Enquiry Quotes - Page 3

• The mention of one apartment in a building naturally introduces an enquiry or discourse concerning the others: and if we think ofa wound, we can scarcely forbear reflecting on the pain which follows it.

  David Hume

  Pain, Thinking, Reflection

  David Hume, Eric Steinberg (1992). “An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding; [with] A Letter from a Gentleman to His Friend in Edinburgh; [and] An Abstract of a Treatise of Human Nature”, p.14, Hackett Publishing

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• The period of Catholic ascendancy was on the whole one of the most deplorable in the history of the human mind. . . . The spirit that shrinks from enquiry as sinful and deems a state of doubt a state of guilt, is the most enduring disease that can afflict the mind of man. Not till the education of Europe passed from the monasteries to the universities, not till Mohammedan science, and classical free thought, and industrial independence broke the sceptre of the Church, did the intellectual revival of Europe begin.

  William Edward Hartpole Lecky

  Men, Europe, Catholic

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• Design is a field of concern, response, and enquiry as often as decision and consequence... it is convenient to group design into three simple categories, though the distinctions are in no way absolute, nor are they always so described: product design (things), environment design (places) and communication design (messages).

  Norman Potter

  Communication, Simple, Design

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• Does a man of sense run after every silly tale of hobgoblins or fairies, and canvass particularly the evidence? I never knew anyone, that examined and deliberated about nonsense who did not believe it before the end of his enquiries.

  David Hume

  Running, Believe, Silly

  David Hume (1965). “David Hume: Philosophical Historian”, Indianapolis : Bobbs-Merrill

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• The writing of solid, instructive stuff fortified by facts and figures is easy enough. There is no trouble in writing a scientific treatise on the folk-lore of Central China, or a statistical enquiry into the declining population of Prince Edward Island. But to write something out of one's own mind, worth reading for its own sake, is an arduous contrivance only to be achieved in fortunate moments, few and far in between. Personally, I would sooner have written Alice in Wonderland than the whole Encyclopedia Britannica.

  Stephen Leacock

  Reading, Writing, Islands

  Stephen Leacock (2014). “Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town”, p.7, The Floating Press

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• We learn together in teams. This involves a shift from a spirit of advocacy to a spirit of enquiry.

  Peter Senge

  Inspiring, Team, Moving

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• To the possible enquiry as to the probable character of a successful flying machine, the writer would answer that in his judgment two types of such machines may eventually be evolved: one, which may be termed the soaring type, and which will carry but a single operator, and another, likely to be developed somewhat later, which may be termed the journeying type, to carry several passengers, and to be provided with a motor.

  Octave Chanute

  Character, Successful, Two

  Octave Chanute (1894). “Progress in Flying Machines”

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• The text-book is rare that stimulates its reader to ask, Why is this so? Or, How does this connect with what has been read elsewhere?

  J. Norman Collie

  Book, Science, Doe

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• By far the most important consequence of the conceptual revolution brought about in physics by relativity and quantum theory lies not in such details as that meter sticks shorten when they move or that simultaneous position and momentum have no meaning, but in the insight that we had not been using our minds properly and that it is important to find out how to do so.

  Percy Williams Bridgman

  Lying, Moving, Science

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• After all, what else is scientific enquiry of any sort other than a controlled version of banging one's head against the universe until something gives?

  Tom Holt

  Giving, Banging, Controlled

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• It is high time that laymen abandoned the misleading belief that scientific enquiry is a cold dispassionate enterprise, bleached of imaginative qualities, and that a scientist is a man who turns the handle of discovery; for at every level of endeavour scientific research is a passionate undertaking and the Promotion of Natural Knowledge depends above all on a sortee into what can be imagined but is not yet known.

  Peter Medawar

  Science, Men, Discovery

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• His attention caught, her companion raised his eyes from the book which lay open beside him on the table and directed them upon her in a look of aloof enquiry. 'What's that? Did you say something to me, Venetia?' 'Yes, love,' responded his sister cheerfully, 'but it wasn't of the least consequence, and in any event I answered for you. You would be astonished, I daresay, if you knew what interesting conversations I enjoy with myself.

  Georgette Heyer

  Book, Eye, Interesting Conversation

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• Modern science has been a voyage into the unknown, with a lesson in humility waiting at every stop. Many passengers would rather have stayed home.

  Carl Sagan

  Home, Humility, Science

  Carl Sagan, Ann Druyan (2011). “Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space”, p.41, Ballantine Books

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• ... your spiritual teachers caution you against enquiry--tell you not to read certain books; not to listen to certain people; to beware of profane learning; to submit your reason, and to receive their doctrines for truths. Such advice renders them suspicious counsellors.

  Frances Wright

  Spiritual, Teacher, Book

  Frances Wright (1829). “Course of popular lectures; with 3 addresses on various public occasions, and a reply to the charges against the French reformers of 1789”, p.45

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• It is conceivable that animal life might have the attribute of using the heat of surrounding matter, at its natural temperature, as a source of energy for mechanical effect . . . .The influence of animal or vegetable life on matter is infinitely beyond the range of any scientific enquiry hitherto entered on. Its power of directing the motions of moving particles, in the demonstrated daily miracle of our human free-will, and in the growth of generation after generation of plants from a single seed, are infinitely different from any possible result of the fortuitous concurrence of atoms.

  Lord Kelvin

  Moving, Animal, Vegetables

  "The Life of Lord Kelvin, Volume 2" by Silvanus Phillips, (2005 edition, p. 1093), 1910.

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• Had you or I been born at the Bay of Soldania, possibly our Thoughts, and Notions, had not exceeded those brutish ones of the Hotentots that inhabit there: And had the Virginia King Apochancana, been educated in England, he had, perhaps been as knowing a Divine, and as good a Mathematician as any in it. The difference between him, and a more improved English-man, lying barely in this, That the exercise of his Facilities was bounded within the Ways, Modes, and Notions of his own Country, and never directed to any other or farther Enquiries.

  John Locke

  Country, Kings, Lying

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• Theology differs from science in many respects, because of its different subject matter, a personal God who cannot be put to the test in the way that the impersonal physical world can be subjected to experimental enquiry. Yet science and theology have this in common, that each can be, and should be defended as being investigations of what is, the search for increasing verisimilitude in our understanding of reality.

  John Polkinghorne

  Reality, Understanding, Tests

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• Political Economy as a branch of science is extremely modern; but the subject with which its enquiries are conversant has in all ages necessarily constituted one of the chief practical interests of mankind.

  John Stuart Mill

  Political, Age, Branches

  John Stuart Mill (1866). “Principles of Political Economy: With Some of Their Applications to Social Philosophy”, p.1

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• Funnily enough we have never had one enquiry for Paul Scholes. You know why? Because they all know he will never leave. in my time he would be in the top six or seven (best United players ever) without a doubt. His contribution and quality have been great, even without the fantastic goals he has scored. [ . . . ] He has that wonderful velvet touch on the ball. When he gets it, it goes stone dead. It is wonderful to see that amidst all the mayhem that can happen in a football match.

  Alex Ferguson

  Football, Player, Goal

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• The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something because it is always before one’s eyes.) The real foundations of his enquiry do not strike a man at all

  Ludwig Wittgenstein

  Real, Eye, Men

  Ludwig Wittgenstein (1958). “Philosophical Investigations”

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• How she might have felt had there been no Captain Wentworth in the case, was not worth enquiry; for there was a Captain Wentworth: and be the conclusion of the present suspense good or bad, her affection would be his forever. Their union, she believed, could not divide her more from other men, than their final separation.

  Jane Austen

  Men, Forever, Would Be

  Jane Austen (2013). “Persuasion In Modern English”, p.346, BookCaps Study Guides

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• Touch and away, Jack?’ asked Stephen. ‘Touch and away? Do you not recall that I have important business there? Enquiries of the very first interest?’ To do with our enterprise? To do with this voyage?’ Perhaps not quite directly.

  Patrick O'Brian

  Important, Voyages, Firsts

  Patrick O'Brian (2000). “Blue at the Mizzen (Vol. Book 20) (Aubrey/Maturin Novels)”, p.121, W. W. Norton & Company

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• The University of Cambridge, in accordance with that law of its evolution, by which, while maintaining the strictest continuity between the successive phases of its history, it adapts itself with more or less promptness to the requirements of the times, has lately instituted a course of Experimental Physics.

  James Clerk Maxwell

  Science, Discovery, Law

  James Clerk Maxwell, Elizabeth Garber, Stephen G. Brush, C. W. Francis Everitt (1986). “Maxwell on Molecules and Gases”, p.111, MIT Press

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• Science teaches us, in effect, to submit our reason to the truth and to know and judge of things as they are-that is to say, as they themselves choose to be and not as we would have them to be.

  Miguel de Unamuno

  Science, Judging, Reason

  Miguel de Unamuno (2012). “Tragic Sense of Life”, p.197, Courier Corporation

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• [John] Dalton was a man of regular habits. For fifty-seven years he walked out of Manchester every day; he measured the rainfall, the temperature-a singularly monotonous enterprise in this climate. Of all that mass of data, nothing whatever came. But of the one searching, almost childlike question about the weights that enter the construction of these simple molecules-out of that came modern atomic theory. That is the essence of science: ask an impertinent question, and you are on the way to the pertinent answer.

  Jacob Bronowski

  Science, Simple, Men

  Ascent of Man (1973) ch. 4

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