The essential question is not, "How busy are you?" but "What are you busy at?"
Who are we? And to me that's the essential question that's always been in science fiction. A lot of science fiction stories are - at their very best - evocations of that question. When we look up at the night sky and wonder, "Is there anyone else out there?" we're also asking who we are we in relation to them.
If we accept and internalize the fact of our own mortality, then, by definition, we have to deal with the essential questions of how we live and spend our allotted time. We have to stop procrastinating, pretending that we have forever to do what we want to do and be what we long to be.
The answers to these questions will determine your success or failure. 1) Can people trust me to do what's right? 2) Am I committed to doing my best? 3) Do I care about other people and show it? If the answers to these questions are yes, there is no way you can fail.
The question is not 'Can you make a difference?' You already do make a difference. It's just a matter of what kind of difference you want to make during your life on this planet.
In the midst of global crises such as pollution, wars and famine, kindness may be too easily dismissed as a 'soft' issue, or a luxury to be addressed after the urgent problems are solved. But kindness is the greatest need in all those areas - kindness toward the environment, toward other nations, toward the needs of people who are suffering. Until we reflect basic kindness in everything we do, our political gestures will be fleeting and fragile.
The essential question is not, however, how love began, but whether it is growing.
The key question to keep asking is, Are you spending your time on the right things? Because time is all you have.
The wise man doesn't give the right answers, he poses the right questions.
Once evil is individualized, becoming part of everyday life, the way of resisting it also becomes individual. How does the soul survive? is the essential question. And the response is: through love and imagination.
That which is called humanism, but what would be more correctly called irreligious anthropocentrism, cannot yield answers to the most essential questions of our life
When Jesus got the big questions, he didn't present arguments. He presented himself.
Jesus didn't come to tell us the answers to the questions of life, he came to be the answer.
The big question is, are we letting ourselves become what we wish to become?
All socialism involves slavery.... That which fundamentally distinguishes the slave is that he labors under coercion to satisfy another's desires. The relation admits of many gradations. Oppressive taxation is a form of slavery of the individual to the community as a whole. The essential question is -- How much is he compelled to labor for other benefit than his own, and how much can he labor for his own benefit?
The question isn't whether we 'need' guns. It's wether the government should have a monopoly on force
In the word question, there is a beautiful word - quest. I love that word. We are all partners in a quest. The essential questions have no answers. You are my question, and I am yours - and then there is dialogue. The moment we have answers, there is no dialogue. Questions unite people.
Your most important task as a leader is to teach people how to think and ask the right questions so that the world doesn't go to hell if you take a day off.
or simply:
