Cited in: LIFE, 8 sept 1958, p. 73
Variant translation: Half of science is asking the right questions.
Prudens quaestio dimidium scientiae.
A Grief Observed (1961)
Context: Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable. How many hours are there in a mile? Is yellow square or round? Probably half the questions we ask — half our great theological and metaphysical problems — are like that.
[Charles Vernon Boys, Soap-bubbles and the forces which mould them: Being a course of three lectures delivered in the theatre of the London institution on the afternoons of Dec. 30, 1889, Jan. 1 and 3, 1890, before a juvenile audience, Society for promoting Christian knowledge, 1896, 11]
“It is better to ask some of the questions than to know all the answers.”
"The Scotty Who Knew Too Much", The New Yorker (18 February 1939)
From Fables for Our Time and Further Fables for Our Time
“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.
“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)
“He who knows all the answers has not been asked all the questions.”
“If you ask me a question I don't know, I'm not going to answer.”
What Time Is It? You Mean Now?: Advice for Life from the Zennest Master of Them All, Simon and Schuster, 2003, ISBN 0743244532, p. 101.
Yogiisms
