This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"The “silly question” is the first intimation of some totally new development." - Alfred North Whitehead
"Our civilization… is not devaluing its awareness of the unknowable; nor is it deifying it. It is the first civilization that has severed it from religion and superstition in order to question it." - André Malraux
"The historian’s elemental question: “How has this come out of that?”" - Arnold J. Toynbee, fully Arnold Joseph Toynbee
"Science cannot supply a definite answer to this question. Immortality relates to an aspect of life which is not physical, that is which cannot be detected and measured by any instrument, and to which the application of the laws of science can at best be only a well-considered guess." - Arthur Compton, fully Arthur Holly Compton
"An approximate answer to the right question is worth a great deal more than a precise answer to the wrong question."" - Author Unknown NULL
"Ignorance never settles a question." - Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield
"In all affairs, love, religion, politics or business, it's a healthy idea, now and then, to hang a question mark on things you have long taken for granted." - Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
"The path of Knowledge is only to dive inward with the mind, not uttering the word ‘I’, and to question whence, as ‘I’, it rises. To meditate ‘This is not I’ or ‘That I am’ may be an aid, but you can it form the enquiry? When the mind, inwardly enquiring, ‘Who am I?’ attains the heart, something of Itself manifests as ‘I-I’, so that the individual ‘I’ must bow in shame. Though manifesting, it is not ’I’ by nature by Perfection, and this is the Self." - Ramana Maharshi, fully Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi
"Nothing is more common than good things; the only question is how to discern them; it is certain that all of them are natural and within our reach and even known by every one. But we do not know how to distinguish them. This is universal. It is not in things extraordinary and strange that excellence of any kind is found. We reach up for it, and we are further away; more often than not we must stoop. The best books are those whose readers think they; could have written them. Nature, which alone is good, is familiar and common throughout." - Blaise Pascal
"If there is a God, he is infinitely beyond our comprehension, since, being indivisible and without limits, he bears no relation to us. We are therefore incapable of knowing either what he is or whether he is. That being so, who would dare to attempt to answer the question? Certainly not we, who bear no relation to him." - Blaise Pascal
"It is certain that the soul is either mortal or immortal. The decision of this question must make a total difference in the principles of morals. Yet philosophers have arranged their moral system entirely independent of this. What an extraordinary blindness!" - Blaise Pascal
"No one can deny that much of our modern advertising is essentially dishonest; and it can be maintained that to lie freely and all the time for private profit is not to abuse the right of free speech, whether it is a violation of the law or not. But again the practical question is, how much lying for private profit is to be permitted by law?" - Carl Lotus Becker
"The significance of man is that he is that part of the universe that asks the question, 'What is the significance of man?' He alone can stand apart imaginatively and, regarding himself and the universe in their eternal aspects, pronounce a judgment: The significance of man is that he is insignificant and is aware of it." - Carl Lotus Becker
"In cases of doubtful morality, it is usual to say, Is there any harm in doing this? This question may sometimes be best answered by asking ourselves another: Is there any harm in letting it alone?" - Charles Caleb Colton
"A noble mind can see a question from all sides without bias. Small minds are biased and see a question only form one side." - Confucius, aka Kong Qiu, Zhongni, K'ung Fu-tzu or Kong Fuzi NULL
"Your ‘personal’ life cannot have a lasting intrinsic meaning. It can acquire a contingent meaning, but only by being fitted into and subordinated to something which ‘lasts’ and has a meaning in itself. Is this something what we attempt to identify when we speak of ‘Life’? Can your life have a meaning as a tiny fragment of life? Does Life exist? Seek and you shall find, experience Life as reality. Has Life a ‘meaning’? Experience Life as reality and the question becomes meaningless. Seek - ? Seek by daring to take the leap into unconditional obedience. Dare this when you are challenged, for only by the light of a challenge will you be able to see the cross-roads and, in full awareness of your choice, turn your back upon your personal life - with no right ever to look back. You will find that ‘in the pattern’ you are liberated from the need to live ‘with the herd’. You will find that, thus subordinated, your life will receive from Life all its meaning, irrespective of the conditions given you for its realization. You will find that the freedom of the continual farewell, the hourly self-surrender, gives to your experience of reality the purity and clarity which signify - seal-realization. You will find that obedience requires an act of will which must continually be re-iterated, and that you will fail, if anything in your personal life is allowed to slip back into the center." - Dag Hammarskjöld
"[During dire days under the Nazis] Who stands fast? Only the man whose final standard is not his reason, his principles, his conscience, his freedom, or his virtue, but who is ready to sacrifice all this when he’s called to obedient and responsible action in faith and in exclusive allegiance to God – the responsible man, who tries to make his whole life an answer to the question and call of God." - Dietrich Bonhoeffer
"When the captain of a ship has put out from Singapore bound for Boston, we have only one question to ask. And this question does not refer to typhoons, hurricanes, pirates, shoals, shallows or icebergs. The one question we ask is, “Did you bring the ship into port?”" - Elbert Green Hubbard
"No question is ever settled until it is settled right." - Ella Wheeler Wilcox
"Language was invented to ask questions. Answers may be given by grunts and gestures, but questions must be spoken. Humanness came of age when man asked the first question. Social stagnation results not from the lack of answers but from the absence of the impulse to ask questions." - Eric Hoffer
"It is not the answer that enlightens, but the question." - Eugène Ionesco, born Eugen Ionescu
"As it asketh some knowledge to demand a question not impertinent, so it requireth some sense to make a wish not absurd." - Francis Bacon
"A prudent question is one-half of wisdom." - Francis Bacon
"Beyond a critical point within a finite space, freedom diminishes as numbers increase. ...The human question is not how many can possibly survive within the system, but what kind of existence is possible for those who do survive." - Frank Herbert, formally Franklin Patrick Herbert, Jr.
"Mere customary life (the watch wound up and going on of itself) is that which brings on natural death. Custom is activity without opposition, for which there remains only a formal duration; in which the fullness and zest that originally characterized the aim of life are out of the question - a merely external sensuous existence which has ceased to throw itself enthusiastically into its object." - Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
"The important question of how poverty is to be abolished is one of the most disturbing problems which agitate modern society." - Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
"Age generally makes men more tolerant; youth is always discontented. The tolerance of age is the result of the ripeness of a judgment which, not merely as the result of indifference, is satisfied even with what is inferior, but, more deeply taught by the grave experience of life, has been led to perceive the substantial, sold worth of the object in question. The insight then to which - in contradistinction fro those ideals - philosophy is to lead us, is, that the real world is as it ought to be, that the truly good, the universal divine reason, is not a mere abstraction, but a vital principle capable of realizing itself." - Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
"The religious concentration of the soul appears in the form of feeling; it nevertheless passes also into reflection; a form of worship is a result of reflection. The second form of the union of the objective and subjective in the human spirit is art. This advances farther into the realm of the actual and sensuous than religion. In its nobles walk it is occupied with representing, not indeed, the spirit of God, but certainly the form of God; and in its secondary aims, that which is divine and spiritual generally. Its office is to render visible the divine; presenting it to the imaginative and intuitive faculty. but the true is the object not only of conception and feeling, as in religion - and of intuition, as in art - but also of the thinking faculty; and this gives us the third form of the union in question - philosophy." - Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
"No question is so difficult to answer as that to which the answer is obvious." - George Bernard Shaw
"Just before she [Gertrude Stein] died she asked, 'What is the answer?' No answer came. She laughed and said, 'In that case what is the question?' Then she died." - Gertrude Stein
"What is the answer? In that case, what is the question?" - Gertrude Stein
"The whole duty of life is implied in the question, how to respire and aspire both at once." - Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
"Instead of asking – 'How much damage will the work in question bring about?' why not ask 'How much good? How much joy?’" - Henry Miller, aka Henry Valentine Miller
"God asks no man whether he will accept life. This is not the choice. You must take it. The only question is how." - Henry Ward Beecher
"My question is, what can we hope to achieve with reason, when all the material and assistance of experience are taken away?" - Immanuel Kant
"The power to question is the basis of all human progress." - Indira Gandhi, fully Indirā Priyadarśinī Gāndhī
"In many spiritual traditions there is only one important question to answer, and that question is: Who am I? When we begin to answer it, we are filled with images and ideals – the negative images of ourselves that we wish to change and perfect and the positive images of some great spiritual potential – yet the path is not so much about changing ourselves as it is about listening to the fundamentals of our being." - Jack Kornfield
"That is the essence of science: ask an impertinent question, and you are on the way to the pertinent answer." - Jacob Bronowski
"We believe willingly what we love, and rarely what we love not. To the question of divine faith is united the question of divine virtue." - Jean Baptiste Lacordaire, fully Jean Baptiste Henri Lacordaire
"I recognize, as the all-comprehensive, and only right and proper end of Government, the greatest happiness of the members of the community in question: the greatest happiness - of all of them, without exception , in so far as possible.: the greatest happiness of the greatest number of them..." - Jeremy Bentham
"Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign asters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do. On the one hand the standard of right and wrong, on the other the chain of causes and effects, are fastened to their throne. They govern us in all we do, in all we say, in all we think: every effort we can make to throw off our subjection will serve but to demonstrate and confirm it. In words a man may pretend to abjure their empire: but in reality he will remain subject to it all the while. The principle of utility recognizes this subjection, and assumes it for the foundation of that system, the object of which is to rear the fabric of felicity by the hands of reason and law. Systems which attempt to question it deal in sounds instead of sense, in caprice instead of reason, in darkness instead of light." - Jeremy Bentham
"A good question is never answered. It is not a bolt to be tightened into place but a seed to be planted and to bear more seed toward the hope of greening the landscape of idea." - John Ciardi, fully John Anthony Ciardi
"This is not a legal or legislative issue alone… We are confronted primarily with a moral issue. It is as old as the Scriptures and is a clear as the American Constitution. The heart of the question is whether all Americans are to be afforded equal rights and equal opportunities… We face, therefore, a moral crisis as a country and as a people." -
"Taste is not only a part and an index of morality - it is the only morality. The first, and last, and closest trial question to any living creature is, “What do you like?” Tell me what you like, an I’ll tell you what you are." - John Ruskin
"The question is now what a man can scorn, or disparage, or find fault with, but what he can love and value and appreciate." - John Ruskin
"The... closest trial question to any living creature is, "What do you like?" Tell me what you like, and I'll tell you what you are." - John Ruskin
"As soon as any part of a person’s conduct affects prejudicially the interests of others, society has jurisdiction over it, and the question whether the general welfare will or will not be promoted by interfering with it, becomes open to discussion." - John Stuart Mill
"When the “sacredness of property” is talked of, it should always be remembered, that any such sacredness does not belong in the same degree to landed property. No man made the land. It is the original inheritance of the whole species. Its appropriation is wholly a question of general expediency. When private property in land is not expedient, it is unjust. It is no hardship to any one, to be excluded from what others have produced: they were not bound to produce it for his use, and he loses nothing by not sharing in what otherwise would not have existed at all. But it is some hardship to be born into a world and to find all nature’s gifts previously engrossed, and no place left for the new-comer. To reconcile people to this, after they have once admitted into their minds the idea that any moral rights belong to them as human beings, it will always be necessary to convince them that the exclusive appropriation is good for mankind as a whole, themselves included. But this is what no sane human being could be persuaded of." - John Stuart Mill