Quotes about doubt

page 12

“The question of the stranger in a society which estranges everybody from it--while forcing everybody to assimilate their own alienation--takes cover under dubious and sinister masks.”

“Ancient Egyptians believed that upon death they would be asked two questions and their answers would determine whether they could continue their journey in the afterlife. The first question was, 'Did you bring joy?' The second was, 'Did you find joy?”

“He prefers not to ruin things with any more questions. What it is is what it is.”

“She said, 'Believe it or not, I used to be idealistic.' I asked her what 'idealistic' meant. 'It means you live by what you think is right.' 'You don't do that anymore?' 'There are questions I don't ask anymore.”

“I asked myself childish questions and proceeded to answer them.”

“You are never truly together with one you love until the person in question is dead and actually inside you.”

“So please don't think that I am renouncing anything, I am reasonably faithful in my unfaithfulness and though I have changed, I am the same, and what preys on my mind is simply this one question: what am I good for, could I not be of service or use in some way, how can I become more knowledgeable and study some subject or other in depth?”

“Sometimes questions are more important than answers.”

“That's the question, isn't it?" you said one night. "Does death bring freedom, or is it the end of freedom?”

“See, records have helped me to fall in love, no question. I hear something new, with a chord change that melts my guts, and before I know it I’m looking for someone, and before I know it I’ve
found her.”

“She surprised him by agreeing. "Yes, I was simply curious, and no, I would never criticize you in front of your followers. Do you have the patience to endure one more question, husband?"

"What is it?"

"When do you suppose you'll leave me behind?”

“I want to question my belief, so that what is left after I have questioned it, will be even stronger.”

“If you don't ask the right question, every answer seems wrong”

“I think if you know what you believe, it makes it a lot easier to answer questions. I can't answer your question”

“Surely only boring people went in for conversations consisting of questions and answers. The art of true conversation consisted in the play of minds.”

“Artemis felt like he was six again and caught hacking the school computers trying to make the test questions harder”

“Never question another man's motive. His wisdom, yes, but not his motives.”

“There's no point in asking why, even though everybody will. I know why. The harder question is "why not?" I can't believe she ran out of answers before I did.”

“Cultural analysis is intrinsically incomplete. And, worse than that, the more deeply it goes the less complete it is. It is a strange science whose most telling assertions are its most tremulously based, in which to get somewhere with the matter at hand is to intensify the suspicion, both your own and that of others, that you are not quite getting it right. But that, along with plaguing subtle people with obtuse questions, is what being an ethnographer is like.”

“Once you've posed that question, it won't go away. I think many people kill themselves simply to stop the debate about whether they will or they won't.”

“Beauty is a question of optics. All sight is illusion.”

“The real question is not whether machines think but whether men do. The mystery which surrounds a thinking machine already surrounds a thinking man.”

“When you get your,'Who am I?', question right, all of your,'What should I do?' questions tend to take care of themselves”

“The only important elements in any society are the artistic and the criminal, because they alone, by questioning the society’s values, can force it to change.”

“Why can't reason give greater answers? Why can we throw a question further than we can pull in an answer? Why such a vast net if there's so little fish to catch?”

“Morality, too, is a question of time.”

“The only interesting answers are those which destroy the questions.”

“A simple question unlocks best.”

“science should be question driven, not methodology driven.”

“One last question.”
“Very well, dearling.”
“Can I trust Cadeon?”
Nïx gave her a sunny smile with
blank golden eyes. “As far as you can throw him.”

“Imagine having a mother who worries that you read too much. The question is, what is it that's supposed to happen to people who read too much? How can you tell when someone's crossed the line.”

“Why did you come if not to murder my king?"
"I came to steal his magus."
"You can't," said the magus in question.
"I can steal anything," Eugenides corrected him, "even with one hand.”

“My grandpa always said asking a question is embarrassing for a moment, but not asking is embarrassing for a lifetime.”

“That's not a real answer.'
Says who?'
Says me. I mean real fear, like of failure, of death, of regret. Like that. Something that keeps you awake nights, questioning your very existence.'
Clowns.”

“and the question is, which one is really “you”

“Do you always ask me the same questions you ask him?"

"It depends on whether or not I get an answer.”

“Even as a child she had lived her own small life within herself. At a very early period she had apprehended instinctively the dual life - that outward existence which conforms, the inward life which questions.”

“A person could leave you so quickly. So much history and time and memories, but they snuck away from you, and other things took their place. How could you hold on? Wait. A bigger question. The biggest. How could you hold on and
let go?”

“Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems - but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems more and more incredible.”

“I keep asking myself," whispered Sabetha, giving Locke's arm a squeeze, "ARE we smarter than that woman's chicken?"

"At the moment, it's an open question," said Locke.”

“Because in the end nothing is worse than seeing the fall of one you loved. It was somehow worse than losing a love. It made everything seem questionable. It made the past bitter and confused.”

“the same question arose in every soul: "For what, for whom, must I kill and be killed?"… p982”

“I accept your deflection and raise you another question.”

“At this particular moment, there’s just no question about it.”

“Answer all the questions that I'm too afraid to ask”

“Knowing the right questions is better than knowing all the right answers" Caleb from Pretty Little Liars (TV Show)”

“Never forget that God is your friend. And like all friends, He longs to hear what's been happening in your life. Good or bad, whether it's been full of sorrow or anger, or even when you're questioning why terrible things have to happen.”

“There are times in
life when the question of knowing if one can think differently
than one thinks, and perceive differently than one sees, is
absolutely necessary if one is to go on looking and reflecting
at all.”

“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.”

“At a very early period she had apprehended the instinctively the dual life - that outward existence which conforms, the inward life which questions.”

“But will you miss me? More importantly - will I miss you? Does either one of us really want to hear the answer to that question?”

“All generalizations are questionable.”

“I dream of a better tomorrow, where chickens can cross the road and not be questioned about their motives.”

“There will always be more questions. Every answer leads to more questions. The only way to survive is to let some of them go.”

“Where the questions of religion are concerned people are guilty of every possible kind of insincerity and intellectual misdemeanor.”

“Now you know I’m a reporter, so you might as well answer my question truthfully, or I’ll just keep asking it until you lose your mind. (Susan)”

“What do you feel? I’ve never been asked this question once. None of us has. We aren’t supposed to feel. We’re British.”

“When good Americans die, they go to Paris,' the ghost said, after taking a drag on a small cigarette.
But you’re not dead. I suppose the question must be, are you good?”

“wonder what day god created the egg' 'how should we know? we should not question. our stay on earth is not for long. let us rejoice and believe and give thanks'. 'eat a egg”

“Emotional Channeling Technique #1: Ask Courageous Questions”

“We are all, I suppose, beholden to our parents - the question is, how much?”

“If Romeo had never met Juliet, maybe they both would have still been alive, but what they would have been alive for is the question Shakespeare wants us to answer.”

“So what's the plan?” Ben asked.

“Go inside. Look around. Improvise.”

“Brilliant." Hi stroked his chin. “Quick question: Is having no plan the same as having a terrible plan, or are those different categories?”

“Always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question.”

“Don't ask me any questions. I've seen how things that seek their way find their void instead.”

“Sometimes people think you’re smart if you question the status quo, if nothing else.”

“Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.”

“‎Halt looked up at the trees above him.
"Why does this boy ask so many questions?" he asked the trees.
Naturally, they didn't answer.”

“Justice must always question itself, just as society can exist only by means of the work it does on itself and on its institutions.”

“There are times when God leaves huge question marks as tools in our lives to stretch our our faith.”

“He gives my hand a tight squeeze, but that desperation, that urgency between us is gone. No insecurities. Max and Fang. Fang and Max. No longer a question. We just are.”

“Where does it all lead? What will become of us? These were our young questions, and young answers were revealed. It leads to each other. We become ourselves.”

“This is how humans are: We question all our beliefs, except for the ones that we really believe in, and those we never think to question.”

“Answerless questions can destroy. Move on.”

“What about confusing clutter? Information overload? Doesn't data have to be "boiled down" and "simplified"? These common questions miss the point, for the quantity of detail is an issue completely separate from the difficulty of reading..”

“She hated that little voice inside her head. Like the Seelie Queen, it planted doubts where there shouldn't be doubts, asked questions that had no answer.”

“As you see, it is not that I don't know my own mind, I know it very well but only up to a certain point in the matter. I know perfectly well what the question is. It's the answer I want.”

“The question was which spell did I make? Which did I have time to make?
The answer was eerily simple.
I had time to make all of them.”

“Being or nothing, that is the question. Ascending, descending, coming, going, a man does so much that in the end he disappears.”

“The problem is that I know the textbook answers to any question you care to ask.”

“The essential question is not, "How busy are you?' but 'What are you busy at?' 'Are you doing what fulfills you?”

“There's this saying: in an all-blue world, colour doesn't exist… If something seems strange, you question it; but if the outside world is too distant to use as a comparison then nothing seems strange.”

“Q: So, why do you write these strong female characters?
A: Because you’re still asking me that question.”

“It is important that students bring a certain ragamuffin, barefoot irreverence to their studies; they are not here to worship what is known but to question it.”

“A question that sometimes drives me hazy: am I or are the others crazy?”

“As you get older the questions come down to two or three. How long have I got and what am I gonna do with the time I've got left?”

“People do not see that the main question is not : "Am I loved?" which is to a large extent the question : "Am I approved of? Am I protected? Am I admired?" The main question is: "Can I love?”

“I am often asked the question How can the masses permit themselves to be exploited by the few. The answer is By being persuaded to identify with them.”

“I'd blurted out the question only to keep him from noticing that I was working my hands free, but the Warden behind me, some young brown-haired surfer dude, yelled a warning. "She's getting loose!"
Narc.”

“The way I approached a question, my habit of mind, the way I looked at things, what I took for granted - all this was myself and it did not seem to me that I could alter it.”

“I wanted to ask a thousand questions, but there was no one to ask. Besides I knew that people only told lies to children-lies about everything from soup to Santa Claus.”

“They could see she was a real Princess and no question about it, now that she had felt one pea all the way through twenty mattresses and twenty more feather beds. Nobody but a Princess could be so delicate.”

“We all need to have dreams. The question is, does the dream control you or do you control the dream?”

“Beatrix, do you know what happens to girls who ask such naughty questions?”
“They’re ravished in haylofts?” she inquired hopefully.”

“The most important questions in life can never be answered by anyone except oneself.”

“Because faithfulness is not a human question, but a divine one.”

“I pray to the God within me that He will give me the strength to ask Him the right questions.”

“I have many questions, but no patience to think them through.”

“People think I'm a miserable sod but it's only because I get asked such bloody miserable questions.”