Ben Feldman Quotes

I think that probably the most important thing about our education was that it taught us to question even those things we thought we knew. To say you've got to inquire, you've got to be testing your knowledge all the time in order to be more effective in what you're doing.

We hear only those questions for which we are in a position to find answers

The scientist … creates more and more questions, never fewer. Indeed the measure of our intellectual maturity … is our capacity to feel less and less satisfied with our answers

You are your own best teacher. My advice is to question all things. Seek for answers, and when you find what seems to be an answer, question that, too.

If you don't ask the right questions, I can't give you the answers, and if you don't know the right question to ask, you're not ready for the answers

I think the appropriate kind of skepticism is this: you've got to be asking questions all the time, you've also got to make sure that you're doing so in the spirit of genuinely wanting to find the answers - and that also means being open. I battle with this: I know I tend to be very skeptical and as a result, I veer towards the dismissive. But being aware of the tendency, I like to challenge my own skepticism and make sure it's not just knee-jerk. You need to be skeptical towards yourself as well. When you're only skeptical outwards you've got an unbalanced skepticism.

I think that probably the most important thing about our education was that it taught us to question even those things we thought we knew.

a question has the most power before we rush to answer it, when it is still making us think, still testing us.

I say with my own authority that if you go on questioning without accepting anybody's answer, including mine, by and by you will find that the answer is not found but the question disappears.

General scepticism is the live mental attitude of refusing to conclude. It is a permanent torpor of the will, renewing itself in detail towards each successive thesis that offers, and you can no more kill it off by logic than you can kill off obstinacy or practical joking.

Those questions - when you think about a thought, when you're believing a thought or concept and you question it - you realize that it changes things. Every cell in your body is awake with inquiry.

Science is more than a body of knowledge. It's a way of thinking: a way of skeptically interrogating the universe.

There cannot be mental atrophy in any person who continues to observe, to remember what he observes, and to seek answers for his unceasing hows and whys about things.

Someone has to ask you a question," George continues meaningly, "before you can answer it. But it's so seldom you find anyone who'll ask the right questions. Most people aren't that much interested.

Whatever we think about and question a lot becomes questionable.

Once you have learned to ask questions - relevant and appropriate and substantial questions - you have learned how to learn and no one can keep you from learning whatever you want or need to know.

Care about understanding and before you know it, in just a few decades, you'll have a system of thinking that gives you answers whenever you ask.

I think doubt is a very healthy way to live.

I believe unconditionally in the ability of people to respond when they are told the truth. We need to be taught to study rather than believe, to inquire rather than to affirm.

It's the questions we can't answer that teach us the most. They teach us how to think. If you give a man an answer, all he gains is a little fact. But give him a question and he'll look for his own answers.

Sometimes people think you’re smart if you question the status quo, if nothing else.

There is no faith, without a critical mind

Writers always sound insufferably smug when they sit back and assert that their job is only to ask questions and not to answer them. But, in good part, it is true. And once you become committed to one particular answer, your freedom to ask new questions is seriously impaired.

A thinking mind is not swallowed up by what it comes to know. It reaches out to grasp something related to itself and to its present knowledge (and so knowable in some degree) but also separate from itself and from its present knowledge (not identical with these). In any act of thinking, the mind must reach across this space between known and unknown, linking one to the other but also keeping visible to difference. It is an erotic space.

As a kid you learn that there are thinkers and there are philosophers and there are theologian, and I'd hear little bits of the ideas that these people pursued or developed or created and I'd be really excited. Then I'll start to read it and I think, "Wait a minute, this is a rabbit hole. This isn't a gateway or a ticket to anything except itself."