Inquiry Quotes - Page 15

• The crime of inquiry is one which religion never has forgiven.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Crime, Forgiven

  Percy Bysshe Shelley (1859). “Shelley Memorials: From Authentic Sources : Now First Printed”, p.30

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• One of my superstitions had always been when I started to go anywhere or do anything, not to turn back, or stop until the thing intended was accomplished. I have frequently started to go places where I had never been and to which I did not know the way, depending upon making inquiries on the road, and if I got past the place without knowing it, instead of turning back, I would go until a road was found turning in the right direction, take that, and come in by the other side.

  Ulysses S. Grant

  Past, Knowing, Superstitions

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• Any honest inquiry into the reality of nature also yields insights about ourselves.

  Carl Safina

  Reality, Yield, Honest

  Carl Safina (2010). “Song for the Blue Ocean: Encounters Along the World's Coasts and Beneath the Seas”, p.440, Macmillan

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• A system of philosophy, or metaphysics, is a union of a world view and a life view in one harmonious, complete, integral conception. In so far as any man strives to attain, by rational inquiry, a consistent and comprehensive view of life and reality, he is a metaphysician.

  Joseph Alexander Leighton

  Philosophy, Reality, Men

  Joseph Alexander Leighton (1922). “Man and the Cosmos - An introduction to Metaphysics.”

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• No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes than a public library; for who can see the wall crowded on every side by mighty volumes, the works of laborious meditations and accurate inquiry, now scarcely known but by the catalogue.

  Samuel Johnson

  Wall, Writing, Vanity

  Samuel Johnson, Arthur Murphy (1837). “The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL. D.: With an Essay on His Life and Genius /c by Arthur Murphy, Esq”, p.167

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• When I start writing novels, I go into them with a spirit of inquiry, rather than to substantiate prejudices I had in the beginning. If you don't do that, you can't write good characters.

  Ruth Ozeki

  Writing, Character, Prejudice

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• Because answers are inert things that stop inquiry. They make you think you have finished looking. But you are never finished. There are always discoveries that will turn everything you think you know on its head and that will make you ask all over again: Who are we?

  Marisa Silver

  Thinking, Discovery, Make You Think

  Marisa Silver (2013). “Mary Coin: A Novel”, p.193, Penguin

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• There has never been a book like this. At once a poetics of place, a work of deep history, a bildungsroman, and an acute inquiry into the big subjects: love, family, other animals, the nature of creativity. It is sublime. It's also very funny. Haunting and haunted, Hold Still is the memoir of an artist that is art itself.

  Melissa Holbrook Pierson

  Art, Book, Creativity

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• I began to make inquiries of the hundreds of successful men who collaborated with me in the organization of the science of success, and discovered that each of them had received guidance from unknown sources, although many of them were reluctant to admit this discovery.

  Napoleon Hill

  Successful, Men, Discovery

  Napoleon Hill (2011). “You Can Work Your Own Miracles”, p.46, Ballantine Books

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• The purpose prong of the Lemon test requires that a government activity have a secular purpose. That requirement is not satisfied, however, by the mere existence of some secular purpose, however dominated by religious purposes... The proper inquiry under the purpose prong of Lemon, I submit, is whether the government intends to convey a message of endorsement or disapproval of religion.

  Sandra Day O'Connor

  Religious, Government, Atheism

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• As for Christianity's alleged concern with truth, Christian faith is to free inquiry what the Mafia is to free enterprise. Christianity may be represented as a competitor in the realm of ideas to be considered on the basis of its merits, but this is mere disguise. Like the Mafia, if Christianity fails to defeat its competition by legitimate means (which is a forgone conclusion), it resorts to strong-arm tactics. Have faith or be damned - this biblical doctrine alone is enough to exclude Christianity from the domain of reason.

  George H. Smith

  Christian, Strong, Mean

  George H. Smith (1974). “Atheism: The Case Against God”

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• The poor quality of Christian that grows out of our modern evangelistic meeting may be accounted for by the absence of real repentance accompanying the initial spiritual experience of the converts. And the absence of repentance is the result of an inadequate view of sin and sinfulness held by those who present themselves in the inquiry room.

  Aiden Wilson Tozer

  Christian, Spiritual, Real

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• In mathematical science, more than in all others, it happens that truths which are at one period the most abstract, and apparently the most remote from all useful application, become in the next age the bases of profound physical inquiries, and in the succeeding one, perhaps, by proper simplification and reduction to tables, furnish their ready and daily aid to the artist and the sailor.

  Charles Babbage

  Artist, Profound, Age

  Charles Babbage, Peter Mark Roget (1989). “Reflections on the decline of science in England and on some of its causes: with a new appendix of correspondence by Charles Babbage & Peter M. Roget from the Philosophical magazine”

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• Even the great scientists have reported that their creative break-throughs came at a time of mental quietude. The surprising result of a nationwide inquiry among America's most eminent mathematicians, including Einstein, to find out their working methods, was that thinking 'plays only a subordinate part in the brief, decisive phase of the creative act itself'.

  Eckhart Tolle

  Thinking, Play, America

  Eckhart Tolle (2010). “The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment”, p.24, New World Library

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• It's a difficult thing to describe theology, what it means and how it disciplines thinking. Certainly, theology is the level at which the highest inquiry into meaning and ethics and beauty coincides with the largest-scale imagination of the nature of reality itself.

  Marilynne Robinson

  Mean, Reality, Thinking

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• The motives of the best actions will not bear too strict an inquiry. It is allowed that the cause of most actions, good or bad, may be resolved into the love of ourselves; but the self-love of some men inclines them to please others, and the self-love of others is wholly employed in pleasing themselves. This makes the great distinction between virtue and vice.

  Jonathan Swift

  Men, Self, May

  Jonathan Swift, Thomas Roscoe (1843). “The Works of Jonathan Swift ...: Containing Interesting and Valuable Papers, Not Hitherto Published ... With Memoir of the Author”, p.305

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• The voice of our age seems by no means favorable to art, at all events to that kind of art to which my inquiry is directed. The course of events has given a direction to the genius of the time that threatens to remove it continually further from the ideal of art. For art has to leave reality, it has to raise itself bodily above necessity and neediness; for art is the daughter of freedom, and it requires its prescriptions and rules to be furnished by the necessity of spirits and not by that of matter.

  Friedrich Schiller

  Daughter, Art, Mean

  Friedrich Schiller (2015). “The Works of Frederick Schiller: Top Classic of German”, p.3324, 谷月社

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• All sorts of articles and letters appear in the papers about women. Profound questions are raised concerning them. Should they smoke? Should they work? Vote? Marry? Exist? Are not their skirts too short, or their sleeves? Have they a sense of humor, of honor, of direction? Are spinsters superfluous? But how seldom similar inquiries are propounded about men.

  Rose Macaulay

  Men, Profound, Honor

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• It is sufficiently humiliating to our nature to reflect that our knowledge is but as she rivulet, our ignorance as the sea. On points of the highest interest, the moment we quit the light of revelation we shall find that Platonism itself is intimately connected with Pyrrhonism, and the deepest inquiry with the darkest doubt.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Faith, Ignorance, Light

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• Seven years of silent inquiry are needful for a man to learn the truth, but fourteen in order to learn how to make it known to his fellow-men.

  Plato

  Truth, Men, Order

  Socrates, Plato, Aristotle (1967). “Wit and Wisdom of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle: Being a Treasury of Thousands of Glorious, Inspiring and Imperishable Thoughts, Views and Observations of the Three Great Greek Philosophers, Classified Under about Four Hundred Subjects for Comparative Study”

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• To achieve respectability, to be admitted to the debate, they must accept without question or inquiry the fundamental doctrine that the state is benevolent, governed by the loftiest intentions, adopting a defensive stance, not an actor in world affairs but only reacting to the crimes of others...If even the harshest of critics tacitly adopt these premises, then the ordinary person may ask, who am I to disagree?

  Noam Chomsky

  Ordinary, Doctrine, Fundamentals

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• At almost every step in life we meet with young men from whom we anticipate wonderful things, but of whom, after careful inquiry, we never hear another word. Life certain chintzes, calicoes, and ginghams, they show finely on their first newness, but cannot stand the sun and rain, and assume a very sober aspect after washing day.

  Nathaniel Hawthorne

  Rain, Men, Firsts

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• We should not be too hasty in bestowing either our praise or censure on mankind, since we shall often find such a mixture of good and evil in the same character, that it may require a very accurate judgment and a very elaborate inquiry to determine on which side the balance turns.

  Henry Fielding

  Character, Evil, Balance

  Henry Fielding, Thomas Roscoe (1853). “The Works of Henry Fielding, Complete in One Volume”, p.540

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• Religion has been an important part of my understanding, my inquiry into what it means to be human.

  Ayad Akhtar

  Mean, Understanding, Important

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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• When the heart is touched by direct experience, the mind may be challenged to change. Personal involvement with innocent suffering, with the injustice others suffer, is the catalyst for solidarity which then gives rise to intellectual inquiry and moral reflection.

  Peter Hans Kolvenbach

  Heart, Reflection, Giving

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