Questions - Quotes
I am a philosopher, not a scientist, and we philosophers are better at questions than answers.
The personalized environment is very good at answering the questions we have but not at suggesting questions or problems that are out of our sight altogether. It brings to mind the famous Pablo Picasso quotation: "Computers are useless. They can only give you answers."
I met an old lady once, almost a hundred years old, and she told me, "There are only two questions that human beings have ever fought over, all through history. How much do you love me? And Who`s in charge?"
We live in a society where people are uncomfortable with not knowing. Children aren`t taught to say "I don`t know," and honesty in this form is rarely modeled for them. They too often see adults avoiding questions and fabricating answers, out of either embarrassment or fear, and this comes at a price. When children are embarrassed by or afraid of the feeling of not knowing, they are preoccupied with escaping their discomfort, rather than being motivated to learn. This robs them of the joy of curiosity. Let`s celebrate the feelings of awe and wonder in our children, as the foundation for all learning. Let`s teach children to say "I don`t know" and help them understand the power behind it. Let`s talk to them about how it feels to not know something. And, finally, let`s be honest with children about the limits of our own knowledge.
One of the most important gifts we can give our children is the confidence to say "I don`t know." It`s the foundation from which we begin our investigation of the world: asking questions, taking the necessary time to understand the answers, and searching for new answers when the ones we have in hand don`t seem to work. The feeling of not knowing is also the source of wonder and awe.
The most important questions in life can never be answered by anyone except oneself.
The great moral questions of the present age are those about human rights, war, poverty, the vast disparities between rich and poor, the fact that somewhere in the third world a child dies every two and a half seconds because of starvation or remediable disease. The churches` obsessions over pre-marital sex and whether divorced couples can remarry in church appears contemptible in the light of this mountain of human suffering and need. By distracting attention from what really counts, and focusing it on the minor and anyway futile attempt to get people to conduct their personal lives only in ways the church permits, harm is done to the cause of good in the world.
The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?
Every biologist has at some time asked `What is life?` and none has ever given a satisfactory answer. Science is built on the premise that Nature answers intelligent questions intelligently; so if no answer exists, there must be something wrong with the question.
The scientist is not a person who gives the right answers, he is one who asks the right questions.
We`re all born with curiosity, but at some point, school usually manages to knock that out of us. I feel that my main responsibility as a teacher isn`t to convey facts, but to rekindle that lost enthusiasm for asking questions.
Myths, whether in written or visual form, serve a vital role of asking unanswerable questions and providing unquestionable answers. Most of us, most of the time, have a low tolerance for ambiguity and uncertainty. We want to reduce the cognitive dissonance of not knowing by filling the gaps with answers. Traditionally, religious myths have served that role, but today - the age of science - science fiction is our mythology.