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How do you get the right answers? By asking the right questions, of
course. The questions you ask define the areas in which you will look, so
taking time and even asking questions about the questions you are asking
can be a useful strategy for getting creatively great solutions.
See also
children, constraints, curiosity*, doubt, learning, impossibility, openness*,
perception, rationality, stimulation, truth*, understanding
Quotes
‘To ask the hard question is simple.’
— W. H.Auden
‘Millions saw the apple fall, but Newton was the one who asked why.’
— Bernard Mannes Baruch
‘The trouble with life isn't that there is no answer, it's that
there are so many answers.’
— Ruth Benedict
‘Every sentence I utter must be understood not as an affirmation, but as a
question.’
— Niels Bohr
‘That is the essence of science: ask an impertinent question, and you are on
the way to the pertinent answer.’
— Jacob Bronowski
‘The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason
for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries
of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality.’
— Edmund Burke
‘I don’t pretend we have all the answers. But the questions are certainly
worth thinking about.’
— Arthur C. Clarke
‘The one real object of education is to have a man in the condition of
continually asking questions.’
— Mandell Creighton
‘To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new
angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advance in science.’
— Albert Einstein
‘Reason can answer questions, but imagination has to ask them.’
— Ralph Gerard
‘The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best—and therefore
never scrutinize or question.’
— Stephen Jay Gould
‘Only stupid questions create wealth.’
— Gary Hamel
‘What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of
questioning.’
— Werner Heisenberg
‘The only questions that really matter are the ones you ask yourself.’
— Ursula Le Guin
‘The scientific mind does not so much provide the right answers as ask the
right questions.’
— Claude Levi-Strauss
‘There is frequently more to be learned from the unexpected questions of a
child than the discourses of men, who talk in a road, according to the notions
they have borrowed and the prejudices of their education.’
— John Locke
‘The job is to ask questions–it always was–and to ask them as inexorably as I
can. And to face the absence of precise answers with a certain humility.’
— Arthur Miller
‘You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a
man is wise by his questions.’
— Mahfouz Naguib
‘One hears only those questions for which one is able to find answers.’
— Friedrich Nietzsche
‘There are many questions which fools can ask that wise men cannot answer.’
— George Polyá
‘Children enter school as question marks and leave as periods.’
— Neil Postman
‘People have enough ideas. The real question is “Which ideas are you going to
use?”.’
— Michael Ray
‘Be patient towards all that is unresolved in your heart and try to love the
questions themselves.’
— Rainer Maria Rilke
‘Art is really people asking the eternal question, “What is it all about?”’
— Gene Roddenberry
‘Man’s "progress" is but a gradual discovery that his questions have no
meaning.’
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
‘What people think of as the moment of discovery is really the discovery of
the question.’
— Jonas Salk
‘Good questions outrank easy answers.’
— Paul Samuelson
‘No question is so difficult to answer as that to which the answer is
obvious.’
— George Bernard Shaw
‘The only interesting answers are those which
destroy the questions.’
— Susan Sontag
‘There are no foolish questions, and no man has become a fool until he stops
asking questions.’
— Charles P. Steinmetz
‘I’d rather know some of the questions than all of the answers.’
— James Thurber
‘Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers.’
— Voltaire
‘The ability to ask the right question is more than half the battle of
finding the answer.’
— Thomas J. Watson
‘The "silly question" is the first intimation of some totally new
development.’
— Alfred North Whitehead
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