“We are very shy of asking questions of those who know enough to destroy with one word the hopes we live on.”
Elsie Venner (1859)
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Oliver Wendell Holmes 135
Poet, essayist, physician 1809–1894Related quotes

“Of all the questions we can ask ourselves the most important is: how is one best to live?”
Source: Life, Sex, and Ideas: The Good Life Without God (2002), “Introduction” (p. xi)
Source: Make disciples of all men https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9rEbitrSPM (July 18, 2020)

It was, "We the people."
As quoted by the Philadelphia Daily News (21 October 2005).

Source: Think Big (1996), p. 265

“The question is asked in ignorance, by one who does not even know what can have led him to ask it.”
Preface
1840s, Philosophical Fragments (1844)
A Language Older Than Words (2000)