Inquiry quotes
170 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside inquiry — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"Finding the courage to go to the places that scare us cannot happen without compassionate inquiry into the workings of ego... Openness doesn't come from resisting our fears but from getting to know them well."
"The crime of inquiry is one which religion never has forgiven."
"As it is, the lover of inquiry must follow his beloved wherever it may lead him."
"All inquiries carry with them some element of risk."
"In exchange for freedom of inquiry, scientists are obliged to explain their work."
"The greatest inventions are those inquiries which tend to increase the power of man over matter."
"With inquiry, every painful story unravels. Freedom is possible in every moment."
"Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry."
"Every man's condition is a solution in hieroglyph to those inquiries he would put. He acts it as life before he apprehends it as truth."
"The inquiry leads us to that source, at once the essence of genius, of virtue, and of life, which we call Spontaneity or Instinct."
"Explore, and explore. Be neither chided nor flattered out of your position of perpetual inquiry. Neither dogmatize or accept another's dogmatism."
"Inquiries into the heart are not for man."
"It is not honest inquiry that makes anarchy; but it is error, insincerity, half belief and untruth that make it."
"I'm just trying to look at something without blinking, to see what it is like, or it could have been like, and how that had something to do with the way we live now. Novels are always inquiries for me."
"Scientific inquiry shouldn't stop just because a reasonable explanation has apparently been found."
"The inquiry of truth, which is the love-making, or the wooing of it, the knowledge of truth, which is the presence of it, and the belief of truth, which is the enjoying of it, is the sovereign good of human nature."
"I know of no inquiry which the impulses of man suggests that is forbidden to the resolution of man to pursue."
"To achieve respectability, to be admitted to the debate, they must accept without question or inquiry the fundamental doctrine that the state is benevolent, governed by the loftiest intentions, adopting a defensive stance, not an actor in world affairs but only reacting to the crimes of others...If even the harshest of critics tacitly adopt these premises, then the ordinary person may ask, who am I to disagree?"
