69 quotes
“To question what I see, then to question what I see after that, because the questions matter as much, perhaps more than, the answers.”
"Thinking is the most overrated human activity."
— Wendell Berry
"A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right."
— Thomas Paine
"Every sentence I utter must be understood not as an affirmation but as a question.[A caution he gives his students, to be wary of dogmatism.]"
— Niels Bohr
"How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress."
"It is difficult to describe paths of thought where there are already many paths laid down, and not fall into one of the grooves"
— Ludwig Wittgenstein
"All things must be examined, debated, investigated without exception and without regard for anyone's feelings."
— Diderot
"I survive by finding the sweet spot between reason and unreason, between the rational and irrational."
— Dean Koontz
"Skeptical scrutiny is the means, in both science and religion, by which deep thoughts can be winnowed from deep nonsense."
— Carl Sagan
"It takes a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious."
— Alfred Whitehead
"The simplest questions are the most difficult."
— William S. Burroughs
"The basic stimulus to the intelligence is doubt, a feeling that the meaning of an experience is not self-evident."
— W.H. Auden
"It Begins with skepticism. The history of human folly, and our own susceptibility to illusions and fallacies, tell us that men and women are fallible."
— Steven Pinker
"Take away paradox from the thinker and you have a professor."
— Søren Kierkegaard
"How dangerous can false reasoning prove!"
— Sophocles
"Thinking is not to agree or disagree. That's voting."
— Robert Frost
"What matters is not the facts but how you discover and think about them."
— Richard Dawkins
"Reason respects the differences and imagination the similitudes of things."
— Percy Shelley
"Reason respects the differences, and imagination the similitudes of things."
"I was never aware of any other option but to question everything."
— Noam Chomsky
"One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane."
— Tesla