Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young (1894)
“A wise man can learn more from a foolish question than a fool can learn from a wise answer.”
“There are questions I'm still not wise enough to answer, just wise enough to no longer ask.”
Source: I Lived to Tell It All (1996, ebook 2014), Page 148.
“There are no foolish questions and no man becomes a fool until he has stopped asking questions.”
[John J. B. Morgan and T. Webb Ewing, Making the Most of Your Life, 2005, 75 http://books.google.fr/books?id=5i-JlfkMEUUC&pg=PA75]
Attributed
Variant: No man really becomes a fool until he stops asking questions.
Source: 1980s, That Benediction is Where You Are (1985), p. 63
Context: Are we wasting our lives? By that word “wasting” we mean dissipating our energy in various ways, dissipating it in specialized professions. Are we wasting our whole existence, our life? If you are rich, you may say, “Yes, I have accumulated a lot of money, it has been a great pleasure.” Or if you have a certain talent, that talent is a danger to a religious life. Talent is a gift, a faculty, an aptitude in a particular direction, which is specialization. Specialization is a fragmentary process. So you must ask yourself whether you are wasting your life. You may be rich, you may have all kinds of faculties, you may be a specialist, a great scientist or a businessman, but at the end of your life has all that been a waste? All the travail, all the sorrow, all the tremendous anxiety, insecurity, the foolish illusions that man has collected, all his gods, all his saints and so on — have all that been a waste? You may have power, position, but at the end of it — what? Please, this is a serious question that you must ask yourself. Another cannot answer this question for you.
Liguori, A. M. (1882). Sunday within the Octave of the Nativity: In What True Wisdom Consists. In N. Callan (Trans.), Sermons for All the Sundays in the Year (Eighth Edition, p. 43). Dublin; London: James Duffy & Sons.
Source: Infinite in All Directions (1988), Ch. 2 : Butterflies and Superstrings, p. 17
Context: Euclid... gave his famous definition of a point: "A point is that which has no parts, or which has no magnitude." …A point has no existence by itself. It exists only as a part of the pattern of relationships which constitute the geometry of Euclid. This is what one means when one says that a point is a mathematical abstraction. The question, What is a point? has no satisfactory answer. Euclid's definition certainly does not answer it. The right way to ask the question is: How does the concept of a point fit into the logical structure of Euclid's geometry?... It cannot be answered by a definition.
47 : The Question and its Answer, p. 78.
The Everything and the Nothing (1963)
Original: (it) Quando si è bimbi si fanno tante domande pretendendo altrettante risposte. Quando si è adulti si evitano molte domande, per evitare inutili risposte.
Source: prevale.net
“There are years that ask questions and years that answer.”
Source: Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), Ch. 3, p. 21.
