“Why try to pursue what is completed?”

Source: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd

From the TV documentary The Importance of Being Morrissey (2003)
In interviews etc., About himself and his work

As quoted in Stephen Hawking's Universe http://books.google.com/books?id=lkntNIwunAAC&pg=PA77&dq=hawking+%22my+goal+is+simple%22&ei=q5HtSvCOIoLklQTU_cWhDA#v=onepage&q=hawking%20%22my%20goal%20is%20simple%22&f=false (1985) by John Boslough, Ch. 7 : The Final Question, p. 77

Source: 1920s, Prejudices, Third Series (1922), Ch. 3 "Footnote on Criticism", pp. 85-104
Context: Truth, indeed, is something that is believed in completely only by persons who have never tried personally to pursue it to its fastness and grab it by the tail. It is the adoration of second-rate men — men who always receive it as second-hand. Pedagogues believe in immutable truths and spend their lives trying to determine them and propagate them; the intellectual progress of man consists largely of a concerted effort to block and destroy their enterprise. Nine times out of ten, in the arts as in life, there is actually no truth to be discovered; there is only error to be exposed. In whole departments of human inquiry it seems to me quite unlikely that the truth ever will be discovered. Nevertheless, the rubber-stamp thinking of the world always makes the assumption that the exposure of an error is identical with the discovery of truth — that error and truth are simply opposites. They are nothing of the sort. What the world turns to, when it has been cured of one error, is usually simply another error, and maybe one worse than the first one. This is the whole history of the intellect in brief. The average man of today does not believe in precisely the same imbecilities that the Greek of the Fourth Century before Christ believed in, but the things that he does believe in are often quite as idiotic.
Perhaps this statement is a bit too sweeping. There is, year by year, a gradual accumulation of what may be called, provisionally, truths — there is a slow accretion of ideas that somehow manage to meet all practicable human tests, and so survive. But even so, it is risky to call them absolute truths. All that one may safely say of them is that no one, as yet, has demonstrated that they are errors. Soon or late, if experience teaches us anything, they are likely to succumb too. The profoundest truths of the Middle Ages are now laughed at by schoolboys. The profoundest truths of democracy will be laughed at, a few centuries hence, even by school-teachers.

Source: Mostly Harmless

Melissa Johnson, Chapter 26, p. 308-309
2000s, The Rescue (2000)

"Give the Drummer Some," http://www.fooarchive.com/gpb/tenjokes.htm www.fooarchive.com (1995)

Source: Howl's Moving Castle

On an article by Qunta magazine(when asked: Is there one big question that has always guided you?) https://www.quantamagazine.org/michael-atiyahs-mathematical-dreams-20160303
Context: I always want to try to understand why things work. I’m not interested in getting a formula without knowing what it means. I always try to dig behind the scenes, so if I have a formula, I understand why it’s there. And understanding is a very difficult notion. People think mathematics begins when you write down a theorem followed by a proof. That’s not the beginning, that’s the end. For me the creative place in mathematics comes before you start to put things down on paper, before you try to write a formula. You picture various things, you turn them over in your mind. You’re trying to create, just as a musician is trying to create music, or a poet. There are no rules laid down. You have to do it your own way. But at the end, just as a composer has to put it down on paper, you have to write things down. But the most important stage is understanding. A proof by itself doesn’t give you understanding. You can have a long proof and no idea at the end of why it works. But to understand why it works, you have to have a kind of gut reaction to the thing. You’ve got to feel it.