Real Questions Quotes

The God of your understanding, has chosen you and you've agreed
To be here in this space and time to do something, that only you can do
Now I won't stand here to try and tell you what it is
But deep, inside yourself
As you take time to uncover, and ask yourself some vital questions
Like - what is it that brings me peace, what is it that brings me joy?
What do I love doing?
What am I willing to become highly skilled at doing?
What part can I play for the betterment of the society
And the world in which I want to live?
When you begin to ask yourself those real questions
And it doesn't have to be done in a formal way
It can be done just like we're speaking, right now
Ask yourself the question
Look at how you see yourself in just a year from now
And then go forward
And if you have children or even if you don't have children
Now begin to, look at your future beyond
The space and time that you are
Now visualize exactly, the way that you desire to live
Don't be afraid to, dream ~ KRS-One

The real question is: how can I live so that my death will be fruitful for others? ~ Henri Nouwen

I may say that (Being) love, in a profound but testable sense, creates the partner. it gives him a self-image, it gives him self-acceptance, a feeling of love-worthiness, all of which permit him to grow. It is a real question whether the full development of the human being is possible without it. ~ Abraham Maslow

I have no idea where I'm going but here's the real question: What am I doing here in the first place? ~ Art Buchwald

Gareth turned to Gregory. "Your sister will be safe
with me," he said. "I give you my vow."
"Oh, I have no worries on that score," Gregory said
with a bland smile. "The real question is - will you be
safe with her?"
It was a good thing, Gareth later reflected, that Hyacinth
had already quit the room to fetch her coat and her
maid. She probably would have killed her brother on the
spot. ~ Julia Quinn

Nothing stands still. The real question is can you change it? ~ Jamie Zawinski

The real questions refuse to be placated. They are the questions asked most frequently and answered most inadequately, the ones that reveal their true natures slowly, reluctantly, most often against your will. ~ Ingrid Bengis

The real question is, Why do you feel as though that's emasculating? A man can't have a conflict? When you try to do art, it's how it lands on people, and hopefully some people will see it the way that I saw it, which is all of these awful choices come from the place of a man who's damaged. ~ Wendell Pierce

At teenage parties he was always wandering into the garden, sitting on a bench in the dark ... staring up at the constellations and pondering all those big questions about the existence of God and the nature of evil and the mystery of death, questions which seemed more important than anything else in the would until a few years passed and some real questions had been dumped into your lap, like how to earn a living, and why people fell in and out of love, and how long you could carry on smoking and then give up without getting lung cancer. ~ Mark Haddon

The real question is: How much truth can I stand? ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

All my life, until today, I have been content to ask questions. All the while knowing that the real questions, those that concern the creator and his creation, have no answers. I'll go even farther and say that there is a level at which only the questions are eternal, the answers never are. And so, the patient that I am, more charitable, repeats: 'Since God is, He is to be found in the questions as well as in the answers. ~ Elie Wiesel

She smiled, if he could see that, and waited for him to ask the real question. But he was silent. He wanted her to volunteer the story, she realized, and she could just as easily choose to say nothing. But he deserved to know. They all deserved it, and Kirra already knew it, and Cammon may have guessed it, because Cammon could read souls, but Tayse was the only one she would tell. ~ Sharon Shinn

In almost all matters, the real question should be: why are we letting government handle this? ~ Harry Browne

And a lot of times, the religious discussion is almost a masquerade for the real question, is what stories that we tell ourselves and that we tell each other and what convictions and beliefs actually have the capacity to make us the kind of people who together can make the world the kind of world we all want it to be? ~ Rob Bell

The real question of life after death isn't whether or not it exists, but even if it does what problem this really solves. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

There are questions of real power and then there are questions of phony authority. You have to break through the phony authority to begin to fight the real questions of power. ~ Karen Nussbaum

What you're shooting at doesn't matter, the real question is: 'Does it give you joy?' ~ Jay Maisel

What do you talk about to a murderer, and someone you loved, over a perfect dinner and cocktails? I wanted to know so many things, but I couldn't ask any of the real-questions pounding in my head. Instead, we talked of the coming vacation days, a "plan" for the
here and now in the islands. ~ James Patterson

Everyone is born a poet - a person discovering the way words sound and work, caring and delighting in words. I just kept on doing what everyone starts out doing. The real question is: Why did other people stop? ~ William Stafford

The real question is not are there other forms of life in the universe, but are there other intelligent forms of life out there right now. Because the universe is not only really big but it's also really long. It's been around for a long time; it's going to be around for a long time. ~ Ian Bremmer

Instincts are effective tools of survival, but when it comes to finding true answers to real questions, your rational thinking is the person to do the job. That is why seeking truth requires keeping your innate instincts and biases in check. ~ Abhijit Naskar

How are we to spend our lives, anyway? That is the real question. We read to seek the answer, and the search itself
the task of a lifetime
becomes the answer. ~ Lynne Sharon Schwartz

Did I offer peace today? Did I bring a smile to someone's face? Did I say words of healing? Did I let go of my anger and resentment? Did I forgive? Did I love? These are the real questions. I must trust that the little bit of love that I sow now will bear many fruits, here in this world and the life to come. ~ Henri J.M. Nouwen

Television is full of fictional and real violence that's turned into entertainment. ~ Bill James

We must be cautious in claiming God is on our side. I think the real question we must answer is, are we on His side? ~ Ronald Reagan

The real question is whether we can learn anything from our experiences upon which we may grow and help others to grow in the likeness and image of God. We know that if we rebel against doing that which is reasonably possible for us, then we will be penalized. And we will be equally penalized if we presume in ourselves a perfection that simply is not there. Apparently, the course of relative humility and progress will have to lie somewhere between these extremes. In our slow progress away from rebellion, true perfection is doubtless several millennia away ~ Bill W.

The real question, after all, is not the quantity of life, but its quality, its depth, its purity, its fortitude, its fineness of spirit and gesture of soul. ~ Joseph Fort Newton

There's a real question at stake now. Is President Obama creating a civil war in our own country? ~ Jon Voight

The American people are tired of being told. They're tired of being told that this is as good as it gets. They're tired of hearing politicians in both parties tell us that we'll get to that tomorrow while we pile a mountain range of debt on our children and our grandchildren. ~ Mike Pence

We know what you want to accomplish ... The real question is, 'what are you willing to push through the dip for?' What are you willing to stand up for, bleed for, commit to and generally be unreasonable about? Because that's what's going to actually get done. ~ Seth Godin

The contemporary quarrel over church and state is not really about whether a wall of separation of church and state should exist or not ... The real question is what does 'separation' mean? ~ James Davison Hunter

So, what are you doing tonight?"
Me?" Janie laughs. "Homework, of course."
You want company?" Carrie's looking wistful.
Do you have homework to do?"
Of course. WEther I do it or not is the real question. ~ Lisa McMann

Inside each of us is a monster; inside each of us is a saint. The real question is which one we nurture the most, which one will smite the other. ~ Jodi Picoult

Be a little careful about your library. Do you foresee what you will do with it? Very little to be sure. But the real question is what it will do with you? You will come here and get books that will open your eyes, and your ears, and your curiosity, and turn you inside out or outside in. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Hope is not wishful thinking. It's not a temperament we're born with. It is a stance toward life that we can choose ... not not. The real question for me, though, is whether m hope is effective, whether it produces or is just where I hide to ease my own pain. ~ Frances Moore Lappe

Katniss?" He drops my hand and I take a step, as if to catch my balance.
"It was all for the Games," Peeta says. "How you acted."
"Not all of it," I say, tightly holding onto my flowers.
"Then how much? No, forget that. I guess the real question is what's going to be left when we get home?" he says.
"I don't know. The closer we get to District Twelve, the more confused I get," I say. He waits, for further explanation, but none's forthcoming.
"Well, let me know when you work it out," he says, and the pain in his voice is palpable. ~ Suzanne Collins

The issue is not whether there are horrible cases where the penalty seems "right". The real question is whether we will ever design a capital system that reaches only the "right" cases, without dragging in the wrong cases, cases of innocence or cases where death is not proportionate punishment. Slowly, even reluctantly, I have realized the answer to that question is no- we will never get it right. ~ Scott Turow

Somebody has to give a wakeup call to our coaching world to ask them real questions and show them that if you have kids, then you know there is no way you can talk to somebody else like that, because that's somebody's child. ~ Ray Lewis

Work in classrooms isn't significant work; it fails to satisfy real needs pressing on the individual; it doesn't answer real questions experience raises in the young mind; it doesn't contribute to solving any problem encountered in actual life. The net effect of making all schoolwork external to individual longings, experiences, questions, and problems is to render the victim listless. ~ John Taylor Gatto

Art is craft: all art is always and essentially a work of craft: but in the true work of art, before the craft and after it, is some essential durable core of being, which is what the craft works on, and shows, and sets free. The statue in the stone. How does the artist find that, see it, before it's visible? That is a real question. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

[Moishe] explained to me, with great emphasis, that every question possessed a power that was lost in the answer ...
And why do you pray, Moishe?' I asked him.
I pray to the God within me for the strength to ask Him the real questions. ~ Elie Wiesel

Does it matter that people and things
Have words,
Have names?
If not,
Why read any book?
A litany of useless letters
Detached from bone, muscle.
Or are words the only things that make the muscle, bone, memory, movement,
Person
Real? ~ Stasia Ward Kehoe

The poem is not, as someone put it, deflective of entry. But the real question is, 'What happens to the reader once he or she gets inside the poem?' That's the real question for me, is getting the reader into the poem and then taking the reader somewhere, because I think of poetry as a kind of form of travel writing. ~ Billy Collins

I was thinking about the act of asking real questions in poems as a kind of spiritual practice. I ask questions relatively often in poems and I ask them because I don't know the answer. And I ask them because I think that poems are fantastic spaces with which to arrive at real conundrum-y kinds of questions, to go as far down the road as you can of understanding something and then sometimes that road ends with a real question. So ~ Krista Tippett

There are fun parts of running a startup and not so fun parts, and Facebook handles the not so fun parts, like infrastructure, spam, sales. The real questions are, how big can 'Instagram' get? Is it 400 million, or bigger? Can it be a viable business if it is that big? These are at the top of the list for everyone in Silicon Valley. ~ Kevin Systrom

With MOOCs, the real question becomes, where is human intervention important? ~ Shirley Ann Jackson

I don't think people want to see me as a regular guy; besides, I'm a regular guy in real life. I guess I just want to be reckless in my work. ~ Willem Dafoe

Do not ignore dreams. They are a line from the past to the future. All nightmares are real. ~ Max Gladstone

It was only a couple of chickens. Real chickens. The kind that walk around clucking and pecking. Which is what they were doing. Only no one else seemed to care, or even notice. This is normal? Obviously I had a little hiccup reading my notecards. Understandable. I was talking to forty orphans who had to share a dirt floor with two chickens. No one in college had ever prepared me for this scenario. ~ Tucker Elliot

Medicine had granted permission to a fantasy that men have never abandoned, a muddled version of what Pygmalion wanted - something between a real woman and a beautiful thing. ~ Siri Hustvedt

I tried to warn you,

But girls never listen.

Got your innocence insured?

'Cause it's 'bout to be stolen

Right out from under your nose.

Prepare to curl your toes.

I've got a one-track mind.

You've got a nice behind.

Chorus:

I had a good thing goin'

All numb in my shell,

Then you took me by surprise

And now I'm scared as hell.

I don't wanna feel for you,

I don't wanna feel.

If feeling means hurting,

Then I don't wanna be real.

You crank up my lust, girl,

You tame down my rage.

You let your inner vixen

Roam out of her cage.

The moment our lips met

I saw it in your eyes,

But you were seeing me,

too, I now realize.

Chorus

What do I want from you?

I want everything.

And I'm not gonna share -

This ain't a casual fling.

You can be my bad girl,

I'll even be your good boy.

How'd the tables get turned?

F*** it, I'll be your love toy. ~ Wendy Higgins

Hard words are very rarely useful. Real firmness is good for every thing. Strut is good for nothing. ~ Alexander Hamilton

I pray to the God within me that He will give me the strength to ask Him the right questions. ~ Elie Wiesel

Anyone can believe when God is already moving. But real faith is when you step out when it seems that God is not moving. ~ Reinhard Bonnke

I don't like reality shows and have never watched them, but I'm addicted to 'Real Housewives' because it's authentic old-time soap opera reborn! ~ Camille Paglia

I skipped kindergarten because I was reading at a pretty high level. That's a weird and cocky thing to say, but I was real sharp, and I knew that early on. ~ Hannibal Buress

Life belongs to optimists. Pessimists are just viewers. Making it real, starts with our attitude. ~ Cathy Burnham Martin

The world in which you paint a picture in your mind, a picture which shows things different from what your eyes sees, that is the world from which I get my visions. I tell you this is the real world. ~ John Fire Lame Deer

Because too little talk frightens people and prompts questions. They're afraid of what goes on in a silent mind. As maybe they should be. ~ Mary E. Pearson

The idea of faith is that you hope He's real. But faith beyond that is that you know He's real. And I now know that God is real. ~ Adam Makos

Well, he's not really my friend," Julius admitted. "I don't even know his real name, actually, but I was his healer in the game, and the bond between healer and tank runs deep. ~ Rachel Aaron

I know you, I know you. You're the only serious person in the room, aren't you, the only one who understands, and you can prove it by the fact that you've never finished a single thing in your life. You're the only well-educated person, because you never went to college, and you resent education, you resent social ease, you resent good manners, you resent success, you resent any kind of success, you resent God, you resent Christ, you resent thousand-dollar bills, you resent Christmas, by God, you resent happiness, you resent happiness itself, because none of that's real. What is real, then? Nothing's real to you that isn't part of your own past, real life, a swamp of failures, of social, sexual, financial, personal...spiritual failure. Real life. You poor bastard. You don't know what real life is, you've never been near it. All you have is a thousand intellectualized ideas about life. But life? Have you ever measured yourself against anything but your own lousy past? Have you ever faced anything outside yourself? Life! You poor bastard. ~ William Gaddis

I can't go on flying apart just for those who want the benefit of a few verbal kicks. My God, do you know what poems like that cost? They're not written vicariously: they come out of actual suffering, real madness. ~ Theodore Roethke

I feel like in an interview situation, it's a kind of intimacy that I can understand and handle - versus in real life, when I'm much more of a bumbler and have a hard time. ~ Ira Glass

A typical day in my writing life starts with looking at pictures of real estate online for at least 20 minutes. If I happen to be actually in the market for a house, I do this for 40 minutes. Then I walk my dog, come back home, and tell myself I can look at real estate for another five minutes. ~ Meghan Daum

I look at it this way - I don't ever want to apologize for something i've said, but I want to be gracious enough to be ready to apologize if I ever need to. My answers to those questions have come gradually and after some trial and error. In my own life, personally and professionally, I've realized that being civil is an active decision that I get to choose to make several times a day. That's why I believe there's hope - civility is not extinct. It is a choice. ~ Dana Perino

It [the mind] can make a heaven of hell or a hell of heaven. In our constant search for meaning in this baffling and temporary existence, trapped as we are within our three pounds of neurons, it is sometimes hard to tell what is real. We often invent what isn't there. Or ignore what is. We try to impose order, both in our minds and in our conceptions of external reality. We try to connect. We try to find truth. We dream and we hope. And underneath all of these strivings, we are haunted by the suspicion that what we see and understand of the world is only a tiny piece of the whole. ~ Alan Lightman

I know not how to defeat others, I only know how to win over myself. The real and most dangerous opponents we face in life are fear, anger, confusion, doubt and despair. If we overcome those enemies who attack from within , we can attain a sure victory over any attack from without. ~ Chris Bradford

In order to establish a real teacher-student relationship it is necessary for us to give up all our preconceptions regarding that relationship and the condition of opening and surrender. Surrender means opening oneself completely, trying to get beyond fascination and expectation. ~ Chogyam Trungpa

At the end of the day, what I have is the power to give a louder voice to people who have issues, questions and problems. ~ James Costos

Marilyn Monroe wasn't even her real name, Charles Manson isn't his real name, and now, I'm taking that to be my real name. But what's real? You can't find the truth, you just pick the lie you like the best. ~ Marilyn Manson

I never say "If I were her, this is how I would have acted, this is what I would have done, etc. etc." And why? Well because I am not her and she is not me. We cannot say what we would have done if we were someone else, because, we are us and they are they. If you want to say that, then you must also be willing to go back into the womb of their mothers and live their lives from that point on - then - you can say that. ~ C. JoyBell C.

As with many teens, my first jobs included babysitting and mopping floors at McDonald's. Since then, I've held jobs a diverse as selling used cars, selling apparel, cosmetics, and real-estate, substitute-teaching six graders, teaching undergraduate creative writing, and working as an editorial assistant for a literary magazine. ~ Therese Fowler

My mother says that falling in love and getting dumped is good for you because it prepares you for the real thing, like it gets you ready for true love and all, but I'm thinking it's more like climbing up he St. Louis Arch and falling off twice. Does he first fall really get you ready for the second? ~ Dandi Daley Mackall

How was your day?" he asked.
I faltered, unaccustomed to the question. The look on my face must have been strange because he laughed at me and said, "Okay… don't tell me then."
Considering the question I asked, "Do people normally want a real answer to that?"
I'd only been asked for reports by my father or his team.
Julian thought for a moment and shrugged, "I suppose not. Most people say 'good' or 'fine' even when they don't mean it."
He mistook my question for simple speculation instead of a lack of understanding. Nodding I snickered and said, "Then it was fine. Yours?"
He grinned, "Good. ~ Kay Harding

While we pay lip service to the virtues of reading, the truth is that there is still in our culture something that suspects those who read too much, whatever reading too much means, of being lazy, aimless dreamers, people who need to grow up and come outside to where real life is, who think themselves superior in their separateness. ~ Anna Quindlen

There are the two main reasons we don't get our needs met. First, we don't know how to express our needs to begin with and second if we do, we forget to put a clear request after it, or we use vague words like appreciate, listen, recognize, know, be real, and stuff like that. ~ Marshall B. Rosenberg

I cannot stress enough that the answer to life's questions is often in people's faces. Try putting your iPhones down once in a while, and look in people's faces. People's faces will tell you amazing things. Like if they are angry, or nauseous or asleep. ~ Amy Poehler

People say writing is really hard. That's very unfair to those who are doing real jobs. People who work in the fields or fix roofs, engineers, or car mechanics. I think lying on your back working under an oily car, that's a job. ~ Paul Theroux

Religion and ethics were not always - or even frequently - mutually compatible. The demands of religious absolutism or fundamentalism or rampaging relativism often deflected the worst aspects of contemporary culture or prejudices rather than a system which both man and God could live under with a sense of real justice. ~ Dan Simmons

I really see no harm which can come of giving our children a little knowledge of physiology ... The instruction must be real, based upon observation, eked out by good explanatory diagrams and models, and conveyed by a teacher whose own knowledge has been acquired by a study of the facts; and not the mere catechismal parrot-work which too often usurps the place of elementary teaching. ~ Thomas Huxley

I feel a real need to observe a level of propriety in what I'm handing out. Instead of me just venting or spilling my guts, I've got to consider how it's going to affect people. How it's going to affect me, as well. Because it's like a cycle. ~ Eric Clapton

It is curious to reflect, for example, upon the remarkable legend of the Philosopher's Stone, one of the oldest and most universal beliefs, the origin of which, however far back we penetrate into the records of the past, we do not probably trace its real source. ~ Frederick Soddy

In contexts of colonial oppression, intellectuals, especially those who advocate and work for justice, cannot be just-or mere- intellectuals, in the abstract sense; they cannot but be immersed in some form or another of activism, to learn from fellow activists through real-life experiences, to widen the horizons of their sources of inspiration, and to organically engage in effective, collective emancipatory processes, without the self-indulgence, complacency, or ivory-towerness that might otherwise blur their moral vision. In short, to be just intellectuals, committed to justice as the most ethical and durable foundation of peace. ~ Omar Barghouti

'SuperBetter' is fundamentally about a mind shift. It's about claiming your power to be in charge of how you spend your time and energy, and focusing it on the things that matter the most to you. Focusing on things that will bring real happiness, real well-being. ~ Jane McGonigal

We camouflage our true being before others to protect ourselves against criticism or rejection. This protection comes at a steep price ... we are misunderstood. When we are misunderstood, especially by family and friends, we join the 'lonely crowd.' Worse ... we tend to lose touch with our real selves. ~ Sidney Jourard

All beautiful things should have just a little sorrow about them. Made them seem real. ~ James S.A. Corey

The real writer is one who really writes. Talent is an invention like phlogiston after the fact of fire. Work is its own cure. You have to like it better than being loved. ~ Marge Piercy

Even if the climate change is not real, its funds are real. ~ M.F. Moonzajer

I've always loved film, and since I knew I probably couldn't be a cowboy or a spy in real life, I thought I'd play one in a movie! I started doing theater in middle school and tested for 'Victorious' before being in an episode of 'iCarly.' ~ Spencer Boldman

Even now, I believe that to know how is useless if we do not know why. And there are too many who forbid us to ask. ~ Robin Wasserman

Maybe one day I'll be a real boy. Maybe then my untruthful nose won't be longer than my truthfully aroused penis. ~ Jarod Kintz

If you do not wish to be lied to, do not ask questions. If there were no questions, there would be no lies. ~ B. Traven

I learned how to become wealthy because I asked the right questions when I was broke. ~ Mark Cuban

Real museums are places where Time is transformed into Space. ~ Orhan Pamuk