Asking the right questions leads to wisdom

• A prudent question is one-half of wisdom. Francis Bacon
• Asking good questions is half of learning. Elijah Muhammad
• The key to wisdom is knowing all the right questions. John Simone
• Answers make you wise, but questions make you human. Yves Montand
• A wise man’s question contains half the answer. Solomon Ibn Gabirol
• To ask a good question is the beginning of wisdom. Anthony Lambert
• No man really becomes a fool until he stops asking questions. Charles Steinmetz
• If you want a wise answer, ask a reasonable question. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
• A wise person is full of questions. A dull person is full of answers. Paulo Coelho
• If you want a wise answer, ask a reasonable question. Johann Wolfgang von Goetheugnorance
• The first beginnings of wisdom…is to ask questions but never to answer any. Flann O’Brien
• Wisdom is a love affair with questions. Knowledge is a love affair with answers. Julio Olalla
• The wise man doesn’t give the right answers, he poses the right questions. Claude Levi-Strauss
• Ask dumb questions and listen quietly for the answers. That’s a wisdom stair climber. Greg Gutfeld
• Effective questioning brings insight, which fuels curiosity, which cultivates wisdom. Chip R. Bell
• It’s always wise to raise questions about the most obvious and simple assumptions. C. West Churchman
• A wise man can learn more from a foolish question than a fool can learn from a wise answer. Bruce Lee
• There are questions I’m still not wise enough to answer, just wise enough to no longer ask. George Jones
• Wisdom isn’t an old guy on top of a mountain in a loin cloth. It isn’t an answer. It’s a question. Billy Connolly
• A wise man’s question contains half the answer. Unfortunately the other 50% is harder to come by! Solomon Ibn Gabirol
• You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions. Naguib Mahfouz
• One’s first step in wisdom is to question everything – and one’s last is to come to terms with everything. Georg C. Lichtenberg
• The beginning of wisdom is found in doubting; by doubting we come to the question, and by seeking we may come upon the truth. Peter Abelard
• The only question which any wise man can ask himself, and which any honest man will ask himself, is whether a doctrine is true or false. Thomas Huxley
• To avail yourself of His certain wisdom, ask of Him whatever questions you have. But do not entreat Him, for that will never be necessary. Hugh Prather
• The key to wisdom is this constant and frequent questioning, for by doubting we are led to question, by questioning we arrive at the truth. Peter Abelard
• We get wise by asking questions, and even if these are not answered we get wise, for a well-packed question carries its answer on its back as a snail carries its shell. James Stephens
• When a wise man does not understand, he says: “I do not understand.” The fool and the uncultured are ashamed of their ignorance. They remain silent when a question could bring them wisdom. Frank Herbert
• ‘How do you know so much about everything?’ was asked of a very wise and intelligent man; and the answer was ‘By never being afraid or ashamed to ask questions as to anything of which I was ignorant. John Abbott
• The key to all sciences is unquestionably the question mark. To the word How? we owe most of our greatest discoveries. Wisdom in life may perhaps consist in asking ourselves on all occasions: Why? Honore de Balzac
• When people asked Socrates, ‘What is wisdom?’ he always gave the same answer: ‘I don’t know’. In fact, Socrates never claimed to know much of anything except how to ask questions. And by asking questions, he would prove to other people that they didn’t know what they thought they knew. Jim Rohn
• As long as you ask questions you are breaking through, but the moment you begin to accept, you are psychologically dead. So right through life don’t accept a thing, but inquire, investigate. Then you will find that your mind is something really extraordinary, it has no end, and to such a mind there is no death. Jiddu Krishnamurti
• Wisdom is the ability to read between the lines, listen out for messages that the universe gives us. I’ve been taught that that is true knowledge and that is completely different to the way we are programmed to learn. We are trained to be able to put the right answer with the right question. We don’t really have to know the answer. Speech Debelle
• The Greek word for philosopher (philosophos) connotes a distinction from sophos. It signifies the lover of wisdom (knowledge) as distinguished from him who considers himself wise in the possession of knowledge. This meaning of the word still endures: the essence of philosophy is not the possession of the truth but the search for truth. … Philosophy means to be on the way. Its questions are more essential than its answers, and every answer becomes a new question. Karl Jaspers

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Question especially conventional wisdom and assumptions

• Never assume the obvious is true. William Safire
• Question everything, even if it represents generations of conventional wisdom. Robert Ringer
• In your search for truth, be willing to question conventions and certainties. Anthony Lambert
• All new ideas begin in a non-conforming mind that questions some tenet of the conventional wisdom. Hyman Rickover
• Science sometimes requires courage – at the very least the courage to question the conventional wisdom. Carl Sagan
• I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love for truth – and truth rewarded me. Simone de Beauvoir
• If we all worked on the assumption that what is accepted as true is really true, there would be little hope of advance. Orville Wright
• The wise man questions the wisdom of others because he questions his own, the foolish man, because it is different from his own. Leo Stein
• 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. Noam Chomsky

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Truth walks toward us on the paths of our questions

• Question your answers, Truth has no anger. Ed Roland
• Truth is not afraid of questions. Paramahansa Yogananda
• Questions don’t change the truth. But they give it motion. Giannina Braschi
• Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth. Albert Einstein
• We too often bind ourselves by authorities rather than by the truth. Lucretia Mott
• The ability to ask questions is the greatest resource in learning the truth. Carl Jung
• Truth is not defined by how many people believe something. Question. Think. Decide – for yourself.  Jonathan Lockwood Huie
• Lies are ants, the truth is the sun, and questions are a magnifying glass waiting to be picked up by the curious. Craig Stone
• If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things. René Descartes
• To contact the deeper truth of who we are, we must engage in some activity or practice that questions what we assume to be true about ourselves. A. H. Almaas
• Truth walks toward us on the paths of our questions. As soon as you think you have the answer, you have closed the path and may miss the vital new information. Wait awhile in the stillness, and do not rush to conclusions, no matter how uncomfortable the unknowing. Jacqueline Winspear
• Commitment to the truth means a relentless willingness to root out the ways we limit or deceive ourselves from seeing what is, and to continually challenge our theories of why things are the way they are. It means continually broadening our awareness. It also means continually deepening our understanding of the structures underlying current events. Peter Senge

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