"Sometimes questions are more important than answers." - Nancy Willard
Source: Nancy Willard
"Sometimes questions are more important than answers." - Nancy Willard
Please… tell me who you are and what you want. And if you think those are simple questions, keep in mind that most people live their entire lives without arriving at an answer.
"I beg you...to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer."
"A child can ask questions that a wise man cannot answer."
Quality questions create a quality life. Successful people ask better questions, and as a result, they get better answers.
Question your answers,
Truth has no anger
Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions.
The start of the New Year is a perfect time to start a stop doing list and to make this the cornerstone of your New Year resolutions, be it for your company, your family or yourself. It also is a perfect time to clarify your three circles, mirroring at a personal level the three questions...
1) What are you deeply passionate about?
2) What are you are genetically encoded for -- what activities do you feel just "made to do"?
3) What makes economic sense -- what can you make a living at?
Those fortunate enough to find or create a practical intersection of the three circles have the basis for a great work life.
Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable.
My apprehensions come in crowds;/ I dread the rustling of the grass;/ The very shadows of the crowds/ Have power to shake me as they pass:/ I question things and do not find/ One that will answer to my mind;/ And all the world appears unkind.
Don't ask so many questions and they will all be answered.
--Evelyn to Sky
If you don't put the spiritual and religious dimension into our political conversation, you won't be asking the really big and important question. If you don't bring in values and religion, you'll be asking superficial questions. What is life all about? What is our relationship to God? These are the important questions. What is our obligation to one another and community? If we don't ask those questions, the residual questions that we're asking aren't as interesting.
I scarcely know the meaning of your question; much less can I answer it.
The only way I have ever understood, broken free, emerged, healed, forgiven, flourished, and grown powerful is by asking the hardest questions and then living into the answers through opening up to my own terror and transmuting it into creativity. I have gotten nowhere by retreating into hand-me-down sureties or resisting the tensions that truth ignited.
How is it that God sees each fallen leaf as a new beginning?
Although things seem to be sometimes going up and sometimes descending, sometimes slipping away, nevertheless there is a reality, the same today as in the past. It does not change, for nothing can affect it. Could we not say it is one great harmony? So why shouldn't we ask about it...
Questions, as I long ago tried to teach my students, are like cellular acids that dissolve the glue holding our preconceptions, prejudices, presuppositions, etc. together in customary clumps. All the more is this dissolution a liability in societies that lack any aristic higher structure, any form of critical authority or penetrating logic that is proof against merely slavish or conventionalist taking-for-granted and also against sophist-cynical-nihilist disillusionment. One cannot see and cannot say what is what without then initiating in that bourgeois consensus a cascade of disillusionment, a process of abolishing one absurdity after another. Just the ability to see the meanings of one's own language, what it actually implies and signifies, is already the first step in a process of ultimate subversion. The scales are falling from one's eyes, one doesn't need someone else to lead one around by the hand anymore like a child. --The end of tutelage, the beginning of appropriating one's mind for one's own disciplined use: for a certain, horrified-by-everything kind of slavish personality, this independence or self-responsibility is the most horrific prospect of all.
How would your life change if linear time were shown to be a perception and not a certainty?
Far better an approximate answer to the right question, which is often vague, than an exact answer to the wrong question, which can always be made precise.
If you are not expecting pious lies, then do not ask impious questions.
What is essential is not the answer but the questions; the answers indeed are the death of the life that is in the questions.
The simplest questions are the most profound.
Where were you born?
Where is your home?
Where are you going?
What are you doing?
Think about these once in awhile, and watch your answers change.
Do you measure your greatness more by your gifts or your possessions?
The only questions that really matter are the ones you ask yourself.
The answer is never the answer. What's really interesting is the mystery. If you seek the mystery instead of the answer, you'll always be seeking. I've never seen anybody really find the answer -- they think they have, so they stop thinking. But the job is to seek mystery, evoke mystery, plant a garden in which strange plants grow and mysteries bloom. The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer.
One who asks a question is a fool for five minutes; one who does not ask a question remains a fool forever.
Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.
An unanswered question is a fine traveling companion. It sharpens your eye for the road.
If it doesn't move, it's dead. Any question that requires an answer in a 'one' tends to paralyse the actor, so we need questions with answers that shift.
