Inquiry Quotes - Page 17

• It is difficult to understand why statisticians commonly limit their inquiries to Averages, and do not revel in more comprehensive views. Their souls seem as dull to the charm of variety as that of the native of one of our flat English counties, whose retrospect of Switzerland was that, if its mountains could be thrown into its lakes, two nuisances would be got rid of at once.

  Francis Galton

  Lakes, Views, Average

  Natural Inheritance The Charms of Statistics (p. 62)

  28 Copy quote

  Show source

• This, I believe, is the appropriate image of human intercourse -- appropriate because it recognizes the qualities, the diversities, and the proper relationships of human utterances. As civilized human beings, we are the inheritors, neither of an inquiry about ourselves and the world, nor of an accumulating body of information, but of a conversation, begun in the primeval forests and extended and made more articulate in the course of centuries. It is a conversation which goes on both in public and within each of ourselves.

  Michael Joseph Oakeshott

  Believe, Diversity, Quality

  10 Copy quote

• Every man's condition is a solution in hieroglyph to those inquiries he would put. He acts it as life before he apprehends it as truth.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Men, Solutions, Every Man

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1851). “Essays, lectures and orations”, p.277

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The inquiry "who am I" turns the mind introvert and makes it calm.

  Ramana Maharshi

  Yoga, Mind, Calm

  17 Copy quote

• Real inquiry is a tremendous moral transforming force. It's not just questioning and looking for a quick answer or explanation, but the process of inquiry-of questioning, of opening-opens something in the human being which has not been touched in our culture. Everybody who is human has in themselves the potential of passionate inquiry after truth, and that's the transforming force.

  Jacob Needleman

  Real, Culture, Passionate

  13 Copy quote

• Pleasantries are low entropy, biased so far that they stop being an earnest inquiry and become ritual. Ritual has its virtues, of course, and I don't quibble with them in the slightest. But if we really want to start fathoming someone, we need to get them speaking in sentences we can't finish.

  Brian Christian

  Needs, Want, Virtue

  "The Most Human Human: What Talking with Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive". Book by Brian Christian, March 1, 2011.

  12 Copy quote

  Show source

• How can a country be home to sectarian militias and yet also to people who are educated, sophisticated, and pluralistic? This is not a simple matter. It's the kind of dialectical inquiry that's impossible to present in the world of Twitter feeds and newspapers where stories are shorter and shorter and more simplistic.

  Annia Ciezadlo

  Country, Home, Simple

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• It may be old hat, but I see no reason to close off what is for me a fruitful subject of inquiry, especially so for one, like me, who is very much interested in creating stories and novels of ideas.

  Norman Lock

  Ideas, Creating, Stories

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I tend to view the superstitions or fragments of myth as triggers for lyric inquiry. I also find I think of this kind of language as ars poetica - if we can find the right combination of words, we can make something improbably or extraordinary happen.

  Anna Journey

  Thinking, Views, Superstitions

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• My own awakening came in 1991 and my teacher then, in India, asked me to return to the West and to share this kind of inquiry.

  Arjuna Ardagh

  Teacher, India, Awakening

  Source: www.edgemagazine.net

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• It's sort of another innovation, probably a good innovation, of Western culture to separate the ideas between science and philosophy, but it's important to remember they weren't always separate realms of inquiry.

  Brad Warner

  Philosophy, Ideas, Innovation

  Source: theindiespiritualist.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The political left, which holds itself as progressive, rational and fact-based, is becoming an enemy of academic inquiry, and a practitioner of thought control on a wide variety of issues. Increasingly, from the left's perspective, there is just one acceptable viewpoint.

  David Limbaugh

  Issues, Perspective, Political

  4 Copy quote

• A history-stopping archetype is being released into the skies of this planet, and if we are not careful it will halt all intellectual inquiry in the same way that the Christos archetype halted intellectual inquiry in the Hellenistic Age.

  Terence McKenna

  Sky, Intellectual, Age

  4 Copy quote

• I suspect the base that I'm working from is not particularly one of inquiry, but of memory of what I did last time.

  Ian Mckellen

  Memories, Lasts, Last Time

  Source: collider.com

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• Unbelief, in distinction from disbelief, is a confession of ignorance where honest inquiry might easily find the truth. - "Agnostic" is but the Greek for "ignoramus."

  Tryon Edwards

  Ignorance, Greek, Might

  Tryon Edwards (2015). “The New Dictionary of Thoughts”, p.1423, Ravenio Books

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• College campuses have become fascist colonies of anti-American hate speech, hypersensitivity, speech codes, banded words and prohibited scientific inquiry.

  Ann Coulter

  Hate, College, Speech

  14 Copy quote

• Faith in the possibilities of continued and rigorous inquiry does not limit access to truth to any channel or scheme of things. It does not first say that truth is universal and then add there is but one road to it.

  John Dewey

  Doe, Add, Limits

  William James, John Dewey, John M. Capps, Donald Capps (2005). “James and Dewey on Belief and Experience”, p.238, University of Illinois Press

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• So long as knowledge goes beyond mere true belief, foreknowledge is implausible, since having and relying on relevant true beliefs is sufficient for inquiry. A stepping-stone version of prior true belief seems reasonable, though perhaps we should accept only an even weaker view: a stepping-stone version of roughly-accurate beliefs.

  Gail Fine

  Views, Long, Stones

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Mental fight means thinking against the current, not with it. It is our business to puncture gas bags and discover seeds of truth.

  Virginia Woolf

  Truth, Business, Mean

  "Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid".

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• Upon this first, and in one sense this sole, rule of reason, that in order to learn you must desire to learn, and in so desiring not be satisfied with what you already incline to think, there follows one corollary which itself deserves to be inscribed upon every wall of the city of philosophy: Do not block the way of inquiry.

  Charles Sanders Peirce

  Wall, Block, Philosophy

  Charles Sanders Peirce, Nathan Houser (1998). “The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings”, p.48, Indiana University Press

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• You can't drop concepts. You can only shine a little flashlight on them as you do inquiry, an you see that what you thought was true wasn't. And when the truth is seen, there's nothing you can do to make the lie true for you again.

  Byron Katie

  Lying, Light, Shining

  11 Copy quote

• Any situation in which some men prevent others from engaging in the process of inquiry is one of violence;… to alienate humans from their own decision making is to change them into objects.

  Paulo Freire

  Men, Decision, Violence

  29 Copy quote

• The field of the Geologist's inquiry is the Globe itself, ... [and] it is his study to decipher the monuments of the mighty revolutions and convulsions it has suffered.

  William Buckland

  Science, Fields, Revolution

  William Buckland (1820). “Vindiciæ Geologicæ: The Connexion of Geology with Religion, Explained in an Inaugural Lecture Delivered Before University of Oxford, May 15, 1819, on the Endowment of Readership in Geology”, p.5

  24 Copy quote

  Show source

• The number of such as live without the ardour of inquiry is very small, though many content themselves with cheap amusements, and waste their lives in researches of no importance.

  Samuel Johnson

  Knowledge, Numbers, Research

  Samuel Johnson, William P. Page (1840). “The Life and Writings of Samuel Johnson...”, p.40

  18 Copy quote

  Show source

• Science and policy-making thrive on challenge and questioning; they are vital to the health of inquiry and democracy.

  Nicholas Stern

  Policy Making, Challenges, Democracy

  "The point of no return" by Nicholas Stern, www.theguardian.com. March 29, 2009.

  5 Copy quote

  Show source