Questioning Quotes

“We often hear of someone saying, ‘So you don’t trust me’ or ‘Are you questioning my integrity?’ or ‘You don’t believe me.’ They get defensive and angry because someone questions their actions, and they think they are above being questioned or having to prove their trustworthiness. But none of us is above questioning.”
― Henry Cloud, Safe People: How to Find Relationships That Are Good for You and Avoid Those That Aren't

“And all this while the subtle-souled girl asking herself why she was born, why sitting in a room, and blinking at the candle; why things around her had taken the shape they wore in preference to every other possible shape.”
― Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge

“If your organization is not formally committed to a policy of nondiscrimination based on sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression or gender presentation in its employment practices, you should not expect lesbian,
gay, bisexual, transgender, gender-nonconforming, queer, and/or questioning patients and families to feel safe seeking out your services.”
― Kimberly D. Acquaviva, LGBTQ-Inclusive Hospice and Palliative Care: A Practical Guide to Transforming Professional Practice

“Good questions are to be appreciated, not answered.”
― Raheel Farooq

“The art of questioning is to ignite innovative thinking; the science of questioning is to frame system thinking, with the progressive pursuit of better solutions.”
― Pearl Zhu, Leadership Master: Five Digital Trends to Leap Leadership Maturity

“The fabric of human life is woven with relationships. Once we thematize the importance of dialogue, the multiplicity of ongoing and created situations in which dialogical skills can be nurtured abound. As we have seen, this requires us to slow down and turn toward each other, having a clear sense of the relationship between our current footing in dialogue with one another and the future we are trying to create. The nurture of dialogical capacities is essential to human liberation.”
― Mary Watkins, Toward Psychologies of Liberation

“But what if hope had a threshold? What if there was a limit to it? What if each of us was only given a certain amount and mine was used up?”
― Jennifer Niven, American Blonde

“What do you call the Hrothgar-wrecker when Hrothgar has been wrecked?”
― John Gardner, Grendel

“A central argument is never a summary. It is more like a generator.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

“Question everything, even the question mark, that shepherd's crook floating in the air above that small round rock

If you - stubbornly - still wish to be unhappy,
maybe you can grasp it.”
― Dick Allen, Zen Master Poems (1)

“It is the questions that matter. When you start getting arrogant, you stop asking questions.”
― Rick Delmonico

“It’s about running wild in a field of exclamation points chasing question marks”
― Natasha Tsakos

“Of everything we must first ask: is it real or not?”
― Mike Klepper

“They say "doubt everything," but I disagree. Doubt is useful in small amounts, but too much of it leads to apathy and confusion. No, don't doubt everything. QUESTION everything. That's the real trick. Doubt is just a lack of certainty. If you doubt everything, you'll doubt evolution, science, faith, morality, even reality itself - and you'll end up with nothing, because doubt doesn't give anything back. But questions have answers, you see. If you question everything, you'll find that a lot of what we believe is untrue...but you might also discover that some things ARE true. You might discover what your own beliefs are. And then you'll question them again, and again, eliminating flaws, discovering lies, until you get as close to the truth as you can.

Questioning is a lifelong process. That's precisely what makes it so unlike doubt. Questioning engages with reality, interrogating all it sees. Questioning leads to a constant assault on the intellectual status quo, where doubt is far more likely to lead to resigned acceptance. After all, when the possibility of truth is doubtful (excuse the pun), why not simply play along with the most convenient lie?

Questioning is progress, but doubt is stagnation.”
― Tom Jubert / Jonas Kyratzes

“The IGAD-Plus's compromise peace agreement is probably pregnant with a noisy, perhaps thunderous baby.”
― Duop Chak Wuol

“Questions to be answered by questions itself when you wanna ignore it in first place. It’s better to be diplomatic rather than Ignorant.”
― Praveen Chenna

“Framing the right problem is equally or even more important than solving it.”
― Pearl Zhu, Leadership Master: Five Digital Trends to Leap Leadership Maturity

“Let's fall in love and screw up our lives even more?”
― Tamara Stamenkovic

“Her mind escaped between them, and went exploring for itself through the great gaps they had made in the simple obedient assumptions of her girlhood. That question originally put in Paradise, "Why shouldn't we?" came into her mind and stayed there. It is a question that marks a definite stage in the departure from innocence. Things that had seemed opaque and immutable appeared translucent and questionable. She began to read more and more in order to learn things and get a light upon things, and less and less to pass the time. Ideas came to her that seemed at first strange altogether and then grotesquely justifiable and then crept to a sort of acceptance by familiarity. And a disturbing intermittent sense of a general responsibility increased and increased in her.

You will understand this sense of responsibility which was growing up in Lady Harman's mind if you have felt it yourself, but if you have not then you may find it a little difficult to understand. You see it comes, when it comes at all, out of a phase of disillusionment. All children, I suppose, begin by taking for granted the rightness of things in general, the soundness of accepted standards, and many people are at least so happy that they never really grow out of this assumption. They go to the grave with an unbroken confidence that somewhere behind all the immediate injustices and disorders of life, behind the antics of politics, the rigidities of institutions, the pressure of custom and the vagaries of law, there is wisdom and purpose and adequate provision, they never lose that faith in the human household they acquired amongst the directed securities of home. But for more of us and more there comes a dissolution of these assurances; there comes illumination as the day comes into a candle-lit uncurtained room. The warm lights that once rounded off our world so completely are betrayed for what they are, smoky and guttering candles. Beyond what once seemed a casket of dutiful security is now a limitless and indifferent universe. Ours is the wisdom or there is no wisdom; ours is the decision or there is no decision. That burthen is upon each of us in the measure of our capacity. The talent has been given us and we may not bury it.”
― H.G. Wells, The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman

“We don't have to have all the answers and know everything. Life is about acknowledging the unknown and just living.”
― Raneem Kayyali

“God is real by any name you chose, or none at all.”
― Deepak Chopra, Fire in the Heart: A Spiritual Guide for Teens

“One day a young daughter was watching her mother make a roast for the family. She watched as her mother cut off the two ends of the roast and put it in the pan, along with the potatoes and vegetables. Perplexed by the procedure, the child asked why her mother cut off both ends. The mother smiled and answered, “Because that’s the way grandma always did it.” The next time the child saw her grand- ma, she asked her why she did this. Her grandma answered that she had cut off the ends of her roasts and baked them in a small pan because the stove she had was so small.
Like the girl’s mother, many of us do things a certain way be- cause that’s the way they have always been done, and we never nd out if those things are still relevant today. So let’s take a moment and think outside the box of what has been done in the past, asking God to reveal Himself to us afresh.”
― Theresa Dedmon, Born to Create: Stepping Into Your Supernatural Destiny

“A set of excellent questions themselves is perhaps like a poem, both philosophical and intellectual.”
― Pearl Zhu, Leadership Master: Five Digital Trends to Leap Leadership Maturity

“Our lives are cluttered by complexities and that leads to problems. Genius is the one solves simple problems which seem complicated.”
― Saurabh Gupta Earth5R

“If you want your employees to be rockstars, teach them the single biggest quality of Entrepreneurship- Asking questions!”
― Saurabh Gupta Earth5R

“Running wild in a field of exclamations, chasing question marks”
― Natasha Tsakos

“He could have killed me for the blunder— which really wasn’t my fault— but I was lucky , and he gave me another chance. The two officers who questioned him were also incredibly lucky for not having had any idea who it was they’d been questioning.”
― Floyd C. Forsberg, The Toughest Prison of All

“Designing well-written tests still remains a challenging task. Some complex questions may lose clarity causing difficulties in providing meaningful answers. Basically, questions should be designed in such a way that each well-prepared student can easily give a correct answer.”
― Eraldo Banovac

“Aiming to check a new test's difficulty, ask your assistants to solve the test prior to the actual exam. If the results are not satisfactory, reevaluate all ambiguous questions and correct them.”
― Eraldo Banovac

“Alignment, to us, means bringing pieces into the same line - the same direction. The metaphor is that a magnet will make pieces of iron point toward it. Agreement is shared intellectual understanding. Tribes are clusters of people, and people are complex and nonrational at times. If a tribe is united only by agreement, as soon as times change, agreement has to be reestablished. If people learn new ideas or see a problem from a new perspective, they no longer agree, so tribes based on agreement often discourage learning, questioning, and independent thought. Tribes based on alignment want to maximize each person's contribution, provided that they stay pointed in the same direction like magnetized iron filings.”
― Dave Logan, Tribal Leadership: Leveraging Natural Groups to Build a Thriving Organization