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Questioning Quotes

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Questioning Quotes

“Learning to be flexible in values takes a very long time...Of course I felt a little uncomfortable during questioning the concept of God, but then reading about the history and evolution of Gods. There were many different Gods: the God of war, the God of peace, the God of love, which was more like the people that invented them. They behaved, they got angry, they made sacrifices, they created floods when they didn't like the way things are going. This didn't come through as superior intelligence.”

“If you make people uniform, you can control them. If you teach people to read, and think, and question things, you lose control. So, the best idea is to separate people if you wish to maintain a monetary system. It's called divide and conquer. By dividing people, they're not a threat, you can control them.”

“The very foundation of science is to keep the door open to doubt. Precisely because we keep questioning everything, especially our own premises, we are always ready to improve our knowledge. Therefore a good scientist is never ‘certain’. Lack of certainty is precisely what makes conclusions more reliable than the conclusions of those who are certain: because the good scientist will be ready to shift to a different point of view if better elements of evidence, or novel arguments emerge. Therefore certainty is not only something of no use, but is in fact damaging, if we value reliability.”

“The key to maintaining your inspiration in the day-to-day work of meditation practice is to approach it as play—a happy opportunity to master practical skills, to raise questions, experiment, and explore.”

“I am thinking of the onion again. . . . Not self-righteous like the proletarian potato, nor a siren like the apple. No show-off like the banana. But a modest, self-effacing vegetable, questioning, introspective, peeling itself away, or merely radiating halos like ripples.”

“I'm questioning it. We're trying to get a lot of money for health and education and I'm wondering... You look at these gangs, and I look back at Prohibition. When we didn't allow alcohol, what did we have? We had gangs. We had big gangs. It's something that needs to be discussed a little more. It's an economic issue and a violence issue.”

“It [motherhood] has changed absolutely everything. I mean, it's changed my life. I think I've changed as a human being more since I've had Kai than in any other period in my life...It's such an incredible catalyst for growth. I found myself questioning absolutely everything: how I spend my time, how I speak, what kind of projects I work on, how I look at the world.”

“Many psychologists ... thought by turning their attention to their own consciousness to be able to explain what happened when we were thnking. Or they sought to attain the same end by asking another person a question, by means of which certain processes of thought would be excited, and then by questioning the person about the introspection he had made. It is obvious ... that nothing can be discovered in such experiments.”

“The entire force of the Conciliar revolt comes from the fact that it has apparently been imposed by the authority of the Church. How many bishops, priests, religious, and laymen, would have swallowed the lies of the heretics if they had not believed themselves bound to do so by the voice of Christ's Vicar on earth? Questioning the authority of these men renders their revolution of doubtful authenticity.”

“Motive is also important in our quest for knowledge and in the questioning that accompanies it. In commenting on our duty to educate for eternity, Eugene England writes: Teaching or learning - with the Spirit of God simply means (though it is not simple) that we are doing so with an eye single to eternal, not worldly, values, with an eye single to lasting development of the mind and spirit and to useful service to others, especially to aid in their lasting development of mind and spirit.”

“Read for yourselves, read for the sake of your inspiration, for the sweet turmoil in your lovely head. But also read against yourselves, read for questioning and impotence, for despair and erudition... and also read those whose darkness or malice or madness or greatness you can't understand because only in this way will you grow, outlive yourself, and become what you are.”

“I try to encourage people to think for themselves, to question standard assumptions... Don't take assumptions for granted. Begin by taking a skeptical attitude toward anything that is conventional wisdom. Make it justify itself. It usually can't. Be willing to ask questions about what is taken for granted. Try to think things through for yourself.”

“Why are there organized beings? Why is there something rather than nothing? Here again, I fully understand a scientist who refuses to ask it. He is welcome to tell me that the question does not make sense. Scientifically speaking, it does not. Metaphysically speaking, however, it does. Science can account for many things in the world; it may some day account for all that which the world of phenomena actually is. But why anything at all is, or exists, science knows not, precisely because it cannot even ask the question.”

“Celebration... is self restraint, is attentiveness, is questioning, is meditating, is awaiting, is the step over into the more wakeful glimpse of the wonder - the wonder that a world is worlding around us at all, that there are beings rather than nothing, that things are and we ourselves are in their midst, that we ourselves are and yet barely know who we are, and barely know that we do not know all this.”