“My grandpa always said asking a question is embarrassing for a moment, but not asking is embarrassing for a lifetime.”
Source: Kafka on the Shore
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Haruki Murakami 655
Japanese author, novelist 1949Related quotes
“Children are not afraid to pose basic questions that may embarrass us, as adults, to ask.”
Source: The Emperor's New Mind (1989), Ch. 10, Where Lies the Physics of the Mind?, p. 448–9 (p. 580 in 1999 edition).
Context: Beneath all this technicality is the feeling that it is indeed "obvious" that the conscious mind cannot work like a computer, even though much of what is involved in mental activity might do so.
This is the kind of obviousness that a child can see—though the child may, later in life, become browbeaten into believing that the obvious problems are "non-problems", to be argued into nonexistence by careful reasoning and clever choices of definition. Children sometimes see things clearly that are obscured in later life. We often forget the wonder that we felt as children when the cares of the "real world" have begun to settle on our shoulders. Children are not afraid to pose basic questions that may embarrass us, as adults, to ask. What happens to each of our streams of consciousness after we die; where was it before we were born; might we become, or have been, someone else; why do we perceive at all; why are we here; why is there a universe here at all in which we can actually be? These are puzzles that tend to come with the awakenings of awareness in any one of us — and, no doubt, with the awakening of self-awareness, within whichever creature or other entity it first came.
“It is not my questions that embarrass South Africa; it is your answers.”
As quoted in "About Helen Suzman" https://web.archive.org/web/20070927230210/http://www.hsf.org.za/shelen2.asp (February 2004), by David Welsh, South Africa: The Helen Suzman Foundation, p. 2
“Asking what the question is, and why the question is asked, is always asking a pertinent question.”
Source: Philosophy and Real Politics (2008), p. 17.
As quoted in Escape The Pace: 100 Fun And Easy Ways To Slow Down And Enjoy Your Life (2002) by Lisa Rickwood; this quote appears at least as early as 1996 online
1990s
the answer escapes us.
The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-century Philosophers (1932)