Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

I wanted to ask a thousand questions, but there was no one to ask. Besides I knew that people only told lies to children-lies about everything from soup to Santa Claus.

Once you were a child. Once you knew what inquiry was for. There was a time when you asked questions because you wanted answers, and were glad when you had found them. Become a child again, even now... You have gone wrong. Thirst was made for water; inquiry for truth.

Children are the closest we have to wisdom and they become adults the moment that final drop of everything mysterious is strained from them.

I was 7 years old, and I challenged everything. I never accepted answers on face value.

I believe that part of what propels science is the thirst for wonder. It's a very powerful emotion. All children feel it. In a first grade classroom everybody feels it; in a twelfth grade classroom almost nobody feels it, or at least acknowledges it. Something happens between first and twelfth grade, and it's not just puberty. Not only do the schools and the media not teach much skepticism, there is also little encouragement of this stirring sense of wonder. Science and pseudoscience both arouse that feeling. Poor popularizations of science establish an ecological niche for pseudoscience.

Indeed, the only truly serious questions are ones that even a child can formulate. Only the most naive of questions are truly serious.

Children can ask what adults don't dare to because we don't want to admit we're scared and we don't really want to hear the answers.

Asking doesn't mean you lack wisdom - it's evidence of wisdom.

Certainly Adam in Paradise had not more sweet and curious apprehensions of the world, than I when I was a child.

Is the world all grown up? Is childhood dead? Or is there not in the bosom of the wisest and the best some of the child's heart left, to respond to its earliest enchantments?

As a child I would just question things.

The child had indeed shut up but all the questions that had accumulated on his tongue circulated in his mouth, moved through the passages of his nose and climbed up from there to tickle into his teardrop ducts, so in his moss green pupils, curious, insistent, accusing sparks of questions continued to light up and fade away like fireflies flitting about on summer nights.

The way a child discovers the world constantly replicates the way science began. You start to notice what's around you, and you get very curious about how things work. How things interrelate. It's as simple as seeing a bug that intrigues you. You want to know where it goes at night; who its friends are; what it eats.

Only the children know what they are looking for.

I am the biggest "but why?" question asker.

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.

Questioners sooner or later end up in a library... And answers are dangerous; they kill your wonder.

Past certain ages or certain wisdoms it is very difficult to look with wonder; it is best done when one is a child; after that, and if you are lucky, you will find a bridge of childhood and walk across it.

Even when I was older, I couldn't stop asking questions.

A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands; How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.

I keep six honest serving men.

One who never asks either knows everything or nothing.

As a child, I wanted to know how things worked and to control them. With a friend, I built a number of complicated models that I could control. It was a natural next step to want to know how the universe works.

Science strives for answers, but art is happy with a good question.

Children and scientists share an outlook on life. If I do this, what will happen? is both the motto of the child at play and the defining refrain of the physical scientist. ... The unfamiliar and the strange - these are the domain of all children and scientists.