Questioning Things Quotes

What I always liked about Socrates was his insistence on questioning things for the sake of reaching some sort of clarity - even if it is only clarity about the gaps in our knowledge. ~ Samantha Harvey

Regret is counterproductive. It's looking back on a past that you can't change. Questioning things as they occur can prevent regret in the future. ~ Colleen Hoover

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

Oh, I know a lot of people struggle, wondering is there really a God. They sit and think and worry over it all their life. The good Lord had to make smart people but I don't think he did them any favors because it seems the smart ones start questioning things from the get go. But I never did. I'm one of the lucky ones. I thank God every night, my brain is just perfect for me, not too dumb, not too bright. ~ Fannie Flagg

I have often tried to imagine how I might have acted differently. Always I end up in the same place. ~ Lynn I. Wilson

Doubt gets a bad rap. Doubting doesn't mean you've stopped believing, but that you've started thinking. Sheep doubt nothing. Chances are you'll get further in life by questioning things than by living like something that ends up as dinner and a sweater. ~ Amy Alkon

You know, it's nothin' quick overnight. If anything happens to you quick, you need to start questioning that. You know, you hear young people go, aw, I'm gonna blow up. You gonna blow up but with a controlled explosion. Don't just blow up all over the place. ~ Chuck D

We have this desire for everything to be explained to us. But if you go through your daily actions, very little ends up having a written-down explanation for why things happen, or why people do specific things. So it made sense to me to reflect the human condition that not every action has an explanation. We act, and then later maybe come to an understanding about it, or maybe not. ~ Alice Sebold

To feel successful, you must be able to be honest about the things that are really important to you. ~ Daniel G. Amen

Anthologies are mischievous things. Some years ago there was a rage for chemically predigested food, which was only suppressed when doctors pointed out that since human beings had been given teeth and digestive organs they had to be used or they degenerated very rapidly. Anthologies are predigested food for the brain. ~ Rebecca West

From the time we began to build houses and cities, since we invented the wheel, we have not advanced one step toward happiness. We have always been in halves. As long as we invent and progress in mechanical things and not in love, we shall not achieve happiness. ~ Jean Giono

For the most part, he'd accepted that some people were born to be Extraordinaries, and some people were born to be medicated so they didn't spin out of control. Fair? Not really, but Nick was learning that his brain could do things that others couldn't. In a way, he had his own superpower, even if it was called a disorder. ~ T.J. Klune

Toil and risk are the price of glory, but it is a lovely thing to live with courage and die leaving an everlasting fame. ~ Alexander The Great

As soon as you meet him [james Corden], within five minutes you'll want to sleep with him. He presented me with my award for Comedy Actress of the Year at the Glamour Awards and he said such lovely things. He's so charming and he listens to you and he's funny and sensitive and adorable. I can totally see why all the women fall for him. ~ Joanna Page

You know, it's a funny thing about writers. Most people don't stop to think of books being written by people much like themselves. They think that writers are all dead long ago
they don't expect to meet them in the street or out shopping. They know their stories but not their names, and certainly not their faces. And most writers like it that way. ~ Cornelia Funke

When my head is in the typewriter the last thing on my mind is some imaginary reader. I don't have an audience; I have a set of standards. But when I think of my work out in the world, written and published, I like to imagine it's being read by some stranger somewhere who doesn't have anyone around him to talk to about books and writing - maybe a would-be writer, maybe a little lonely, who depends on a certain kind of writing to make him feel more comfortable in the world. ~ Don DeLillo

Strange how things turn out. Two birds, one stone and all that.' McBlane chuckled at his own impromptu joke. 'But things have worked out for the best and now we all get to work together,' he said, and a smile spread across his face as easy as a politician's lie. ~ R.D. Ronald

With all of the stuff downstairs, the three of us settled on the floor and began sorting it all out. Father Andrew gave us instructions on what to save and what to throw out, and it was a relief to be off my feet for a change this week. He made small talk as we worked, asking me about classes and other things. It wasn't so bad. ~ Richelle Mead

These mistakes were heart-breaking. And yet, because people knew how easily they could happen , because they didn't go around with the illusion that they understood perfectly the things other people said., they were used to interrupting each other to ask if they'd understood correctly. Sometimes these misunderstandings were even desirable, since they gave people a reason to say, Forgive me, I was only scratching my nose. Of course I know I have always been right to love you. ~ Nicole Krauss

I'd been told of all the things you're meant to feel when your father dies. Sudden freedom, growing up, the end of dependence, the step into the sunlight when no one is taller than you and you're in no one's shadow. I know what I felt. Lonely. ~ John Mortimer

You know, I don't at all hesitate to be a bit utopian about all this because I think hope is itself an act, a very big leap, which in a sense defies the grim facts always about us and opens up new ways of thinking about things. ~ Daniel Berrigan

Science is about principles. It's about concepts. It's not about memorizing the parts of a flower. It helps to know some of these things, but if that's all you do that's not science, science is about principles and concepts. ~ Michio Kaku

Women are in a position now to voice their opinion ... women are getting empowered. The more power they get, the more voice they get to shift certain things around. Now I have a daughter, I understand. When I didn't have a daughter, I didn't understand. ~ Snoop Dogg

How is it that one day life is orderly and you are content, a little cynical perhaps but on the whole just so, and then without warning you find the solid floor is a trapdor and you are now in another place whose geography is uncertain and whose customs are strange?
Travellers at least have a chose. Those who set sail know know that things will not be the same as at home. Explorers are perpared. But for us, who travel to cities of the interior by chance, there is no preparaton. We who are fluent find liffe is a foreign language. Somewhere beween the swamp and the mountains. Somewhere beween fear and sex. Somewere beween God and the Devil passion is and the way there is sudden and the way back worse. ~ Jeanette Winterson

As from a star I saw, coldly and soberly, the separateness of everything. I felt the wall of my skin; I am I. That stone is a stone. My beautiful fusion with the things of this world was over. ~ Sylvia Plath

Well, we all like things to be predictable, don't we? We expect things to be safe and to keep on happening just the way they always have. We expect the sun to rise in the morning. We expect to get up, survive the day and finish up back in bed at the end of it, ready to start all over again the next day. But maybe that's just a trick we play on ourselves, our way of making life seem ordinary. Because the truth is, life is so extraordinary that for most of hte time we can't bring ourselves to look at it. It's too bright and it hurts our eyes. The fact of the matter is that nothing is ever certain. But most people never find that out until the ground suddenly disappears from beneath their feet. ~ Steve Voake

I wouldn't have wished for something hoping that I wouldn't get it. I wouldn't have wished for it knowing that I'd get it ~ Prabhukrishna M

I love only extreme novelty or the things of the past. ~ Berthe Morisot

This is the way photography can be cruel ... in the sense that it describes everything, even the things we are not necessarily aware we're revealing. ~ Katy Grannan

You don't have contempt for a horse that's troubled. Everybody has baggage, everybody has things that they've had to deal with in their life, and it can be something positive depending on how you use it. ~ Buck Brannaman

You can't prepare for the things that change your life. They come suddenly and unannounced. ~ Marty Rubin

One of the hardest things I do as FBI Director is call the chiefs and sheriffs in departments around the nation when officers have been killed in the line of duty. I call to express my sorrow and offer the FBI's help. ~ James Comey

The Universal Law is impartial. It will give you anything you believe. It will throw you garbage or roses depending on the energy you put in. You are the one in charge, and you must accept that and stand alone. If you think God is coming down to fix things for you, forget it. God is out playing golf. ~ Stuart Wilde

Maybe bad things happen because it's the only way we can keep remembering what good is supposed to look lie. ~ Jodi Picoult

The faculty of being acquainted with things other than itself is the main characteristic of a mind. ~ Bertrand Russell

All of us are in two stories at the same time," said the sandwich lady. "Life and Times. There is our own personal story, and the bigger story of what's happening around us. When both are in trouble simultaneously, when the crisis inside you intersects with the crisis outside you, things get a little crazy. ~ Salman Rushdie

In my experience, one of the very nice things about Catholic Churches is how diverse, ordinary, and natural they are and feel. So many evangelical churches, by contrast, seem to me to be very earnest in trying so hard to be and do something or other - to be sincere or happy or vibrant or dynamic or appealing or whatever. By contrast, in my experience, most Catholic parishes are simply unperturbed in doing the regular business of being Church. They've been doing it for 2,000 years and will keep doing it till Christ returns. ~ Christian Smith

The only philosophy that can be practiced responsibly in the face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption. Knowledge has no light but that shed on the world by redemption: all else is reconstruction, mere technique. Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, that reveal its fissures and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will one day appear in the Messianic light. ~ Theodor W. Adorno

Had the ancient Greek poet Archilochus and the modern philosopher Isaiah Berlin been magically transported to northern Italy in November of 218 B.C., they might well have speculated on the strategic prospects. "Hannibal knows many things, but Rome knows one big thing," the Greek might have proposed. To which Berlin might have replied, "Perhaps at the outset. But then the fox could get stuck in a rut, and the hedgehog might learn new tricks." This would have been the Second Punic War epitomized. ~ Anonymous

God wants to take us step by step to free us from any unhealthy distractions. Don't expect other people to change, nor should we live in the past. He understands our hearts. We are not afraid to go forward because we are his children. Part of healing is understanding the past including the good and bad things ~ Phil Mitchell

If you have ever belonged to such a community, however, you may have discovered that the trouble starts when darkness falls on your life, which can happen in any number of unsurprising ways: you lose your job, your marriage falls apart, your child acts out in some attention getting way, you pray hard for something that does not happen, you begin to doubt some of the things you have been taught about what the Bible says. The first time you speak of these things in a full solar church, you can usually get a hearing. Continue to speak of them and you may be reminded that God will not let you be tested beyond your strength. All that is required of you is to have faith. If you still do not get the message, sooner or later it will be made explicit for you: the darkness is your own fault, because you do not have enough faith. ~ Barbara Brown Taylor

I guess I'd like people to be able to forget a lot of things and just enjoy the beauty of harmony and melody for a moment. ~ Caroline Shaw

One of the things I learned as a young semiotics nerd was that if you have plot moving forward, no matter how banal the facts of it, simply the fact that the plot is rolling forward makes you wonder what's going to happen next, which creates suspense. So you can control peoples' attention simply by having things move forward in a story. ~ Ira Glass

Oh, the things I wanted to say to those two! I wanted to tell them that friendship doesn't have to be hard. That sometimes we let the world make it hard." -Red ~ Katherine Applegate

Most things that pop into my head are really weird, like that one time when I thought about Shrek in Victoria's Secret underwear. ~ Sara Wolf

I think she must have been very strictly brought up, she's so desperately anxious to do the wrong thing correctly. ~ Hector Hugh Munro

There's no use trying to live in other people's opinions. The only thing to do is live in your own. ~ L.M. Montgomery