshlost. Corny trash, vulgar clichés, Philistinism in all its phases, imitations of imitations, bogus profundities, crude, moronic, and dishonest pseudo-literature - these are obvious examples. Now, if we want to pin down poshlost in contemporary writing, we must look for it in Freudian symbolism, moth-eaten mythologies, social comment, humanistic messages, political allegories, overconcern with class or race, and the journalistic generalities we all know. Poshlost speaks in such concepts as "America is no better than Russia" or "We all share in Germany's guilt." The flowers of poshlost bloom in such phrases and terms as "the moment of truth," "charisma," "existential" (used seriously), "dialogue" (as applied to political talks between nations), and "vocabulary" (as applied to a dauber). Listing in one breath Auschwitz, Hiroshima, and Vietnam is seditious poshlost. Belonging to a very select club (which sports one Jewish name - that of the treasurer) is genteel poshlost. Hack reviews are frequently poshlost, but it also lurks in certain highbrow essays. Poshlost calls Mr. Blank a great poet and Mr. Bluff a great novelist. One of poshlost's favorite breeding places has always been the Art Exhibition; there it is produced by so-called sculptors working with the tools of wrec ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Beer's intellectual. What a shame so many idiots drink it. ~ Ray Bradbury

Life is a journey that cannot be survived, only well traveled."

"A great dog never leaves you. For all your days he will haunt you until you smile. ~ Stephen Fajen

That's a great golden nugget that's going in my tactical toolbox ~ Joe Teti

So, many of us have discovered something of the love of God; but there are heights, depths and lengths of it we do not know. That Love is a great ocean; and we require to plunge into it before we really know anything of it. ~ D.L. Moody

If productivity, efficiency, and rationality are not the ways God gauges a human person's value, then they are not the ways I should measure it, eiher. If childlike dependence on God is the mark of a great soul, then there are great souls hidden in all sorts of places where the world sees only disability, decay, and despair. ~ Colleen Carroll Campbell

A king is a mortal god on earth, unto whom the living God hath lent his own name as a great honour; but withal told him, he should die like a man, lest he should be proud, and flatter himself that God hath with his name imparted unto him his nature also. ~ John Locke

I was raised in a large family. The first reason for my travel was to get away from my family. I knew that I wanted to be a writer, but I didn't want people to ask me questions about it. ~ Paul Theroux

A lot of people, Lady Gaga and Katy Perry and a lot of people have written for other people, and of course Bruno Mars. So I think it's a great way to break into the industry and show people what you can do and show them your talent and people tend to listen a little differently to your own music as an artist, when you've proven yourself as a good songwriter for other artists. ~ Bonnie McKee

Knowing the right detail gets you a great return. Ignore them and you just crash & burn. ~ Robert Rolih

There are no great jazz-fusion bands. ~ Prince

Gil sat baking in the sun for at least 45 minutes before one of the tour guides noticed him looking listless and leaning to his left side. As she approached him, she noticed that he had a stupid grin on his face.
"Are you all right, Mr. Cohen?" she asked as she tried to slowly help him to his feet.
His shirt was drenched with sweat and his skin was mostly clammy, signally that he was suffering from the middle stages of heat stroke.
"It's not so bad?" he muttered as he struggled to stand straight up. "What not so bad, Mr. Cohen?" one of the tour guides asked.
"Death," Gil stated in a glazed response.
The guide looked at the heat-stricken man who appeared to have amoment of clarity amidst all of the sweat and dehydration. "Why is death not so bad?" she pressed on. Gil took a big swig of Gatorade and replied, "Because life wasn't so great. ~ Phil Wohl

I have a great relationship with the Mexican people. ~ Donald Trump

The splendid wooden mosque - which you can find if you search - nobody would think of showing you, being less aware of what they have than what they lack. They lack technology: we want to get out of the impasse into which too much technology has led us, our sensibilities saturated to the nth degree with Information and a Culture of distractions. We're counting on their formulae to revive us; they're counting on ours to live. Our paths cross without mutual understanding, and sometimes the traveler gets impatient, but there is a great deal of self-centeredness in such impatience. ~ Nicolas Bouvier

For me, the favourite chapters have always been the last chapters in the books. I knew exactly how each book would end - and how the first chapter of the following book would begin. I knew I wanted to leave the readers with answers - and a bunch of new questions! ~ Michael Scott

Be aware of your breathing and breathe naturally. This will lead you into unity with the great flow of Life, your true nature. ~ Ilchi Lee

There is an emotional promiscuity we've noticed among many good young men and women. The young man understands something of the journey of the heart. He wants to talk, to "share the journey." The woman is grateful to be pursued, she opens up. They share the intimacies of their lives - their wounds, their walks with God. But he never commits. He enjoys her... then leaves. And she wonders, What did I do wrong? She failed to see his passivity. He really did not ever commit or offer assurances that he would. Like Willoughby to Marianne in Sense and Sensibility.

Be careful you do not offer too much of yourself to a man until you have good, solid evidence that he is a strong man willing to commit. Look at his track record with other women. Is there anything to be concerned about there? If so, bring it up. Also, does he have any close male friends - and what are they like as men? Can he hold down a job? Is he walking with God in a real and intimate way? Is he facing the wounds of his own life, and is he also demonstrating a desire to repent of Adam's passivity and/or violence? Is he headed somewhere with his life? A lot of questions, but your heart is a treasure, and we want you to offer it only to a man who is worthy and ready to handle it well. ~ Stasi Eldredge

The gift of life is a great grace. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

A revolution is not a dinner party, nor a literary composition, nor painting nor embroidering. It cannot be done so delicately, so leisurely, so gentlemanly and gently, kindly, politely and modestly. Revolution is insurrection, the violent action of one class overthrowing the power of another. An agrarian revolution is a revolution by the peasantry to overthrow the power of the feudal landlord class. If the peasants do not apply great force, the power of the landlords, built up over thousands of years, can never be uprooted. ~ Mao Zedong

I have a lot of great fans. A lot of fans have cosplayed as Sweet Tooth, which I thought was really cool. ~ Jeff Lemire

Each is great in his own place, but the duty of one is not the duty of the other. ~ Swami Vivekananda

Many banks do not advertise they are portfolio lenders and many people working at the bank may not even know what a portfolio lender is. If you are calling up a bank and they say they aren't a portfolio lender, don't give up! Ask to talk to a loan officer and ask specific questions about what type of investor programs they offer. Here are some good questions to ask; Do you loan to investors who already have four mortgages? Do you sell your loans or keep them in-house? Do you allow investors with four or more mortgages to do cash out refinance? What terms and loan programs do you offer investors? ARM, 15, 30 year fixed, balloon? What interest rates are you charging and what are the initial costs for your loans? What ~ Mark Ferguson

I often hear from new graduates that it's better to wait until you have more experience ... But I'm a big believer in the power of inexperience ... The world needs you before you stop asking naive questions and while you have the time to understand the true nature of the complex problems we face and take them on. ~ Wendy Kopp

One thing I feel is this: that a great deal of poetry is the product of adolescence-or of an emotionally adolescent frame of mind: and that as this state of mind changes, poetry is likely to dry up. ~ James Agee

When Chveya was seven years old she had understood perfectly how the world worked. Now she was eight, and there were some questions. ~ Orson Scott Card

You must have a love, a great love, to ensure an alibi at unjustified despairs that conquer all of us ~ Albert Camus

Men with discrimination will be viewed as schemers; second, men with deep far-sightedness will be seen as cowards; and third, men with rough behaviour will be mistaken for real warriors. These are great errors. ~ Takeda Shingen

The great thing about knowing you're wrong is the moment you realize it, you're right. ~ Vanna Bonta

Father . . . ," Gabriel began. "Father is a worm."
Will gave a short laugh. He was in gear as if he had just come from the practice room, and his hair curled damply against his temples. He was not looking at Tessa, but she had grown used to that. Will hardly ever looked at her unless he had to. "It's good to see you've come round to our view of things, Gabriel, but this is an unusual way of announcing it."
Gideon shot Will a reproachful look before turning back to his brother. "What do you mean, Gabriel? What did Father do?"
Gabriel shook his head. "He's a worm," he said again, tonelessly.
"I know. He has brought shame on the name of Lightwood, and lied to both of us. He shamed and destroyed our mother. But we need not be like him."
Gabriel pulled away from his brother's grip, his teeth suddenly flashing in an angry scowl. "You're not listening to me," he said. "He's a worm. A worm. A bloody great serpentlike thing. Since Mortmain stopped sending the medicine, he's been getting worse. Changing. Those sores upon his arms, they started to cover him. His hands, his neck, h-his face . . ." Gabriel's green eyes sought Will. "It was the pox, wasn't it? You know all about it, don't you? Aren't you some sort of expert?"
"Well, you needn't act as if I invented it," said Will. "Just because I believed it existed. There are accounts of it - old stories in the library - ~ Cassandra Clare

They all chose Indian names for themselves. Teddy was Little Fox ("Naturally," Ursula said). Nancy was Little Wolf ("Honiahaka" in Cheyenne, Mrs. Shawcross said. She had a book she referred to). Mrs. Shawcross herself was Great White Eagle ("Oh, for heaven's sake," Sylvie said, "talk about hubris"). ~ Kate Atkinson

I've always been more natural at doing hosting things: reading teleprompters, taking direction and asking questions ... I'm actually able to perform a little bit. ~ Vinny Guadagnino

When I should have been producing obscure volumes of verse entitled the Triumph of Humpty Dumpty or the Nose with the Luminous Dong! Or at best, like Clare, "weaving fearful vision" ... A frustrated poet in every man. Though it is perhaps a good idea under the circumstances to pretend at least to be proceeding with one's great work on "Secret Knowledge," then one can always say when it never comes out that the title explains the deficiency. ~ Malcolm Lowry

But if we abide in Him and He abides in us, we will bear much fruit in oneness with other believers. He will give us the glory to come into unity. And when we receive love from God, we will be able to love others as He loves us. This twofold unity - with the triune God and with each other - is the key to evangelism. Indeed, our intimacy with God has everything to do with His great harvest. Jesus said, "May they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me" (John 17:23, emphasis mine). It is through our oneness with God and His people that His glory is revealed through us, leading the world to believe in Him. ~ Che Ahn