Skeptic

A skeptic is not one who doubts, but one who examines.

— Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, French literary critic and historian


Questioning the Value of Old Rules

We have to see, I think, that questioning the value of old rules is different from simply breaking them.

— Elizabeth Janeway, Between Myth & Morning: Women Awakening


Doubt

My hosannahs have all be forged in the crucible of doubt.

— Fyodor Dostoyevski


Questions

Judge a man by his questions, not his answers.

— Voltaire


Live Life’s Questions

I want to beg you as much as I can . . . to be patient towards all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek 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 now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

Take whatever comes with great trust, and if only it comes out of your own will, out of some need of your innermost being, take it upon yourself and hate nothing.

– Rainer Maria Rilke
Letters to a Young Poet